Narrative Factuality: A Handbook 9783110486278, 9783110482805
The study of narrative—the object of the rapidly growing discipline of narratology—has been traditionally concerned with
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Content
Factual Narrative: An Introduction
I. Basic Issues: Factuality and Fictionality
Theories of Fictionality and Their Real Other
Factual Narration in Narratology
Fact, Fiction and Media
Factualities and their Dependence on Concepts of the Fictional and the Mendacious
Typology of the Nonfactual
Panfictionality/Panfictionalism
The Factual in Psychology
Is Factuality the Norm? A Perspective from Cognitive Narratology
Is Factuality in the Eye of the Beholder?
Metaphor, Allegory, Irony, Satire and Supposition in Factual and Fictional Narrative
II. Truth and Reference: Philosophical and Linguistic Approaches
The Philosophical Perspective on Truth
Facts and Realism in Philosophy
Truth in Literature: The Problem of Knowledge and Insight Gained from Fiction
Reference in Philosophy
Reference in Literature/Literary Studies
Reference in Linguistics
Evidentiality in Linguistics and Rhetoric
III. Factuality across Disciplines and Media
Factual Narratives and the Real in Therapy and Psychoanalysis
Authenticity in Sociology and Psychology
Factuality in Anthropology
Factuality in Historiography/Historical Study
Factual Narrative and Truth in Political Discourse
Narrative and Factuality in Sociology
Factual Narrative in Economics
Factuality, Evidence and Truth in Factual Narratives in the Law
Truth in (Christian) Religion and in Genres of Religious Narrative
The Narration of Scientific Facts
Narrative in Early Modern and Modern Science
Empiricism and the Factual
The Role of Factuality in Film
Facts and Factual Narration in Journalism
Factuality and Fictionality in Advertisements
IV. Literary Issues: Fact, Truth and the Real
From Mimesis to Realism: The Role of Factuality and the Real in the History of Narrative Theory and Practice
Realism in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Authenticity in Narratology and in Literary Studies
Factuality and Convention
The Ethics of Factual Narrative
Transgressive Narration: The Case of Autofiction
Factual or Fictional? The Interpretive and Evaluative Impact of Framing Acts
Pseudofactual Narratives and Signposts of Factuality
Pseudofactuality
Factuality and Literariness
V. Factuality and Fictionality in Various Cultures and Historial Periods
The Factual in Antiquity
Diachrony: The Factual in the Middle Ages
Factual Narrative in the Early Modern Period
Factual Narrative in Pre-Modern China: Historiography – Its Nature, Function and Influence on Narrative Fiction
Premodern Japanese Narratives and the Problem of Referentiality and Factuality
Reality and Factuality of Classical Indian Narratives
Narrative in Classical Persian Literature
Factual Narrative in Medieval Arabic Literature
Factual and Fictional Narratives in East African Literatures
Contributors
Name Index
Subject Index
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Narrative Factuality
Revisionen Grundbegriffe der Literaturtheorie
Herausgegeben von
Fotis Jannidis Gerhard Lauer Matías Martínez Simone Winko
6
De Gruyter
Narrative Factuality A Handbook
Edited by
Monika Fludernik Marie-Laure Ryan in cooperation with Hanna Specker
De Gruyter
ISBN 978-3-11-048280-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-048627-8 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-048499-1 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019946004 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Typesetting: Meta Systems Publishing & Printservices GmbH, Wustermark Printing and Binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com
Content MONIKA FLUDERNIK/MARIE-LAURE RYAN Factual Narrative: An Introduction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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I. Basic Issues: Factuality and Fictionality 1. IRINA RAJEWSKY Theories of Fictionality and Their Real Other . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29 2. MONIKA FLUDERNIK Factual Narration in Narratology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51 3. MARIE-LAURE RYAN Fact, Fiction and Media . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 4. STEPHAN PACKARD Factualities and their Dependencies on Concepts of the Fictional and the Mendacious . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 5. MARK J. P. WOLF Typology of the Nonfactual . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 6. FRANK ZIPFEL Panfictionality/Panfictionalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 7. RICHARD J. GERRIG/JANELLE M. GAGNON The Factual in Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 8. MARCO CARACCIOLO Is Factuality the Norm? A Perspective from Cognitive Narratology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 9. DOROTHEE BIRKE Is Factuality in the Eye of the Beholder? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
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10. MICHAEL SINDING Metaphor, Allegory, Irony, Satire and Supposition in Factual and Fictional Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
II. Truth and Reference: Philosophical and Linguistic Approaches 1. TOBIAS KLAUK The Philosophical Perspective on Truth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 2. MARIUS BARTMANN Facts and Realism in Philosophy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 3. JUKKA MIKKONEN Truth in Literature: The Problem of Knowledge and Insight Gained from Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 4. WOLFGANG FREITAG Reference in Philosophy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 5. TILMANN KÖPPE Reference in Literature/Literary Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 6. DANIEL JACOB Reference in Linguistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 7. RÜDIGER ZYMNER Evidentiality in Linguistics and Rhetoric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287
III. Factuality across Disciplines and Media 1. CARL EDUARD SCHEIDT/ANJA STUKENBROCK Factual Narratives and the Real in Therapy and Psychoanalysis 297 2. MARK FREEMAN Authenticity in Sociology and Psychology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313 3. GREGOR DOBLER Factuality in Anthropology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 4. STEPHAN JAEGER Factuality in Historiography/Historical Study . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335
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5. ANDREAS MUSOLFF Factual Narrative and Truth in Political Discourse . . . . . . . . . . 351 6. HELLA DIETZ Narrative and Factuality in Sociology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 367 7. BERNHARD KLEEBERG Factual Narrative in Economics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 379 8. SIMON STERN Factuality, Evidence and Truth in Factual Narratives in the Law . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 391 9. ANDREAS MAUZ Truth in (Christian) Religion and in Genres of Religious Narrative. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 401 10. RICHARD WALSH The Narration of Scientific Facts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417 11. ARIANNA BORRELLI Narrative in Early Modern and Modern Science . . . . . . . . . . . 429 12. CATHERINE MILNE Empiricism and the Factual. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 443 13. FLORIAN MUNDHENKE The Role of Factuality in Film . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 453 14. KARL NIKOLAUS RENNER Facts and Factual Narration in Journalism. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465 15. ELSA SIMÕES LUCAS FREITAS Factuality and Fictionality in Advertisements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 479
IV. Literary Issues: Fact, Truth and the Real 1. MICHAEL MCKEON From Mimesis to Realism: The Role of Factuality and the Real in the History of Narrative Theory and Practice . . . . . . . . . . . . 487 2. ROBYN WARHOL Realism in the Nineteenth-Century Novel. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 511 3. MATÍAS MARTÍNEZ Authenticity in Narratology and in Literary Studies. . . . . . . . . . 521
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4. JOHANNES FRANZEN Factuality and Convention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 533 5. JAMES PHELAN The Ethics of Factual Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 543 6. STEFAN IVERSEN Transgressive Narration: The Case of Autofiction . . . . . . . . . . 555 7. LIESBETH KORTHALS ALTES Factual or Fictional? The Interpretive and Evaluative Impact of Framing Acts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 565 8. FRANÇOISE LAVOCAT Pseudofactual Narratives and Signposts of Factuality . . . . . . . . 577 9. NICHOLAS PAIGE Pseudofactuality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 593 10. ANDERS PETTERSSON Factuality and Literariness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 601
V. Factuality and Fictionality in Various Cultures and Historical Periods 1. MARGALIT FINKELBERG The Factual in Antiquity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 615 2. EVA VON CONTZEN Diachrony: The Factual in the Middle Ages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 625 3. NICOLAS DETERING/CHRISTIAN MEIERHOFER Factual Narrative in the Early Modern Period . . . . . . . . . . . . . 635 4. VICTOR H. MAIR/ASHLEY LIU Factual Narrative in Pre-Modern China: Historiography – Its Nature, Function and Influence on Narrative Fiction . . . . . 647 5. MICHAEL WATSON Premodern Japanese Narratives and the Problem of Referentiality and Factuality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 663 6. HAIYAN HU-VON HINÜBER/LUITGARD SONI Reality and Factuality of Classical Indian Narratives . . . . . . . . 677
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7. MOHSEN ASHTIANY/BO UTAS Narrative in Classical Persian Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 695 8. ISABEL TORAL-NIEHOFF Factual Narrative in Medieval Arabic Literature . . . . . . . . . . . . 709 9. KYALLO WADI WAMITILA Factual and Fictional Narratives in East African Literatures . . . 721 Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 735 Name Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 755 Subject Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 765
MONIKA FLUDERNIK/MARIE-LAURE RYAN
Factual Narrative: An Introduction As the title indicates, the focus of this handbook is on factual narrative, a notion intuitively understandable as stories that convey true, reliable information. At a time when the term post-truth has become common parlance (McIntyre 2018),1 it is imperative to reaffirm the commitment to facts of certain types of narratives, and to examine the foundations of this commitment in various disciplines and media. But since it takes a background for a figure to emerge clearly, this book will also explore nonfactual types of narrative. For literary scholars, the negative background image of factual narrative is narrative fiction. But do factual and fictional narrative constitute positively defined opposites, comparable to black and white, or is fictional narrative only one member of a broader field of nonfactual genres and modes of narration that contains many shades of grey? Conversely, should we call the background of fiction simply nonfiction? (/ I.1 Rajewsky)2 As the essays gathered in this book demonstrate, opinions differ in this respect, and it is not our intention to impose one (supposedly correct) answer in this introduction. Rather, we will use the dilemma as an incentive to take a closer look at facts, fiction, and narrative. The book addresses readers from the humanities and, more particularly, from the philological disciplines (English Studies, German Studies, Romance Studies, Slavic Studies, etc.) with an interest in narrative and narratology. Our objective is to foreground the hitherto neglected mass of narratives that are generally considered to be factual, thus compensating for narratology’s and literary studies’ (over-)emphasis on fictional narratives and media objects, especially on novels, fiction films and other literary uses of narrative. The handbook is conceived as a companion piece to Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe’s Fiktionalität: Ein interdisziplinäres Hand-
1 Post-truth was named word of the year 2016 by the Oxford Dictionaries. It is defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief ” (McIntyre 2018, 5). 2 This symbol / refers to other essays in this handbook. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-001
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buch (2014). Our attempt is to refocus narrative studies in order to accommodate both theoretically and practically the broad range of factual narratives and to propose analyses of factual narration from a transhistorical and transcultural perspective. The handbook is a project initiated by the graduate school “Factual and Fictional Narration” (GRK 1767) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).3 The GRK has allowed four successful generations of PhD students from a variety of disciplines including psychology, philosophy, archaeology and legal history besides history, language, literature and media studies, to focus on questions of factual and fictional narratives, on the hybridization of fact and fiction (in genres such as docudrama, autofiction or phenomena like fake news)4 and on the functional blending and juxtaposition of factual and fictional material in individual genres and texts. The handbook Narrative Factuality has been designed as a reference work for the PhD students of the graduate school and its production was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of its support for the school. The main idea was to provide information on many issues central to the understanding of factuality and fictionality that would be difficult to convey in comparable depth in a first-semester colloquium for the doctoral students. Once the project had been initiated, it soon became apparent that such a handbook could claim a wider audience among narratologists and literary scholars thanks to its topical and innovative focus on factuality. In addition, we hope that the handbook will also attract some interest among practitioners of many of the disciplines that have contributed chapters to this volume. For instance, a historian might find the way in which anthropologists or psychologists deal with truth and authenticity inspiring for their own work, just as a sociologist or economist might be intrigued by the way in which biologists or physicists narrate their experiments. Finally, since the volume now appears in the Revisionen series, it will also acquire a readership that is attuned to that particular format within more general literary and cultural studies. 1. What are facts? If we assume that facts correlate with true information, an investigation of the nature of facts cannot take into account all the common deploy3 Funding period 2012–2021. 4 See, for instance, Korte (2015) on docudrama, Weiser (2015), Lessau (2016) and Baier (2018) on autofiction; as well as Podskalsky (in progress) on fake news and political satire.
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ments of the word. Some of these usages associate facts with false, deceptive information, for instance in the occasionally heard expression, “the author’s facts are not trustworthy” (example from Wikipedia). Similarly, an investigation of the nature of fiction cannot rely on popular uses of the term that characterize fiction as the opposite of facts. For instance, one encounters statements like the following, which are typical of infomercials: ‘Fact: Glutanol will make you lose 10 pounds in one week without diet or exercise. Fiction: It will give you hallucinations.’ If we want to start our enquiry on solid philosophical ground, the association of facts with truth quickly leads into a morass of complex logical, epistemological and ontological issues (/ II.1 Klauk, / II.2 Bartmann). Back in the fifties, a philosopher (C. Burniston Brown 1953) asked whether “the definition of the word fact” is “the first problem in philosophy.” Here we can only hope to scratch the surface of these controversial issues. In an ontological/realist perspective,5 facts are “part of the inventory of what there is” (Mulligan and Correia 2017), or states of affairs that obtain in the world. They exist independently of language or of other kinds of representation, and it is the purpose of science to discover previously unknown facts (/ III.10 Walsh, / III.12 Milne). In an epistemological perspective, facts are objects of knowledge, and they are connected to propositions (/ II.2 Bartmann): it is their correspondence with facts (/ II.1 Klauk) that makes propositions true. But the mode of existence of propositions is itself a matter of debate: do they exist autonomously, independently of any semiotic system, or are they part of communicative events? If we choose the second option, factuality cannot be defined independently of a sender’s intentions. Rather than opposing factuality to falsity or non-existence, the communicative approach opposes the assertion of facts to other kinds of speech acts. Relying on John Searle’s speech act theory (Searle 1969), we can define factuality as the propositional content of a felicitous assertion: the sender believes in the truth of the proposition, has reasons to do so, and wants the receiver to share this belief. A non-felicitous assertion can fail in two ways: either the proposition is not true, in which case we have honest error; or the sender does not believe in its truth, but wants the receiver to do so, in which case he or she is lying (/ I.4 Packard). Of these two cases, only the second can be defined in intentional terms. Yet another way to present information is through the type of intent constitutive of fictionality. This intent can be defined in many ways: as non-deceptive
5 An ontological anti-realist perspective would say that there is no such thing as autonomously existing facts.
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pretended assertion (Searle 1975), as asking the receiver to imagine rather than believe the information (Walton 1990), or more simply as presenting information that is unasserted (Carroll 1996). Cross-classifying the types of intent constitutive of sincere assertion, lies and fiction with the two types of relation that can link a proposition to the world, namely true or false, we get six categories: (1) sincerely asserted and true (= fact); (2) sincerely asserted and false (= error); (3) deceptively asserted and true (= accidentally true lies); (4) deceptively asserted and false (= lies); (5) non-asserted and false (= standard fiction); and (6) nonasserted and true (= true fiction). If the factuality of a statement is decided by the receiver, then only (1) will qualify as factual. Alternatively, if the intention to assert content is regarded as constitutive of factuality (regardless of accuracy), then (1) and (2) will both be regarded as factual, though (2) does not contain true propositions. Finally, if factuality is associated with the sender’s intention to have the recipient believe in the assertion, then even lies can be regarded as a kind of factual discourse (/ I.4 Packard). So far we have considered factuality and its others on the level of isolated propositions. But if the factual is to designate a kind of narrative, this is to say, a culturally recognized genre, it must operate on the textual level. When one passes from the local to the global level, lies lose their importance, because they cannot be constitutive of genre: if they could, deception would be expected of certain types of text, and nobody would be deceived.6 (This of course does not mean that individual texts cannot lie.) The investigation can therefore be narrowed down to factual and fictional texts (Genette 1993 [1991]; Cohn 1990, 1999). This raises the question of whether global factuality and fictionality must be reproduced on the level of individual statements, or whether the two levels can differ. It is obvious that fiction can contain statements that happen to be true in the actual world (/ II.4 Freitag, / II.3 Mikkonen). Conversely, factual texts may use embedded nonfactual statements, such as parables or thought experiments in support of arguments that are meant to yield truths for the actual world (/ I.10 Sinding, / I.5 Wolf ). These islands of fictionality are usually framed by statements that redirect reference temporarily away from reality. Opinions differ on how to handle discrepancies between the global and the local level (/ II.3 Mikkonen). Some scholars regard fictional texts as patchworks of facts and invention (Nielsen et al. 2015), or of asserted and
6 Some genres, such as tall tales, may be described as ‘lies,’ but this is taking the term lie in a loose sense as synonymous with fiction.
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non-asserted claims (Searle 1975). According to this view, we must sort out fictions with regard to what we believe and do not believe, and it is as legitimate to gain knowledge from fictional texts as it is from factual ones. Alternatively, fictionality and factuality can be regarded as categories that affect textual worlds as a whole and that cannot be overridden on the local level, except through explicit framing: for instance, a genuine photo of a real person can be embedded in a comic book (as in Maus by Art Spiegelman), and a fictional parable can be embedded in a sermon. In both cases, the embedding is properly framed through verbal or visual clues. A fictional world may present some degree of overlap with the real world, so that some of the statements that build this world will also be true in the real world, but even when the text refers to entities that also exist in the real world, the author is not asserting truths-for-the-real-world about these entities. Users of fiction can suspend judgment as to which statements within fiction are also true of the real world, since the task at hand is to construe the fictional world, not to gather information about reality. This approach does not preclude deriving knowledge about the real world from a fictional text, but it regards this process as a risky business which must be placed under the warning: caveat lector. Another issue raised by the notion of factuality concerns the rigidity of the distinction between true and false information. In classical logic, true and false are regarded as binary categories that do not admit of degrees. But while a factual text is meant to elicit belief in the receiver, this belief can be either weak or strong. Depending on the genre, audiences will grant factual texts various degrees of credibility, and they will be more or less tolerant of unverified or unverifiable information. In oral narrative of personal experience, for instance, audiences accept exaggerations, embellishments, and free reconstruction of dialogue, regarding the story as true in its broad outline. In academic historiography, by contrast, every claim must be substantiated. This spectrum of flexibility can also be observed in visual representations where, like historiography, maps are supposed to deliver reliable information about geography, whereas hand-made sketches for the purpose of orientation can be partially imprecise or even quite vague. (Only think of subway maps, abstracted maps for route designation on holiday or festival homepages.) Similarly, linguistic reference can be purposefully imprecise for purposes of initial rough description as in the French term hexagon for France, which certainly does not precisely have the shape of a geometric hexagon.) This diversity of generic and cultural conventions compromises the notion of truth or unambiguously true statements, though it does not eliminate the functional distinction between truth and falsity, but allows factuality to appear in both strong and weak versions (/ I.3 Ryan).
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2. Terminological matters 2.1 Cross-linguistic terminology relating to fact and fiction Besides the question what are the meanings of fact, factuality and nonfiction, fiction and related terms, such as allegory, satire, parody, there are several issues about the terminology that need to be discussed in relation to current practices in narratology and other disciplines as well as crossculturally between linguistic communities. We will also have to confront the difficulty of what is to be understood by the term narrative. Let us start with the terminology of fictionality. Three terms compete with one another: fiction, fictionality (adj. fictional ) and fictivity (adj. fictive). (See Zipfel 2001, Klauk and Köppe 2014.) In German there is Fiktion, Fiktionalität, Fiktivität with the adjectives fiktional and fiktiv (/ I.1 Rajewsky). In French one has fiction, fictionalité with the adjectives fictionnel and fictif, with the first referring to fiction, the second to what is not actual or imaginary. English and French also have a fourth lexeme, English fictitious and French factice, which both highlight artificiality and nonfactuality. The narratological traditions of these three languages have used these terms in quite a distinct and to some extent incompatible manner (/ I.1 Rajewsky). Thus, whereas in English fiction refers primarily to the novel and thus is a generic marker, in theoretical discourse fictionality can also be used to indicate that one is talking about the quality or definition of what is fiction(al) rather than about concrete textual manifestations of fiction. (See, for instance, Catherine Gallagher’s 2006 thesis about the “rise of fictionality.”) The term fictive has little narratological currency in English and is often used synonymously with fictional, although some distinctiveness can be made out in phrases like fictive numbers. Most English speakers would also agree that in the phrase legal fictions (/ III.8 Stern) we are dealing with fictive (rather than fictional ) cases that are posited to obtain. While fiction is colloquially used to denigrate the respectability of statements or utterances, in the arts and in literature, the term is employed either neutrally to designate a mode or genre, or it is used positively to underline the text’s lack of legal or factual liability, which is seen as an asset for the opportunity to present utopian scenarios and voice critical opinions. In German narratology and literary studies, by contrast, a long tradition has established itself that distinguishes between the fictive (fictivity) as referring to the made-up or invented or nonfactual, and the fictional (fictionality) as signaling of producers’ and receivers’ conventions and expectations about the text, utterance or work. The fictive in these studies refers to, and collocates with, characters, settings and objects on the story level of a narrative – there are fictive characters, fictive scenarios, fictive places,
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towns or houses and fictive tables, chairs or paintings in novels or plays or films. They are fictive because they have been invented by the author and do not exist (no extra-textual evidence or source is available). Outside fictional texts, such fictive scenarios may also occur in philosophy where one is asked to imagine a fictive case (‘Let us suppose that …’) or in the sciences where theoretical assumptions may be presented as fictive (and not yet proven or as yet unprovable) propositions. By contrast, in German terminology fiktional is used to refer to the global level of production, reception and hence literary communication – a text may be fictional, which is as much as to say that it has been produced as a text that belongs to the genre of fiction, and that its audience will normally be aware of the fictionality of the text and read it as fiction, hence without expecting its contents to contain verifiable information about the real world or to intervene directly in ongoing real-world exchanges. Incidentally, the literary to some extent cuts across this line of distinctions. For instance, Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2016) is clearly a literary text, produced by a novelist of reputation and written in stylistically sophisticated (‘literary’) English. However, this is a factual book which tries to sway its readers to do something about global warming and it intervenes in current political and social debates about climate change. Having neatly separated the fictional and the fictive (fictionality and fictivity), German terminology uses Fiktion for the abstract concept of fictionality (in its English meaning), and never for the genre of fictional texts or novels (English: fiction). By way of analogy with the fictivity/fictionality doublet, German scholars have recently proposed (/ I.1 Rajewsky) introducing the same type of distinction for the realm of factuality, thus suggesting an opposition between factive (faktisch) persons, places or events and factual (faktual ) texts, statements and discourses. This usage is new in German language narratology but meets wide acceptance as an innovation; however, French and English narratologists are largely opposed to the German distinction of fictive vs. fictional (which is new to them) and are therefore even less sanguine about extending it to the realm of the factual. A possible explanation for their resistance is that until a good reason is found for the distinction – which makes Anna Karenina ‘fictive,’ but the text that creates her ‘fictional,’ or true information about Syria ‘factive’ but the texts in which it appears ‘factual’ – the doubling of terms violates the principle of Occam’s razor. 2.2 Definitions of narrative and narrativity In the handbook the term ‘narrativity’ is used to designate the quality of being a narrative. Since narrativity is a property that can be manifested in
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different media, it cannot be associated with specific textual devices. Rather it must be conceived as a cognitive pattern, or mental representation, that is triggered by certain semiotic objects or even by unmediated life experience. We construct stories in our mind not only when we read texts or watch videos, but also when we witness an accident, watch a sports game, or revisit certain memories. These mental representations become narratives when they are captured and communicated through semiotic means such as language, image, sound, moving bodies or through combinations of various types of signs. The distinctive features that confer narrativity to mental representations have been described by narratologists on various levels of abstraction. The more succinct definitions call for the transformation of a state of affairs by an event (Prince, Genette), or for a sequence of equilibrium, disruption, and restoration of equilibrium (Todorov). A more detailed definition has been proposed in Ryan (2006, 2007). It involves eight components, which can be regarded as constitutive of a “basic narrativity”: Spatial dimension (1)
Narrative must be about a world populated by individuated existents.
Temporal dimension (2)
This world must be situated in time and undergo significant transformations.
(3)
The transformations must be caused by non-habitual physical events.
Mental dimension (4)
Some of the participants in the events must be intelligent agents who have a mental life and react emotionally to the states of the world.
(5)
Some of the events must be purposeful actions by these agents.
Formal and pragmatic dimension (6)
The sequence of events must form a unified causal chain and lead to closure.
(7)
The occurrence of at least some of the events must be asserted as fact for the storyworld.
(8)
The story must communicate something meaningful to the audience. (Ryan 2007, 29)
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On the basis of these conditions, we can distinguish two kinds of narrativity, separated by a continuum rather than by a rigid boundary. The first is strong narrativity. It requires not only the construction by the reader, hearer, spectator or player of a mental representation that fulfills all the conditions constitutive of basic narrativity, it also involves a mode of narration that goes much beyond the depiction of a sequence of events involving beginning, middle and end. Such narratives will focus on the mental worlds of human or human-like protagonists, this is to say, on their desires, intentions and feelings. Strong narratives must flesh out the kind of content that is constitutive of story in order to bring out its experientiality (Fludernik 1996). Audiences are invited not only to accept certain facts or to contemplate certain situations, but also to participate imaginatively and emotionally in the represented events and to immerse themselves in the storyworld. This type of narrativity is mostly found in fiction; in the factual domain, it can occur in conversational narratives, in travel writing, in autobiography, and it is the distinctive property of feature journalism (/ III.14 Renner). On the other end of the narrative continuum is weak narrativity. It comes in two kinds. The first stems from an only partial fulfillment of the basic conditions. For instance, a news headline is an incomplete story that needs to be fleshed out by the text that follows. A list of the events that compose somebody’s daily routine lacks the property of non-habitual eventfulness because its elements can be repeated over and over again. The report of a weather event lacks human agency; it only becomes a full-fledged story when humans or human-like creatures are emotionally affected. A novel consisting exclusively of stream of consciousness will fail the requirement that calls for the occurrence of external events causing changes in the state of the world. Annals of historical events – such as the Annals of St Gall, as described by Hayden White – lack causal relations between their components. Narrativity is therefore a matter of degree, and the set of all narrative texts is a fuzzy set (Ryan 2007). This fuzziness explains why people will not agree when asked if a certain type of text – say, a postmodern novel without a summarizable plot – constitutes a narrative. The other form of weak narrativity fulfills the basic conditions listed above, but it does so through a mode of representation that limits itself to the transmission of information. Such texts have a distinct plot made of sequences of events and actions but they do not foreground the mental activity of the protagonists or actants. Neglecting the ‘how,’ they privilege the ‘what’ and the ‘why.’ This reporting style is the dominant form of factual narrative, but it is also found in some types of fiction. Many medieval narratives, for instance, strike the modern reader as weakly narrative, because the expressive devices of modern fiction, such as stream of con-
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sciousness, or vivid descriptions, had not yet been developed. In the factual domain, this kind of weak narrativity is typical of historical chronicles and news reports, as well as of legal and scientific narratives. Outside narrative theory and literary studies, the term narrative is also used more nontechnically to refer to constructedness as in the work of the ‘Life is a narrative’ school (Bruner 1987, 1991; for counter-arguments see Strawson 2004; see also Battersby 2006 and Hyvärinen 2008). Moreover, the term narrative enjoys wide currency in contexts that are considered by narratologists to lie outside the realm of what could properly be considered a legitimate instance of storytelling as in phrases such as the narrative of global warming. This actually refers to a scientific argument about the rise of temperature and not to a story relevant to the definition of narrative as given above. Although some chapters in this handbook discuss this usage, the contributions collected in this volume abide by the narratological understanding of narrativity and therefore focus on strong or weak narrativity as defined above. 3. How factuality emerged in narrative studies Another issue that this introduction needs to address is the reason for the timeliness of a handbook on narrative factuality. Put differently, why is it that factual narration has not been a standard focus of narrative studies so far? Narratology has traditionally focused on fictional narrative, especially the genres of the novel and short story, though it also considered the fairytale, the epic and myth. This preoccupation was a direct consequence of who became involved in the study of narrative, namely literary critics who were teaching one or several European national literatures. Thus, structuralist narratologists like Tzvetan Todorov, Roland Barthes, Gérard Genette, Franz Karl Stanzel, Seymour Chatman and their followers like Susan Lanser, Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Marie-Laure Ryan and David Herman initially chose their narrative material from prose fiction, even if they then went on to consider film, the media and some nonfiction (the baseball report in Ryan 1993; conversational narrative in Herman 1999). Even outside the narrowly literary profession and outside mid-twentieth century structuralism, the emphasis on literary narrative and hence fiction proved to be determinative. Thus, early narratologically inclined linguists and Russian Formalists like Charles Bally (famous for his early studies of free indirect discourse – Bally 1912; see also Karpf 1928) or
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Victor Shklovsky (1991 [1917]) examined literary texts, hence fiction.7 Russian Formalists were interested in analyzing how literary language differed from ordinary everyday usage, with the doctrine of defamiliarization a key argument. Likewise, early narrative study by the German scholars Friedrich Spielhagen and Käte Hamburger and by the novelist Henry James were explicitly focused on the novel and on fiction. This tradition with its institutional bias was supported by a general educational preference for literary classics and a distaste for popular fiction. Despite the fact that historians and Bible scholars had been perfecting the practice of hermeneutics, textual analysis and the close reading of sources, there was initially little trade-off between these disciplines and narratologists because the former were suspicious of narratives in their texts (and, among historians, repressed their own storytelling practices), while the latter preferred the challenging and innovative complexities of literature to the mundane and formally unappealing material studied by historians, not to speak of newspaper articles or economic treatises and the like. This neglect of nonfictional narrative only began to dissolve in the final decades of the twentieth century as a consequence of several important developments. These can be distinguished as influences from fields outside literary studies on the one hand and developments within literary studies on the other. Within literary criticism, two developments can be made out. One is the invention of the nonfiction novel, also called faction.8 This genre drew narratologists’ attention to possible differences between factual and fictional representations of stories and challenged critics’ neatly dichotomous assumptions about the nature of fiction vs. nonfiction. The second, more general impact derived from the rise of cultural studies and the extension of the academic canon to include popular literature. This was also the moment when autobiography (considered as literary by the French educational system) and life stories in general began to be studied from a narratological angle (/ IV. 7Korthals Altes; Niggl 1989). The interdisciplinary influences were even more important. They comprise (a) the impact of Hayden White and the narratological analysis of historiography; (b) the availability of (transcribed) oral language with the evolving linguistic discipline of conversation analysis; (c) the development of narrative analysis in medicine and therapeutic psychology; and (d) the explosion
7 But see Roman Jakobson’s insight into the alliterative and rhymed language of commercials (1987 [1958]). 8 On the nonfiction novel see Hollowell (1977), Weber (1980), Smart (1985), Sauerberg (1991), Zander (1999), Rubie (2009), Flis (2010).
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of media studies, which included the study of documentaries and mockumentaries, reality TV and – most recently – postfactuality and fake news (these are of course not real genres) in blogs and twitter messages. These departures led to several initiatives within narratology that take factual narration or nonfiction as their object of analysis. In the 1970s and 1980s an extensive concern for the narrativity of historical scholarship evolved in counterpoint to those strands in the historical sciences which privileged an elimination of storytelling and the use of statistics in historiographic academic writing. (See, for instance, the Annales School – compare Carrard 1992, Rüth 2005.) The best-known proponent of the narrative approach is Hayden White, who studied the ‘literariness’ of nineteenth-century works of history. White’s major contribution was to draw attention to the constructed nature of historical writing; he also proposed that nineteenth-century narrative history used literary forms like tragedy, comedy, romance or satire as global narrative structure. However, White was not the only representative of the narratological analysis of history (Jaeger 2002, 2009; / III.4 Jaeger). Important contributors to “historiographic narratology” (as Elias 2005 calls it) are also Danto (1985), Carr (1986), Rüsen (1986, 2005), Kellner (1989), Rigney (1990), Berkhofer (1995), Süssmann (2000), Fulbrook (2002), and Munslow (2007). Important contributions have also come from Dorrit Cohn (1989, 1995, 1999). The narrative analysis of historical discourse has been linked with the ‘narrative turn’ in the humanities (Kreiswirth 1995). Historical writing also figures prominently in Paul Ricoeur’s monumental Time and Narrative (1984–1988).9 The impact of linguistics, particularly pragmatics and discourse or conversation analysis, was even more incisive. Since the seminal study by Labov and Waletzky (1967), the exploration of narrative in conversational language (which is factual) has flourished for the past five decades (de Fina 2015). Key insights of this research include the recognition that storytellers are granted an extended turn within the turn-taking frames of oral exchanges; the elaboration of story patterns (abstract – orientation – narrative clauses – resolution); the discovery of minimal storytelling units (small stories); the analysis of collaborative storytelling; and the typical patterns of narrator–audience interaction.10 Conversational narratives are often examples of strong narrativity. 9 There has of course been extensive literary analysis of the historical novel. See Fleishman (1971), De Groot (2010), Dalley (2014), and Johnston and Wiegandt (2017). 10 The literature on discourse and conversation analysis is massive. For the distinctions between discourse analysis and conversation(al) analysis see Wooffitt (2005). Classical contributions to discourse analysis are Ehlich (1980), Brown and Yule (1983), Tannen
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Extensive narratological analysis has also been expended on autobiography (/ IV.7 Korthals Altes; Lejeune 1989; Schulze 1996; Barros 1998; Smith and Watson 2005, 2010) and on ego-documents (letters, diaries, etc.), also treated under the labels of life writing and biofiction (Linde 1993; Middeke and Huber 1999; Nünning 2003; Leader 2015; Goodson et al. 2017). There are numerous studies that focus on the narrative structure of autobiography, e.g. Eakin (1985), Lehmann (1988), Niggl (1989), Bourdieu (1990), Wagner-Egelhaaf (2005), Brockmeier (2015). In the handbook, we have opted to focus on the problematic case of autofiction (/ IV.6 Iversen) rather than autobiography (but see / IV.7 Korthals Altes, / IV.5 Phelan) for which separate handbooks and studies exist in great number (Wagner-Engelhaaf 2005). While narratologists have not come across revolutionary insights when studying historiography, the impact of the linguistic analysis of conversational narratives on narrative studies has been transformative. The transfer has in fact been two-directional since discourse analysts have profited from narratology (Bamberg 1997, 2007; Chafe 1994; Ochs and Capps 2001) just as narratologists have been inspired by linguistic analysis (Fludernik 1996, Herman 1999, Mildorf 2004, 2010, 2016, Mildorf and Kinzel 2016). There has also been extensive work on narrative identity in the field of conversational analysis which has been absorbed by literary scholars and sociologists (Bamberg 1997; Andrews 2004; Straub 2005; Holler and Klepper 2013). The extensive use of narrative analysis in therapy goes back to Freud, but has resulted in current practices of storytelling in therapy sessions and their academic analysis (Boothe 2010, Vassilieva 2016, / III.1 Scheidt and Stukenbrock). This is particularly relevant in fields such as trauma studies (Kacandes 2005; Schauer et al. 2011; Scheidt 2016), the treatment of grief and bereavement (Aurnhammer and Fitzon 2016), or the treatment of pain and illness (Lucius-Hoene 2002, Deppermann and Lucius-Hoene 2005), besides narrative psychoanalysis (Alcorn 2005, Scheidt et al. 2015).11
(1984), Polanyi (1985), Young (1987), Sacks (1992), Kerbrat-Orecchioni (1996), Jaworski and Coupland (1999), Schiffrin et al. (2001), Johnstone (2008 [2002]), Hyland (2011) and Gee (2012). Classical contributions to conversation analysis are Atkinson and Heritage (1984), Psathas (1995), Hutchby and Wooffitt (2008 [1998]), Ten Have (1999), Norrick (2000), Quasthoff and Becker (2005), Drew (2007), Schegloff (2007), Sidnell and Stivers (2013), Rühlemann (2015) and Clift (2016). On small stories see Bamberg (2007) and Georgakopoulou (2007). 11 See also Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann (2000); / III.2 Freeman, / III.1 Scheidt and Stukenbrock.
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A key volume is Rita Charon’s study of narrative medicine (2016).12 There has also been extensive study of narratives from a cognitive psychological point of view (Gerrig 1993; / I.7 Gerrig and Gagnon). It is since the millennium that narratology has concentrated more thoroughly on nonfiction narratives. Two German collections of essays here deserve pride of place: Ansgar and Vera Nünning’s volume on transgeneric, intermedial and interdisciplinary approaches to narratology (2002); and Christian Klein and Matías Martínez’s Wirklichkeitserzählungen (‘Narratives about the real world’) from 2009. In their collection, the Nünnings include essays on historical narrative as well as narration in psychology and therapy. In Klein and Martínez’s volume, which explicates their reality-focused narratives as ‘non-literary narration’ (see their subtitle: Felder, Formen und Funktionen nicht-literarischen Erzählens – ‘Areas, forms and functions of nonliterary storytelling’), the chapters deal with narratives of the law and in psychotherapy, with scientific texts, historiography, economic texts, moral and ethic discourses, journalism, theological texts and storytelling in politics. This is supplemented by chapters on collective narrative and on narrative in internet forums. (For a more in-depth discussion see Fludernik 2014, 2017, 2018; Bekhta 2017, see also Palmer 2010.) Both Phelan and Rabinowitz’s Companion to Narrative Theory (2005) and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (Herman et al. 2005) devote a substantial number of essays and entries to factual genres. This interest in factual narration can also be observed in the second edition of de Gruyter’s Handbook of Narratology by Hühn et al. (2014), which contains entries on several types of factual narrative including (auto)biography, corporate storytelling, narrative in legal and religious discourse, narration in various disciplines (/ I.2 Fludernik). Besides the expanding interest in factual narratives in narratological reference works, two research groups have recently started to concentrate on factual narratives, though with an emphasis on the comparison between fictionality and factuality and on interferences and hybridizations between fact and fiction. The two groups are the study group (Arbeitsstelle) ‘Faktualität/Fiktionalität’ at the University of Hamburg (part of the Hamburg ICN – International Centre of Narratology) and the Freiburg graduate school ‘Factual and Fictional Narration’ (GRK 1767).13 Work from these two groups includes a thesis by Frederike Lagoni on biography vs. fiction
12 Compare the entry in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory on “narrative therapy” (Mills 2005; see also Brown and Augusta-Scott 2007). 13 See http://www.icn.uni-hamburg.de/projects/research-group-factuality-fictionality and http://www.grk-erzaehlen.uni-freiburg.de/english-summary/.
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(Lagoni 2016); PhD theses in the field of psychology (Haug 2015; Koppermann, in progress), on collectives in history vs. fiction (Alders 2015), on the roman à clef (Franzen 2018), early modern newspapers and travelogues (Detering 2017), on narratives constructed from CCTV cameras (Falkenhayner 2019), on narratives of economic crisis (Galke, in progress), on Tretyakov’s literature of fact (Hinze 2019), on narratives of dying (Klatt, in progress), and on witness narratives (Hipp 2018). The graduate school moreover hosts a book series. The first volume of the series is an essay collection covering religious and historical narration as well as discussions of narratives in psychotherapy and analyses of docudrama and of ethical narratives (Fludernik et al. 2015). Other volumes in the series concentrate on narratives of grief in poetry cycles (Aurnhammer and Fitzon 2016), on narratives about the last German emperor, Wilhelm II (Detering et al. 2016), and on the historization of the concept of fictionality (Franzen et al. 2018). Finally, work by the Aarhus Centre for Fictionality Studies should receive a mention here14 since some of their work deals with the use of narrative in the genre of charity appeals on YouTube. Although the focus of the center is on fictionality, it therefore considers in particular the use of fiction(al narratives) within factual genres which, in themselves, are not necessarily narrative. For the work of the center see especially the landmark essay by Nielsen, Phelan and Walsh (2015). From the above, it should be clear that the present time is the right moment to be contemplating a handbook on narrative factuality and to examine in more detail what a narratological analysis of factual narrative involves both practically and methodologically. Though we have been unable to fully cover all the important aspects of this question and the issues it raises, and despite some regrettable lacunae, we do hope that this handbook will serve its main function, namely that of drawing more general attention to the importance of factual narration and the desirability of interdisciplinary dialogue between narratologists and nonphilological fields in which narratives occur and could be profitably studied both in their specific functions and in their own right. 4. Structure of the volume The handbook has five sections or parts. In the first section we have included contributions that try to situate the phenomenon of factuality
14 See http://fictionality.au.dk/.
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within narratology. The essays collected in this section raise issues of terminology in relation to factuality and fictional narrative (/ I.1 Rajewsky). They position factual narration in the context of the narratological discipline, especially in relation to media studies (/ I.2 Fludernik, / I.3Ryan). It is usually assumed that discourses, including narratives, are assumed to refer to the ‘real world’ as a default reception attitude. The chapters by / I.8 Caracciolo and / I.9 Birke approach this issue from, respectively, a cognitive and a reception-oriented perspective. A number of contributions are more concerned with factual narrative’s others. Thus, / I.4 Packard notes that the dichotomy of fact and fiction is interestingly triangulated by the practice of lying. As psychological research has demonstrated, our cognitive makeup processes factual and fictional information differently (/ I.7 Gerrig and Gagnon), thus turning this ability of distinguishing into an inherent human capacity. Factual texts can incorporate departures from the literal truth in the form of embedded narratives; they also display a number of modal formats such as those of allegory, satire, supposition or metaphor which are not fictional but both nonfactual and nonfictional (/ I.10 Sinding). Another approach to the factual is to deny its very existence, which is what it seems theories of panfictionality are doing (/ I.6 Zipfel). The ‘nonfactual’ in fact includes a whole range of forms that go beyond that of the lie, and these perspectives on the real and its opposite can be delineated along several axes of opposites (/ I.5 Wolf ): the literal vs. the metaphorical, the empirical vs. the theoretical (abstraction as falsification), the real vs. the pretended (simulation and false identities), the actual vs. the virtual (the fictive as the potentially real), the nonfictional vs. the fictional (reminding us of the fact that not all nonfiction is true). / I.5 Wolf also discusses mixed analogies and imaginary worlds as important categories of the (not so simple) real and its generic imbrications. The second section represents a more philosophical and linguistic orientation and provides introductions into the concepts of truth, facts and realism from a philosophical perspective (/ II.1 Klauk, / II.2 Bartmann, / II.3 Mikkonen). It also deals with reference from a literary, linguistic and philosophical point of view (/ II.5 Köppe, / II.6 Jacob, / III.15 Freitag). The section additionally contains a survey of the fascinating phenomenon of evidentiality (/ II.7 Zymner), fascinating, that is, because this cognitive category has not been morphologically formalized in the Indo-European languages. Section III, “Factuality across Disciplines and Media,” provides a conspectus of a great variety of disciplines and media and tries to answer the question to what extent factual narrative has a role in them, either in their material or in their discourses. The question of the real and factual plays
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out quite differently in these areas of human learning and communication. Thus, the determination of what is (or might be) real or has actually happened is a fraught issue both for psychotherapy and for anthropology (/ III.1 Scheidt and Stukenbrock, / III.3 Dobler), though for entirely different reasons. Likewise, many discussions in a number of disciplines circle around the concept of authenticity (/ III.2 Freeman; a key concept also for literary studies / Martínez). In these areas, the very possibility of determining the truth is loaded with irresolvable problems; the strategy of producing verisimilar versions of the unattainable real emerges as an important means of authentication that has decidedly literary or ‘fictional’ associations/overtones. A major subsection of Part III is devoted to the use of narrative in scholarly discourse and to the role that narrative plays in these discourses. In many instances, the suspicion of fiction attaches to such uses of narrative, whether in the writings of historians (/ III.4 Jaeger) or politicians (/ III.5 Musolff ). In some disciplines, the use of so-called narrative interviews, in which the probands are encouraged to tell their life story, or of exempla-like stories has become an accepted format (/ III.6 Dietz, / III.7 Kleeberg). For the law and for religion, on the other hand, narratives are common discursive models, but the main question is that of the evidence that can be set out for the court or the believers (/ III.8 Stern, / III.9 Mauz). Three contributions concern themselves with the narration of scientific facts (/ III.10 Walsh, / III.12 Milne, / III.11 Borrelli), and – in parallel to the law and religion – it emerges that here, too, the truth remains an elusive matter while the reality of experimental procedures trying to capture that truth can be presented in narrative format. The essays by / III.13 Mundhenke, / III.14 Renner and / II.4 Freitas consider media-related aspects of factual narrative. Thus, whereas journalism prides itself on its truthfulness, advertising and documentaries are often not merely playful but undermine their claim to truthfulness by their obvious reliance on fictional strategies. Journalism has developed a number of key strategies to ensure the assessment of truth value and the control of practitioners through structures of mutual verifiability, while preserving a variety of viewpoints by means of generic options of journalistic formats (/ III.14 Renner). Part IV elaborates a number of issues that are fundamental to literature and literary studies and intersect with the focus on factuality, truth and the real. First and foremost among these is of course the difficult question of realism and verisimilitude in fiction (/ IV.1 McKeon, / iv.2 Warhol). Second, but linked to the notion of the verisimilar, is the concept of the authentic: whereas literature does not usually attempt to tell the truth (or only in a moral sense; / II.1 Klauk), it does want to be authentic
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(/ IV.3 Martínez). Thus, even in fiction, where one would assume readers suspend their expectations of truthfulness, ‘facts’ play an important role. Conversely, one can diagnose an ‘ethics’ of factual (not merely of fictional) narrative (/ IV.5 Phelan, / IV.7 Korthals Altes). Ethical and aesthetic interpretations of the practice of literature moreover relate to the constitution and maintenance of frames within which such assessments take place (/ IV.7 Korthals Altes) and to the conventions (/ IV.4 Franzen) that are historically and variably current at particular times and in specific cultural, ethnic and political circumstances. Iversen, on the other hand, examines transgressive narratives on the example of autofiction, an increasingly common genre of fictional autobiography that metanarratively celebrates the imbrication of life and fiction (/ IV.6 Iversen). Another important issue is that of pseudofactuality (/ IV.9Paige) which projects an illusion of referentiality and actuality. This leads to the question whether the factual can be determined on the basis of factuality markers (/ IV.8 Lavocat). In the final chapter of the section, / IV.10Pettersson considers the literariness of factual texts and discusses how factual works composed in an elaborated style are often appreciated as instances of ‘literature.’ The factual here parades as fiction, constituting an inverse of pseudofactuality (/ IV.10 Pettersson). Our final section is devoted to the transcultural and diachronic applicability of the concept of factuality and fictionality, which are arguably products of modern institutional parameters or even of contemporary theoretical presuppositions. Rather than asking whether the concept of fiction existed in Classical Antiquity or the Middle Ages, the three essays opening Part V focus on the factual from a historical perspective, which of course implicitly also involves a concern for fictionality. The essays consider factual narratives and the factual in a number of different cultural backgrounds (for which we had to be selective in our choices); they demonstrate interesting commonalities (for instance, the importance of history in both Chinese and Arabic writing) as well as unexpected singularities, as in the different manners of authenticating narrated facts in both form and content. A focus on the factual serves to highlight that – depending on the cultural context – different genres become the repository of factuality in the various literary traditions. Part V is perhaps the most experimental and innovative in the handbook since it constitutes an initial attempt to pose the question of factuality in areas where this question has so far been largely neglected.
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5. Acknowledgments Thanks go to the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) for funding the graduate school “Factual and Fictional Narration” (GRK 1767) and for having sponsored a conference in July 2017 at which the contributors of this handbook were able to meet in Freiburg and discuss draft versions of their papers. We are additionally grateful to the DFG for funding translation and editorial work. In this context, thanks go to Teresa Woods for stylistic checking of non-anglophone contributors’ essays. Most of the formatting work has been in the hands of Hanna Specker, to whom we are extremely grateful for her thoroughness and efficiency. We would also like to thank Hanna Häger, the coordinator of the graduate school, for the organization of the conference, the continuous administrative and logistic work helping the project along as well as the proof-reading and index-generation she has performed in the two years running up to the publication of this handbook. Particular thanks go to the PhD students of the graduate school and to our post-doctoral fellow, Dustin Breitenwischer, for their active participation in study groups before and during the conference as well as for help in proof-reading. At de Gruyter, we would like to thank the series editors of the Revisionen series for their benevolent interest in this publication; we are also grateful to Manuela Gerlof of de Gruyter for immediately welcoming and supporting the project.
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Zipfel, Frank. Fiktion, Fiktivität, Fiktionalität. Analyse zur Fiktion in der Literatur und zum Fiktionsbegriff in der Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2001.
I. Basic Issues: Factuality and Fictionality
IRINA RAJEWSKY
Theories of Fictionality and Their Real Other This contribution will deal with how current theories of fictionality conceive of fictionality’s ‘other(s),’ focusing on the controversial term factuality as fictionality’s other or foil. An introductory section on factual narrative in Genettian terms will be followed by a survey of the terminological quandaries observable in literature-centered fiction/ality discourse, based on a comparison between the anglophone and German-language debates. In view of current socio-cultural and academic shifts in paradigm, my closing remarks will address a broader, transmedial perspective on the issues at hand. 1. The invention of factual narrative In his 1990 “Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative” (and in Fiction et diction / Fiction and Diction 1991 / 1993 with even greater impact) Gérard Genette surprised his readership with extensive criticism of his own theoretical perspectives in narrative theory, anticipating an “expansion of research agendas” (Pier 2010, 11). Such an expansion manifested itself over the following years in the shift from so-called classical to postclassical narratology. While maintaining classical narratology’s focus on verbal forms of narrative, Genette recognizes its quasi exclusive focus on fictional narrative texts as an intrinsic shortcoming. “[N]arratology,” Genette states, “ought to be concerned with all sorts of narratives, fictional or not. It is quite clear, however, that [it] has concentrated almost exclusively up to now on the features and objects of fictional narrative alone” (1993 [1991], 54). Genette thus detects a fundamental restrictedness of narratology (cf. 56), which has “proceeded as if by virtue of an implicit privilege that hypostatizes fictional narrative into narrative par excellence, or into a model for all narratives” (54–55).1 He now maintained that narratological 1 For remarks on previous research into nonfictional forms of narrative (e.g. by Paul Ricœur, Hayden White, and Paul Veyne) cf. Genette (1993 [1991], 55); see also Fludernik (2013). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-002
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considerations must necessarily include nonfictional narrative and he introduced the concept of factual narrative (le récit factuel ). From a present-day perspective Genette’s diagnosis certainly still falls short of the mark. For instance, from the viewpoint of transgeneric and transmedial approaches classical narratology’s restrictedness is not merely evident in its focus on fictional narrative, but in fact applies to the limited conception of narrative itself. In this context, it is important to recall that there are currently two basic types of approach in both the narratological debate and the debate on fiction/ality: a) established language- and (more specifically) literary fiction-based approaches, and b) transmedially-oriented approaches concerned with the study of narrative and/or fictionality/factuality across the arts or media. Hence, we are confronted with two fundamentally different conceptions of narrative: a) Genette’s and, more generally speaking, classical narratology’s narrowly conceived concept and b) more broadly conceived conceptions, which have become commonplace in postclassical narratology (see, e.g., Ryan 2005; Wolf 2011; 2017). With regard to Genette’s notion of narrative, one must bear in mind that classical narratology applies the term following the Platonic-Aristotelian distinction between epic and drama. More precisely, the use of the term is derived from Plato’s (Politeia III, 394b–c) and Aristotle’s (Poetics, Ch. 3) famous distinction between the two basic modes of conveying a story: recounting vs. showing, i.e., mimetically enacting. Yet, in contrast to Plato’s superordinate broadly conceived notion of diegesis, classical narratology does not treat ‘recounting’ and ‘enacting’ as two modes of diegesis, i.e. of narrative, but has placed narrative (as well as diegesis) as a term and concept on one side of the dichotomy: narrative versus drama, diegetic storytelling versus mimetic (re)presentation.2 When Genette argues in favor of a “strict” use of the term narrative – “one referring to mode” (1988 [1983], 17) – he thus only addresses the diegetic mode, which is, in fact, further restricted and equated with fictional, narrator-transmitted storytelling.3 Mimetic forms of conveying a story are regarded as ‘extra-’ or ‘non-narrative,’ which is why Genette does not consider them part of the field of (modal) narratology (cf. 15–18). To sum up, we can identify four conditions that determine Genette’s and classical narratology’s understanding of narrative as well as
2 This is to say that classical narratology has equated Plato’s understanding of diegesis with what Politeia III, 392d, regards “as one particular species of that genus, i.e. ‘plain’ or ‘single-voiced’ diêgêsis” (Halliwell 2009, 18). In Plato’s view both ‘plain’ diegesis (haple diegesis) and mimesis are forms of diegesis. 3 Cf. also Chatman: “In the narrower, traditional sense, Narrative is a text entailing […] the diegetic condition: that is, that the text must be told by a […] narrator” (1990, 114; emphasis deleted).
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of narration / to narrate: (1.) narrative is a matter of diegetic forms of storytelling; which is to say, (2.) that they are verbal; and (3.) (in general) fictional narratives; moreover, (4.) academic research and debates are almost exclusively restricted to the analysis of written texts. Genette’s remarks in Fiction and Diction need to be read in this light. When he claims that narratology “ought to be concerned with all sorts of narrative” (1993 [1991], 54; my emphasis), he does not refer to narrative in a broader sense, including drama, theater, film, etc. His understanding remains restricted to the narrow sense (i.e. verbal, diegetic storytelling), except that it now includes both fictional and factual narratives. A global debate of the matter must take such conceptual restrictions into account. However, even if Genette’s (self-)critique falls short of the mark from a present-day perspective, at the time it did raise an awareness of a crucial shortcoming and a ‘blind spot’ in conventional narrative theory; namely that of the exclusive focus on fictional narrative texts. As recent research has shown, this has far-reaching implications for the entire theoretical framework of narratology – and particularly for transgeneric and transmedial approaches (cf., e.g., Ryan 2005; Rajewsky 2013). For the present contribution it is, moreover, relevant that Genette introduced the term factual narrative (albeit with certain reservations concerning its terminological aptness) in precisely this context. His declared goal was to put forward a positive term to designate fictionality’s ‘other’: For want of a better term, I use the adjective factual [ factuel ] here, […] so as to avoid depending systematically on negative expressions (nonfiction, nonfictional ) which reflect and perpetuate the very privilege that I want to call into question. (Genette 1993 [1991], 55 fn. 3)
While Genette’s focus is clearly on narrative texts, he also implies a more general distinction between fictionality and factuality (cf. 1993 [1991], 79). This paved the way for the semantic opposition of fictional/fictionality and factual/factuality in the wider context of postclassical narratology and theories of fictionality. Yet, despite the apparent plausibility of the fictional/factual dichotomy, contrasting the two terms or notions has not defused the complex terminological situation in fiction/ality research. Two aspects are particularly relevant in this context: Firstly, if factuality is defined as the counterpart of fictionality, a more precise definition of factuality evidently depends on one’s related understanding of fictionality. This is as much as to say that factuality is rooted within the fiction/ality debate and has been conceptualized in relation to fictionality. This is striking since nonfictional discourse is generally seen as the default mode of communication. Consequently, the main section of
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this contribution will outline the extent to which different conceptions of fiction/ality have affected the notion and understanding of factuality. Secondly, there is no consensus regarding the advantages of Genette’s dichotomy: some theoreticians consider fictionality vs. factuality a self-evident and heuristically useful opposition, while others (such as J. Alexander Bareis; see below) reject factuality in favor of adhering to the term nonfictionality. However, there are also voices that raise concerns on another point: namely that factuality can only ever partially convey the notion of the nonfictional. Klaus W. Hempfer, for instance, emphasizes that the debate pays too little heed to the context in which Genette introduced the term (cf. 2018, 100–101). He points out that Genette does not distinguish “between ‘fictionality’ and ‘factuality’ tout court ” 4 (101), but applies factual to narrative practices and, hence, to a specific kind of referential representation. Hempfer makes it clear that the aptness of the fictional-factual opposition is limited: “[F]actual discourses or texts [are] only those [...] which can in principle be traced back to assertions, for which it is possible to assign a truth value and thus a reference” (101). This does not imply that statements in factual discourses are necessarily ‘true.’ Just as assertions may be true, false, or undecidable, statements in factual discourses can also be false or undecidable (cf. 101). Fictional and factual utterances should thus be distinguished in the context of referential semantics in its broadest sense (i.e. one which also problematizes reference; cf. 101). Further, Hempfer points out that the fictional-factual opposition fails to include “utterances that cannot be referenced, such as orders, regulations, obligations, permissions, etc.” (101). He thus distinguishes the fictional vs. factual opposition from the fictional vs. nonfictional one, since nonfictionality covers a broader range of types of utterances and discourses: “[T]he realm of the nonfictional [must] be separated out into different categories [...], ranging from the normative to the hypothetical to the counterfactual [...]” (101) (/ I.4 Packard). Jean-Marie Schaeffer delineates factuality’s area of validity and scope of application in a comparable way (though he also opens up the discussion to a consideration of non-literary and non-narrative practices). In his seminal 2014 article on “Fictional vs. Factual Narration,” he highlights the importance of placing “the problem of the distinction between factual and fictional narrative [...] in its wider context” (181). Schaeffer provides the following specification of the fictional/ity vs. factual/ity opposition:
4 Unless otherwise indicated, here and in all further quotations from German criticism, the translation is mine.
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First, not every verbal utterance is narrative, nor is every referential utterance narrative. Thus discursive reference cannot be reduced to narrative reference. More generally, reference is not necessarily verbal: it can also be visual (e.g. a photograph makes reference claims without being of a discursive nature). The same holds for fiction. Not every fiction is verbal (paintings can be, and very often are, fictional), and not every fiction, or even every verbal fiction, is narrative: both a painted portrait […] and a verbal description of a unicorn are fictions without being narrations. Factual narrative is a species of referential representation, just as fictional narrative is a species of nonfactual representation. And of course not every verbal utterance without factual content is a fiction: erroneous assertions and plain lies are also utterances without factual content. Indeed, fiction, and its species narrative fiction, are best understood as a specific way of producing and using mental representations and semiotic devices, be they verbal or not. This means that narrative and fiction are intersecting categories and must be studied as such […]. (181)
Hence, like Hempfer, Schaeffer restricts factuality to referential forms of representation – and at the same time makes it clear that the factual/ fictional divide points beyond fictionality research’s traditional focus on language and literature as well as beyond the equally traditional proximity between fictionality-related questions and narrative practices. Narrative and factuality (just like narrative and fictionality) must, therefore, be understood and studied as intersecting categories. Moreover, both narrative and fictionality/factuality classify as transgeneric and transmedial phenomena, i.e. as phenomena that are observable across a variety of different genres, arts, and media. 2. Fictionality and factuality from the perspective of literary studies The international fiction/ality debate is characterized by heterogeneous concepts of fiction/ality, its derivatives and counter-concepts. In this context, differences in the understanding and use of terms in individual languages must be given due attention. Even though this has repeatedly been noted (see, e.g., Hempfer 2004 [1990]; Zipfel 2001, Ch. 1.1), the widerreaching implications have so far largely remained disregarded. In what follows, I will outline the differences between terminological approaches in English and in German as a case study.5 In the anglophone debate the term fictional generally serves as the adjective corresponding to the noun fiction. Fictionality as the nominalized form of fictional thus primarily denotes the property of ‘being’ fiction/al. In the anglophone context, then, fictional/ity is a rather vague term that covers,
5 This analysis excludes a consideration of the notions of fiction sensu ‘genre’ and sensu ‘construct’ as in panfictionalism (Konrad 2014; / I.6 Zipfel).
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or may cover, fiction in all its possible meanings and as a multidimensional term (see below). In recent years, the extensive impact of Kendall L. Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990) – and of the use of fiction/fictional/fictionality linked to this specific approach – has further complicated terminological issues. One should note that Walton’s primary concern is not the theoretical (and/or terminological) fiction/ality debate, but rather the attempt to establish a general theory of representation. To that end, his ‘game of make-believe’ concept treats representation and (works of ) fiction as ultimately interchangeable terms: We thus find ourselves with a way of distinguishing fiction from nonfiction. Works of fiction are simply representations in our special sense, works whose function is to serve as props in a game of make-believe. Except for the fact that representations need not be works [i.e. human artifacts], we could use ‘representation’ and ‘work of fiction’ interchangeably. (1990, 72)
From the perspective of a theory of fiction/ality, this renders the term fiction rather nebulous,6 and this has significant terminological implications. In accordance with general anglophone practice, Walton uses fictional/ity to denote the property of ‘being’ fiction; however in this case fiction is to be understood as representation and, more precisely, as representation in Walton’s “special sense.” Among other things, this leads to his conclusion that images, even press images, “are fiction by definition” (1990, 351). Walton’s notion of fiction, fictional and fictionality (and thus also of ‘fictional truth’) is hence out of line with the received use of the terms. This often leads to terminological and conceptual confusion, especially when Walton’s use of the terms fictional and fictionality is adopted in the German-language context (see Rajewsky 2018). Let us then turn to the German-speaking scholarly community. Since the early 1990s, German criticism has increasingly highlighted the distinction between Fiktivität (fictivity) and Fiktionalität (fictionality), which is generally regarded as fundamental.7 Andreas Kablitz considers this dichotomy “the core [Kernstück] of all theories of literary fiction” (2008, 18). There exists a broad consensus in German criticism that fiktiv/Fiktivität denotes a quality of what is represented (i.e. it refers to fictive entities, characters or places), 6 It has, moreover, been pointed out that Walton quite paradoxically considers all visual artifacts as fictions (see below), while he distinguishes between fictional and nonfictional narrative texts. For critical discussions of Walton’s approach see Schaeffer (2010 [1999]); Zipfel (2001, esp. 23); Bunia (2007, esp. 30); Thon (2014); Wenninger (2014, 469); Hempfer (2018, esp. 86–87). See also Bareis (2008, 2014, 2016). 7 See Hempfer (2004 [1990]), Gabriel (1991), Rühling (1996), Zipfel (2001) and numerous current contributions.
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Fiktion (fiction)
fiktiv (fictive) Fiktivität (fictivity)
fiktional (fictional) Fiktionalität (fictionality)
quality of what is represented
quality/mode of representation
Narnia as a fictive country Lara Croft as a fictive character
The Chronicles of Narnia as fictional texts (novels) Lara Croft: Tomb Raider as a fictional film
Fig. 1: Terminological differentiations of Fiktion in the German-language context
while fiktional/Fiktionalität is perceived to denote a quality or mode of representation (fictional discourse, utterances, texts, films, etc.) (see Fig. 1). Consequently, in the German-language debate neither fiktiv/Fiktivität nor fiktional/Fiktionalität are taken to be synonymous with Fiktion (fiction). Rather, Fiktion is understood as a superordinate, semantically ambivalent term whose ambivalence becomes apparent in its having two corresponding adjectives (fiktiv and fiktional ), each of which refers to different aspects or dimensions of Fiktion (cf. Kablitz 2008, 17–18). However, despite this broad consensus on a distinction between Fiktivität and Fiktionalität, the specification of how to conceptualize and apply these terms is open to debate. In fact, views on the matter differ considerably, which also affects the use and conception of the respective counterconcepts. For a start, the term fiktiv is subject to different conceptions: it is sometimes used in the sense of ‘invented’ and sometimes in the sense of ‘possible’ or ‘fictive’ worlds. This prompts different applications of the term: the first one distinguishes between fictive and real entities (e.g., between invented and historically authentic characters in a novel; see Zipfel 2001, 102); the second defines all entities within a fictional text as fictive, since they form part of a ‘closed,’ ‘fictive’ world, irrespective of their potential similarities to entities that exist in ontological reality (see Schmid 2010, 31). Some of these latter approaches, moreover, introduce an additional differentiation between fiktiv and erfunden (‘fictive’ and ‘invented’; see Bunia 2007; Kuhn 2018). In the following, fiktiv/fictive will be used in the sense of ‘invented.’ One of the (international) debate’s central points of dispute is the issue whether Faktualität (factuality) – or rather Nicht-Fiktionalität (nonfictionality) –
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can be considered commensurable as counter-concepts of Fiktionalität. For instance, Bareis has repeatedly spoken out against Faktualität/factuality as the antonym of Fiktionalität/fictionality. In taking up Walton’s approach (and oriented along the lines of the anglophone debate) he states: Fiction sensu Walton is not defined in opposition to actuality/reality and/or truth. The opposite of fiction is nonfiction. Consequently, the opposite of fictional narrative is not factual narrative but nonfictional narrative. ‘Reality can be the subject of fantasy,’ as Walton says, but conversely fictive entities can be the subject of nonfictional narration. (2014, 61)
Regarding narrative, Bareis therefore does not simply conceive of factuality as a synonym of nonfictionality, but as a term that also inherently implies ‘actuality/reality and/or truth’ and which is thus perforce linked to facticity. From Bareis’s point of view this association with truth and facticity is all the more problematic as it analogously suggests that fictionality is intrinsically related to fictivity (i.e. inventedness), or that fictionality presupposes at least a “minimal dimension of fictivity” (“ein Mindestmaß an Fiktivität”; 2008, 106). This is a conclusion that pragmatic approaches such as Bareis’s reject. Discarding factual/ity as a counter-concept of fictional/ity on these very grounds shows up a certain lopsidedness in how the terms are used. From the perspective of most current theories of fictionality it is not only necessary to clearly disengage fictionality from questions pertaining to fictivity or nonfictivity; but this also appears unproblematic, despite the fact that “[i]nvented entities and actions are [generally considered] the common stuff of fiction” (Schaeffer 2014, 186). However, at least the anglophone (and francophone) debates seem to approach the term and concept of factuality against the background of a different kind of intrinsic logic, one which does not suggest decoupling factuality from facticity. Such a view is also advocated by Schaeffer. In presenting pragmatic (vs. semantic and syntactic) definitions of fiction/ality he states: In conclusion, the pragmatic definition claims that the syntactic status of fiction depends on its formal make-up, its semantic status on its relationship to reality, but that its status as fiction (or not) depends on the way the representations implemented by the text are processed or used. (191)
For Schaeffer this also poses a problem, for it would imply that the pair fact/fiction is logically heterogeneous. The conditions for satisfying the criteria of factual narrative are semantic: a factual narrative is either true or false. Even if it is willfully false (as is the case if it is a lie), what determines its truth or its untruth is not its (hidden) pragmatic intention, but that which is in fact the case. The conditions for satisfying the criteria of fictional narrative are pragmatic: the truth claims a text would make if it (the same text, from the syntactic point of view) were a factual text (be these claims true or false) must be bracketed out. (191)
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Theories of Fictionality and Their Real Other
Thus Schaeffer highlights the very same issue that Bareis tries to solve by rejecting factual/ity and reinstating nonfictional/ity as fictional/ity’s counter term. However, the fictionality/factuality divide can also be approached from a different angle. It is no coincidence that the notion of factual/ity has come to prevail in the German-language debate. In contrast to French (where factuel means “qui s’en tient aux faits” [Larousse] / “qui est de l’ordre du fait” [Le Petit Robert] – ‘that which accords with the facts’ / ‘that which is of the order of facts’) and English (where factual means “relating to or concerned with facts or reality; of the nature of fact, consisting of facts” [OED]), the German language, according to Duden, has the adjective faktisch (meaning “in Wirklichkeit, tatsächlich, wirklich” – ‘in reality, factually, really’) but does not have the word faktual. Thus, the neologism faktual (as opposed to faktisch) can be used to supplement the traditional conceptual pair fiktiv vs. faktisch and fiktional vs. nicht-fiktional to yield conceptually complementary ones: fiktiv vs. faktisch and fiktional vs. faktual (see Fig. 2).8 FACT / FICTION quality of what is represented
faktisch/real (‘factual’) Faktizität ( facticity)
fiktiv (fictive) Fiktivität ( fictivity)
quality/mode of representation
faktual (‘factual’) Faktualität ( factuality)
fiktional (fictional) Fiktionalität ( fictionality)
Fig. 2: ‘Fact/fiction’ – overview of the terminological oppositions in the Germanlanguage context
As Figure 2 demonstrates, in English factual refers to both the mode of representation and the quality of what is represented (‘factual narrative’ and ‘factual content,’ see Schaeffer above); i.e. factual also means ‘based on facts.’ However, the German-language context differentiates between faktual and faktisch. Genette’s introduction of a positive term to supplement the already established notion of nonfictionality has thus proven particularly productive here. After all, it was this additional term (faktual ) which 8 In the francophone context, Genette applies factuel (in the sense of non-fictionnel ) despite the common denotation, which he himself recognizes as a terminological ‘blemish.’ – Interestingly, the problem poses itself to him in a different way than it does, e.g., to Bareis: “[…] I use the adjective factual here, though it is not an ideal choice (for fiction, too, consists in sequences of facts)” (Genette 1993 [1991], 55 fn. 3).
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produced a terminological frame, homogeneous in itself, in the Germanlanguage context. This frame has, in fact, brought to the fore the analogy and conceptual complementarity of the distinction between fiktiv vs. fiktional on the one hand and faktisch vs. faktual on the other. To juxtapose factual and fictional narrative along these conceptual lines qualifies the notion that they are based on inherently heterogeneous criteria (semantic ones in the case of factual narrative and pragmatic ones in the case of fictional narrative, see Schaeffer above). It should be noted that, with regard to Faktualität as a term and concept, the German-language debate nonetheless features two conflicting positions (both of which employ the term Faktualität as synonymous with Nicht-Fiktionalität): – The first one indeed links Fiktionalität/Faktualität to Fiktivität/Faktizität. For instance, Frank Zipfel takes the position that Fiktionalität is always determined by Fiktivität (cf. 2001, 165). Conversely, this implies that factual narratives are linked to facticity. (For a modified approach with reference to prototype theory by Zipfel himself see 2016.) – The second and prevalent position disengages the concepts from one another and thus also explicitly detaches the concept of Faktualität from Faktizität or Nicht-Faktizität.9 This position therefore considers Fiktionalität and Fiktivität as well as Faktualität and Faktizität as logically independent notions (cf. Rühling 1996, 30). A case in point for the latter position is Kablitz’s approach. In his eyes the differentia specifica of fictional (as compared to factual) narratives is the absence of the obligation to state ontological facts and be ‘truthful’ (cf. 2014, 95). He coins the term Vergleichgültigung (‘indifferentiation’) for this ‘license’ (2008, 16 and 2014, 95). (For a critical stance see Hempfer 2018; Kuhn 2018.) The crucial point is that it is admissible to make false statements in fictional utterances. That is, they need not but can also be true. According to Kablitz, it is perfectly possible for a fictional text not to contain any kind of invention (cf. 2008, 16) – just as “fictivity [i.e. inventedness] is not a privilege of fictional texts” (2014, 96; see also Danneberg 2006). From this Kablitz deduces that Fiktivität is scalable (e.g. historical novels vs. fantasy novels), whereas Fiktionalität/Faktualität is not
9 Against this backdrop, it is significant that in 2009 Klein and Martínez considered it necessary to introduce yet another term, viz. Wirklichkeitserzählung (literally: ‘narrative of reality’), into the German-speaking debate, evidently with the objective of coining an additional term which emphasizes the respective narratives’ dimension of facticity or reality.
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(cf. Kablitz 2014, 96). A narrative text can either be fictional or factual: it is either exempted from the obligation to relate to facts or it is not (cf. 2014, 96 and 2008, 17). What is represented can, however, be “more or less fictive” (17), a possibility which according to Kablitz exists for fictional as well as for factual narratives (cf. 17). Approaches such as Kablitz’s hence are neither in line with the notion that Faktualität aims at something other than Nicht-Fiktionalität, nor are they consonant with Schaeffer’s assessment that factuality and fictionality constitute a logically heterogeneous pair. But they are in complete alignment with the pragmatic orientation that prevails in current fictionality research, applying Faktualität in conceptual analogy to Fiktionalität (i.e., disengaged from questions of fictivity/facticity/truth value).10 Certainly, “what determines [a factual narrative’s] truth or […] untruth is not its (hidden) pragmatic intention, but that which is in fact the case” (Schaeffer 2014, 191). A reader’s evaluation of whether the statements a factual narrative makes are ‘true’ or ‘untrue’ (or undecidable) is indeed necessarily based on knowledge of the world. This, however, is likewise the case for fictional narratives and does not exempt the reader from having to decide whether to approach the respective text as a factual or fictional one in the first place.11 As a consequence one cannot conclude that “[t]he conditions for satisfying the criteria of factual narrative” (191) are only semantic; one also needs to take into account pragmatic conditions and a corresponding “pragmatic attitude” (191) that determine how a reader approaches and deals with a given text. This becomes apparent from the implications arising from pragmatic approaches to fictional narratives. Whenever one assumes a fictional ‘contract’ between author and reader12 or conceives of fictionality as an ‘institution’ (see Lamarque and Olsen 1994; Köppe 2014) or as a ‘convention’ (“Fiktionalitätskonvention”; Hempfer 2018, 47), one also presupposes a nonfictional contract, an institution or a convention of nonfictionality (cf. 47).13 Just as in the case of fictional narratives, an appropriate recep10 See also Klauk and Köppe (2014b) who specify that “[i]n differentiating between fictional and nonfictional texts, the latter are sometimes referred to as ‘factual.’ This, however, means merely that the text in question is nonfictional; and it does not mean that the text describes or states facts” (5–6). 11 Note, however, that some textual features may indicate (or signal) a narrative’s fictionality and thus prompt the reader’s assumption that what is represented is fictive (see also Hempfer 2018, 64–65). 12 Cf., e.g., Searle (1975, 331); Warning (1983, 194); Eco (1994, 75). 13 Hempfer defines fictionality as a “set of discursive conventions” (2018, 53, 55) and argues against conceptions of fictionality based on notions of ‘contract’ or ‘institution.’ On how a systematic theory of fictionality compares to historically variable fictionality
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tion of factual narratives requires the reader to assume an appropriate attitude or disposition, approaching a given narrative as fictional or factual. The relevance of pragmatic conditions becomes particularly apparent if one considers borderline cases, such as fictional texts that obscure their fictional status or factual narratives featuring strategies usually associated with fiction. In these cases semantic (as well as syntactic) approaches face certain problems, as is already evident in Genette. Genette derives his distinction between fictional and factual narrative from a given story’s different semantic – or, as Hempfer puts it more convincingly, “epistemic” (2018, 102) – status: the “story is in one case (supposed to be) ‘true’ and in the other fictitious, that is, invented” (Genette 1993 [1991], 57). However, Genette also notes that it is necessary to “attenuate considerably” his initial “hypothesis that there is an a priori difference of narrative regime between fiction and nonfiction” (82). He points to “the interaction” (80) and to “reciprocal exchanges” (82) between these two regimes: [T]o a large extent the heterodiegetic fictional narrative is a mimesis of factual forms […] – a simulation in which the markers of fictionality are only optional licenses that it can just as well do without [as, e.g., in Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s Marbot].14 […] [C]onversely, […] techniques of ‘fictionalization’ […] have been extended over the last several decades to certain forms of factual narrative, such as newspaper reporting or journalistic investigation (the so-called new journalism), and other derivative genres such as the ‘nonfiction novel.’ (81)
These observations lead Genette to the conclusion that there is no such thing as pure fiction and no such thing as history so rigorous that it abjures any ‘emplotting’ and any use of novelistic techniques; we have to admit, then, that the two regimes are not as far apart […] as might be supposed from a distance. (82)
However, from the viewpoint of pragmatic approaches, this conclusion misses the point, since none of the narrative strategies cited by Genette actually affects the respective text’s fictional or factual status: the fact that Hildesheimer’s fake biography Marbot. Eine Biographie (1981) “quite spectacularly” (Genette 1993 [1991], 82) feigns to be what its title claims, a biography, does not make it a factual text; just as historiographical texts do not become fictional when they resort to emplotment or use certain ‘novelistic’ techniques.15 conventions cf. Hempfer (2018, esp. 56–57, 103–104); see also Fludernik (2018) and Kuhn (2018). 14 For an extensive discussion of Hildesheimer’s Marbot (1981) see Schaeffer (2010 [1999]) and / IV.8 Lavocat. 15 Concerning the fervent and ‘lopsided’ discussion of Hayden White’s arguments for a ‘fictional’ status of historical narratives see Fludernik (2001, 2013) and / III.4 Jaeger.
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Another recent example is Roberto Saviano’s internationally highly successful Gomorrah. Italy’s Other Mafia (2006); a nonfiction investigative book on criminal activities of the Italian Camorra. Due to the application of narrative methods that are conventionally associated with literary fiction, Gomorrah has provoked extensive discussions as to its factual or fictional status. Some readers have indeed interpreted the text as fictional or hybrid. Without doubt, both Hildesheimer’s Marbot and Saviano’s Gomorrah are somewhat atypical examples of fictional and factual narrative respectively. Yet, this does not call into question the basic classificatory distinction between fictionality and factuality. In this respect it is telling that despite Gomorrah’s ‘novelistic dimension’ Saviano received Camorra-related death threats following the book’s publication.16 The reciprocal exchanges between the “fictional and factual regimes of narrative” (Genette 1993 [1991], 80) should therefore not be perceived as an index of alleged shortcomings of the fictionality/factuality divide but as illustrating the fact that both fictional and factual narratives pertain to the superordinate narrative (as well as textual/medial) regime. They must thus always be treated in terms of their narrative (and medial) constructedness. Moreover, the fact that some texts (like Marbot or Gomorrah) can be misinterpreted regarding their respective fictional or factual status indicates that the fictivity/facticity of what is represented does not automatically result in a text’s classification as fictional or factual.17 Such misreadings hinge on (para)textual and/or contextual markers and on narrative conventions. If missing or potentially misleading, such clues may lead the reader to process fictive ‘facts’ as actual facts (Marbot) or a factual narrative as fiction (Gomorrah) (/ IV.7 see Korthals Altes). These considerations do not just highlight the relevance of pragmatic conditions for satisfying the criteria of both fictional and factual narrative. They also foreground the decisive role of (para-)textual strategies in signaling a text’s factual or fictional status. To a certain extent, such strategies are “optional licenses” (Genette 1993 [1991], 82). This has proven of particular relevance for fiction from a historical point of view.18 Yet, both fictional 16 The extent to which the publication of Gomorrah provoked the death threats against Saviano remains disputable. Public appearances by the author during which he verbally denounced individual Camorra members no doubt played a role. Saviano has been under police protection since 13 October 2006. See Del Porto (2006); Donadio (2007). 17 Nor is the author’s ‘intention’ decisive, as claimed by several pragmatically oriented theories of fictionality. See, e.g., Searle (1975), Lamarque and Olsen (1994), Köppe (2014); with respect to Marbot see Schaeffer (2010 [1999], Ch. 3); see also / IV.8Lavocat. 18 It goes without saying that fictional narratives may obscure their fictional status, e.g., by signaling precisely the opposite. For the historically variable and often highly ambiv-
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and factual narratives may (and usually do) employ such practices, structures, paratexts, or contextual indicators to serve as ‘signals’ or “signposts” (Cohn 1990) for their fictional or factual status (/ IV.8Lavocat). While the term signpost or signal of fictionality can be considered a standard one in the international debate (in German: Fiktions- or Fiktionalitätssignal ), the term signal of factuality (Faktualitätssignal ) has recently gained popularity particularly in the German-language debate (see, e.g., Schaefer 2008; Zipfel 2014a; Franzen 2018, esp. 124). In conceptual analogy to Fiktionalitätssignal, Faktualitätssignal serves to denote textual as well as para- or contextual strategies that indicate a given narrative’s factual status, thus triggering a ‘factual reading’ of the respective text. This heightened interest in signals of factuality (as well as in various kinds of ‘factualization strategies’ [Faktualisierungsstrategien]) must, of course, also be seen in the wider context of current socio-cultural developments (digital transformation processes, the impact of social and mobile media, etc.). In particular, it seems to have been stimulated by the growing hybridization of fictional and factual forms of representation. In the literary field this development has been evident since the 1960s/70s.19 However, since the turn of the millennium factual-fictional hybrids have proliferated across all media. Cases in point are ‘mockumentaries’ or films whose status as either documentary, pseudo-documentary or mockumentary remains undecidable (such as Exit Through the Gift Shop. A Banksy Film, UK 2010).20 One can also observe a remarkable boom in literary autofiction and autofictional formats which has been taking place in other arts/media over the last few decades, i.e. in openly hybrid forms which blur and call into question the conventionalized demarcations between fictional and factual narrative or other forms of (self)representation (/ IV.6 Iversen). These developments have triggered wide-ranging discussions on the historical dynamics of the factuality/fictionality divide and on new ways of challenging the respective boundaries and conventions (see Fludernik, Falkenhay-
alent status of paratexts in this context see Kuhn (2018). Yet, such texts often also feature certain (narrative) strategies which indicate their fictional status in a rather unequivocal manner (see also Kablitz 2008, 17 fn. 8). Significantly, ‘pseudofactual’ narratives or hoaxes (such as Marbot; cf. / IV.8 Lavocat) also adopt and, in fact, need to adopt, certain strategies that indicate their pseudofactual status (/ IV.9 Paige); otherwise their simulation of factuality would risk going unnoticed. 19 Cf., e.g., Truman Capote’s ‘nonfiction novel’ In Cold Blood (1966), Serge Doubrovsky’s early autofictional novel Fils (1977), or so-called Nouvelle Autobiographie, i.e. autofictional texts of the 1980s/90s by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, and others. See also / IV.6 Iversen. 20 See also Korte (2015) and / III.13 Mundhenke.
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ner, and Steiner 2015). In fact, on account of these and other (sociocultural and socio-political) current trends, it may be that we are witnessing a phase of renegotiating the boundaries between fact/uality and fiction/ ality. The fact that these boundaries are permeable constructs and can thus be undermined does not suggest that one should question their existence. On the contrary; it is only when one conventionally recognizes a demarcation that one can play with the boundaries concerned, challenge them or even cross and renegotiate them.21 This also applies to autofictional formats, which unfold their specific potential on the very basis of conventionalized demarcations between fictionality and factuality (in the case of literary autofiction, notably challenging the established disjunction between author and narrator). The conventionality of these demarcations also emphasizes the crucial relevance of genre- and media-related issues in this overall context. Thus, a further dimension of current debates on fictionality and its ‘other’ has emerged, namely the fact that over the past years these questions have increasingly been looked at from a broader, transmedial perspective with both traditional and digital formats being taken into account. 3. Fictionality and factuality from a transmedial perspective: An outlook Recent developments in the field of fictionality research show a clear tendency towards the inclusion of transdisciplinary approaches. This goes hand in hand with the attempt to emancipate fictionality theory from the traditional focus on literature and to study fiction/ality across genres, arts, media, and academic disciplines.22 However, research on the implications for theories of fiction/ality and its ‘other’ is still at an early stage. It also remains to be seen what consequences this extension of research agendas may have for existing theories (esp. for literary approaches). It is worth
21 At the same time, such practices make it possible to detect a specific awareness of the existence of respective conventions and demarcations at given points in history. In this context, it should be emphasized that the interplay between factuality and fictionality is by no means a new phenomenon, but was, in fact, already inherent in the emergence of the respective (historically variable) boundaries and conventions. On historical transformations of the concept of fictionality see / V.1 Finkelberg, / V.2 von Contzen and / V.3 Detering and Meierhofer. 22 See, e.g., Klauk and Köppe (2014a); Bareis and Nordrum (2015); Enderwitz and Rajewsky (2016); / I.3 Ryan. Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe forms a cornerstone of this approach and has given rise to a decisive shift in focus towards a transmedial concept of fictionality (see, e.g., Thon 2014; Wenninger 2014).
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noting that the growing interest in transmedial research perspectives is not restricted to an expansion of subject matter, i.e. to a media-comprehensive orientation. There is also an increased interest in media-comparative questions and a heightened media-awareness within the arts and humanities (including literary studies). A transmedially-oriented fictionality debate is therefore not just concerned with “[t]he theoretical question of whether and how the concept of fictionality can be applied to nonliterary art forms” (Zipfel 2014b, 103); it also affects established approaches in literary studies and thus in the traditional subject area of fictionality research itself. In this context, the intrinsic ‘double logic’ of transmedially relevant phenomena is of particular relevance, i.e. the fact that such phenomena can be observed across a variety of different media, while their actual manifestations are perforce medium-specific.23 Thus, they may effectively sharpen our understanding and appreciation of media specificities and differences. They may also heighten our awareness that the vast majority of established theoretical concepts in fictionality/factuality research, narratology, and related fields, is contingent upon literary fiction and is hence tied to, and determined by, the specific medial qualities of fiction, namely its verbal and textual form.24 Moreover, they may foreground the relationship between genre and medium, namely that genre conventions are always linked to the affordances and limitations of a given medium, and vice versa: that the ‘mediality’ (Medialität) of a given subject, i.e. its mediumdetermined disposition, plays a crucial role in the emergence of genre con-
23 That is to say, they are necessarily tied to and contingent upon their respective medial dispositions (e.g., as text, film, performance, painting, etc.). Hence, when talking of transmedially relevant phenomena or categories, we must bear in mind the non-existence of a ‘medium-free’ (cf. Ryan 2005, 11) form of aisthesis: from the recipient’s point of view such phenomena materialize in similar ways across media (cf. Wolf 2005, 253), while their actual realizations nevertheless – and necessarily – remain specific to the respective medium. 24 A case in point is the debate about fictionality’s systematically defined ‘characteristics’ or ‘properties’ (in German: Fiktions- or Fiktionalitätsmerkmale; for a distinction between ‘characteristics’/‘properties’ vs. ‘signals’ of fiction/ality see Hempfer 2004 [1990] and 2018; Zetterberg Gjerlevsen 2016; Fludernik 2018). Such characteristics or properties of fictionality have been discussed primarily with regard to literary fiction, though usually without raising the question to what extent the assumptions are contingent on the subject matter’s medial disposition (e.g., the systematic disjunction between author and narrator which literary studies consider a defining feature ‘of fictionality,’ thus overlooking or marginalizing the medium-specificity of the issue at hand). This becomes particularly problematic as soon as non-literary fields of research come into play (e.g., when the author-narrator disjunction is taken up in theater or film narratology; see Rajewsky 2013).
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ventions, also in the context of fictionality and factuality.25 The dynamics of changing relations between individual genres and individual media must likewise be taken into account, given that arts/media never operate in isolation from each other. This means that the emergence and (re-)negotiation of fictionality- or factuality-related conventions in individual genres/ arts/media have to be contextualized within their respective historical and socio-cultural dimensions. A transmedial perspective on fiction/ality is, of course, also concerned with the media-comprehensive significance of the phenomenon and thus with the question of “what fictionality [is] in general” (Walton 1990, 75). In this context, current transmedial approaches additionally invite us to revisit certain basic assumptions, categories and concepts that have dominated the literature-centered debate for decades. A particularly telling example is the concept of aesthetic illusion (sensu Wolf ) as well as the question of how aesthetic illusion relates to (concepts of ) fictionality. In this connection, it is noteworthy that there are significant overlaps between the conception of aesthetic illusion on the one hand and of fictionality on the other – at least if one considers pragmatically oriented approaches to fictionality that regard fictionality as tied to a specific disposition of the audience. Ultimately, all of these approaches agree that the central property of fictional representations is that they trigger a “willing suspension of disbelief,” which, following Coleridge, “constitutes poetic faith” (1965 [1817], 169). Coleridge famously captures what has been expressed with regard to theater and literature since antiquity (see Rösler 2014, Pape and Burwick 1990); namely, that fictional representations call for a “willing disposition of the spectator [or reader]” (Pape and Burwick 1990, 2) to engage in the ‘game’ of fiction.26 In the reception
25 From a transmedial perspective, e.g., signals of fictionality (or factuality) and (narrative) representational conventions must clearly be considered within the context of every individual medium and genre to which they pertain. Moreover, a transgeneric and transmedial research perspective raises the question of how relevant such signals indeed are, since the extent to which signaling fictionality and/or factuality is necessary varies in different genres/media. (With regard to narrative texts vs. drama/theater, cf. Hempfer (2004 [1990], 311); with regard to literature vs. painting: Kablitz (2014, 99). With regard to digital media, questions of this kind will certainly have to be discussed in more detail in the future.) In her contribution to the present volume, Marie-Laure Ryan takes this issue one step further, when she argues “that the distinction between fact and fiction is not equally applicable to all media” (77). 26 The emphasis is on willing suspension of disbelief. The question is not whether the recipient believes a representation to be ‘true’ (as is often stated in make-believe theories, cf., e.g., Currie 1990, 18). It is a matter of their engaging in the representation despite (or precisely because) knowing that it is fiction/al.
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process of a work of fiction there is always a latent awareness of the work’s fictional status, which places the recipient in a pleasurable state of oscillation between immersion in a fictional representation and distancing themselves from it (see Wolf 2013). And yet, both the recipients’ ‘willing disposition’ and their related oscillation between immersion and distance are central not only to the concept of fictionality but also to that of aesthetic illusion. Coleridge’s dictum is invoked in both contexts, as “one of the most felicitous definitions of ‘fiction(ality)’” (Hempfer 2018, 83), and as a “famous definition of illusion” (Pape and Burwick 1990, 2). This recourse to Coleridge is especially interesting in the context of (narrative) factuality. Even though the concept of aesthetic illusion is rooted in the investigation of fictional narrative texts, and despite a marked tendency in research on aesthetic illusion “to exclusively focus on fictional works” (Wolf 2013, 32), in practice, aesthetic illusion cannot be restricted either to narrative or to fiction/ality. This has become apparent in light of transgeneric and transmedial research (cf. Schaeffer 2010 [1999], 262; Wolf 2013, Ch. 4.1), highlighting the heuristic potential of broader research perspectives, i.e. of transdisciplinary, genre- and media-comparative approaches.27 Applying a transmedial perspective to the topic of factuality prompts a number of further questions that call for clarification but cannot be answered within the scope of this contribution. It is clear that the issues that the current handbook is concerned with have thus far primarily been viewed and discussed from a literary point of view, with a focus on fictional narrative texts and their ‘other.’ Despite recent developments, transmedial approaches are still in their infancy and remain informed by literary, language-based concepts, categories and positions that have dominated the prevalent debates. This becomes especially apparent in current convergence culture, but has, indeed, always been the wider backdrop against which individual phenomena and theories need to be viewed. References Bareis, J. Alexander. Fiktionales Erzählen. Zur Theorie der literarischen Fiktion als Make-Believe. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 2008.
27 Interestingly, recent research on aesthetic illusion has also shown that Walton’s gameof-make-believe concept (highly influential in the international fictionality debate both within literary studies and beyond), “in many respects appears to be synonymous with aesthetic illusion” (Wolf 2013, 32; see also Rajewsky 2018). This raises questions as to the pertinency of some of Walton’s categories and assumptions for conceptualizing
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Bareis, J. Alexander. “Fiktionen als Make-Believe.” Fiktionalität. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Eds. Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. 50–67. Bareis, J. Alexander. “Randbereiche und Grenzüberschreitungen. Zu einer Theorie der Fiktion im Vergleich der Künste.” Fiktion im Vergleich der Künste und Medien. Eds. Anne Enderwitz and Irina O. Rajewsky. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. 45–62. Bareis, J. Alexander, and Lene Nordrum. Eds. How to Make Believe. The Fictional Truths of the Representational Arts. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. Bunia, Remigius. Faltungen. Fiktion, Erzählen, Medien. Berlin: Schmidt, 2007. Chatman, Seymour. Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Cohn, Dorrit. “Signposts of Fictionality: A Narratological Approach.” Poetics Today 11.4 (1990): 775–804. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. [1817] Ed. George Watson. London: Dent, 1965. Currie, Gregory. The Nature of Fiction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Danneberg, Lutz. “Weder Tränen noch Logik: Über die Zugänglichkeit fiktionaler Welten.” Heuristiken der Literaturwissenschaft: Disziplinexterne Perspektiven auf Literatur. Eds. Uta Klein, Katja Mellmann, and Steffanie Metzger. Münster: Mentis, 2006. 35–83. Del Porto, Dario. “Minacce camorriste a Roberto Saviano. Finisce sotto scorta l’autore di Gomorra.” La Repubblica.it (13 October 2006): http://www.repubblica.it/2006/10/ sezioni/cronaca/scrittore-sotto-scorta/scrittore-sotto-scorta/scrittore-sotto-scorta. html?refresh_ce (30 July 2018). Donadio, Rachel. “Underworld.” Sunday Book Review. The New York Times (25. November 2007). https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/books/review/Donadio-t.html (30 July 2018). Duden. Duden Online. www.duden.de. Berlin: Bibliographisches Institut, 2018 (30 July 2018). s. v. faktisch, Faktum. Eco, Umberto. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1994. Enderwitz, Anne, and Irina O. Rajewsky. Eds. Fiktion im Vergleich der Künste und Medien. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. Fludernik, Monika. “Fiction vs. Non-Fiction. Narratological Differentiations.” Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert. Ed. Jörg Helbig. Heidelberg: Winter, 2001. 85–103. Fludernik, Monika. “Factual Narrative: A Missing Narratological Paradigm.” GermanischRomanische Monatsschrift 63.1 (2013): 117–134. Fludernik, Monika. “The Fiction of the Rise of Fictionality.” Poetics Today 39.1 (2018): 67– 92. Fludernik, Monika, Nicole Falkenhayner, and Julia Steiner. “Einleitung.” Faktuales und fiktionales Erzählen. Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven. Eds. Monika Fludernik, Nicole Falkenhayner and Julia Steiner. Würzburg: Ergon, 2015. 7–22. Franzen, Johannes. Indiskrete Fiktionen. Theorie und Praxis des Schlüsselromans 1960–2015. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018. Gabriel, Gottfried. Zwischen Logik und Literatur. Erkenntnis von Dichtung, Philosophie und Wissenschaft. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991.
fictionality (as opposed to nonfictionality or factuality); e.g., his notion of ‘fictional truths’ which might well turn out to cover factual representational practices too.
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Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse Revisited. [1983] Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1988. Genette, Gérard. “Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative.” Poetics Today 11.4 (1990): 755– 774. Genette, Gérard. Fiction and Diction. [1991] Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993. Halliwell, Stephen. “The Theory and Practice of Narrative in Plato.” Narratology and Interpretation. The Content of Narrative Form in Ancient Literature. Eds. Jonas Grethlein and Antonios Rengakos. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2009. 15–42. Hempfer, Klaus W. “Some Problems Concerning a Theory of Fiction(ality).” [1990] Style 38.3 (2004): 302–324. Hempfer, Klaus W. “Fiktion.” Literaturwissenschaft. Grundlagen einer systematischen Theorie. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2018. 38–106. Kablitz, Andreas. “Literatur, Fiktion und Erzählung – nebst einem Nachruf auf den Erzähler.” Im Zeichen der Fiktion. Aspekte fiktionaler Rede aus historischer und systematischer Sicht. Eds. Irina O. Rajewsky and Ulrike Schneider. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2008. 13–44. Kablitz, Andreas. “Referenz und Fiktion.” Linguistics and Literary Studies / Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft. Interfaces, Encounters, Transfers − Begegnungen, Interferenzen und Kooperationen. Eds. Monika Fludernik and Daniel Jacob. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. 93–125. Klauk, Tobias, and Tilmann Köppe. Eds. Fiktionalität. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014a. Klauk, Tobias, and Tilmann Köppe. “Bausteine einer Theorie der Fiktionalität.” Fiktionalität. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Eds. Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014b. 3–31. Klein, Christian, and Matías Martínez. Eds. Wirklichkeitserzählungen. Felder, Formen und Funktionen nicht-literarischen Erzählens. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009. Köppe, Tilmann. “Die Institution Fiktionalität.” Fiktionalität. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Eds. Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. 35–49. Konrad, Eva-Maria. “Panfiktionalismus.” Fiktionalität. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Eds. Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. 235–254. Korte, Barbara. “Geschichte im Fernsehen zwischen Faktualität und Fiktionalität: Das Dokudrama als Hybridform historischer Darstellung, mit einer Fallstudie zu Simon Schamas Rough Crossings.” Faktuales und Fiktionales Erzählen: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven. Eds. Monika Fludernik, Nicole Falkenhayner and Julia Steiner. Würzburg: Ergon, 2015. 181–198. Kuhn, Roman. Wahre Geschichten, frei erfunden. Verhandlungen und Markierungen von Fiktion im Peritext. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2018. Lamarque, Peter, and Stein Haugom Olsen. Truth, Fiction, and Literature. A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Larousse: Dictionnaires de français. Larousse online. http://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/ francais. Paris: Larousse, 2018 (30 July 2018). s. v. factuel. The Oxford English Dictionary. OED Online. www.oed.com. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018 (30 July 2018). s. v. factual. Pape, Walter, and Frederick Burwick. “Aesthetic Illusion.” Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and Historical Approaches. Eds. Frederick Burwick and Walter Pape. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1990. 1–15. Le Petit Robert. https://pr12.bvdep.com/robert.asp. Paris: Dictionnaires Le Robert, 2018 (30 July 2018). s. v. factuel. Pier, John. “Gérard Genette’s Evolving Narrative Poetics.” Narrative 18.1 (2010): 8–18.
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Rajewsky, Irina. “Potential Potentials of Transmediality. The Media Blindness of (Classical) Narratology and its Implications for Transmedial Approaches.” Translatio. Transmédialité et transculturalité en littérature, peinture, photographie et au cinéma. Ed. Alfonso de Toro. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013. 17–36. Rajewsky, Irina. “Der ‘Mythos’ des erzählerlosen Erzählens revisited (mit einigen Anmerkungen zu aktuellen optional-narrator theories).” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift 68.2 (2018): 189–230. Rösler, Wolfgang. “Fiktionalität in der Antike.” Fiktionalität. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Eds. Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. 363–384. Rühling, Lutz. “Fiktionalität und Poetizität.” Grundzüge der Literaturwissenschaft. Eds. Heinz Ludwig Arnold and Heinrich Detering. München: DTV, 1996. 25–51. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “On the Theoretical Foundation of Transmedial Narratology.” Narratology beyond Literary Criticism. Mediality, Disciplinarity. Ed. Jan Christoph Meister. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2005. 1–23. Schaefer, Christina. “Die Autofiktion zwischen Fakt und Fiktion.” Im Zeichen der Fiktion. Aspekte fiktionaler Rede aus historischer und systematischer Sicht. Eds. Irina O. Rajewsky and Ulrike Schneider. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2008. 299–326. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. Why Fiction? [1999] Trans. Dorrit Cohn. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. “Fictional vs. Factual Narration.” Handbook of Narratology. Eds. Peter Hühn et al. 2nd ed. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. 179–196. Schmid, Wolf. Narratology. An Introduction. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010. Searle, John R. “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse.” New Literary History 6.2 (1975): 319–332. Thon, Jan-Noël. “Fiktionalität in Film- und Medienwissenschaft.” Fiktionalität. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Eds. Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. 443–466. Walton, Kendall L. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1990. Warning, Rainer. “Der inszenierte Diskurs. Bemerkungen zur pragmatischen Relation der Fiktion.” Funktionen des Fiktiven. Eds. Dieter Henrich and Wolfgang Iser. München: Fink, 1983. 183–206. Wenninger, Regina. “Fiktionalität in Kunst- und Bildwissenschaften.” Fiktionalität. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Eds. Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. 467–495. Wolf, Werner. “Intermediality.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. 252–256. Wolf, Werner. “Narratology and Media(lity): The Transmedial Expansion of a Literary Discipline and Possible Consequences.” Current Trends in Narratology. Ed. Greta Olsen. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2011. 145–180. Wolf, Werner. “Aesthetic Illusion.” Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media. Eds. Werner Wolf, Walter Bernhart, and Andreas Mahler. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2013. 1–63. Wolf, Werner. “Transmedia Narratology: Theoretical Foundations and Some Applications (Fictions, Single Pictures, Instrumental Music).” Narrative 25.3 (2017): 256–285. Zetterberg Gjerlevsen, Simona. “Fictionality.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. Eds. Peter Hühn et al. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/fictionality. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press, 2016 (30 July 2018). Zipfel, Frank. Fiktion, Fiktivität, Fiktionalität. Analysen zur Fiktion in der Literatur und zum Fiktionsbegriff in der Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: Schmidt, 2001.
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Zipfel, Frank. “Fiktionssignale.” Fiktionalität. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Eds. Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014a. 97–124. Zipfel, Frank. “Fiction across Media. Toward a Transmedial Concept of Fictionality.” Storyworlds across Media. Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. Eds. Marie-Laure Ryan and JanNoël Thon. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2014b. 103–125. Zipfel, Frank. “Ein institutionelles Konzept der Fiktion – aus einer transmedialen Perspektive. Überlegungen zur Fiktionalität von literarischer Erzählung und theatraler Darstellung.” Fiktion im Vergleich der Künste und Medien. Eds. Anne Enderwitz and Irina O. Rajewsky. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. 19–43.
MONIKA FLUDERNIK
Factual Narration in Narratology 1. The establishment of factual narrative as a narratological issue In the Introduction to this book it has been explained how factual narrative for a long time remained off limits to narratologists and how Gérard Genette was the first to draw attention to its importance (Genette 1993 [1990, 1991]; / I.1 Rajewsky).1 There has been an extended discussion on the distinctions between fact and fiction, though focused primarily on the determining features of fictionality (Zipfel 2001) and on the question of how fictionality is signaled in texts (Cohn 1999 [1989, 1990, 1995]; Nünning 2001, 2005). Without regarding my own call for an analysis of factual stories from a narratological perspective (Fludernik 2013, 2015), I want to engage with what the state of the art is in terms of factual narrative when analyzed within a narratological framework. Two German collections of essays here deserve pride of place: Ansgar and Vera Nünning’s volume on transgeneric, intermedial and interdisciplinary approaches to narratology (2002); and Christian Klein and Matías Martínez’s Wirklichkeitserzählungen (‘Narratives about the real world’) from 2009. In their collection, the Nünnings include essays on historical narrative as well as narration in psychology and therapy. In Klein and Martínez’s volume, which explicates their reality-focused narratives as ‘non-literary narration’ (see their subtitle: Felder, Formen und Funktionen nicht-literarischen Erzählens – ‘Areas, forms and functions of non-literary storytelling’), the chapters deal with narratives of the law and in psychotherapy, with scientific texts, historiography, economic texts, moral and ethic discourses, journalism, theological texts and storytelling in politics. This is supplemented by articles on collective narrative and on narrative in internet fora. (See my discussion of this volume below in section 2.)
1 The research for this essay was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of the graduate school GRK 1767 “Factual and Fictional Narration.” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-003
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While Klein and Martínez provide an almost exhaustive survey, one which only lacks a transcultural comparison, the function of narratives in factual contexts has also been considered in a number of narratological reference works. Thus, Phelan and Rabinowitz’s Companion to Narrative Theory (2005) devotes an essay to biblical narrative (Richter 2005b; Sternberg 1985 can be seen as a precursor), and includes an article on autobiography (Smith and Watson 2005) as well as on legal narratives (Brooks 2005). The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (Herman et al. 2005), which has entries on autobiography and biography (Löschnigg 2005, Kindt 2005), moreover includes “Law and Narrative” (Gearey 2005), “Narrative Therapy” (Mills 2005), “Psychoanalysis and Narrative” (Alcorn 2005), “Medicine and Narrative” (Hydén 2005), “Philosophy and Narrative” (Plotnitsky 2005a) and “Science and Narrative” (Plotnitsky 2005b); it also has entries on “Biblical Narrative” (Richter 2005a), “Historiographic Narratology” (Elias 2005; and even the “chronicle” – Carrard 2005a), “diary” (Abbott 2005), “journalism” (Dardenne 2005), “Tabloid Narrative” (Bird 2005), “Institutional Narrative” (Linde 2005), the “family chronicle” (Humphrey 2005), “legend” (Tate 2005), “Letters as Narrative” (Fludernik 2005) as well as the “non-fiction novel” (Zipfel 2005), “Prison Narratives” (O’Connor 2005), the “sermon” (Jacobsen 2005), “Radio Narrative” (Allen 2005), the “sports broadcast” (Carrard 2005b), “testimonio” (Restrepo 2005), “Travel Narrative” (Korte 2005) and the “Urban Legend” (Preston 2005).2 This interest in factual narration can also be observed in the second edition of de Gruyter’s Handbook of Narratology by Hühn et al. (2014), which contains entries on several types of factual narrative: “Autobiography” (Schwalm 2014); “Conversational Narration – Oral Narration” (Fludernik 2014b; see also Herman 1997); “Corporate Storytelling” (Norlyk, Wolff Lundholt and Hansen 2014); “Fictional vs. Factual Narration” (Schaeffer 2014; see also 2010 [1999]) “Historiographic Narration” (Fulda 2014); “Narration and Narrative in Legal Discourse” (Olson 2014); “Narration in Medicine” (Goyal 2014; see also Charon 2016); “Narration in Religious Discourse” (Finnern 2014); “Narration in Various Disciplines” (Meuter 2014) and “Text Types” (Aumüller 2014) as well as “Narratives in Rhetorical Discourse” (Iversen 2014). Besides the expanding interest in factual narratives in narratological reference works, two research groups have recently started to concentrate
2 The Routledge Encyclopedia moreover reaches out into the transhistoric and transcultural realms by supplying entries on “medieval narrative” (though not in Latin or Greek antiquity) as well as entries on “Chinese narrative,” “Japanese narrative,” “Native American narrative” and “African narrative.”
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on factual narrative, though with an emphasis on the comparison between fictionality and factuality and on interferences and hybridizations between fact and fiction. The two groups are the study group (Arbeitsstelle) ‘Faktualität/Fiktionalität’ at the University of Hamburg (part of the Hamburg ICN – International Centre of Narratology) and the Freiburg graduate school ‘Factual and Fictional Narration’ (GRK 1767).3 Work from these two groups includes a thesis by Frederike Lagoni on biography vs. fiction (Lagoni 2016); PhD theses in the field of psychology (Haug 2015; Koppermann, in progress), on collectives in history vs. fiction (Alders 2015), on the roman à clef (Franzen 2018), early modern newspapers and travelogues (Detering 2017), on narratives constructed from CCTV cameras (Falkenhayner 2019), on narratives of economic crisis (Galke, in progress), on Tretyakov’s literature of fact (Hinze 2019), on narratives of dying (Klatt, in progress), and on witness narratives (Hipp 2018). There are also two theses that focus on poetry (Steiner 2018; Varela, in progress). The Freiburg graduate school moreover hosts its own book series. The first volume of the series is an essay collection covering religious and historical narration as well as discussions of narratives in psychotherapy and analyses of docudrama and of ethical narratives (Fludernik et al. 2015). The series also comprises a volume on narratives of grief in poetry cycles (Aurnhammer and Fitzon 2016), a volume on narratives about the last German emperor, Wilhelm II (Detering et al. 2016), and a volume on the history of the concept of fictionality (Franzen et al. 2018). This research has been flanked internationally by a renewal of interest in fictionality, an issue which had been investigated since the 1970s by philosophers (John Searle, David Lewis) and philosophy-inspired literary theorists from logical, ontological, illocutionary and possible worlds points of view (Felix Martínez-Bonati, Umberto Eco, Gregory Currie, Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Amie Thomasson, Thomas Pavel, Lubomír Doležel, Marie-Laure Ryan, Ruth Ronen). Discourse-oriented narratologists focusing mostly on fiction had failed to consider the issue of fictionality until the recent work of Richard Walsh and of the Aarhus center of fictionality studies. At the GRK 1767 in Freiburg, the first phase of funding focused on the mixture or hybridization of fictional and factual texts. The topic of factuality was developed directly from an earlier graduate school (“Promotionskolleg Geschichte und Erzählen”) on the topic of “History and Narra-
3 See http://www.icn.uni-hamburg.de/projects/research-group-factuality-fictionality and http://www.grk-erzaehlen.uni-freiburg.de/english-summary/.
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tive” 4 and extended this focus on historical narratives to other factual narrations; it did so in counterpoint to the ongoing discussions about fictionality, especially in response to the 2015 article in Narrative by Henrik Skov Nielsen, James Phelan and Richard Walsh and the handbook Fiktionalität by Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe (2014). Since then, fictionality studies have blossomed even further, with a number of initiatives on the part of the Aarhus Centre of Fictionality Studies, including a volume on fictionality studies, co-edited by Henrik Skov Nielsen and myself, which is dedicated to presenting recent work on fictionality (often published in German, French or Danish) to a wider international audience (Fludernik and Nielsen, in progress). Moreover, there has been a major monograph on fictionality by Françoise Lavocat (2016). What I would like to do in what follows is to provide an analysis of the research results attained so far regarding factual narrative (section 2) and a more theoretical analysis of the kind of questions factuality poses as a research topic for narratological inquiry (section 3). 2. Factual narratives: Narratological descriptions The essays in Klein and Martínez’s volume systematically apply the procedure already employed by Gérard Genette in his Fiction and Diction (1993 [1991]). They discuss each genre’s or discipline’s preferences for particular modes of presentation, utilizing Genette’s categories of tense, voice and mood. Whereas Genette had, generally, stated that factual narratives employ external focalization, the analysis of different kinds of factual narratives allows for a much more precise description, documenting the variation between disciplines, text types and registers (see Table 1). When we look at the different modes and disciplines of factual narration that Klein and Martínez include in their volume, we find the following. Two results stand out clearly: on the one hand, in many of the genres discussed, there are a variety of different subgenres of quite diverse forms and narrative modes. It is therefore impossible to make out consistent features for these discourses. Secondly, Genette’s statement that all his categories are applicable to factual narration is on the whole correct. Thus, among Genette’s categories, in terms of tense, anachrony can be found in almost all text types, though they are more frequent in journalism, historiography and oral narrative (of whatever text type). (This is even true of metalepsis.)
4 See: https://www.zam-promotionskolleg.uni-freiburg.de/index_html-en-en?set_language =en.
[all possible]
All possible [all possible] [all possible] [concurs with Genette]
[all possible]
K/M Scientific texts (Brandt)
K/M Historiography (Jaeger)
K/M Economic discourse (Kleeberg)
[all possible] [all possible]
[all possible] [iterative important]
[all possible] Iterative and episodic processual (57–59)
[all possible]
K/M Psychotherapy (Boothe)
[all possible] –
[all possible]
Iterative also possible in factual narrative
Klein/Martínez Legal texts (Arnaud)
Genette Anachrony & all factual discourse metalepsis alternatives possible possible
distance
Variable distance (127)
[distanced]
– [both]
[distanced]
–
Distance
Frequency
Order
Duration
MODE
TENSE
authorial
All 3 types of focalization
[external]
– [N.A.]
[dito]
Zero and external possible
Focalization
both possible: A=N≠F (heterodiegetic) A=N=F (homodiegetic)
Person: homo- vs. heterodiegesis
Retrospective and gnomic
– [retrospective]
frequently historical
homo- & heterodiegetic
A=N N≠F A ≠ F (124)
homo- & heterodiegetic
[A = N]
Present tense / A = N Future
–
Time of narrating
VOICE
Factual Narration in Narratology
55
–
–
–
–
–
–
K/M Journalism (Martínez)
K/M Religious discourse (Mauz)
K/M Political discourse (Schaal)
K/M Collective narrative.* (Sommer)
K/M Internet narratives* (Tophinke)
–
–
–
–
–
–
– [closeness]
–
–
–
– [both]
Distance (175)
–
–
–
–
–
zero/external [but also internal]
–
–
–
Conversion retrospective and prospective
–
retrospective
–
–
–
homo- & heterodiegetic
–
homo- & heterodiegetic
Tab. 1: Narratological categories compared between Genette and individual factual narratives according to Klein and Martínez A … author; N … narrator; F … Figure (Character); K/M … Klein/Martínez; – … no comment on this point
* Sommer and Tophinke note that these two categories comprise a great diversity of texts which are hardly comparable.
–
–
–
–
–
K/M [all possible] Ethical discourse (Klein)
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The contraction of events or the elimination of events (ellipsis) as well (see Table 1) as pauses and slow-downs are also to be observed more generally, and are therefore a feature common in both fictional and factual narratives. As for frequency, the situation is more interesting here since the repeated narration of the same event is absent from economic, historical or historiographic narratives, and this is also true of science if the event is a specific experiment undertaken by the researcher and does not refer to what happens in the experiment as an abstract model. (Professor X did the experiment on a specific day ONCE, but the experiment can be repeated and the atoms or chemical reactions should perform the same way again and again.) More striking is the widespread use of the iterative, i.e. the representation of one representative scene which has, however, occurred often (with slight variations). This feature is particularly prominent in narratives told in therapy sessions, but also in scientific texts, historiography and particularly in economic discourses, though it may occur equally in narratives of the law, ethical and religious texts and in journalism. This strategy serves to highlight typicality which, together with universality, caters to a notion of a describable and rule-governed reality. The comments by the various contributors on the category mode are also noteworthy. Genette himself fails to comment on distance, but many of the articles in Klein and Martínez note that their text type is characterized by an emphasis on distance between the narration and the story. While therapeutic interview narratives, journalism and historical texts vary their distance, and internet fora tend to encourage a lack of distance, most of the other genres prefer a distanced relation between the act of narration and the narrated facts. Focalization in factual narratives tends to be mostly external or zero focalization, but first-person narratives regularly have access to the firstperson narrator’s (past) thoughts, and thus conversational narrative or interviews with the psychotherapist will include passages of internal focalization.5 This is also true of autobiography (Barros 1998; see also Eakin 1985, Lehmann 1988, Smith and Watson 2010, Leader 2015 and Goodson et al. 2017). Jaeger (2002, 2009) illustrates with great acumen how more innovative historical writing sometimes employs fictionalized story scenarios in
5 On conversational narratives also see Labov and Waletzky (1967), Polanyi (1985), Bamberg (1997, 2007), Norrick (2000), Ochs and Capps (2001) and Quasthoff and Becker (2005). On discourse analysis see Brown and Yule (1983), Schiffrin et al. (2001), Drew (2007), Johnstone (2008), Hutchby and Wooffitt (2008), Hyland (2011), Gee (2012), De Fina (2015), Rühlemann (2015) and Clift (2016). On therapy narratives see LuciusHoene (2002), Kacandes (2005), Brown and Augusta-Scott (2007), Boothe (2010), Schauer, Neuner and Elbert (2011) and Scheidt (2015).
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which the reader seems to look into people’s minds, e.g. into those of soldiers landing in France on D-Day.6 The category voice also yields some crucial insights. For instance, the relation between the time of narration and reference to story time (simultaneous, retrospective and prospective narration) – not thematized by Genette (1993 [1991]) – is quite variable between text types. Thus, in the law, narrative can be retrospective (in witness reports), while simultaneous or, better: timeless in law books; in criminal law it can also be implicitly prospective (compare Sternberg 2008). Likewise, the switch from retrospective to prospective is typical in the discourses of psychotherapy and religion; while simultaneous and timeless (gnomic) presents predominate in scientific and economic narratives. The historical present is common in historical, journalistic and therapeutic narratives. Finally, the category person varies throughout. Even scientific abstracts may have (though rarely) homodiegetic narratives of experiments in which ‘I’ or ‘we’ performed a series of actions and achieved specific results. As regards heterodiegesis, the A = N [Author = Narrator] formula of Genette obtains throughout, and this is the only really constant feature of factual narrative across different disciplines or text types. (Though one has to exclude ghost writers from this role.) Let me now turn to Nünning and Nünning (2002), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (Herman et al. 2005), Phelan and Rabinowitz’s Companion to Narrative Theory (2005) and the Handbook of Narratology by Hühn et al. (2014). Unlike Klein and Martínez, these publications rarely turn to the Genettean categories observable in their genres or the narrative passages in texts from their disciplines. Instead, most of the analyses focus on important theoretical issues linked to the respective genre and discipline. For instance, the contributions to (auto)biography tend to emphasize the performativity of autobiographical narrative, to elaborate on recent problematizations of the fact/fiction borderline in literary hoaxes and to foreground the social role of witnessing and testimony in such texts, thus underlining the ethical issues associated with (supposedly) telling one’s own story. Smith and Watson (2005) close their article with a section on the “troubling differences of the autobiographical,” thus emphasizing that the factual nature of autobiography often is compromised in recent literary instances of the genre. Löschnigg (2005), by contrast, links the current practice of autobiography to a long history of religious and confessional literature and notes the major paradigm shift that occurred at the end of
6 On historical narratives also see Danto (1985), Carr (1986), Carrard (1992), Berkhofer (1995) and Rüsen (2005), among others.
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the eighteenth century, when the subjectivity of the autobiographical subject began to move into the foreground (see also Schwalm 2014, vol. I, 17). Many of the entries in these handbooks also focus on historical developments (e.g. Kindt 2005 on the inclusion of ordinary people in the biographical canon in the wake of Romanticism and the extension of democracy to wider segments of the population). Though the basic distinction between the narrating self and the experiencing self is mentioned, a diachronic analysis of their shifting relationships over time is missing, which would at least have related to Genette’s category of distance. What does get pointed out is the existence of experiments with third-person autobiography (classically, Julius Caesar’s account of the war in Gallia), to which one can add Michel Sarde’s second-person biography of Marguerite Yourcenar (1995).7 Abbott (2005) in his contribution on the diary notes the peculiar temporal structure of “intercalated” narrative (106), which had of course given rise to a distinct category in Genette (interpolated narrative in contrast to subsequent, simultaneous and prior narration under time of narration in the discussion of voice). The same applies to epistolary fiction and letters in so far as a series of them tell a narrative. The category tense receives some insightful comments in Schwalm (2014), where the practice of employing the narrative present in (recent) autobiography is pointed out and its destabilization of the retrospective and assessment-oriented format of classical autobiography discussed. This feature could historically be linked to the common emphasis in first-person novels and some autobiographies on the experiencing self, but would also need to be set in relation to the general rise of presenttense narrative in fiction since the 1960s. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory includes an insightful essay on the travelogue, which discusses the narrative technique of this genre (Korte 2005). It does not mention the frequent episodic plot structure but draws attention to the necessity of distinguishing between the historical author and the first-person narrator and his or her experiencing self. Korte also emphasizes the strategies of authentication employed in many factual (but also fictional; / IV.9 Paige) travelogues as in the inclusion of statistics, newspaper articles, letters and the like. The category of narratorial comment in travelogues is often expansive and may include moral and didactic preaching, (pseudo-scientific) ethnological disquisitions as well as philosophical ponderings.
7 On biography and biofictions see also, besides the classic text of Bourdieu (1990), Middeke and Huber (1999) and Nünning (2003).
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In the realm of historiography, the handbooks focus on academic history, but also consider several genres like the family chronicle, testimonio and legend (Humphrey 2005, Restrepo 2005, Tate 2005). Many of the contributions on historiography spend the bulk of their entries on discussing the status of narrative in history and give ample space to an assessment of Hayden White’s theses (1978; 1980). However, Fulda (2014, 230) points out the rarity of experimental narration in the genre, which is largely modeled on the realist novel, thus noting that anachronies and non-verisimilar (i.e. internal) types of focalization occur only in exceptional texts like that of Richard Price’s The Convict and the Colonel, 1998–2004. Fulda’s essay is moreover extremely pertinent to a discussion of history writing’s factual claims and strategies of authentication. He summarizes Nünning’s 1999 essay, which lists a number of signals of fictionality that help to distinguish fictional from factual history writing, among which the ability to present extensive internal focalization on actants’ minds and the distinction between author and narrator figure prominently as signals of fictionality (Fulda 2014, 232). Fulda, by contrast, proposes to question the automatic Genettean equation of author and narrator, endorsing Rüth’s suggestion (2005, 35–36) to distinguish the role of the narrator-historian from that of the historical author and his or her personal viewpoints (Fulda 2014, 236). Work on narrative in different disciplines such as the law, corporate discourse, religion, scientific prose and therapeutic psychology often focuses on the question of whether there is any narrative at all to be found in these texts and what its functions are. Thus, the contributions to the narrative in the law debates rarely address the Genettean categories; instead, they focus on the performativity and rhetorical effectiveness of legal storytelling in court and on the merely implied narratives in legal texts like law codes or judgements. Most work on legal narrative understandably highlights the ethical problems attached to stories in the law and the use of metaphor and other rhetorical strategies in legal writings (Brooks 2005). There is, hence, little relevant material for a comparison with Klein and Martínez, where Arnaud (2009) demonstrates the narratological importance of the Law & Literature approach (see Olson 2014 and / III.8 Stern). Likewise, the entries on corporate storytelling (Norlyk, Wolff Lundholt, and Hansen 2014) in Hühn et al. (2014) and on narrative in the natural sciences (Plotnitsky 2005b) in Herman et al. (2005) focus on whether any narrative exists in these texts at all. By contrast, in journalism it is fictional techniques that are foregrounded in the discussion of this factual genre. Thus, Dardenne (2005) remarks upon the anecdotal opening of many news stories, which display a medias in res onset and frequently supply an insight into the described person’s mind by means of internal focalization (268).
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As in / III.9 Mauz, the discussion of narrative in religious texts tends to turn on the different varieties of religious genres and modes from the biblical canon to sermons, prayers, theological treatises and so on as well as on the factuality of religious texts and on the narratives’ authentication strategies. In terms of narratological insight into the narrative strategies of biblical stories, including their use of anachrony, focalization and durationrelated devices, Meir Sternberg’s 1985 study remains the best narratological appreciation of the biblical text, supplemented by the superb analysis of temporal order and repetition in Richter (2005b; see also 2005a). Extensive narratological study has been devoted to both conversational narrative and narratives in the therapeutic context. In addition to more sociological aspects like the preservation or projection of face and the constitution of identity (Atkinson and Heritage 1984; Lucius-Hoene and Deppermann 2000; Straub 2005; Mildorf 2010; Holler and Klepper 2013; Vassilieva 2016), research has found many narratologically relevant features of storytelling in informal conversation and in therapy (Fludernik 2014b). Besides outlining the episodic structure of everyday conversational exchange and its insertion into the turn-taking structure of oral communication (Tannen 1984, 1989), studies like Deppermann and Lucius-Hoene (2005) have provided extensive and significant toolboxes that highlight the use of repetition, of deliberate anachrony (Polanyi 1985) and of the fictionalizing deployment of ‘quotations’ from both the speech and internal thought of actants (Herman 1999) in the attempt to performatively enhance the effect or impact of the story in a vivid manner.8 As this very brief survey demonstrates, the analyses of Klein and Martínez, which could be extended to other features, were extremely original in their focus on Genette’s discourse analysis. What is so far largely missing in the narratological work on factual narratives in specific genres and interviews is the recognition that individual subgenres of, say, historical narrative, journalism (/ III.14 Renner) or religious texts (/ III.9 Mauz) may have completely different modes of storytelling, so that any reliable statements about the narrative features ‘of historiography’ or ‘of journalistic prose’ may in fact be impossible to arrive at and require separate analyses for each subgenre. 3. Theoretical issues for a narratology of factual narrative Rather than merely restating these previous research results, I would like to conclude this essay with a number of methodological comments on how 8 See the literature quoted above in footnote 5.
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one could approach the question of factual narrative from a narratological perspective, proposing research questions that might be useful to follow up on. 3.1 The factual pact Philippe Lejeune has created the term “the autobiographical pact” for the understanding that obtains between writers of autobiography (or other ego-documents) and their readers (Lejeune 1989, 19). In analogy with the “fictional pact,” a term popular with proponents of the institutional model of literature (see Köppe 2014), one could therefore postulate a factual pact describing the default assumption that a text encountered as a history, critical essay or economic treatise is, by definition, taken to be making statements about the real world (/ I.1 Rajewsky). Failure to follow the rules of evidence or abide by the cooperative principles and sincerity codes will entail negative consequences on the legal or institutional plane, since such failure will be interpreted as lying, cheating, misrepresentation or incompetence (/ I.4 Packard). These frame conditions apply to storytelling and narration in a factual frame, though the particulars may be quite diverse in specific genres. Thus, in a dinner conversation, accounts of one’s personal experiences may significantly bend the limits of verifiability by resorting to exaggeration, the invention of fictive dialogue and even the addition of material that is not, strictly speaking, true. By contrast, a witness report, a journalistic article or an academic book are constrained to avoid nonfactual elements and should present truth to the extent that this is humanly possible (given limitations of memory and incomplete access to evidence). Such strictures are policed by the threat of libel actions (/ IV.4 Franzen) and the loss of reputation in one’s profession. The factual pact is thus nothing but a different name for the Gricean maxim of quality (Grice 1975), which is part of the cooperative principle applying to all communicational exchange. It can be partially violated (or better: set aside) in order to privilege politeness, or irony, and it will be truly violated or infringed upon by lying. 3.2 The definition of narrative One of the foremost controversial issues regarding factual narratives is the definition of narrative itself (/ I.2 Fludernik and I.3 Ryan). The term is used in a strict narratological manner by some critics, and in a wider meaning of ‘news item,’ or for ‘fiction,’ i.e. a fictive construct. Andreas von Arnaud,
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for example, points out that there is a current metaphoric use of narrative for ‘any kind of cultural production of meaning’ (“Synonym jeglicher kultureller Sinnprodution” – 2009, 47) and posits a tendency towards a pannarrativism (in analogy with panfictionalism 9 ), i.e. the penchant to label everything as a narrative, for instance when calling the explanation of the Bohr model of the atom a ‘narrative.’ Since the problem of definition is extensively discussed in the introduction to this handbook (/ I.2 Fludernik and I.3 Ryan), I merely note the problem here.10 3.3 Universality and the narratological approach Since, as has been noted above, the hold-all factual narrative includes a panoply of different genres, modes and contexts of speech or writing, a primary question is whether or not a discussion of factual narrative per se makes sense. Does a history of France or a biography of Marx narrate in the same manner as a study of the social welfare state, which will most likely contain reports on particular reform initiatives, the attempt by particular politicians to push through such reforms or to thwart them? As other contributions to the handbook demonstrate (/ I.4 Packard, / IV.8 Lavocat, / I.1 Rajewsky), factual(ity) is generally used in alternation with nonfiction, and therefore as the antonym and uncanny ‘other’ of fiction(ality). Especially when fiction is reduced to literature (or even the novel), the wideness and disparate multiplicity of the field of the factual stand out clearly. A general treatment of these diverse texts can therefore only be undertaken in terms of the factual pact or the context of factual communication and not (or only partially) on the basis of narratological analysis. It is presumably pointless to search for universally valid features of factual narrative, just as it is pointless to try to recuperate a number of narrative qualities for all historical (sub)genres. To the extent that they consider a variety of different subgenres and modes, contributions in this handbook already go a long way towards accommodating this insight.
9 On panfictionalism see / I.6 Zipfel in this volume as well as Ryan (1997), Groeben and Schreier (2000), Konrad (2014a, b) and Köppe and Stühring (2015). 10 On the problem of narrativity see Sturgess (1992), Ryan (2007), Meister (2007), Nünning and Sommer (2008), Pier and Landa (2008), and Abbott (2014).
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3.4 Factuality vs. fictionality. Fiction vs. nonfiction. Factual vs. nonfactual. These dichotomies raise the question to what extent factual narratives should not be treated in contrast with factual texts that are not narrative: the focus would then be factuality (narrative, argumentative, instructional text types – see Chatman 1990) rather than narrative as factual vs. fictional, with narrative as the top category of classification. Which takes me to another key point, namely the proposal that one needs to distinguish at least three types of factual narratives: (a) texts which are consistently narrative and factual – e.g. conversational narratives; (b) texts that belong to the argumentative or instructional text type and contain (sometimes extensive) passages of narrative; (c) texts that are not narrative but embed narrative passages – e.g. sermons with parables or political speeches with exempla or anecdotes. For categories (b) and (c) the question of the function(s) of narrative becomes a crucial concern. To resolve this question will require the elucidation of notions such as illustration or explanation. Recipes outline a series of actions that are to be performed and will, if successful, result in the production of a cake or meal, but the ‘narrative’ quality of this instructional prose is nevertheless problematic even in terms of low narrativity. It is the report of a virtual succession of actions. However, Ryan’s ingenious analysis of a baseball commentary (1993) demonstrates that (low) narrativity can be encountered in many text types. For texts falling into the (c) category, literary analyses of the anecdote (see Fineman [1989] 1991) should be combined with the examination of how such anecdotes or parables are inserted into the (non-narrative) environment and what is their narrative structure. How is the (symbolic, metaphorical) moral articulated both explicitly and implicitly? 3.5 Further research questions Another vector of research could concentrate on features shared by fictional and nonfictional narratives and compare their focus, uses and functions in the two environments. I have myself attempted such an approach for descriptions (Fludernik 2014c, 2017b) and the representation of collective action and consciousness (Fludernik 2014a, 2017a). While it emerged that fictional we-narratives are often extremely different from factual modes of collective storytelling (see also Bekhta 2017a, b), the case with
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description was much closer to the situation outlined above regarding signals of factuality and fictionality – elaborate descriptive passages of a stylistically neutral nature tend to dilute the impression of fictionality in a text (see Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, 1722), while elaborately constructed and stylistically enhanced passages of descriptive prose in historical or hagiographical texts may create a suspicion of not merely literary overload, but even of fictionality. Additional foci of comparative analyses could be: the handling of dialogue; the involvement of the reader (addressee); the use of tense; anachronies; metanarrative and metadiscursive commentary (see Fludernik 2003); gnomic commentary and narratorial evaluation in general. It would also be interesting to learn whether, statistically, summary predominates in factual narratives (presumably to be differentiated by text type) and whether the pattern of narrative profile described by Stanzel (1984 [1979], 63– 78), according to which summary occurs mostly at the beginning and ending of stories, is reproduced in factual genres. Likewise, the distribution and number of passages of iterative or singulative narration in factual texts (in contradistinction with fiction) and the use of metalepsis strike me as worth exploring. An especially interesting hunting ground for the analysis of the factual will be documentary fiction (Hollowell 1977, Sauerberg 1991, Rubie 2009, Flis 2010) and the historical novel (Fleishman 1971, Rigney 1990, Nünning 1994, de Groot 2010, Dalley 2014 and Johnston and Wiegandt 2017). So far I have only listed aspects that will be relevant for verbal narratives in written form or in conversational exchange. Since narratology has now incorporated drama and film as well as a host of other media,11 features that relate to performance and visual presentation will also be important areas of research for a factual narratology. Drama narratology has recently become established with a vengeance (Fludernik 1996, 2008; Jahn 2001; Sommer 2005; Rajewsky 2007; Richardson 2007; Schenk-Haupt 2007; Nünning and Sommer 2008; Horstmann 2018), but to my knowledge there has been no narratological study of dramatic documentary. In fact, outside documentary film (/ II.13 Mundhenke), the factual element has not yet been the focus of research.
11 On film see the classic Bordwell (1985) and Burgoyne (1990) as well as Kuhn (2009) and Alber (2010); on the lyric the work of Hühn (2004, 2005), Wolf (2005), McHale (2009) and Zettelmann (2011, 2017). More general studies of transmediality have been conducted by Marie-Laure Ryan in several of her books (see Ryan 1999, 2004, and Ryan and Thon 2014) as well as by Nünning and Nünning (2002), Wolf (2003) and Wolf and Bernhart (2006). Note especially the studies by Mildorf (2016) and Mildorf and Kinzel (2016), which are more relevant to factual narratology.
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As I have tried to argue, the study of narrative factuality is as yet in its infancy, and many theoretical questions remain open. Put in a more positive manner, there is also much opportunity for discovery and exploration, for which the present volume can serve as an initial stepping stone.
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MARIE-LAURE RYAN
Fact, Fiction and Media In this chapter I will defend the thesis that the distinction between fact and fiction is not equally applicable to all media. More specifically, I will argue that not all narrative media (i.e. media capable of narration) are also capable of convincing their users of the factuality of their stories, though all narrative media are capable of making up fictional stories. Before I test my thesis on individual media, let me sharpen my terminological tools, by defining the three components of my title: fact, fiction, and media.
1. Definitions 1.1 Media Media are one of the most prominent and contentious topics of contemporary public discourse, but providing a reasonably strict scholarly definition of this intuitive concept is an elusive task (as shown in Elleström 2010), because medium, or media, is not an analytic category created by theoreticians to serve a specific purpose, but a word of natural language, and like most of the words of language it has different senses. These senses can be subsumed under the two definitions proposed by the Webster English Dictionary (Ryan 2004, 16): (1) a channel or system of information, communication, or entertainment; and (2) the material or technical means of artistic expression. To qualify as medium in sense (2), a channel or distribution platform must have idiosyncratic affordances that determine what kind of information can be created with it. But a given phenomenon can fit both definitions. Television, for instance, is a classic channel of transmission, but it has also given birth to its own forms of expression, especially narrative ones, such as the live broadcast, or the narratives of reality TV. The relation between these two conceptions of media is shown in Figure 1. The top line lists semiotic modalities, the middle line lists media as https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-004
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Marie-Laure Ryan Semiotic modalities
Media as means of expression
Media as channels of transmission
Image
Literature
Language
Music
Books
Visual arts
Radio
Movement
Film
Projection camera
Comics
Sound
Interactivity
Video games
Theater
Television
The Internet (or computer)
Fig. 1: The relations between semiotic modalities, media as means of expression, and media as channels of transmission. Dotted arrow means optional or secondary modes of transmission.
forms of expression, the bottom line lists distribution platform, or delivery channels, and the connecting arrows show the relations between these levels. For instance, literature comes to us through books, comics through booklets, film through some type of projection system and video games need computers. There are no specific delivery channels for music, theater and visual art because these artistic media can be apprehended directly by the senses, without the mediation of technology: you just look at pictures, listen to music, or watch a play.1 But media as means of expression have secondary delivery channels, shown by dotted arrows: TV for film, radio for music, books for visual arts. And finally, all means of expression can use computers as delivery channel. The question however remains on what criteria the elements of the second line are designated as media. I propose that media as forms of expression can be distinguished by three kinds of components (Ryan 2014, 29–30): 1. A semiotic component, which describes the types of signs used by different media. These signs can be of any of the three types described by C. S. Peirce: symbolic, in media supported by language; iconic, in most visual media; and indexical, in media based on visual or sound recording
1 It could be objected that musical instruments play the role of delivery channel of music, and the bodies of actors for the theater; but insofar as music and the theater exist only in performance (scores and text are only directions for performance), instruments and actors are the material support of the medium, and therefore an integral part of it.
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(though these signs are also iconic). But artistic media can also consist of sensorial elements that do not qualify as signs, because they have no specific meaning, such as abstract images or musical sounds. 2. A material component, which describes the means through which signs and sensorial elements are encoded and delivered. This material component can be a natural ability, such as the human voice for oral language, or a technology, such as print or photography. 3. A cultural component, which deals with the role of media in society, the behavior of their consumers, and the institutions that guarantee their existence. It is in this third sense that one generally speaks of ‘the media’ as either guardians of freedom of expression, or as hopelessly biased manipulators of public opinion. It should be noted that none of these three criteria provides a reliable discovery procedure for determining what counts as a medium and what does not in a given culture; rather, the approach I am proposing consists of starting top-down with the phenomena culturally or intuitively recognized as media, and of analyzing them in terms of their semiotic, material and cultural dimensions. The three components carry variable weight in the distinction of individual media. Some modes of communication may be regarded as distinct media on the basis of a combination of cultural role and technological support; this is the case for social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Other media, such as film or photography, are distinguished from their semiotic cousins drama and painting through purely technological criteria. And finally, if art forms are to be considered media, the semiotic component will be dominant in their definition. It is the variety of these distinctive criteria that makes lists of what counts as a medium in a given culture so relative, and the project of a media taxonomy so problematic. But whether or not the semiotic, material and cultural criteria are truly distinctive, media can always be studied according to these categories. 1.2 Fiction How one defines fiction depends on an a priori decision as to what a definition should include and exclude. Most people agree that the prototype of fiction is literary and folklore narratives such as novels, short stories, fairy tales and jokes; but beyond that opinions vary widely: should fiction be limited to narrative? Is it a language-based phenomenon or does it extend to other media? Are metaphors and other forms of verbal creativity fiction? Does the label fiction apply to artifacts as a whole, covering all
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of their elements, or can fictional elements intrude in globally factual texts and vice-versa? (Questions asked in Nielsen et al. 2015). Once a decision has been made, and a definition has been crafted, this definition can be used as a heuristic device to decide what other phenomena should be covered and excluded. Here I will adopt the following definition, knowing full well that its inclusions and exclusions, whether deliberate or unforeseen, will not create a consensus. Fiction is a use of signs meant by the producer to invite the user to imagine, without believing them, states of affairs obtaining in a world that differ in some respect from the actual world. These uses of signs are typically framed by external devices so that users know they are dealing with fiction, not with failed factual representation (i.e. errors and lies), but within the frame, the irreality of these represented states of affairs is not overtly marked, though it may be suggested by so-called “signposts of fictionality” (Cohn 1999). The user’s act of imagination can be undertaken for two reasons: (a) for its own sake (i.e. for the pure pleasure of imagining a world) or (b) for the sake of detecting similarities between the imagined world and the actual world. Option (a) describes artistic and ludic uses of fiction, which can be considered the fullest realization of fictionality; (b) describes didactic ones, such as parables and thought experiments. The term fictional could be used for (a) and fictive for (b).2 In artistic fictions, users transport themselves in imagination into the worlds described by the text, pretending that they are real through an act of make-believe (Walton 1990). In heuristic uses, they try to derive from the fictional world some general principles that also describe the actual world, but they do not immerse themselves in the fictional world, and they do not regard the act of imagining it as inherently rewarding. My definition is medium-free, since it is uncommitted as to what kind of signs should be used, and it does not a priori limit fiction to narrative, though there is a close connection between fiction and storytelling.3 It is
2 There is however another use of ‘fictive’ that describes entities rather than texts and that contrasts with real (/ I.2 Fludernik and I.3 Ryan, / I.1 Rajewsky). For instance, Santa Claus and unicorns are fictive, though they can be referred to in factual statements (e.g., Santa Clause does not exist). However, the distinction between real and fictive entities runs into problems when fictional texts attribute imaginary properties to real individuals: are they then fictive or real? Possible worlds theory (Ryan 1991) solves this dilemma by regarding the Napoleon of War and Peace as a fictional counterpart of the real Napoleon who possesses all the properties of the real Napoleon, unless contradicted by the text (/ II.4 Freitag). 3 Lorenzo Menoud (2005) goes as far as making narrativity a condition of fictionality. For an opposite view, see Nielsen et al (2015).
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indeed very difficult to find examples of artistic or ludic non-narrative fiction, because the acts of imagination that are most likely to provide pleasure concern worlds that evolve in time. This temporal dimension can only be represented by narration. Note finally that this definition refers to the product of the user’s act of imagination as ‘worlds.’ It rests therefore on a many-worlds ontology (Ryan 1991) in which the actual world is opposed to many fictional worlds, which may lie at variable distances from the actual world, depending on how much they have in common. All the elements of fictional artifacts contribute, more or less directly, to the mental construction of their fictional world, even when some of these elements happen to represent states of affairs that obtain in the real world. 1.3 Facts The Oxford Companion to Philosophy defines facts as follows: “A fact is, traditionally, the worldly correlate of a true proposition, a state of affairs whose obtaining makes that proposition true” (Lowe 2005, 267). According to this definition, facts are states of affairs that function as the realworld referents of true propositions. (State of affairs must be broadly understood in this case as covering both static situations and dynamic events; it is, for instance, a fact that John F. Kennedy was assassinated.) Conversely, a proposition is true when it captures a fact, this is to say, a state of affairs that obtains in the real world, or, to accommodate a many-world ontology, in the world regarded as real by the evaluator. If facts are the referents of true propositions, what in turn are propositions? According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (McGrath and Frank 2014, 16), a proposition is a “sharable object of attitudes” such as believing, knowing, hoping, desiring etc. Propositions can therefore be seen as the semantic content that fills the slot p in the formula S Vs that p, where S designates a person who stands in the attitude relation expressed by V. More generally, propositions can be regarded as the semantic content of the sentences of natural language, a content that logicians try to translate into some kind of formal logical notation. It follows that there is a strong connection between propositions and language as a medium of expression. And since facts are defined as a relation of correspondence between states of affairs and propositions, it also follows that there is a strong connection between language and facts. This affinity between language, propositions and facts derives from the discrete nature of linguistic units and from their potential for meaningful combination. A proposition consists typically of a subject and a predicate, or of a predicate and a number of arguments. Predicates are normally
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expressed by a verb, and arguments by nouns. Thanks to these discrete elements, language can isolate specific messages, or propositions, from the wealth of potential data provided by the world. This ability of language to focus on certain objects and certain properties of these objects can be demonstrated by comparing the sentence The cat is on the mat to a picture of a cat on a mat. Whereas the sentence asserts a specific proposition, excluding others (such as The cat is sleeping, The cat is black, etc.), the image is unable to do so because it represents an infinity of visual properties. Even with a painting titled “Cat on a Mat,” spectators will see far more in it than the position of the cat. The sentence, by contrast, limits its representation to a single proposition, this is to say, to a definite fact. If it is true that facts correspond to propositions (/ II.1 Klauk, / II.2 Bartmann), and propositions can only be expressed in media with discrete, combinable elements, then the question of the potential of various media for factuality has a very simple answer: only media that rely on language are capable of expressing or establishing facts. But this claim is too strong, because we can form beliefs in certain propositions not only on the basis of verbal communication that spells facts explicitly, but also on the basis of our experience of the world. For instance, if I witness an accident at 12:45 pm on the corner of Main Street and Mulberry Street, I will regard as true, and therefore as factual, the proposition There was an accident at 12:45 pm on the corner of Main Street and Mulberry Street. If I am a journalist, I may then build a news report around this fact. All factual assertions made in nonfictional verbal genres, such as news, scientific discourse, or historical narratives, can be ultimately traced back to a direct observation of the world, even when this direct observation is mediated through multiple acts of quoting. Now imagine that instead of witnessing an event directly, we watch it on a video recording on TV, YouTube, or through a surveillance camera. Then we are also entitled to regard the proposition The event happened as fact, even though the recording does not explicitly state the proposition. Kendall Walton (1984) has suggested that automatic, mechanical captures of the world such as photos and videos should be considered aides in visualization, comparable to glasses and telescopes. If seeing and hearing directly have a testimonial value that lead to beliefs in certain propositions, so do (though perhaps to a lesser degree) the mediated forms of seeing and hearing. This is why video and audio recording can be used as evidence in a trial. An image obtained by mechanical means is not only an icon that bears a visual or auditive resemblance to an object, it is also an index related to this object by a causal relation: the properties of the object determine the properties of the image, even when they are not exactly identical. For instance, the object may have color, while its photograph is black and
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white, but it is still the pattern of light projected by the object that determines the shades of black and white. It could be argued that mechanical recordings can be manipulated, and that their truth-warranting power is no longer automatic, but the possibility for a medium to lie or mislead is intimately connected to its ability to tell truths. In what follows, I will examine media according to their ability to report fact and fiction, dividing them into four categories: (1) media capable of both fact and fiction; (2) media capable of fiction but not fact; (3) media capable of neither; and (4) media (or rather, one medium) that cancel the importance of the distinction between fact and fiction. 2. Media capable of both fact and fiction 2.1 Language-based media By language-based I mean media that use language as their principal means of expression, rather than as one of many modalities, as in comics, film, or the theater. These media can use images as long as the image is seen as an illustration, or complement of the textual part. Since language presents the unique ability among semiotically defined media to represent propositions, language-based media present the most clear-cut, and the most epistemologically necessary distinction between facts as objects of belief and fictions as objects of imagining. Mistaking fiction for fact can have severe practical consequences, since it will lead to wrong beliefs. Mistaking facts for fiction, a situation less likely to occur, would lead people to ignore potentially useful information. This does not mean that every language-based text is either fact or fiction; rather, it is either fiction or nonfiction, a category broader than the factual that includes not only texts that assert propositions about the real world, but also persuasive and instructional texts with real-world relevance such as sermons and recipes, as well as counterfactuals, which are generally used to say something about reality, or predictions such as weather forecasts, which are assertions about the future with weak commitment. (Only the past can contain hard facts.) Moreover, fiction can appear either on the macro-level, as in novels, jokes, or short stories, or on the micro-level, as in parables inserted in a sermon or invented examples in philosophical discourse.4 4 Can nonfiction appear in fiction? I would not regard statements that happen to be true of the real world as an example of nonfiction within fiction, because these statements contribute to the building of the fictional world as much as the statements that
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Yet the genres of language-based media differ from each other in their standards of factuality. Some basically nonfictional genres, such as oral narratives of personal experience or travel writing,5 are much more tolerant of undocumented assertions than historiography or science writing. Knowing that the audience will evaluate their discourse according to a “principle of charity” (Walton 1990, 151), oral narrators telling stories as true may feel free to represent other people’s thoughts, to report dialogue in the direct mode, though it is unlikely that they remember exactly what people said, or even to imitate the voice of characters, even though impersonating somebody else is a trademark of fiction. In print communication, standards of truth are much stricter than in oral storytelling because of the durable nature of written inscription, and also because authors have ample time to support their claims. For instance, in historiography, every statement of fact should in principle be made verifiable by providing the source of the historian’s knowledge, a source that can lie in actual documents, in the account of eyewitnesses, or in the report of another, reliable historian. But standards of truth, and consequently believability, vary according to the social status of the channel of diffusion: we tend to believe stories that appear in the news section of respected newspapers, and to disbelieve stories that appear in the tabloid press. In digital media, the fact that anybody can post information, or forward it to other users without asking about its source, has led to the phenomenon of ‘fake news’ and to the often-heard claim that we have entered a ‘post-truth’ era. While reliability is more problematic in digital than in print communication, all language-based media are capable of both
concern imaginary objects. However, metafictional statements (such as “these characters never existed” in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman [1981, 80]) could be regarded as nonfiction, because they break the illusion of the autonomous existence of the fictional world. Also, photos of real-world entities can be used in literary fiction, and documentary clips can be used in fiction film. For instance, the graphic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman uses photos of his brother and parents, and the film Michael Collins, which is an acted recreation of the life of the Irish revolutionary, ends with a film of the hero’s real funeral. In both of these cases the insertion of nonfictional materials breaks the frame of the fiction. 5 My example of travel writing is The Lost Heart of Asia by Colin Thubron (1995), which reports many conversations between the author and local informants, all reflecting a high degree of verbal and intellectual sophistication. Since the author, by his own admittance, did not use a tape recorder, and since his knowledge of Russian, the lingua franca of the region, is limited (not to mention that of his informants, who speak Russian as a second language), one cannot take these conversations as literally accurate, though they do reflect the informants’ attitude toward life and political situations.
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factual and fictional storytelling, as well as of errors and lies, the inseparable correlates of factuality. To account for variable truth criteria I propose to distinguish four epistemological categories for texts that represent states of affairs: (1)
strong factuality, where claims must be supported, as in biography and historiography;
(2)
weak factuality, where the narrator is granted some freedom from the truth for the sake of tellability, as in narratives of personal experience, autobiography, New Journalism and travel writing;
(3)
weak fictionality, where the fictional world is very close to the real world and its closeness to reality is a major source of appeal, as in faction (sometimes referred to as true fiction or as nonfiction novel ),6 autofiction7 or romanced biographies; and
(4)
strong fictionality, where the fictional world is clearly distinct from the real world.
The border between (2) and (3) can be fuzzy, but in (2) the narrator and the audience are bound by what Monika / I.2 Fludernik calls a factual pact, so that the accuracy of the narrative can be challenged, for instance by accusing a conversational narrator of exaggerating (not a diplomatic move, but it can happen), while in (3) the audience regards the fictional world as a plausible and more knowable though not necessarily faithful version of the actual world, but also adopts an aesthetic attitude that gives free rein to the storyteller’s imagination. In a model of verbal narrative that regards the distinction author/narrator as distinctive of fiction (Genette 1993), in (2) they are the same person, while in (3) they are distinct, though the narrator can be a fictional alter ego of the author. 2.2 Media of mechanical capture If we regard video or audio recordings as substitutes for hearing and seeing, then media that rely on mechanical capture can present believable 6 For instance In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, which narrates the actual murder of a Kansas farm family using narrative techniques that presuppose far greater knowledge than any investigator could acquire, such as reported dialogue and representations of the character’s private thoughts (see Zipfel 2005). 7 The term autofiction (/ IV.6 Iversen) covers a wide range of phenomena: from Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, which could be entirely true, though the reader is more interested in the human authenticity than in the actual truth of the text, to Michel
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information through a simulated visual or auditive experience. Furthermore, if a medium can present information to be believed, that is, potential facts, it can also present information for make-believe. It is therefore not surprising that film and TV, both of which are based on mechanical capture, and therefore on indexicality, are the only media other than verbal communication for which the distinction factual/fictional is widely recognized. But the distinction is equally valid for photography, though its fictional use is much less common than that of film. Even Roland Barthes, a militant advocate of postmodern relativism, admits that photography (and by extension film and audio recordings) makes irrefutable existential claims, especially when compared to verbal discourse: “Discourse combines signs that have referents, of course, but these referents can be and are most often ‘chimeras.’ Contrary to these imitations, in Photography, I can never deny that the thing has been there” (Barthes 1981, 76; original emphasis). Mechanically obtained pictures cannot represent imaginary creatures such as unicorns, unless one puts a horn on a horse, in which case the thing represented is not what it is presented as being. If a photo of the Yeti or of the Loch Ness monster could be produced, and if it could be proved that the photo had not been manipulated nor the captured scene simulated (but this could never be proved), the existence of these creatures would have to be accepted as fact. The criterion for distinguishing fact from fiction in these media is straightforward. Does the image require make-believe, which means, is it intended to pass as something that it is not? According to this criterion, any film or photo that involves acting will be considered fiction, since actors impersonate somebody else. In photography, fictionality is rather rare. A good example is the work of the Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, who produced illustrations of literary works (“King Lear allotting his kingdom to his daughters”) or Biblical scenes (“Jephtah and his daughters”) in which real people posed in the required roles. But whenever photos document scenes of the real world and human subjects who stand for themselves, conditions fulfilled by the vast majority of them, they should be considered factual, unless they have been overly manipulated.8 Houellebecq’s La Carte et le territoire, which includes a character named Michel Houellebecq who is assassinated. I would place Knausgaard in category 3, though some people will argue for 2, and Houellebecq clearly in 4. 8 Another example of photographic fictionality is the use of originally factual photos to illustrate a fictional text, as in W. G. Sebald’s work. In the novel Austerlitz, Sebald uses a found postcard, and weaves a fictional story around the person shown in it, turning this person into the character Jacques Austerlitz.
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Fictionality is much more common in film than in photography, undoubtedly because of the inherent narrativity of the moving picture: as we have seen above, fictionality, though not limited to narratives, entertains special links with storytelling. The nonfictional manifestation of film is the documentary, but this does not mean that documentaries are a raw capture of the world (/ III.13 Mundhenke). Unlike photos, which consist of only one frame, documentary films can include many different elements, only some of which are indexical recordings. As Carl Plantinga has shown, among these elements are maps, drawings, and even reenactments, which, by the above criterion, should be considered fictional.9 This raises problems for the global classification of documentaries as factual, a problem that Plantinga solves by describing documentaries as “asserted veridical representations” (2005, 111). By this formula he means that documentaries are neither pure indexical records, since they contain other elements, nor are they pure assertions, since assertion is a linguistic act with narrowly defined propositional content; instead, they should be regarded as assemblages of documents that are proposed as “veridical,” that is, non-deceptive. The message conveyed by such documents is not a specific set of propositions, but “a sense of the look, sound, or overall perceptual experience of a scene or scenes” (113). Out of this perceptual experience, the viewer is invited to extract more specific propositions about the real world. Another medium that relies overwhelmingly on mechanical capture is television. It consists in equal parts of factual representations (news, documentaries, live broadcasts of real-world events) and of fictional ones (serials, made for TV movies, cartoons). With these genres, factuality and fictionality can be decided by the same criteria as with film. But the decision is much more difficult in the case of a form of representation that is native to television, namely the reality show. These shows are widely considered ‘fake’ and therefore fictional (in a non-technical sense of the word), but I will play the devil’s advocate by arguing that at least the classical cases (Survivor, Big Brother, House Hunters) are more fact than fiction. The argument for the fictionality of reality TV rests on the obvious staging of these shows for the camera, without which they would not happen. By contrast, most of the events shown or discussed in news broadcasts happen independently of their representation. While the participants of reality TV are ordinary people rather than professional actors, they are carefully chosen for their personality and for the type of identity they represent, and their
9 Similarly, a museum exhibit of, say, Viking artifacts, which as a whole should be considered factual, may include man-made pictures of life in a Viking settlement that represent imagined scenes.
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behavior on screen is to a large extent controlled, scripted and possibly rehearsed. For instance, on the reality show House Hunters, it is a safe bet that when the participants discuss and decide which one of three houses to buy, they have already made the decision and they merely reenact the process for the camera. For the partisan of a fictional classification, all of these features prevent reality TV from passing as an authentic document of ordinary life. On the contrary, the argument for factuality says that staged events are not necessarily fake and do not always extend an invitation to make-believe. In ritual, for instance, gestures and words must follow a very specific protocol, but it is precisely its adherence to a rigidly pre-determined script that enables the ritual to affect the life of the participants. Moreover, in a reality-TV show, in contrast to standard drama, the participants impersonate themselves rather than other people, and the show can have a direct impact on their personal life in the form of money prizes, celebrity status, choice of a house or even of a spouse. I would therefore like to suggest that the reality show is not a representation of life but life itself, however pre-arranged the circumstances (in contrast with the randomness of ordinary life). What the spectator sees on the screen is admittedly a representation, but unlike fiction film, which is a representation of a representation, namely the pro-filmic performance, the reality show is a representation of actual events, comparable to a sports broadcast. In House Hunters, for instance, participants end up buying the house (I assume), and this is what makes the show factual. If they do not buy the house, and if the spectator knows that they are just pretending, the show will be fiction.
3. Media capable of fiction but not of fact Media capable of factuality are also capable of fictionality, but the converse does not hold. This asymmetry can be explained by the contrast between the freedom of the imagination and the constraints exercised by the real: if a medium can state facts for the real world and support its assertions, it can also present propositions to the imagination without asking the user to believe them; but the ability to present states of affairs to the imagination does not entail the authority to assert facts. Here are some narrative media that cannot be used factually, if by factuality we understand not just their ‘being based on true facts’ or ‘on a true story’ (an occurrence frequent in acted films, which I consider fictional), but their entering into a factual pact between author and user on the basis of which users expect true, reliable and verifiable information.
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3.1 Theater If we define the theater as a live performance by actors who pretend to be characters, and if we associate fictionality with make-believe, then fictionality is implicit to this definition. Unlike film, the theater (and its cousins the opera and the musical) presents no genuine documentary manifestation, because it is always acted. This is not to say that dramatic performance cannot be about realworld events, or about a world so close to our world that spectators cannot avoid reflecting about real situations. In the past fifty years, dramatic performance has relied more and more on real-world documents, instead of fully invented text. In the so-called genre of Verbatim Theater, scripts are constructed on the basis of actual emails, diaries, or interviews (for instance, My Name is Rachel Corrie, 2008, by Katherine Viner and Alan Rickman, or The Laramie Report, 2001, by Moisés Kaufman).10 Whether the factual sources are strongly rewritten, or presented with next to no modifications, these examples retain the pretense inherent to the performance of the actors. Could one then say that the script is factual while the performance is fictional? This would amount to denying the script its nature as direction for performance, and to regarding it instead as a mimetic statement about the world. For a live stage performance to be nonfictional, the participants would have to perform their own texts, and these texts would have to represent their personal stories or beliefs. This kind of public testimony (represented by storytelling jams) could fall into what I have called ‘weak factuality,’ but the performers would no longer be actors, and the performance would no longer be theater. 3.2 Computer games Computer games are another medium that is currently expanding its coverage from clearly imaginary worlds to realistic ones. The basic mode of operation of computer games is not the representation of specific events but the simulation of possible ones (Frasca 2003). Each run of the program that underlies the game produces a different sequence of events, depending 10 My Name is Rachel Corrie was created from the diaries and emails of a pro-Palestinian activist from the US who was killed in Jerusalem; The Laramie Report (which exists in both film and stage versions) is inspired by interviews with people from Laramie, Wyoming, after the particularly bloody murder of gay student Matthew Shepart in that town in 1998, a murder nationally publicized as a hate crime. The film version has the look of a documentary, but like the play it uses actors for all the testimonies.
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on the player’s actions. When the game creates a fictional world, these events can be described as ‘fictional facts,’ just as the propositions asserted in a novel can be described as “fictional truths” (Walton 1990). These fictional facts constitute the history of the game world. But what would it take for computer games (or for computer simulations in general) to generate real facts? The movement known as “serious games” (Bogost 2010) has promoted the educational potential of video games, a potential exploited by industries such as defense, education, city planning, scientific exploration, and engineering. In order to fulfill an educational purpose, computer simulations must be heavily based on verified facts. For instance, a flight simulator would be worthless as a training tool if it did not incorporate the technology of an actual plane, as well as accurate maps and realistic weather data. Yet while the usefulness of a simulation engine depends on the accuracy of the data used as input, this does not mean that its output can be considered ‘facts’ because it concerns the possible and not the actual, the future and not the past. Insofar as only the past can contain facts, the output of computer simulations belongs to the domain of predictions, a domain neither fictional nor fully factual. But games are more than simulations, which can run by themselves once the initial conditions have been determined, they are simulations that integrate the actions of the user. The identification of the user with an avatar – that is, with a specific member of the game world – involves an act of make-believe comparable to the play of actors, and it places computer games squarely in the fictional camp. In addition, the fact that a game must be interactive means that it must be able to generate several different sequences of events, depending on the actions of the player. This feature disqualifies games from representing history, since there is only one way the past took place, whether or not this way is known. The best a game can do is to explore how history could have been, without commitment to truth. 3.3 Graphic narratives The resources of graphic narratives (i.e., comics) are overwhelmingly used to tell fictional stories, but in recent years, their subject matter has expanded from the fantastic worlds of super-hero stories to everyday and historical worlds, and we have seen a number of autobiographical graphic novels, for instance Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Maus by Art Spiegelman, and Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Insofar as memoirists rely on unverifiable personal memories, and insofar as memory is not a permanent, immutable recording of past events, but a recreation that varies with each act of recollection, it is nearly impossible to distinguish facts from invention in life writing,
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especially when it deals with deeply subjective experiences. Personal memoirs belong therefore to the category I have above called weak factuality. But this weakness is intensified when the medium is a combination of language and hand-drawn images. In the title of a 2013 article, Nancy Pedri, a leading scholar of the medium, indeed calls the graphic memoir “neither fact nor fiction.” 11 Why should the factuality of graphic memoirs be even more problematic than that of language-based ones? While language-based memoirs are normally told in the first person (or occasionally in the third), the graphic memoir represents the narrator/protagonist in three distinct ways: in the first person (through the narrated parts contained in text boxes, also known as “recitatives”), in the third person (through the images), and again in the first person (through the dialogue contained in the speech bubbles). This clash of perspectives, which is found in nearly every frame, creates a distance between the author/narrator and the character he or she tells about: the character both is, and is not the author/narrator. Such a distance is unique to graphic memoirs, and it prevents their assimilation to standard verbal autobiographies. In addition, the visual features of the autobiographical subject are often so stylized that any resemblance with the reallife author disappears: in Maus, the autobiographical subject looks like a mouse (as do all the Jewish characters), and in Persepolis, she looks like a child’s drawing, with a round face, elliptical eyes, and a mere line for nose and mouth. Only Bechdel’s protagonist bears some resemblance to the author. Another feature that undermines the factuality of the graphic memoir is the predominance of dialogue. The conventions of the medium require that most of the action be mimetically represented through images of characters and dialogue contained in speech bubbles. (Without this mimetic element, the text would become indistinguishable from an illustrated first-person narrative.) Readers do not ask whether the dialogue is factually accurate; they interpret it as a free re-creation. And finally, the importance of visual aesthetics – whether it concerns the arrangement of frames on the page, the style of the drawings or the appearance of the lettering – brings the graphic memoir closer to fiction than to factual narrative, since the latter is primarily judged on the quality and quantity of its information rather than on its presentation. This aesthetic intent means that authors of graphic memoirs, even when their work is heavily inspired by real events, will not be held to the same standards of accuracy as historians or
11 As Marianne Hirsch writes, “the Pulitzer prize committee invented a special category for Maus, suggesting the impossibility of categorizing it as either fiction or nonfiction” (1997, 274).
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biographers. They will not be considered guilty of misrepresentation if they take some minor liberties with the truth in order to create a more compelling narrative. Since the border between weak factuality and weak fictionality is fuzzy, the classification of reality-based theater, fact-inspired video games and graphic memoirs into one or the other of these categories depends on how narrowly the reader conceives factuality. Of these three media, graphic memoirs are the most likely to be considered “weakly factual” rather than “weakly fictional”: Art Spiegelman, for instance, regards Maus as nonfiction (Spiegelman 1989, 21). But the point I want to make is that none of these media can make claims of strong factuality. This impossibility is partly a matter of how media are defined,12 partly a matter of expressive resources, and partly a matter of cultural acceptance: you do not use comics or video games if you want to publicize important historical facts that you have recently discovered. 4. Media capable of neither facts nor fiction For a medium to be able to express either fact or fiction, it must be able to articulate specific content; in order to do so, it must rely on signs that represent one of the three modes of signification defined by C. S. Peirce: iconic, indexical, or symbolic. There are at least two forms of artistic expression that do not meet this criterion: music and architecture. The material of music is not signs but sound; the sound of music can be used iconically to imitate sounds of nature or of everyday life (for instance bird songs or trains), but it is usually abstract and refers only to itself. Though an important school of musicology argues for the inherent narrativity of music (Tarasti 2004), this narrativity does not reside in a specific content, but in a dynamic unfolding of musical ideas leading to a sense of closure; this unfolding can be compared to the pattern of expectations generated by narrative plots, but a comparison is not an identification. As for architecture, it is a spatial design meant to be experienced by the eye and the body, and this experience can occasionally be shaped in a narrative way as it unfolds in time (for instance, when the visit of a church guides the visitor through the life of Jesus), but the medium is totally unable to suggest a narrative by its own material means – that is, without using images or
12 For instance, the theater could be defined as any kind of public performance taking place on a stage, rather than as an impersonation by actors. Then storytelling jams would count as theater.
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text. Their fundamental lack of mimeticism makes music and architecture inadequate for conveying either facts or fiction. 5. A medium that cancels the importance of the distinction between fact and fiction: Man-made pictures Pictures drawn by human hands involve neither one of the two forms of representation that support a clear distinction of fact and fiction: they lack the ability of mechanical methods of capture to bear witness to the existence of what they show, and they lack the ability of language to make precisely identifiable truth claims. Yet these expressive limitations have not discouraged scholars from attempting to draw a line between factuality and fictionality for single-frame man-made pictures (Currie 1990, Schaeffer 1999). An easy answer to what makes a painting fictional or factual is whether or not the world or the object represented in the picture actually exists. By this criterion, a surrealistic landscape, for instance, Dali’s “Swans Reflecting Elephants,” or the illustration of a fictional narrative, for instance John Millais’s “Ophelia,” are fictional, though in the second example fictionality is not created by the picture, but inherited from the text it illustrates. Another type of pictorial fictionality is one-frame, captionless cartoons that invite the spectator to interpret the situation shown in the picture narratively, that is, by imagining its past and its future. But the criterion of actual existence works less well for the designation of pictures as factual. Gregory Currie (1990, 401) regards Gainsborough’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington as factual (or as nonfictional). By the same criterion, a Cubist portrait by Picasso of Henry Kahnweiler done in a Cubist style that bears only the slightest resemblance to a human being must also be regarded as factual. However, Currie admits that we cannot derive any information about Kahnweiler’s appearance from this portrait. Another set of pictures that cannot be considered factual, even though their title refers to a real-world situation, are the numerous paintings illustrating the death of Cleopatra. In these paintings the artists represent historical events from their imagination, and most of them use the scene as an opportunity for showing a female nude, though there is no evidence that Cleopatra died naked. It follows that the reality of the referent does not automatically classify a painting as factual, though a fictive referent could be considered sufficient grounds for regarding a picture as fictional. This is not to say that man-made images cannot convey facts. But because of their expressive limitations (as Sol Worth argued in a famous article, pictures cannot say ain’t [1981]), their power to capture factual information is limited to general visual appearance. This power is useful
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in domains where the visual represents an important criterion of identification, such as botany, zoology or anatomy. Though a botanical illustration represents the general appearance of plants, without dividing it into discrete elements, as a verbal description would do, it enables users to extract individual facts, such as ‘The flowers of Asclepias speciosa have five petals, they are arranged in umbellas, and the leaves are lance-shaped.’ Though they lack the indexicality of photographs, hand-drawn illustrations of plants and animals can be much more precise in their representation of distinctive properties. All reasonably convincing examples of pictorial factuality deal with pictures created for practical purposes, but a large number of man-made images are works of art that fulfill an aesthetic function. As I argue in Ryan (2010), when a picture is regarded as art, the issue of faithfulness to its subject matter loses much of its relevance. For instance, we do not necessarily ask whether or not the painting is historically accurate when we look at Vermeer’s “View of Delft.” Nor do we ask whether Picasso’s portrait of Henry Kahnweiler reflects the painter’s actual perception of his subject: what matters in this case is what the model suggested to the painter’s imagination. Even in the case of the portrait of Wellington by Goya, aesthetic appreciation does not depend on resemblance. While the painting can be regarded as a document of what the historical figure of Wellington looked like (realistic portraits often assume a quasi-indexical function, especially for those periods that preceded the invention of photography), aesthetic appreciation focuses on the overall composition of the image, the use of color, the style of the representation, and on what can be inferred about the model’s personality from his posture and facial expression. When a man-made picture is created as an aesthetic object, it requires an aesthetic attitude from the spectator, and this attitude cancels the importance of the distinction between fact and fiction. Is this principle exclusive to paintings or does it apply to verbal texts? When a nonfictional verbal text, such as Rousseau’s Confessions, is read as literature, which means as art, the reader is much less preoccupied with its truth than when the same text is read as a document. But the distinction between fact and fiction is much more important in verbal texts than in painting, because verbal texts rely on the semiotic mode that is best able to express propositions. Insofar as propositions capture explicit content, it is important to decide whether this content is to be believed or simply imagined.
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6. Conclusion Media differ from each other not only in their ability to convey fact and fiction, but also in the importance of deciding between these categories. I have shown that man-made images present a large zone of indeterminacy with regard to the dichotomy, but most if not all media present such a zone. It varies in size from medium to medium, depending on their representational resources. In language, the indeterminate zone is minimal. In addition to containing speech acts that qualify as neither fictional nor fully factual, such as forecasts and counterfactuals, this zone is occupied by concrete poetry. In media based on mechanical capture, virtually all works are either fictional or factual, depending on whether or not the captured scene involves deliberate role-playing. The indeterminate zone could perhaps be represented by certain artistic montages of recorded images that do not tell a story. Abstract works, whatever their medium, will always fall into the indeterminate zone, since both fictionality and factuality presuppose a mimetic dimension. Some media are optionally abstract, while others, such as music and architecture, are necessarily so, because they lack the semiotic resources that make it possible to articulate propositions. These media will therefore lie entirely within the no man’s land of neither fact nor fiction.
References Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Games. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Currie, Gregory. The Nature of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Elleström, Lars. “The Modalities of Media: A Model for Understanding Intermedial Relations.” Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality. Ed. Lars Elleström. New York: Palgrave-McMillan, 2010. 11–48. Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Chicago: Signet Books, 1981. Frasca, Gonzalo. “Simulation vs. Narrative: Introduction to Ludology.” The Video Game Reader. Eds. Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron. New York: Routledge, 2003. 221– 235. Genette, Gérard. Fiction and Diction. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1993. Hirsch, Marianne. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Lowe, E. J. “Fact.” The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. Ed. Ted Honderich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 267.
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McGrath, Matthew, and Devin Frank. “Propositions.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. 2014. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/propositions/ (8 August 2018). Menoud, Lorenzo. Qu’est-ce que la fiction? Paris: Vrin, 2005. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, James Phelan and Richard Walsh. “Ten Theses About Fictionality.” Narrative 23.1 (2015): 61–73. Pedri, Nancy. “Graphic Memoir: Neither Fact nor Fiction.” From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels. Eds. Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. 127–153. Plantinga, Carl. “What a Documentary Is, After All.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63.2 (2005): 105–117. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Introduction.” Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 2–40. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Fiction, Cognition, and Nonverbal Media.” Intermediality and Storytelling. Eds. Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010. 8–26. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Story/World/Media: Tuning the Instruments of Media-conscious Narratology.” Storyworlds Across Media. Eds. Marie-Laure Ryan and Jan-Noël Thon. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. 25–49. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. Pourquoi la fiction? Paris: Seuil, 1999. Spiegelman, Art. “Maus & Man.” Voice Literary Supplement (6 June 1989). Tarasti, Eero. “Music as a Narrative Art.” Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Ed. Marie-Laure Ryan. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. 283–304. Thubron, Colin. The Lost Heart of Asia. New York: Harper Perennials, 1995. Walton, Kendall. “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism.” Critical Inquiry 11.2 (1984): 246–277. Walton, Kendall. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Worth, Sol. “Pictures Can’t Say Ain’t.” Studies in Visual Communication. Ed. Larry Gross. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 1981. 162–184. Zipfel, Frank. “Non-Fiction Novel.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2005. 397–398.
STEPHAN PACKARD
Factualities and their Dependence on Concepts of the Fictional and the Mendacious Sometimes, factual discourse will refer to fiction and to lies in order to discuss the critical standards of its own factuality. While fiction and lies are not good points of departure for a theory of factual narration, such a theory must consider closely what is accomplished in factual discourse in these moments of indirect self-description. This chapter outlines such a discourse analysis as part of a study of factuality. The fundamental provocation in this approach is the consideration of non-technical conceptions of factuality and its others, used outside a precise theoretical framework, as a stepping stone towards a conceptually welldefined theory. Colloquially, we might claim factuality by denying error, mendacity, or fictionality, even though in technical terms, we usually only recognize fiction as factuality’s contrary. Such self-descriptors are far too central for factual discourse to be ignored merely because they differ from the jargon of the theory of factuality. But it would be equally fruitless to accept their definitions and terms uncritically. Instead, the plethora of distinctions on the object level needs to be carefully viewed in its relation to the level at which the workings of these discourses are to be described. Factuality itself is heterogeneous. It manifests itself in a diverse set of types and genres of texts. Each of these stipulates that facts with a reference to real life be conveyed; but they each apply different standards for satisfying that requirement. Factuality is ascribed by a descriptive claim – this text is factual – which expresses the idea that the text is being subjected to normative expectations – this text should be an attempt to express a true proposition. One common ground unifying the diversity of factualities therefore consists in this acknowledgment: since factuality is a standard to be met, the possibility of failure is part of each of these conceptions – if this text does not express a true proposition, it has failed: because it was erroneous, or mendacious, or even fictional despite previous claims to the contrary. Note that to fail at factuality does not necessarily imply a failure to be factual, just as a failure at dancing does not necessarily imply that the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-005
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infelicitous performance is that of a person who did not dance: an error and a lie are factual statements, but they fail to satisfy their normative standard. Thus, one approach to the study of factuality is to consider the ways in which discourses of factuality describe their standards by means of a description of possible failures and by an analysis of the similarities and differences in their various routes towards that result. In this way, the shifting colloquial concepts of the fictional and the mendacious are part of the study of the discourse of factuality. This chapter considers some of the questions which we might want to address when scrutinizing discourses that situate their specific understanding of factuality by describing fiction or lies as its others. Conceived as discourse analysis, this approach traces the theories of factuality within each discourse of factuality. It is only indirectly concerned with a genre theory of factuality, turning instead to explicit and implicit descriptions of the normative standards that a speaker would see applied to factual media. It thus complements the similar but distinct approach that defines factuality by distinguishing it from its others not as they are conceived within each factual discourse, but as they are defined within narrative theory (/ I.1 Rajewsky). While the narratological approach will produce one or more concepts for a systematic theory of factuality, discourse analysis will trace existing concepts as a matter of history. I will begin with a discussion of the basic oppositions or distinctions and will then turn to the methodological problems, requirements, and advantages – in this order – of this type of discourse analysis. For each of these points, I will offer short examples along with systematic descriptions. This discussion intends to clarify the questions we might ask of any text from the perspective of inquiry, rather than to catalogue all possible answers. The latter are potentially infinite and ultimately depend on the idiosyncrasies of each specific text. 1. Conceptual distinctions The opposition between factual and fictional narration may well appear to be a distinction that lacks clarity. Even though factual narration is not adequately defined as nonfiction, the metatextual commentaries by means of which it negotiates its own standards will sometimes refer to factuality’s others. These commentaries will call upon fiction, speculation, imagination and other modes of narration as well as other rhetorical stances (/ I.10 Sinding), each considered distinct from the factual, in order to outline ways in which texts can fail to be factual. On the other hand, factual texts might
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also fail at being factual when they contain errors, misrepresentations, lies, or in other ways do not fulfill the requirements of factuality. One might distinguish these two kinds of differences as descriptive and normative; but also, in terms of genres, as external and internal distinctions. Thus, narrative fiction lies outside factual narration by virtue of its genre and differs from factual discourse by refusing to submit to the demands that govern factual discourse. Lies, on the other hand, occur in factual discourse, fall well into the scope of its standards, but then fail to live up to those standards. While fiction is nonfactual from a descriptive perspective, lies are always factual statements and only appear as less than factual from a normative point of view. Wherever factual discourse includes descriptions of its own standards one frequently finds references to the external and internal delimitations of factuality. On the following pages, I will consider selected discussions of fiction, and of fiction as opposed to lies, in order to illustrate both types of delimitation. I am especially interested in those passages where the efforts of factual discourse to distinguish itself from external and internal others intersect. Such instances may be considered discursive points of diffraction in Foucault’s sense (Foucault 1969, 87): they mark positions at which two (or often many more) different options are available; the selection of a specific alternative will then hinge on the strategy by means of which the discourse situates itself. Points of diffraction are typically characterized by fundamental but pertinent incompatibilities, as Foucault points out. In our case, factuality, fiction, and lies are outlined as principally opposed to one another. At the same time, these oppositions are pertinent because the texts in question may appear superficially similar and liable to being confused: fact, fiction, and lies are distinguished in order to avoid taking one for the other, since this is an ever-present danger. The strategies I will delineate counter this threat by turning the points of diffraction into what Foucault calls “accrochages,” ‘hooks from which to hang a system.’ They support various systematizations within which factual discourse may address the situating of its own genres. It is the differences that can exist between such systems that are of interest to this essay.
2. Problems When one decides to discuss factuality in terms of what it is not, one tends to run into a number of problems. Such discussions often work with unsuitable corpora, stymie much-needed examination of fundamental terms, and employ misleading dichotomies.
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The problem of corpus has emerged as a key question in recent narratology. It was the revisions of the narratological corpus that stimulated the research question underlying this handbook. Narration has long been studied with a strong focus on, in many cases emphatically, literary texts. This has often meant ignoring popular literary forms, and has almost always entailed a bias for the fictional. In describing such a conception of fictionality, narratologists and literary theorists will usually say that claims of factuality are suspended in such texts, which is fair enough for understanding fictionality as such (Zipfel 2001, 14–29; Renner and Schupp 2017, 125; Schaeffer 2013). However, once we try to retrace our steps from this indirect treatment of factuality as nonfiction back to describing factuality itself, we find that we have been looking at the wrong body of work to discuss factuality, creating a chimera of what the factual might be only by looking at its distortions in texts that negate it. If we want to understand factuality by looking at distinctions of the factual and the fictional, we must make sure to look at those distinctions where they are made in predominantly factual texts, rather than where they are treated in the muddied waters of fiction. We then quickly face a second problem: while we seemed to know what factuality was when we said that its obligations were suspended in fiction, we now realize that we were defining one term (fiction) through negating another (factuality) without ever having properly clarified the latter. Accurately observing that the demands of the factual are being waived in fiction is in itself no proof that we clearly understand what those demands are where they prevail. Least of all should we confuse our recognition of fictionality with a definition of the factual. Even when we acknowledge that fiction suspends the norms of factuality, to assume that the factual can be suitably and exhaustively described by the absence of such suspension is to proceed through a double negation, rendering factual narration that-which-that-which-is-not-factual-is-not. Such an argument blindly assumes that each negation is total, neatly dividing the realm of narration into the one or the other. But factuality can be different from fiction without necessarily being wholly identified with everything that is nonfiction; and fiction, in turn, might turn out not to coincide precisely with the set of all cases in which factuality is suspended, even though that suspension does of course occur. Take as an example one of the most-cited points of departure for the analysis of fiction, Philip Sidney’s famous claim in his Defence of Poesie: “Now for the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth” (2002 [1595], 103). This sentence immediately proposes not two but three possibilities for any communicative act: (1) poetry, (2) successful affirmation, and (3) lies. Hence a given statement might be poetic; it might instead be
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a proper affirmation; or else it might improperly affirm a lie. The second and third options together dissect the possibility of affirmation, from which poetry is to be distinguished. At the same time, the first two are defended as acceptable alternatives by Sidney, whereas the last is condemned. The triad is thus irreducible. It is by considering the distinction between apology and condemnation that we may understand why in this maxim errors do not appear as their own category. One could certainly have divided the second class, proper affirmations, by distinguishing accurate from erroneous assertion. But Sidney is not interested in haphazard errors that subdivide factuality, but in making two different distinctions that separate factuality from two different opposites: one from the external other of poetry, as fiction, which is affirmation; and one from the internal other of affirmation, namely lies. This triadic constellation might already call into doubt a hasty binary interpretation of Sidney’s proposal. Factuality does not emerge out of a simple negation of only one other, nor is fictionality simply everything that is not properly asserted. As Sidney continues his argument, it becomes clear that his concept of fiction goes far beyond a mere negation of any critical standards. Engaging with Aristotle’s defense of the poetic against Plato’s criticism, he recurs to Socrates’s path through Athens looking for wisdom, and goes on to discuss the proper knowledge employed in a number of different professions in the polis. He eventually circles back to the poet and, joining Aristotle against Plato, contends that the poet’s efforts in reflecting the whole of that city must also define his place in its order. Fiction then clearly does have functions and critical standards – but neither are suitably discussed in terms of avoiding lies. On the other hand, assertive speech should indeed be discussed by considering the threat of the lie. In lies, factual narration fails. But it has to be factual, that is, claim to be an attempt at truth, in order to fail in this specific manner. Factuality can be understood as that which is threatened by a lie. It is not well measured by the critical yardsticks of fiction, which does not threaten factuality. Sidney’s famous sentence is thus not a prescription for a fruitful examination of either set of genres, factual or fictional, but a warning against discussing one in terms of the other. 3. Requirements Sidney’s warning still holds. If we nevertheless are to discuss factual narration by means of considering fiction at all, we should do so only because and only where we cannot escape this indirect approach. This happens in those cases where factual narrations use some concept of fictionality as
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their other in discussing their own purported standards of factuality. Methodologically, one has to sharply separate such conceptualizations from those which we employ in our own theory – as sharply as we distinguish object language from meta-language. Hence, when we find concepts of factuality or fictionality on this object level of a narrative or in its metanarrative reflections, we should not reject them merely because we theoretically disagree with them. Nor, on the other hand, should we adopt them ourselves, since that would lead us back into the aporias of a narratology that conceives of fiction and factuality as opposites with no substantial definitions. Instead, we should describe a given tradition’s conception of factuality, including its conceptions of factuality’s others, as features of that discourse, indispensable for our descriptions but not identical with them. We have to ask: where do these understandings of factuality connect with the conceptions of fiction or of lies? This suggests a number of requirements that might regulate the idea of this discourse analysis, each of them proposing a set of questions for the interrogation of the corpora we examine. We should, I believe, (1)
catalogue imagined failures of the factual as they are conceived of within factual texts;
(2)
accept apparent re-definitions of fiction and lies as factuality’s others;
(3) (3a) (3b) (3c)
consider a matrix: comprised of positive and negative diffractions of facticity, genre distinctions that lie crosswise or athwart these borderlines, and the work of universalization.
(4)
Finally, we must take note of the methods of control involved.
I want to discuss and explain each of these points in greater detail. (1) We should be mindful of the ways in which the connection of factuality to its internal or external others relates to a critical stance. It is in the acts of critique that one can observe distinctions which fall short of the power and precision of analytical definition to gain their pragmatic use, commonly in the shape of indictment and defamation. Factuality in these cases has to be understood first and foremost as a normative claim: it demands that a text convey facts, but does not define the factual text by its performance of this requirement but merely by that stipulation. The factual is that which should be factually accurate, regardless of whether it is. It is a normative and thus genuinely critical category. Discussion of fiction and lies within
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factuality’s self-descriptions need to be interrogated in relation to their place and function within such critique. For instance, what effect does a witness achieve by emphasizing that they have not imagined what they saw? What does the attorney gain by accusing them of fiction? What is it that a politician protests against when he calls his opponent a peddler of fake news? We will be able to collect catalogues of imagined failures of the factual precisely in contexts where such speech occurs. (2) But should such an interpretation not be limited to lies, and exclude fiction, since in fiction factuality is not attempted and thus does not fail? Should a theory of factuality take non-technical, loose uses of the term fiction into consideration? I insist that we cannot avoid doing so for those cases in which the non-technical use of the term is at the heart of the explication of factuality proposed in the discourse we examine. A second requirement following from the first is that we must accept new definitions of fiction, and possibly even of lies, which occur in factual texts where they serve to describe the texts’ factuality. That is, we may well believe that we have learned from Aristotle, Sidney and others that the poet never lies; we may also assume that, since we cannot understand the factual by conceptualizing it as nonfiction (or by theorizing about it exclusively on the basis of what it is not), we need to turn to factual discourse itself rather than to its purported other; yet, precisely by doing so, we find ourselves encountering processes that Foucault described under the label of procedures of raréfaction (Foucault 1971, 28–30). What Foucault means by these procedures is the construction of truth standards, in our context mirrored in standards of factuality, that narrow the scope of true discourse by excluding others. These others are included precisely because they do not conform to the order of the given discourse – that is why they are discussed as its others. They are considered incapable of truth on account of their failure to adopt the shape of scientific theses, for their ‘insanity,’ erroneousness, or indeed for being ‘mere fiction.’ That last rarefication often operates with regard to fiction proper in literary works, which suspends obligations towards veracity in well-established ways. But it occurs no less when describing testimony as false – The witness has presented a pure fiction; scientific theory as obsolete – The phlogiston is now widely considered to be fictitious; political deliberation as misleading – My opponent’s promises are altogether fictional; and journalism as defective – That rag publishes nothing but fiction. Here we again recur to the distinction between an object language and a meta-lingual level of analysis. In our traditional handling of the concept of fictionality, we have perhaps assumed that we should be satisfied with an improved understanding of the fictional, namely by aligning it with a
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specific literary convention that suspends factual obligations, rather than considering a heterogeneous assortment of failed or deceptive claims to the representation of fact. Such accepted models include the genres of the fantastic novel and the fanciful romance, but disregard the scenario of the lying witness, the populist politician, and the practices of the yellow press. But where these different conceptions of fiction occur as critical distinctions in metanarrative reflections, it would be unsatisfactory to merely fault them for employing different, much wider and less precise, concepts than does narratology. To do so would founder in much the same way as does a discussion of factuality exclusively on the basis of its negation of fiction. In either case, we would have failed to take at face value the distinctions from fiction that feature in factual discourses. Instead, we should fully consider these apparent re-definitions of fiction and lies as factuality’s others. (3) The demands to catalogue imagined failures of the factual, and to accept apparent re-definitions of fiction and lies therein, refer to the direct positioning of factuality’s others within its discourses. The third requirement takes us in the opposite direction to look at three broader formations by which factuality carves out its own position. The factual and the nonfactual, then, are to be placed within the matrix that describes that position. We might do so by asking three more questions of each self-described factual discourse: (3a) By which virtue does it make its claim to factuality? (3b) Which other modes of speech does it accept as distinct but compatible? (3c) How does it deny such compatibility? (3a) In the most direct sense, factuality may position itself by claiming for itself some virtue beyond discourse, sometimes referred to as facticity. While the concepts of fiction and lies that we encounter in our corpus might be atomic and heterogeneous, in each case the principle of charity demands that we at least consider how ideas of the factual employed and described within such factual texts might refer to a holistic or complex concept that goes well beyond their fragmentation. As we distinguish the fictional text from the fictivity of some of the objects and events it describes, we also distinguish the factual text that strives to represent facts from the facticity that those representations achieve if the text succeeds. Facticity, then, is the positive description of what a factual statement or text must accomplish in order to succeed. Where this strategy obtains, discourses consider the question of factuality as answerable by first defining what is fact. From the vantage point of a seemingly guaranteed facticity, factuality can then be described positively, rather than through its relation to external or internal failures. An example is the philosophical discussion of truth, by correspon-
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dence or correlation (/ II.2 Bartmann; / II.1 Klauk); truth constitutes a standard of facticity that is simple to name but difficult to verify. In other discourses, we find more modest philosophical, rhetorical or psychological discussions of the factual as a function of mere epistemic justification (cf. Sosa 1980). For instance, one discourse might demand that a factual statement be either true or considered a failure; another might condemn avoidable errors but accept as satisfactory any sufficiently honest, earnest, and sincere attempts at approximating truth, thus refusing to condemn a person who has been deceived despite their best efforts. Such approaches tend to define factuality positively on the basis of one key quality, which in fact derives from a previously assumed concept of facticity. At the same time, it is imperative that we should pay attention to the specificity of different factualities that may co-occur within the same set of utterances. In some scientific texts, religious claims are positioned as contrary to fact, whereas some religious treatises consider religion and science to be engaged in one joint quest for truth. And yet either may still mention the other. Such discourse strategies introduce additional ‘others’ that delineate the idea of factuality beyond the fictional and the mendacious. Similarly, rhetoricians sometimes deal with metaphor as factuality’s other, but will do so in a number of different ways: for instance, by excluding metaphor from factual claims altogether, or by employing metaphor while emphasizing the necessity of its ultimately having to be translated back into nonmetaphorical statements. In still other cases, they do so by discussing special relationships between certain metaphors and specific kinds of the factual, such as factual metaphors in science as opposed to other metaphorical stances (/ I.10 Sinding; see also Knudsen 2005 and / III.5 Musolff ). In tracing all of these text-internal arguments, we will eventually arrive at a second catalogue of functions of the nonfactual (/ I.5 Wolf, / V.2 von Contzen). We should thus be prepared to describe positive and negative diffractions of facticity: those that positively outline a concrete standard for facticity (e.g. ‘this is reliable for it has been empirically tested’), as well as those that negatively outline the different function ascribed to the nonfactual where it is presented as compatible with factuality (e.g. ‘I am only bringing this up as a metaphor’). This procedure will yield a network of terms and concepts in which we might eventually also find a place for fiction and lies. We will then be dealing with a series of diffractions: each conceptual opposition, whether systematic or haphazard, suggests the possibility of selecting one factuality or standard of facticity among a set of incompatible but mutually confoundable alternatives. (3b) That same matrix must also consider claims of genre. Rather than deciding for or against a particular standard of facticity (e.g. by affirming
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or denying a religious conception of truth as revelation) we also need to place any utterance within a certain genre. Thus, a philosophical text can ascribe truth to revelation and yet nonetheless engage in philosophical debate. This is the case for the proofs of God in the work of Aquinas and Augustine, who tell us that they will choose to engage in philosophy even about a truth already otherwise established. Their standards of factuality are taken from their genre, even though the standard of facticity for the existence of God lies beyond that genre’s scope. Thus, distinctions that are inherent in a generic matrix can be related to fundamental worldviews, of the kind that may give rise to an actual confession of belief on the part of a speaker or writer. But on the level of discourse, we need not and in some cases might not ever find the basis to make such bold claims. Instead, we may well assume that the same individual will accept one kind of assertion in a children’s book on science, another in a volume for adult laymen and yet another in a journal for colleagues from a pertinent discipline. That is, the same matrix will contain genre distinctions that criss-cross the borders between the factual and its others. For instance, consider Terry Pratchett’s, Ian Stewart’s, and Jack Cohen’s volume on The Science of Discworld (1999, the first of three). Here, the authors promise to discuss science, a factual endeavor; but at the same time, the title and half of the chapters of the book refer to the fantastical Discworld established in Pratchett’s fantasy novels. It is only the other half of the chapters that are each dedicated to explaining some aspect of factual science. The authors argue for a compatibility between these discourses, in part by coining a now-famous new meaning for the term lies to children. The core of their argument relies on continuously reinterpreting that phrase. Early in the book, it characterizes a kind of auxiliary discourse that explains and conveys concepts to certain audiences – children, the scientifically uneducated, and the stubborn. It is understood to be distinct from more direct representations that would be considered properly scientific. However, the position then changes: arguing that “Liar-to-children is an honourable and vital profession, otherwise known as ‘teacher’,” the authors go on to elevate the teacher to the position of the true scientist, and impugn those that would not ‘lie to children’ for missing the point of science: But what teaching does not do – although many politicians think it does, which is one of the problems – is erect a timeless edifice of ‘facts’. Every so often, you have to unlearn what you thought you already knew, and replace it by something more subtle. This process is what science is all about, and it never stops. (Pratchett et al. 1999, 39)
What begins as a genre distinction – ‘allow us to simplify, for we will teach rather than produce science’ – turns into an undermining of the distinction
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itself. The intended message is that our self-aware misrepresentations of reality are closer to the core of science than are direct statements of fact. (3c) A third consideration for the matrix needs to take into account the opposite movement, namely that which eschews any additional distinctions by genres and instead universalizes one standard of facticity across all other distinctions. Such discourses essentially deny their dependence on a matrix, presenting a vision of their own concepts that is purified from discursive entanglements. We in turn might note that this work of universalization is itself discursive, visible, and historically specific (cf. Butler 1997). The work of universalization can be observed, for instance, when one discourse cannot bring itself to believe that another discourse differs from its own standards of factuality. Consider Galileo’s letter to his pupil and friend Benedetto Castelli (cf. Finocchiaro 1989, 51), which would later become the central piece of evidence against Galileo in the first of his two trials. Here, Galileo argues: […] che le Scritture, benché dettate dallo Spirito Santo, per l’addotte ragioni ammetton in molti luoghi espozioni lontane dal senso litterale, e di più, non possendo con certezza asserire che tutti l’interpreti parlino inspirati divinamente, crederrei che fusse prudentemte fatto se non si permettessi a alcun l’impugnar i luoghi della Scrittura et obligarlo in certo modo a dover sostenere per vere alcune conclusioni naturali, delle quali una volta il senso et le ragioni dimostrative e necessarie ci potessero manifestare il contrario. (Pagano 1984, 73) […] though the scriptures were inspired by the Holy Spirit, because of the mentioned reasons many passages admit of interpretations far removed from the literal meaning, and we also cannot assert with certainty that all interpreters speak by divine inspiration; hence, I should think it would be prudent not to allow anyone to oblige scriptural passages to have to maintain the truth of any physical conclusions whose contrary could ever be proved to us by the senses and by demonstrative and necessary reasons. (My translation)
Galileo is clearly outlining scripture as ‘other’ to his own claims to factuality, which are based on empirical measurements, mathematics, and science. But he is not describing Scripture’s truth as failed factuality, but as a different kind of authority. The disagreement is not about factuality, but about its questionable universalization. His accusers then produced an expertise by the Holy Office that emphasized the importance not just of truth claims, but of their generality: “Non bene enim utitur nomine falsitatis, quocumque modo sacre scripture attribuatur, illa namque est omnimode et infallibilis veritatis” (Pagano 1984, 68): ‘Certainly it is not right to use the word falsehood, in the manner in which it be attributed to the Holy Scripture; for it is the infallible truth in every way’ (my emphasis and translation).
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(4) The situation of that last example points us to a fourth requirement. The genuinely critical distinction of factuality and its others does not merely occur in free critique, but also in the much more defined and practical settings of censorship and other forms of media control. As factual narration is distinguished both from lies and from fiction, the difference between the external and the internal distinction revolves around the legitimacy and illegitimacy of normative standards. A text can be not factual by virtue of being fictional; but only factual texts can lie, and in the latter case, factuality does appear, but in the form of failure. That only the latter can be grounds for an indictment or accusation – be it legal or moral or otherwise –, depends upon the delimitation of arguments that concern legitimacy as opposed to those that do not. Here the discourse analysis of factuality meets the analysis of what might broadly be called the speech of censors – or, more precisely, any act of evaluation that arrogates to itself the position of positive explicit censure on the subject of what the factual text is, fails to be, or might have devolved into. This perspective demands that we ask additional questions about how the examined description of factuality is situated within contexts of power and punishment. In discourses of control (Schauer 1992; Butler 1998; cf. also Packard 2012), two recurring heuristic questions concern the exteriority and the ubiquity of positions within the dispositif of such discourses. Exteriority asks where the limits of a given discourse are drawn and from which position one might judge it – appropriately so, as the phenomenon must fall within its scope, and legitimately so, as the position of the censor must be impartial to the same field. Ubiquity, on the other hand, renders the position of the censor invisible and instead describes whatever rules are upheld as commonplace reflections of that which would otherwise be impossible. How can we tell that a discourse has gone wrong? In exteriority, because someone has marked it as such; in ubiquity, because the alternative would be unthinkable and unrepresentable. To return to the same example, Galileo was never convicted in court for claiming merely that the earth revolved around the sun. In the first trial against him, he was accused of subverting the authority of scripture; the claim to truth ascribed to scripture is presented by the church as crucially universal; it permits no other factualities next to it. And yet by referring to a written expertise from the Holy Office, that ubiquity returns the power over the definition of factuality to a specific institution, an external party that can settle the dispute. In the second trial against Galileo, his accusers had to claim that he had personally and specifically been forbidden to teach the movement of the celestial bodies in the first proceedings (he denied that this had happened): he was declared to be guilty because
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he had talked about this subject and not for spreading a falsehood. Or more accurately: that his claims were false was evident not because they were measured against a ubiquitous and universal concept of truth, but because Galileo’s person had been placed, by the power of an external judge, outside that factual discourse that science and religion supposedly shared. These distinctions are useful to describe in detail the formations of discourse in cases of censorship and similar contexts of media control. In more general terms, they also allow us to re-examine the difference between factuality’s distinction from lies and its distinction from fiction from yet another perspective: for where exteriority sees one specific and manifest discourse condemned in its evaluation by one authority, ubiquity sees incompatible arrays of utterances in which the necessary latency of alternatives gives credence to the censorious judgement. Discourses that negotiate factual narration by virtue of a factuality distinct from lies posit the avoidance of lies as a standard, and violations of those standards as explicit utterances that are condemned in further utterance: one utterance lies, another decries the lie, and both are visible and relate to one another as interior to exterior. Where factual narration is distinguished from fiction, however, the exterior position becomes unimaginable: the poet never lies, in this view, and so while fiction violates no standards, to measure it by the standards of the factual would violate the limits of the generically conceivable. 4. Advantages While the four requirements I have been suggesting might be read either as a program of research or as a warning against undertaking it, they correspond to a set of advantages that such an examination of diffractions may yield. First of all, they allow a genuinely historical treatment of the discourse of factuality. In parallel to recent attempts to do the same for fiction (e.g. Bunia 2007; von Contzen 2017; Fludernik 2014; Franzen et al. 2018), the factual might be interrogated as to its position in historical, societal and cultural contexts, and ultimately as to its dependencies on these. The opposition to such an inquiry might be stronger than for fiction if and wherever the factual is considered a direct result of requirements for truth so fundamental as to be absolute and ahistorical (/ I.3 Ryan, / II.2 Bartmann). And indeed, the discourse outlined here seems to be less common in the sciences, which rarely consider fiction or lies as their starting points for delineating factuality, starting instead with positive proofs of factuality or
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falsifications of apparent truths (/ III.10 Walsh, / Milne). There, the truth that is to be established is treated as objective and often timeless, at least as far as human time is concerned. By the same measure, scientific practice understood in this way is not that of a discursive critique, but of experimental testing and analytical proof. But it is not least for that very reason that the historicity of the diffractive definition of factuality needs to be taken into account where it is foregrounded. Similarly, such an examination will lead to a more detailed description of the discourse of factuality, if not the different kinds of factuality itself, in various genres: journalism and documentaries, scientific discourse, historical treatises, autobiography, legal texts and witnesses’ accounts (/ I.10 Sinding, / IV.6 Iversen, / III.8 Stern) might well develop their own ideas about the fiction and the lies from which they distinguish themselves, and likewise provide different answers to the questions concerning the proper critical stance, the matrices that either envelop or set free such a concept of factuality, and the control that might ensure its standards. A closely linked third advantage consists in offering a productive perspective on those ruptures in which different genres and traditions clash. These are more common, I believe, than suggested by many of those universalizing theories of the factual – Galileo’s second trial being a case in point. Here, we are also often faced with discoveries that might amount to a fourth advantage of this undertaking: the fact that emergent concepts that arise from the dynamic and historically specific treatment of the assumed fundamental differences in play are now recognized more clearly. At the same time, the historical specificity of these disruptive confrontations of different concepts of factuality demands a treatment that takes its departure from the concrete material of a text in conjunction with the more general questions outlined above. In-depth and contextual analyses of concrete cases are required that go beyond the scope of this handbook entry. Every concrete factual text cannot help but signal its conception of factuality as descriptive category and normative standard. When it indicates that such conceptions rely on equally specific ideas about fictionality and lies, or any other external or internal others of factuality, we need to take these dependencies into account in order to understand what supposedly makes a given text factual. References Bunia, Remigius. Faltungen. Fiktion, Erzählen, Medien. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2007. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of Subjection. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997.
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Butler, Judith. “Ruled Out: Vocabularies of the Censor.” Censorship and Silencing. Practices of Cultural Regulation. Ed. Robert C. Post. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of the Arts and the Humanities, 1998. 247–260. Contzen, Eva von. “Unnatural Narratology and Premodern Narratives: Historicizing a Form.” Journal of Literary Semantics 146 (2017): 1–23. Finocchiaro, Maurice A. Ed. The Galileo Affair. A Documentary History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Franzen, Johannes, Frauke Janzen, Patrick Galke, and Marc Wurich. Geschichte der Fiktionalität. Diachrone Perspektiven auf ein kulturelles Konzept. Baden-Baden: Ergon, 2018. Fludernik, Monika. “Collective Minds in Fact and Fiction: Intermental Thought and Plural Consciousness in Early Modern Narrative.” Theoretical Approaches to the Early Modern: Beyond New Historicism? Special Issue of Poetics Today 35.4 (2014): 685–726. Foucault, Michel. L’archéologie du savoir. Paris: Gallimard, 1969. Foucault, Michel. L’orde du discours. Paris: Gallimard, 1971. Knudsen, Susanne. “Scientific Metaphors Going Public.” Journal of Pragmatics 35 (2005): 1247–1263. Musolff, Andreas. “Popular Science Concepts and Their Use in Creative Metaphors in Media Discourse.” Metaphorik.de 13 (2007): 67–84. Packard, Stephan. “Draußen und überall. Zwei heuristische Begriffe zur Diskursanalyse medialer Kontrolle.” Mediale Kontrolle unter Beobachtung 1.2 (2012). Pagano, Sergio M. Ed. I Documenti del Processo di Galileo Galilei. Città del Vaticano: Pontificia Academia Scientiarum, 1984. Pratchett, Terry, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen. The Science of Discworld. London: Ebury, 1999. Renner, Karl Nikolaus, and Katja Schupp. “Journalismus.” Erzählen. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Ed. Matías Martínez. Stuttgart: Metzer, 2017. 122–132. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. “Fictional vs. Factual Narration.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/fictional-vs-factual-narration. 19 August 2012, revised 20 September 2013 (29 March 2018). Schauer, Frederick. “The Ontology of Censorship.” Censorship and Silencing. Practices of Cultural Regulation. Ed. Robert C. Post. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of the Arts and the Humanities, 1998. 147–168. Sidney, Philip: Defence of Poesie. London: Printed for William Ponsonby, 1595. Sidney, Philip: An Apology for Poetry, Or, The Defence of Poesy. Ed. R. W. Maslen. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Sosa, Ernest. “The Raft and the Pyramid: Coherence versus Foundations in the Theory of Knowledge.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5 (1980): 3–25. Zipfel, Frank. Fiktion, Fiktivität, Fiktionalität. Analysen zur Fiktion in der Literatur und zum Fiktionsbegriff in der Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2001.
MARK J. P. WOLF
Typology of the Nonfactual Since each person draws (and redraws) their own line dividing what is real from what is not (based on their beliefs, experience, and other factors), these lines often do not agree with each other (across cultures and even from one person to another), and human subjectivity and our limited means of gaining knowledge mean that they likely never will. Even on a more general scale, things which fall beyond empirical means of detection, such as the spiritual realm, the past and the future, other dimensions, and so forth, as well as things beyond our available means of detection, such as quantum realms smaller than what we can currently investigate, stars and planets out of our reach, or questionable phenomena such as parapsychology, all straddle the line demarcating what is and is not, remaining the subject of debate. Even agreed-upon lines can be redrawn, as new information becomes available. Thus, the divide between real and not real is a spectrum, ranging from those things which the vast majority of people would agree exist (for example, the earth or the sun) to those things which no one, or almost no one, believes to exist. Thus, we will also be limited as to what we can know to be factual, and for the same reasons; though there are still many things that can be demonstrated to exist without being merely the product of consensus.
1. Factual versus nonfactual What we usually call the factual, then, is a subset of those things for which some repeatable proof can be provided through an appeal to logic and available evidence. Since even this definition is still philosophically slippery, it may be easier to define the nonfactual as those things which are not factual or actual (according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word factual is in fact based on the word actual; the earliest use for actual that it lists is from 1315, whereas the earliest listing for factual is from 1820). Although https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-006
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something which someone makes up could later be found to describe something which is actual (for example, someone describes a made-up animal, which is supposed to not exist, and then later such an animal is discovered), the deliberate nature of a human being’s creative invention means that the nonfactual thing does not have a real-world referent, even if something similar is found later. This lack of a real-world referent, then, could be said to be a defining feature of the nonfactual. Another form of the nonfactual is the counterfactual, a term used by Nelson Goodman (1947). The counterfactual conditional poses a what if situation that might have occurred if some other event had not happened. Such conjecture supposes different facts and thus can be considered nonfactual because its ‘facts’ are different, or counter, to those known to exist. Yet, it differs from what we normally mean by nonfactual since it deals with an alternate set of facts that would have led to different consequences and outcomes – a kind of nonfactual factuality, rather than a nonfactuality. Likewise, there are other terms that oppose the factual without entering the realm of the nonfactual. For example, there is the opposition of Fact versus Opinion, the latter of which could be said to include a variety of things from personal preferences to legal and judicial opinions. Opinions, which are often based on facts, do not make a falsifiable claim, although some may seem to come close; one can say ‘I prefer red cars over blue cars,’ but there is no objective way of proving such a statement; even if the speaker owns ten blue cars and no red ones, we cannot conclusively say that his statement is disproven (perhaps no red cars were available). Likewise, legal opinions are based on facts but are not things which lie in the realm of the falsifiable (opinions are overturned in appeals courts when other judges disagree with them, but this does not prove or disprove them). Nonfactual, then, as used here, will be used as the broadest category, referring to anything which is opposed to the factual in a manner which involves a falsifiable truth claim of some kind. We could, then, divide the nonfactual (and all of its types or subtypes) into object and event categories: people, places, and things that do not exist, and actions or occurrences that did not actually happen.1 This overall division is a useful one, and one that pertains to all of different types of the nonfactual as well. These 1 In accordance with the editors’ terminology, the nonfactual in this reading corresponds to what they would call the nonfactive since nonexistence is the key criterion (/ I.2 Fludernik and Ryan, / I.1 Rajewsky). Yet, once one moves to the consideration of genres and discourse modes, i.e., when writers’ and speakers’ intentions and reception habits are involved, one is in fact dealing with nonfactuality. See the distinction made below between the fictional and the fictive.
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types can be distinguished by their ontological status and also by their opposition to various terms which are related to the existence of something, each emphasizing a different aspect of that existence. I will distinguish between the literal, the empirical, the real, the actual, and the nonfictional and their antonyms, the metaphorical, the theoretical, the pretended, the virtual, and the fictional. 2. Literal versus metaphorical The opposition of literal versus metaphorical is found within language. Statements can refer to things and situations in very simple, direct, and straightforward manner, with statements taken completely at face value or perhaps made to have meanings which are more conceptual and analogous or comparative in nature. Whereas the truth claim made by literal statements is clear and direct, metaphors require some context to be recognized and understood. For example, when car manufacturer Lee Iacocca stated, “I talk about gasoline prices and interest rates because they have always been the twin engines that drive my business,” (Iacocca 1994, 141) gasoline prices and interest rates are compared to engines not for any physical resemblance; rather, the similarities lie in their functionality, which is itself still a relatively abstract idea, dependent on knowledge of how the market for automobiles depends on fuel and affordability. Thus, metaphors are not factual insofar as they are only analogies or comparisons rather than direct statements regarding existence or nonexistence. There is a subjective element to metaphors that keeps them from being falsifiable in the same way that other kinds of truth claims are. And even when they are accurate insofar as the comparison they make is a good one, metaphors are still subjective assessments, abstractly stated, which cannot qualify as factual.2 3. Empirical versus theoretical Particularly in the area of science, we often find the opposition of empirical versus theoretical. The OED gives four definitions of empirical which togeth2 Note that for the editors of this handbook, metaphors will not be factive in their literal reference, but decidedly factual because Lee Iacocca is making a truthful statement about his business which he means the recipient to take seriously. However, metaphors do not of course literally refer to the real world, which is why they can be treated as fictional.
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er define it as something based on observation and experience without requiring scientific knowledge or theory (meanings 1–4), while theoretical is defined as pertaining to contemplation, relating to theory, and “existing only in theory, ideal, hypothetical” (meaning 2b). Therefore, while the objects of empirical study are those which have been directly observed, those which are considered theoretical have not necessarily been observed to exist (or, observed in a demonstrably repeatable way); in this sense, they may arguably be placed in the category of the nonfactual. However, such objects can have a different ontological status that sets them apart from objects in other categories of the nonfactual: theoretical objects make an unproven claim to being actual, whereas other types of nonfactual entities do not. Such claims are, of course, a matter of degree. Some objects of theory, such as that of the predicted Higgs boson in physics (whose existence has meanwhile been discovered and confirmed), are well-supported by evidence. Other ‘theories’ like the existence of Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster have yet to be proven and continue to remain only theories; these objects remain questionable. Other objects which were once theorized and even thought to exist (for example, the continent of Terra Australis which even appeared on some maps between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries) have been proven not to exist, thus acquiring the status of nonfactual objects. In this sense, theoretical objects, while they cannot be assigned the status of the factual, at the same time have a provisional and possibly temporary status as nonfactual until their existence or nonexistence is confirmed. Thus we can see these nonfactual items as a repository of proposed objects awaiting existential confirmation. While they are, at least in concept, something suggested by human beings, the suggestion is based on alleged evidence as opposed to complete fabrication, which would be based on imagination and might include incomplete evidence, or a deduction or interpretation open to debate. For example, King Arthur, Pythagoras, John Henry, Robin Hood, Homer, and Lycurgus are historical figures whose existence as actual individuals has been the subject of dispute because of insufficient or contradictory biographical evidence, and while some believe them to have actually existed, others suggest that they are merely figures of legend (Andrews 2013). Likewise, events can also be theoretical and be subject to incomplete evidence and to debates on how something happened or whether that event happened at all. Reconstructions of crimes using forensic evidence and computer simulations of plane crashes have been accepted as evidence in court cases and granted a status approaching that of actual events. Documentary films often piece together evidence to support claims for the actuality of particular events and the way they are thought to have oc-
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curred, yet these are extrapolations beyond whatever evidence exists.3 Like theoretical objects, some theoretical events have more evidential support than others. James Cameron’s film Titanic (1997), for example, uses a range of available evidence in its meticulous reconstruction of the occurrences associated with the sinking of the Titanic. While the main characters of the film are fictional, the information regarding the sinking of the ship was based as much as possible on what was known about the actual events. When less is known for certain about a particular event, accounts tend to be far more speculative about it. Michael Frayn’s stage play Copenhagen (1998), for example, muses about the 1941 wartime meeting between physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, speculating about what they might have discussed without proposing any single theory as being the most likely version of events. Although often more difficult to prove or disprove than theoretical objects, theoretical events can still have their status confirmed as either actual or nonfactual if enough of the right kind of evidence is found. Thus, the category of theoretical objects and events exists in a liminal state between the factual and the nonfactual, with objects and events typically remaining on the nonfactual side of the boundary until enough people (or the right people, or institutions) confer the status of the (f )actual on them. Theoretical objects and events can range from the wildly speculative imaginings with only the thinnest shreds of evidence to carefully argued and well-supported claims. Many such objects and events, no matter how well-supported with evidence, will always encounter skeptics, so that when they do attain the status of the factual, this may be due more to consensus than complete and irrefutable proof. At any rate, the theoretical remains on the boundaries of the nonfactual, which are often uncertain and subject to change. 4. Real versus pretend The next category of the nonfactual can be expressed as one side of the opposition of real versus pretend. Here the term real represents the actual and factual, something existing and not just imagined, whereas pretend indicates a pretense of some kind in which participants are asked to temporarily agree to giving something a status it does not actually have (for example,
3 I have written elsewhere about such films which I have termed “subjunctive documentary” (Wolf 1999, 274–291). Since all documentary involves mediation, one could claim that all documentary is subjunctive to some degree.
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during a stage performance). The pair of terms differs from the empirical vs. theoretical pairing in that it refers to the attitude taken toward a certain object or event, regarding its status and function in a given situation at a particular time. Thus, pretend objects and events are nonfactual because they are not what their users claim them to be, and this change of status is agreed upon according to certain conventions. Thus, children can play games of pretend (Walton 1990) together so long as they agree on some common rules such as how to interpret different objects or actions (for example, pretending that a large cardboard box is a building or a vehicle, or that a stick is a machine gun). Likewise, a theme park ride can pretend to be a jungle cruise or a haunted house, with animatronics figures which are made to look like real animals or other kinds of creatures. Very conventionalized forms of pretend would also include the theater, where actors on a stage set represent characters within different settings, often with much material left to be supplied by the imagination. Pretend actions such as pretend battles on a playground or theater stage also require participants and onlookers to perform them and interpret them in a certain way, and involve adherence to particular conventions. Thus, pretend objects and events are nonfactual insofar as they are intentionally interpreted to be something they are not, for the purposes of play or entertainment; the audience and participants are aware of the dual status of these objects and events, which is agreed upon, and does not involve deception or unsupported claims. Unlike other forms of the nonfactual, the pretend involves actual objects and events, as stand-ins, but temporarily gives them a status or attributes that they do not possess for the purpose of play, entertainment, or to produce an experience which could not otherwise be produced. It is the agreed-upon dual identity that makes the pretending possible. The acknowledgement of this dual identity also keeps the pretend from being mistaken for the real; a confusion of the real with the pretend results in trouble that brings about an end to the pretending: participants who recognize the duality and are not confused usually stop the session in order to end the confusion. Hence, pretending involves combining for a time the factual and nonfactual in order to expand possibilities and make use of imagination, while still being aware of the line between the two. 5. Actual versus virtual According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word virtual appeared as early as 1398 and was used to refer to potentiality; as the OED defines it,
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“[p]ossessed of certain physical virtues or capacities; effective in respect of inherent natural qualities or powers, capable of exerting influence by means of such qualities” (meaning 1a). The opposition of actual versus virtual arose later and traces its origins to optics, where the term virtual is used to describe the image that is formed when light rays appear to diverge from a single point, but do not actually emanate from that point; hence, the image differs from a ‘real image,’ which can be projected onto a screen (while a virtual image cannot). Influenced by Henri Bergson, philosopher Gilles Deleuze suggested that “virtual” is not the opposite of “real,” but is opposed to “actual”; the virtual has an existence, but not a material existence (Deleuze and Parnet 2006 [1977], 112–115). A reflection in a mirror is virtual but not actual, since it has all the appearance of something material, without being so. Since the advent of computer graphics, the virtual has also come to include representations that do not have any real-world referent (although imagery of this sort had already appeared in painting and photography). One reason for this is that computer-generated images can also be animated and interactive, their movement and apparent dimensionality creating an even stronger illusion of actual, three-dimensional objects. As computer graphics has grown more ubiquitous, virtual objects have grown increasingly more detailed and photorealistic, and include entire virtual interactive environments, as in video games and virtual reality. Virtual objects (and events which involve them) differ from actual objects in that they are always mediated; virtual objects can only be present to us in some kind of represented and mediated form (for example, as images or sounds), as opposed to actual objects which have some independent, physical existence. Although they lack materiality, virtual objects differ from other kinds of nonfactual objects in that they can have a kind of continuing existence, as computer code which describes mathematical constructs; such code can be used to depict virtual objects from various angles and even allow user interaction with them, or change them. They may have a continuous existence, for example, the worlds of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) which run 24-hours-aday online, with user-generated events occurring and implementing lasting changes in the world. Such virtual worlds may even simulate such things like lighting, gravity, and other physical laws that make them seem more like the actual world, and for some time now, science fiction authors in their stories have envisioned virtual worlds so detailed that their characters cannot distinguish them from the actual world (for example, in The Matrix [1999]). Virtual objects and environments, then, can be conceptual, like the text of a novel, which, similar to computer code, can be interpreted to instanti-
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ate virtual objects or worlds; or they can be perceptual, with images and sounds representing the virtual objects or worlds. The rise of mass media and the use of it to present so much of the actual world in mediated form has made mediation more acceptable as a surrogate for direct experience. This has had the effect of making virtual worlds, which are available only through mediation, all the more realistic, insofar as they can be seen, heard, and interacted with in a manner which is often similar to that of much of the mediation presenting the actual world. Thus, the virtual has a status unlike other types of the nonfactual in that it can have an on-going and visible existence, albeit not a material one, which instantiates its objects and events as things seen through the windows of mediation, giving them an illusion of existence which is different from that of the theoretical or the pretend, since virtual objects do not rely on real-world referents or use other objects as stand-ins. The virtual realm retains its nonfactual status insofar as it lacks a material existence and relies on constant or itinerant instantiation for its existence and continuance. It cannot exist by itself; it must reside within a medium (for which it has been generated), and it is only available through mediation. While there is a tendency to conflate the virtual and the digital, since all digital items are virtual (as soon as we print a digital image, for example, it becomes an analog object), we must remember that virtual imagery also exists in mirror images, drawings and paintings, sound recordings, and even conceptually in something like a novel which contains the necessary instructions (the textual descriptions) to instantiate the virtual world of the novel in the mind of the reader. This, at last, also brings us to the opposition of the fictional versus the nonfictional. 6. Nonfictional versus fictional At first glance, factual and nonfictional seem to mean the same thing, and even dictionary definitions do little to differentiate between them, especially regarding popular and non-technical uses of the term. It is only when we pair them with their linguistic negations, factual / nonfactual and fictional / nonfictional, that we can begin to discern crucial differences. To begin with, the positive original terms of these two binary oppositions have contradictory meanings; factual and fictional are the positive terms, with nonfactual and nonfictional defined in opposition against them. The two positive terms, fact and fiction, are often paired as antonyms, instead of coupled with the negations that are etymologically directly derived from them. A quick look at the words factual, fictional, nonfictional, and nonfactual on Google’s Ngram Viewer reveals that the positive terms are used far more
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often than their negative counterparts. Thus, while factual implies that actual existence is something of positive value, fictional seems to celebrate the lack of actuality. According to the OED, fiction is derived originally from Latin and means “to fashion or form: see FEIGN,” and its obsolete meaning is “The action of fashioning or imitating” (meaning 1a). Thus, fictional refers to a deliberate fabrication, whereas nonfactual does not necessarily imply something being fashioned or feigned, though the term can include such things. Thus, fictional seems to acclaim the fact that something is invented or made-up, and seems to be in favor of the creative act, unlike nonfactual, which merely indicates a condition that lacks something. The meanings may be similar, but the attitude is different. The term nonfiction is formed as a negation of fiction and appears later than fiction (the OED’s earliest usage listed for the former is 1867, whereas it is 1398 for the latter, as “ficcions”). While not used as a pejorative, the term nonfiction is used to distinguish the two basic types of literature. Interestingly, it is the term fiction that appears to have been used as a pejorative, at least early in its history; meaning 3a describes it as “The action of ‘feigning’ or inventing imaginary incidents, existences, states of things, etc., whether for the purpose of deception or otherwise” and lists examples of this meaning from 1605 to 1840. Today, neither fictional nor nonfictional imply a negative attitude, and the two are often found side by side in the same work. Finally, there is also the difference between fictive and fictional, with the former indicating invented things and places, which are not necessarily used in a narrative, while fictional is used to describe the discourses about fictive elements and thus refer to narratives rather than the their contents. Likewise, then, nonfictional would refer to other narratives which have some kind of truth claim and involve things in our world as opposed to an imaginary one. 7. Mixed ontologies Of course, stories are not always entirely just fictional or nonfictional with a mutually-exclusive line of demarcation between them. Stories can be entirely fictional, as are science fiction stories set on imaginary planets, with nothing in them referencing real people, places, things, or events; but even these will have something relatable and will need to have some degree of emotional realism for its characters to be believable. Works often contain combinations of fiction and nonfiction; even those depicting real people and real events like the films Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Gandhi (1982),
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or The Last Emperor (1987) will necessarily have many fictive objects and events presented on screen. This is the case because the extant information regarding most historical events and biographical data tends to be rather general, especially when no visual record of them exists, hence visual details inevitably will be the product of speculation. Some works combine actual events and fictive participants like the novel War and Peace (1869), or films like Titanic (1997) and Pearl Harbor (2001), which place fictive characters amidst actual historically verifiable occurrences. Other texts or media objects take actual people and insert them into fictional situations: see, for instance, William Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love (1998), or Jane Austen in Becoming Jane (2007). And many works in many media involve fictive characters and fictive events, but do so within an actual larger-scale setting. Such novels and films may be set in London, New York City, Los Angeles, or Tokyo. In these combinations of the factual and fictional, real people, places, and events are used in order to convey greater verisimilitude and greater plausibility for these works’ fictive elements. Such a mixture of fictional and nonfictional elements is even expected by the audience, who will typically fill in actual-world defaults for background details when they are not provided by an author. We tend to assume that the details in a fictional work about New York City will match the actual-world New York City, unless the author tells us otherwise, a process that occurs so naturally that the audience is usually not even aware of the assumptions they are making. This automatic gap-filling is called the “reality principle” by Kendall Walton (1990) and the “principle of minimal departure” by Marie-Laure Ryan (1980). Describing this phenomenon, Ryan writes, We construe the world of fiction and of counterfactuals as being the closest possible to the reality we know. This means that we will project upon the world of the statement everything we know about the real world, and that we will make only those adjustments which we cannot avoid. (1980, 406)
We can thus organize works by authors into a spectrum in accordance with the amount of fictional invention they contain. At one end, we find works that rely heavily on real-world defaults, with only minimal invention by the author, realistic stories with very recognizable characters, settings, and situations. At the other end, we find fantastic stories set in completely fictitious settings with many world defaults that differ from the actual world – invented places, cultures, languages, and so on. The more there is of such authorial invention, the more clearly we will consider the diegetic world in which the story takes place as an imaginary world.
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8. Subcreation and imaginary worlds Writing about the making of imaginary worlds, J. R. R. Tolkien (1988) noted the difference between God’s ex nihilo (from nothing) creation and the creation performed by an author who uses existing ideas and concepts and recombines them to create imaginary entities. Tolkien refers to the latter activity as “subcreation,” literally “creating under (sub-),” to designate the ontological difference of this act. Borrowing Coleridge’s distinction between the Primary Imagination and Secondary Imagination, Tolkien refers to the actual world as the Primary World, and the worlds made by subcreators as Secondary Worlds. His terminology carefully and usefully avoids philosophically-slippery categories like the real and its opposite. He proposes that a subcreated world can have a kind of existence of its own. One can partake of this world through what he calls “Secondary Belief,” a term he prefers to Coleridge’s “Willing Suspension of Disbelief.” Regarding Secondary Belief, Tolkien writes: That state of mind has been called ‘willing suspension of disbelief.’ But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the storymaker proves a successful ‘sub-creator.’ He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended […]. (Tolkien 1988, 36–37)
Secondary worlds, then, make use of many techniques that enhance their verisimilitude in order to provide a more realistic and immersive experience for the audience, even though the audience realizes that the world is imaginary. These strategies often imply or make reference to the pairings of categories discussed earlier, those of empirical versus theoretical, real versus pretend, and actual versus virtual. Imaginary worlds usually do not claim to be entities that are proposed to actually exist, although this was sometimes the case during the Age of Exploration and earlier, when ‘travel liars’ claimed that the imaginary islands and places that they wrote about were real. Of course, the authors knew that they were deliberately misinforming their readers, but from the reader’s point of view, the stories were designed so as to appear true. To make their story more difficult to disprove, the authors of imaginary worlds often set them spatially and temporally at a distance, as can be seen in the well-known ‘Once upon a time’ opening found in literature, or the “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away …” used by the Star Wars films, which indicates both spatial and temporal distance (Wolf 2012, 62–64).
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Even though an imaginary world is not claimed to be the object of a scientific theory, this distancing makes it more difficult or impossible to definitively prove that the world does not exist, softening the boundary between the Primary and Secondary World; the effect is not to make the imaginary world more believable, but simply less unbelievable, implying that it can be placed in a realm with those liminal, theoretical entities whose nonexistence remains unproven. When one visualizes or instantiates an imaginary world, whether on stage or film, there is an element of pretend as actors take on roles and sets represent locations. The more detailed the sets and the greater one’s engagement with actual human actors, the more an audience can experience a world as if it were real, even when it is filtered through the conventions of stage or screen. A simulator ride at a theme park envelops us and pretends to move us through a space by moving us only in small increments of real space; we know we are not really going anywhere, but feel as if we were. In all these cases, we are given a closer view of the world. An immersive experience is created that appeals directly to the senses as does the Primary World. The intimacy provided more than makes up for the conventions that must be followed in order for the pretending to be effective. 9. When boundaries become blurred At the same time, imaginary worlds which are also virtual worlds seem more actual due to the growing presence of mediated experience in people’s lives, in which so much of the Primary World is seen and heard through audiovisual media. This makes virtual worlds that are experienced in the same way seem just as natural. In the form of video games, virtual reality, or any world seen and heard through an interface, virtual worlds appear to exist in space and time as one navigates through them. A powerful illusion of existence is created which does not require pretending; things in the world do not have the dual status that pretending requires, and their simulated presence and interactivity keep them from being merely something one has to imagine, as with theoretical objects or events. Online role-playing games, which can run continuously for years with thousands of players, powerfully evoke the illusion of a continuously-existing world in which events keep occurring even after the player leaves the digital world. Virtual entities from such worlds have even been bought and sold for real currency; such items have an interesting ontological status, since they remain virtual but are used within their respective virtual worlds in a manner analogous to physical objects in the real world, to the
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extent that people will pay money to gain the advantage they provide, even if this advantage is only limited to the virtual world in which they are found. It is not surprising, then, that video games can be clinically addictive, with some players desiring to spend as much time in these worlds as they can. When these and other strategies are combined in a work, the boundary between the factual and nonfactual can become blurred, especially for the person who desires that such blurring occurs or who even desires to cross the boundary. On rare occasions, these strategies can result in an illusion so powerful that the boundary appears to be crossed, and actual belief, not just secondary belief, is achieved. A friend of mine related that around 1987 or so, his father was hosting some foreigners who were visiting from Europe, and he took them to Disneyland in California, where the Star Tours simulator ride had recently opened. It was the first ride of its kind. You appeared to be entering the cabin of an actual vehicle when you entered the ride. The film shown inside the ride was synchronized with the subtle movements of the cabin in which the audience was seated, which began gradually and started with the vehicle supposedly being moved slowly into position before taking off into space. Apparently, the foreign visitors actually became agitated when this happened, and really believed that they were being taken somewhere. One does not even need such a physical experience to create a successful illusion. A. K. Dewdney’s book describes his imaginary world, the Planiverse, so carefully, laying it out in detail with scientific precision, even down to descriptions of two-dimensional chemistry and physics, that some readers saw it not only as an object of theory but as something newly discovered. As Dewdney explained, When The Planiverse first appeared 16 years ago, it caught more than a few readers off guard. The line between willing suspension of disbelief and innocent acceptance, if it exists at all, is a thin one. There were those who wanted to believe, despite the tongue-in-cheek subtext, that we had made contact with a two-dimensional world called Arde, a disk-shaped planet embedded in a vast, balloon-shaped space called the planiverse. […] From the Foreword to the finish, the tale was told with a straight face, written in the style of an academic whose literary opportunities are continually overwhelmed by events. The story used that modern deus ex machina, the computer. It was on their computer, after all, that a group of students happened to make first contact with the planiverse and its four-armed hero, Yendred, whose yen for “higher things” turned to dread when he finally encountered them. […] It surprised and worried the author that so many people believed the tale was factual. Subtext that should have implied a fantasy (albeit a highly detailed one) was missed by many. (Dewdney 2001 [1984], ix–xi)
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Naturally, very few nonfactual worlds are so convincingly presented, even when the audience wishes that they were real. Instead, imaginary worlds, and fiction in general, are valued, distinguished, and even sought after according to the ways in which they diverge from the Primary World, something which is even apparent in the genres by which works of various media are organized and classified. 10. Nonfactuality and genre Although genres are often specific to certain media, some are used more broadly, and loosely, across media. Many of these genres, such as Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror, Westerns, Musicals, Comedy, and so forth, have names which indicate the ways in which the expected fictional elements present within them vary from the actual world. While the other oppositional pairs discussed earlier referred to the respective form of nonfactuality, genres could be seen as sets of conventions which indicate the presence of different types of nonfactual content. Thus, in something identified as a musical, we might expect moments in which characters break out in song and dance, but we are less likely to expect such things as dragons or fasterthan-light travel (though some genres which are not semantically defined, like musicals, can feature any kind of content). Some genres are based on iconography or events, while others are defined by different criteria and conventions. Genres, then, provide a reason to excuse certain kinds of elements which would otherwise seem implausible, and thus threaten the believability of a work. Of course, there are hybrid works which can be classified in multiple genres; for example, the film Blade Runner (1982) can be considered both science fiction and film noir; The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (radio broadcast, 1978; novel, 1979; television series, 1981; computer game, 1984; film, 2005) is both science fiction and comedy; and the film Alien (1979) combines science fiction with horror. Works that can be classified in two (or more) genres follow the sets of conventions of both genres, which means that they contain two kinds of nonfactual material within them, as defined and licensed by the genres’ conventions. Due to the nonfactual elements they contain, some genres’ conventions work better with imaginary worlds than others. Thus, we can find many imaginary worlds whose changed world defaults align well with fantasy or science fiction, but far fewer that align with musicals or slapstick comedy; this is because the conventions of the latter two genres have more to do with characters’ behavior (singing and physical comedy, respectively) than with the material that makes up the world itself. Thus, different combina-
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tions of genres and worlds, just like different combinations of genres, will vary in their feasibility and degree of verisimilitude. Most imaginary worlds tend to have stories within one or only a few different genres, keeping audience expectations within more narrow boundaries than a wide range of genres would elicit.
11. Conclusion The nonfactual has a variety of different uses, as is apparent in the series of forms described earlier. It also varies in content, determined in part by the specific story being told, and on a larger scale by the genre in which that story belongs. Nonfactuality moreover differs in relation to the world in which the story takes place, the medium through which the story or world is experienced by an audience, and the audience’s own expectations based on their own past experiences and what works of media and nonfactual material they have already experienced. By dividing the nonfactual into various categories, particularly those which stand in opposition to the literal, the empirical, the real, the actual, and the nonfictional, we can better articulate the relationship between the nonfactual and the different ways in which it projects nonexistent entities, and how it uses such entities. Each one of these different categories emphasizes different conditions of nonexistence, or lack of factuality. The line between the factual and nonfactual is intriguing and fascinating precisely because it seems to move with our experience of new things that may cause us to rethink the boundary, and attempt to adjust it as it grows asymptotically closer to the factual. As we consider the various types of nonfactuality, fully aware of their fictionality, we can still allow the nonfactual to challenge and inspire us as we speculate about the future and the ways the nonfactual can be brought into being and changed into the factual.
References Andrews, Evan. “6 Historical Figures Who May or May Not Have Existed.” History.com. http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/6-historical-figures-who-may-or-may-nothave-existed. 30 July 2013 (5 May 2018). Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. “The Actual and the Virtual.” [1977] Dialogues II. Trans. Eliot Ross Albert. London and New York: Continuum, 2006. 112–115. Dewdney, A. K. The Planiverse: Computer Contact with a Two-Dimensional World. [1984] New York: Copernicus, 2001.
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Goodman, Nelson. “The Problem of Counterfactual Conditionals.” The Journal of Philosophy 44.5 (1947): 113–128. Iacocca, Lee. I Gotta Tell You: The Speeches of Lee Iacocca. Ed. Matthew W. Seeger. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1994. The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. s. v. empirical, theoretical, virtual. The Oxford English Dictionary. OED Online. www.oed.com. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018 (7 May 2018). s. v. actual, factual, fiction, non-fiction. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Fiction, Non-Factuals and the Principle of Minimal Departure.” Poetics 8 (1980): 403–422. Tolkien, J. R. R. “On Fairy-Stories.” Tree and Leaf. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988 [1939]. 9–73. Walton, Kendall. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990. Wolf, Mark J. P. “Subjunctive Documentary: Computer Imaging and Simulation.” Collecting Visible Evidence. Eds. Michael Renov and Jane Gaines. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 274–291. Wolf, Mark J. P. Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation. New York and London: Routledge, 2012.
FRANK ZIPFEL
Panfictionality/Panfictionalism Both terms, panfictionalism and panfictionality, were created in the 1980s to designate (and mostly criticize) the postmodernist/poststructuralist assumption that the traditional difference between fiction and reality or between fiction and nonfiction is fundamentally flawed or can no longer be maintained.1 The term panfictionalism has been used in a number of different disciplines to refer to a range of theories, which can roughly be divided into three categories: A) Ontological/metaphysical theories. There is no difference between the fictional and the real; reality is fundamentally fictional. This idea is usually linked to the assumption that there is a realm that has a greater degree of reality than the actual world (Crittenden 1991, 166). B) Epistemological theories. Reality, as we know or conceive of it, is fictional. This idea originates in the assumption that actual reality is epistemically inaccessible, that what we call reality is the result of our perceptual and mental constructs and that therefore a correspondence theory of truth (/ II.2 Bartmann, / II.1 Klauk) is inconsistent. C) Textual or representational theories. There is no difference between fictional and factual representations and, moreover, so-called factual representations are to be considered as fictional. In the present context only theories belonging to the third category are of interest, because ontological and epistemological theories labeled as panfictionalism are more or less equivalent to well-known and widely discussed philosophical positions like e.g. Platonism or Berkleyism for the first category and Kantian or other forms of epistemological skepticism for the second. Thus, only textual/representational panfictionalism is specific to late twentieth- and twenty-first-century discussions about cultural phenom-
1 For the origins of the term see Konrad (2014a, 59–63). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-007
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ena. Moreover, only textual/representational panfictionalism challenges the traditional notions of factuality (and fictionality). There have been differing attempts to categorize the arguments that are used to establish textual/representational panfictionalism. Konrad (2014a; also see 2014b) has developed the most differentiated categorization of these arguments. She distinguishes between three approaches which can be labeled as follows: (1)
‘No reference to reality’ arguments;
(2)
Narratological arguments; and
(3)
‘Fictional reality’ arguments.2
The arguments of the first category (‘No reference to reality’) can be summed up in the following syllogism: (1a) (1b) (1c)
The difference between fictional and factual texts is based on the difference between their reference world: fictional texts refer to fictional worlds, factual texts refer to the real world; Reference to the real world is impossible; Hence, there is no possibility of distinguishing factual from fictional texts: all texts are equally fictional.
The diverse ways of supporting premise 1b) can again be divided up into two distinct arguments: an epistemological and a semiological one. The epistemological argument echoes that of epistemological theories (see B above). The problem with inserting this argument into the syllogism in order to back up premise 1b) is that, even if we believe that all our knowledge is not about the world as it really is, but only about the world as we conceive it, this does not mean that reference to what we conceive of as real is impossible. The semiological argument also restates the epistemological argument but in a radicalized manner based on a specific interpretation of Saussurian linguistics (see also Ryan 2005). It claims that language is not capable of referring to anything outside itself. As a matter of fact, reference to reality is not part of Saussure’s conception of language: Saussure maintains that the linguistic sign does not combine a verbal label with a real-world object but an acoustic image with a concept. Moreover, due to the arbitrariness of linguistic signs, the meaning of a sign is not established by its relation to a real-world referent but by its relational difference to other signs. Start-
2 For a different categorization see Ryan (1997).
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ing from Saussure, postmodernist and poststructuralist literary critics and philosophers such as Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida developed their famous claims that facts have only a linguistic existence and that there is nothing outside the text.3 These claims, however, cannot be logically inferred from Saussurian linguistics. The fact that language as a system can be described as organized by differential relationships does not automatically mean that language cannot refer to reality. Or, to state it differently, the differential description of langue does not say anything about the semantic or pragmatic functions of language and does not prevent language from performing these functions. Furthermore, the ‘No-reference’ argument is to some extent self-contradictory: as Gibson has pointed out, if we believe that texts which aspire to represent reality must necessarily fail to do so, we already make a distinction between factual and fictional texts because fictional texts could never fail in this respect (Gibson 2007, 152– 153). Thus, neither the epistemological nor the semiological argument can substantiate premise 1b). Moreover, even if we adhere to the fundamental insights of these arguments (epistemological skepticism and a differential conception of language), we are in no way forced to accept the syllogism. This may explain why panfictionalism has been wrongly ascribed to certain scholars who in one way or the other advocate one of these arguments but, overall, do not adhere to panfictionalism. Thus, Konrad has shown that neither Siegfried J. Schmidt on account of his constructivist epistemology, nor Nelson Goodman on account of his epistemological pluralism and irrealism, nor Stanley Fish and Richard Rorty on account of their adherence to basic poststructuralist arguments can be considered proponents of textual or representational panfictionalism (Konrad 2014a, 72–103). The narratological arguments (category 2) can also be written out in a syllogism: (2a) (2b) (2c)
Fictional texts are characterized by specific narrative strategies; Factual texts make use of the same narrative strategies; Hence, there is no possibility of distinguishing factual form fictional texts: all texts are equally fictional.
This argument can be found in the criticism of Roland Barthes but is usually associated with Hayden White’s re-evaluation of historiography. In his early writings, White seems to be a proponent of this argument (e.g. White 1978). He considers the emplotment of facts, which is necessary to historiographic narrative, a distortion of reality and hence a fictionalization 3 See e.g. Barthes (2002 [1967]) and Derrida (1967).
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of what really happened, and he also believes that the narrative strategies of historiography are the same as those of literary fiction. He concludes that narrativization turns historical facts into fiction. Although White only wants to highlight the constructivist aspect of emplotment, serious problems can arise from a literal interpretation of his statements. If all narrative representations are equally fictional, it becomes impossible to discriminate between adequate representations of historical facts and blatantly wrong ones (like the denial of the Holocaust). Moreover, there is no reason to consider the necessary operations of all narrative representation, namely those of the selection and organization of facts, as being tantamount to fictionalization (see also Ryan 2005, 2006). Although White’s early work undeniably identifies narrativization with fiction, if one considers White’s entire work, he cannot be considered a proponent of panfictionalism. A radicalized version of the narratological argument can, however, be found in Paul de Man’s work on autobiography (Konrad 2014a, 133–137). Some theories of fiction have used certain arguments raised by narratological panfictionalism to highlight the fact that the same linguistic or narratological devices are used in fictional and factual texts and that, therefore, the distinction between fictionality and factuality cannot be based (exclusively) on stylistic, structural or narrative features. But since these theories mostly maintain that there is a contextual or institutional difference between fictional and factual discourse, they cannot strictly be classified as belonging to panfictionalism. The syllogism that can be associated with the ‘fictional reality’ arguments is the following: (3a) (3b) (3c)
The difference between fictional and factual texts is based on the difference between their reference world: fictional texts refer to fictional worlds, factual texts refer to the real world; The real world is fictional; Hence, there is no possibility of distinguishing factual from fictional texts: all texts are equally fictional.
As was the case with the ‘No-reference’ arguments, the validity of the syllogism depends on premise 3b). We can distinguish between a general and a historical understanding of this premise: 3b) either states that reality has always been fictional or that reality at some point of history has become fictional. The general understanding of the premise 3b) is equivalent to using ontological panfictionalism as an argument for textual panfictionalism. But even if, from an ontological point of view, we argue that what we call reality is not the ‘real reality,’ this does not mean that in our real world we cannot distinguish between texts that aspire to represent the real world and those that do not. The historical understanding of premise 3b)
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is linked to the alleged ‘disappearance of the real’ in the age of mass media and digital communication. Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation is a point in case: in his view reality has been superseded by its simulation or by virtual reality (see e.g. Baudrillard 1976). Ultimately, this theory amounts to a media-based version of the epistemological argument. A closer inspection of the different arguments reveals that, although panfictionalism has often been considered a doctrine prevalent in the age of postmodernism and has consequently been ascribed to theoretical statements by various scholars, there are few real proponents of panfictionalism. Nevertheless, textual/representational panfictionalism and the debates it has inspired have had a definite impact and served specific argumentative goals. This impact can be assessed by looking at the different aims associated with the arguments presented above. The goal of the ‘No-reference’ argument seems to be to elevate fictional literature by putting it on par with other kinds of discourse. If all kinds of discourse are equally fictional, there is no reason to consider (fictional) literature as less relevant than, say, the natural sciences. The purpose of the narratological argument is to heighten awareness of historians and authors of other kinds of factual writing that their narratives do not simply mirror reality but are selective constructs elaborated by means of narrative strategies; it is intended to encourage reflection upon how these narrative strategies influence the narrative presentation of facts. The aim of the ‘fictional reality’ argument is less clear-cut: in its general version, it seems to work against a naïve conception of reality with its epistemological pitfalls. In its media-based version, the main thrust seems to be a critical scrutiny of otherwise unquestioned social and cultural phenomena. In literary criticism panfictionalism has often been discussed in close relation to the analysis and interpretation of so-called hybrid texts, i.e. texts which seem to cross the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction. Thus Marie-Laure Ryan (1997) links her analysis of panfictionalism with reflections upon the classification of postmodern metafiction, specifically in the form of metaleptical intrusions of the ‘author’ into the fictional world. Arnaud Schmitt (2015), on the other hand, associates panfictionalism with the genre of autofiction (/ IV.6 Iversen). Both critics agree that even if we try to make the most of the concept of panfictionalism in literary criticism it does not help us to understand borderline cases between factuality and fictionality. They also claim that panfictionalism is liable to blur useful distinctions rather than to provide new insights concerning the analysis and interpretation of literary hybrids.
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References Barthes, Roland. “Le discours de l’histoire.” [1967] Œuvres complètes. Tome II. 1962–1967. Ed. Éric Marty. Paris: Seuil, 2002. 1250–1262. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacres et simulation. Paris: Gallimard, 1976. Crittenden, Charles. Unreality. The Metaphysics of Fictional Objects. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit, 1967. Gibson, John. Fiction and the Weave of Life. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Konrad, Eva Maria. Dimensionen der Fiktionalität. Analyse eines Grundbegriffs der Literaturwissenschaft. Münster: mentis, 2014a. Konrad, Eva Maria. “Panfiktionalismus.” Fiktionalität. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Eds. Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2014b. 235–254. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Postmodernism and the Doctrine of Panfictionality.” Narrative 5.2 (1997): 165–187. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Panfictionality.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laure Ryan. London and New York: Routledge, 2005. 417–418. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Schmitt, Arnaud. “Cognitivité et Hybridité. Le lecteur dans la zone grise.” Cahiers de Narratologie 28 (2015): 1–16. White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
RICHARD J. GERRIG/JANELLE M. GAGNON
The Factual in Psychology Consider this headline from a brief newspaper article, “Soda is Tied to Brain Aging” (Bakalar 2017). The article explains that “Drinking sugary beverages is associated with markers of accelerated aging and early signs of Alzheimer’s disease” (D4). From the perspective of psychological research, a critical question is the extent to which people will use this information as if it is factual. The first part of this chapter (Section 1) focuses on people’s responses when they first encounter assertions such as “soda is tied to brain aging.” We review psychological research to illustrate processes that affect the way in which people immediately evaluate the factuality of information they encounter. Section 2 considers how people act on information that they have previously committed to memory. We review cognitive processes that influence how people make use of the information they retrieve. Section 3 narrows the chapter’s focus to review research on how the factual emerges in people’s experiences of narratives. 1. What happens when people first encounter information? People possess a variety of psychological processes that affect how they will ultimately mark the factuality of assertions such as “soda is tied to brain aging” in long-term memory. We review research in cognitive and social psychology to enumerate relevant processes. As we shall see, some processes operate outside conscious awareness. In other cases, people deploy strategic effort to construct belief or disbelief with respect to particular assertions. 1.1 Cognitive psychological insights When people encounter an assertion such as “Soda is tied to brain aging,” ordinary cognitive processes become active that help determine how the https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-008
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information will be encoded on the dimension of factuality. Marsh et al. (2016) provided an extensive review of relevant cognitive processes. Their analysis emphasized that these processes most often facilitate the acquisition of correct information. However, the same processes prompt people to encode false information as factual. From Marsh et al.’s review, we provide three examples of “adaptive processes that also support errors” (107): a. Because most of the information people encounter is true, they show a bias toward believing that all new information is true. Thus, without strategic effort, people will encode most information as factual. b. When people find it easy to process information, they often believe that information to be true. For example, in a phenomenon known as illusory truth, people who are repeatedly exposed to the same claim have greater faith that the claim is true (for a review, see Dechêne et al. 2010). Repeated exposures make it easier for people to accomplish the cognitive work of comprehending the claim. People interpret that ease of processing as an indication of factuality. c. When existing knowledge contains errors, those errors may make it more difficult for people to learn the truth. For example, people often experience proactive interference when they face new information: extant knowledge consistently interferes with people’s ability to acquire new information (for a review, see Kliegl et al. 2015). Professors experience proactive interference when the students’ names they have learned in the past make it difficult for them to acquire the names of their newest students. In addition, if they have learned the wrong name for a particular student, proactive interference will make it difficult to correct that mistake. Similarly, proactive interference makes it difficult for people to displace old information with new information. Each of these processes helps explain the fate of a claim such as “Soda is tied to brain aging.” All other things being equal, readers will accept that claim as true. However, if individual readers have more or less difficulty processing the claim, that relative fluency will have an impact on how they encode the truth of the information. In addition, readers’ existing collection of memories will affect the likelihood that readers will store the information. That is, even if readers’ initial response to the statement is factual, the assertion might never become part of the repertory of memories that drives their subsequent behavior.
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1.2 Social psychological approaches to persuasion Consider once more the headline, “Soda is Tied to Brain Aging” (Bakalar 2017). As is likely the case for all assertions, this headline is an attempt at persuasion. That is, the author’s goal is quite likely to have readers change their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors as a product of reading the article. In this context, an analysis of the factual in psychology must embrace the conclusions of the very large literature on persuasion. Many theories of persuasion are dual process theories (for a review, see Petty and Briñol 2015). For example, the elaboration likelihood model asserts that persuasion may occur through central and peripheral routes (Cacioppo et al. 2017). The central route represents circumstances in which people are motivated to focus critical attention – elaborative processing – on a message. The peripheral route represents circumstances in which people respond to superficial cues in the situation (such as the attractiveness of a speaker) rather than focusing critical attention to elaborate on the message. In the next sections, we provide two samples from the vast literature on persuasion. We chose these samples to illustrate the distinction between these two routes to persuasion and to demonstrate the relevance of research on persuasion to consideration of the factual.
1.2.1 The impact of source credibility on persuasion The article on soda and brain aging was written by Nicholas Bakalar and appeared in The New York Times. Both the author and venue may affect readers’ assessments of source credibility with a subsequent impact on judgments of factuality. Conceptions of source credibility typically reflect some combination of expertise and trustworthiness. Classic research on persuasion demonstrated that credibility can influence persuasion in circumstances of low elaboration (Hovland and Weiss 1951). That is, when people judge a source to be credible, they may accept the source’s claims without engaging in elaborative processing to evaluate the strength of the arguments in favor of those claims. Advertisers pay celebrities to endorse their products with the hope that consumers will unreflectively accept those recommendations through the peripheral route to persuasion. In fact, marketing research supports the general efficacy of celebrity endorsements (see Elberse and Verleun 2012; Spry et al. 2011). When people engage strategic processes to elaborate on a persuasive argument, source credibility has two distinct paths for influence (Tormala et al. 2007). One path is thought favorability:
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People expect expert sources to have more valid arguments than inexpert sources, leading them to process experts’ messages with a positive bias. This bias can lead people to perceive message arguments as stronger, eliciting more favorable messagerelevant thoughts and, in turn, more favorable attitudes. (537)
Low credibility sources will bias people’s thoughts in a negative direction. The second path is thought confidence: “if one receives a message and generates thoughts in response to it, those thoughts can be validated or invalidated when one learns that the source of the message is high or low in credibility, respectively” (537). Note that thought favorability wields greater influence when source identity precedes people’s encounters with arguments whereas thought confidence wields greater influence when source identity follows those encounters. In that context, people who were aware they were reading “Soda is Tied to Brain Aging” by Nicholas Bakalar in The New York Times likely had their thoughts biased in a positive or negative direction (as a function, for example, of their attitude toward the Times). Those biases could cause readers’ encoding of the factuality of the article’s conclusions to diverge.
1.2.2 Belief polarization Readers’ encodings will also diverge as a function of the prior experiences they bring to the article. Research evidence suggests that the impact of the information will depend on the readers’ prior beliefs. In fact, when faced with new information (that either supports or contradicts their prior stance), people’s beliefs will become more strongly aligned with their original position – an outcome that has been called belief polarization (Cook and Lewandowsky 2016; Jern et al. 2014). Consider a classic study by Lord et al. (1979) that focused on students’ attitudes toward the death penalty. The researchers recruited groups of students who were either “proponents” or “opponents” of capital punishment. Proponents believed that capital punishment had deterrent effects on crime and that extant research supported that view. Opponents believed that extant research weighed against the conclusion that capital punishment functioned as a deterrent. In an experimental session, all the students reviewed one research report that supported the efficacy of capital punishment and one that disconfirmed its efficacy. (The researchers balanced the order in which the students appraised the reports so that equal numbers read the supportive and disconfirming research reports first.) Lord et al. asked the students to evaluate the quality of each research report. The students judged the studies that supported their own prior beliefs to have sounder methods and to be more convincing. In addition, after reviewing both studies, the students’
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attitudes became more polarized: They now provided stronger attitudes for or against the death penalty than those with which they had entered the study. In related work, Koehler (1993) presented advanced graduate students and practicing scientists research reports that confirmed or disconfirmed their prior beliefs. These sophisticated participants also judged the reports that supported their own beliefs to be of higher quality. The research literature on belief polarization generates the conclusion that people often construct factuality as a function of their own prior beliefs. This body of research yields insights into readers’ likely responses to the article on soda and brain aging. That article summarized empirical research to support its conclusion. We suspect that people who enjoy drinking sugary soft drinks will have deemed the research to be of low quality. That is, they likely did not accept the factuality of the article’s conclusions. Thus, factuality is not inherently a property of information but is also a product of how people respond to that information. 2. What happens when people retrieve information from memory? Suppose you are contemplating what beverage to order at a restaurant. You retrieve from memory the information that sugary soft drinks are dangerous to the brain. The extent to which this recollection will influence your behavior quite likely depends on processes of metamemory. People use metamemory processes to make judgments about the quality of their memories (for a review, see Metcalfe and Dunlosky 2008). We focus on two aspects of metamemory. First, we explore the importance of people’s confidence that their memories are correct. When people have greater confidence in their memories, they are more likely to treat those memories as factual. Second, we describe the judgments people make about the sources of their memories. When people attribute their memories to sources they deem credible, they are also more likely to treat those memories as factual. 2.1 Memory confidence When people are confident that they have responded correctly on a memory test, they are likely to treat the content of that recollection as factual. In that context, it becomes important to determine the relationship between accuracy and confidence: Are people likely to be more accurate when they are more confident? As with many issues of metamemory, this question does not permit a general answer. In fact, the correlation between confi-
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dence and accuracy is contingent both on the types of questions people are asked and on the particular context in which people’s memory is assessed (see DeSoto and Roediger 2014; Koriat 2008). Depending on the circumstances, people might show a positive correlation (more confidence will be associated with greater accuracy), a negative correlation (more confidence will be associated with less accuracy), or a zero correlation (no consistent relationship will emerge between the two variables). In one experiment, students studied lists of words from distinct categories (for example, words sampled from the category of vegetables, such as asparagus, bean, beet, broccoli, carrot, celery) (DeSoto and Roediger 2014). The students later performed a memory task in which they were asked to indicate their confidence that they had previously studied a word. The correlations between confidence and accuracy were generally quite positive for the words the students had studied. However, the students were also often confident that they had seen category words that they had never actually studied (for example, cucumber or cabbage). For the non-studied words, the conceptual similarity to the studied words yielded a negative correlation between confidence and accuracy. The relationship between confidence and accuracy often has important real-world implications. The most salient example might be eyewitness reports in legal proceedings. Researchers in psychology have documented various circumstances in which eyewitnesses are inaccurate despite manifest confidence in their reports. The research suggests that these negative correlations often emerge because witnesses’ memories are contaminated by information from other sources (Smalarz and Wells 2015). For example, in some cases witnesses make an incorrect identification but are told that they were correct. In other cases, witnesses make an incorrect identification but that identification is corroborated by a co-witness. In each instance, the witnesses’ confidence is inappropriately boosted so that the relationship between confidence and accuracy suffers. Based on this body of research, psychologists are able to provide concrete advice to maintain a positive relationship between confidence and accuracy (Wixted and Wells 2017). Consider circumstances in which eyewitnesses are asked to determine whether the person in front of them is the offender. Based on research, legal officers should require witnesses to indicate their confidence at that initial moment before contamination has become possible. A procedure of that type increases the probability that witnesses’ confident declarations of fact will indeed reflect factual information. These bodies of research enable us to reflect on the potential for people to be mistaken about their memories for information about soda and brain aging. Suppose the Times has provided a range of closely related information about the health consequences of sugary beverages. Readers might
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have greater than warranted confidence that they recognized particular facts from the Times. In addition, assertions from additional sources might decrease accuracy, but not confidence, with respect to assertions from the original article. 2.2 Source monitoring Earlier, we discussed research suggesting that people are sensitive to the source of information when encoding it into memory. People also attend to source when they retrieve information through a metamemory process that is often called source monitoring (Johnson et al. 1993). A key insight from research on source monitoring is that people’s memory representations do not include explicit tags for their source. Rather, people must infer the source of information based on cues related to the circumstances in which the information was encoded. For example, if people’s recall of information includes more vivid sensory details, they are more likely to infer that the source was television news rather than printed news (Gordon et al. 2009). Because source monitoring is based on inferential processes, people are prone to errors (for a review, see Mitchell and Johnson 2009). For example, people will sometimes commit unconscious plagiarism when processes of source monitoring prompt them to misattribute a novel idea to themselves rather than to another individual (Marsh et al. 1997). Some errors may reflect people’s motivation to attribute to more credible sources information that they prefer to be accurate. Gordon et al. (2005) reported a wishful thinking bias in an experiment on source monitoring. In one experiment, participants learned that one psychic, Anna Ashland, was correct for 80 % of her predictions whereas a second psychic, Candy Carson, was correct only 20 % of the time. Participants then read a series of predictions from each psychic, some of which were desirable and some that were undesirable. For example, one psychic might have made the undesirable prediction that a plant that would increase the breeding rate of mosquitoes would soon thrive in urban areas. One-half hour after reading a series of predictions, participants were asked to recall the source for each of them. Participants showed a consistent pattern of errors in which they incorrectly attributed desirable predictions to the reliable psychic and undesirable predictions to the unreliable psychic. Based on their results, Gordon et al. argued that real-life source attributions are likely to be affected by a wishful thinking bias. Specifically, if people wish to use certain information as factual, they are likely to err in attributing the information to a more credible source.
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Within the broad category of source monitoring, people must often engage in the more specific process of reality monitoring to determine whether they imagined an event or it really did occur (for a review, see Mitchell and Johnson 2009). Researchers have demonstrated circumstances in which people are likely to make rather dramatic misattributions. For example, Seamon et al. (2006) had participants perform bizarre actions (for example, “Lie down on the couch and talk to Freud”) or just imagine performing those actions. When tested after a two-week delay, the students often reported having performed the bizarre actions that they had only imagined. Seamon et al. concluded that the students in their experiment likely confused “vivid perceptual elements of a recalled image with a memory for an action” (755). Once again, legal proceedings provide a critical example of the failure of reality monitoring. People regularly confess to crimes they did not, in fact, commit (Henkel and Coffman 2004; Shaw and Porter 2015). These false confessions arise, in part, because interrogators ask suspects to create vivid mental images of how they might have committed the crimes (Henkel and Coffman 2004). When the suspects retrieve these memories, the vividness of the cues essentially tips the balance of reality monitoring. The suspects’ metamemory processes indicate that they had actually perceived the events encoded in the memories. Instances of false confessions provide salient evidence that people can experience events that clearly depart from reality as deeply factual. This discussion of reality monitoring brings us to the final topic for this chapter. People often encounter information in the context of fictional narratives. We review research that considers how fictional information may become part of the reader’s reality. 3. Fictional narratives and the factual Fictional narratives provide readers with abundant opportunities to encounter new information. For example, the early chapters of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (Shafer 2014) introduce readers to the physical and political reality of life in Mandalay, Myanmar. The novel also makes assertions about US intervention in the country when introducing a character named Ned: “Ned was a grade 4 field analyst for a clandestine US military outfit called the Central Security Service. Though the name made them sound like mall cops, the CSS in fact outranked every other intelligence service and agency save one (that one was possibly mythical; it was said to have no name or emblem)” (85). In this section, we review evidence from two research traditions that indicates the circumstances in which readers might come to
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treat such information as factual in the real world. (/ I.9 Birke for an extended discussion of readers’ misattributions of factuality in the context of fictional narratives.) 3.1 Learning facts from fiction Suppose readers of Whiskey Tango Foxtrot were asked questions about US intelligence services. Would they be likely to provide information about the Central Security Service? Marsh et al. (2003) designed a procedure for measuring readers’ information acquisition from fictional narratives. They wrote a collection of short stories with embedded target statements. The target statements provided information relevant to general knowledge questions such as, “What is the name of the island-city believed since antiquity to have sunk into the ocean?” (Nelson and Narens 1980, 346), with the correct answer being “Atlantis.” Marsh et al. embedded this fact into one of their stories using the phrase, “I wanted to name her [a boat] the Atlantis after the mythical island that sunk into the sea.” This version has a correct frame, as the correct answer is embedded within the sentence. Marsh et al. also embedded misinformation in the stories, to examine participants’ source monitoring for narrative information. In the mislead frame version, the phrase read, “I wanted to name her the Pompeii after the mythical island that sunk into the sea.” Each story had different versions so that some participants read correct information and some read misleading information. Participants read the different versions of the set of stories and then answered a survey of general world knowledge containing questions relating to the embedded target statements. Marsh et al. found that participants acquired both accurate information (from the correct frames) and misinformation (from the mislead frames). When asked about the source of their answers, participants often indicated that they were using information they had read in a story, but also believed they had also known the information before reading the story. This illusion of prior knowledge (Marsh et al. 2003, 529) held even when participants answered questions with misinformation. Marsh et al.’s study demonstrated that people use information presented in fictional texts to answer questions about general world knowledge, sometimes even when that information is false. Fazio et al. (2013) further examined this finding, testing whether participants acquire false information from fictional stories even when they already know the correct information. For example, if a participant knows that Atlantis is the name of the mythical sunken city, but later reads in a story that the city is called Pompeii, will they update their knowledge about that mythical city and
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replace their prior, correct knowledge with the misinformation? Or will they ignore the new information and maintain their prior knowledge that Atlantis is the mythical sunken city? To assess participants’ prior knowledge, Fazio et al. had participants take an online survey assessing general world knowledge two weeks before undertaking the study. Participants’ answers on the pre-survey were compared with their performance on the same survey after reading the narratives. Fazio et al. found that participants produced misinformation responses after a mislead frame at the same rate regardless of whether they had known the correct answer before reading the story. This result suggests that people will sometimes acquire and incorporate false information from fictional stories even when they know the correct information, privileging the information they learned from the story over their prior knowledge. In fact, readers are so easily persuaded by narrative fiction that it is difficult to stop them from acquiring information from narratives. Marsh and Fazio (2006) found that warning readers about potential errors in the fictional stories did not decrease their acquisition of the false information, even when the story was easy to read (thus freeing resources for the potentially demanding task of monitoring for errors). When participants were asked to explicitly point out every error they read, they still acquired the false information (although at a lower rate). However, readers’ acquisition of information from a fictional narrative is affected by the realism of the story. Rapp et al. (2014) created an unrealistic version of each of the narratives from Marsh (2004), maintaining the plots and embedded target information but changing the settings, characters, and other details of the stories to create science fiction and fantasy versions. For example, a realistic story about an art thief and a tourist talking in Paris was adapted into an unrealistic version featuring the same characters as an alien species talking on one of Jupiter’s moons. Rapp et al. found that readers were less likely to acquire misinformation from an unrealistic story than a realistic story. Presumably, readers questioned the credibility or generalizability of the information in the unrealistic story because of the fictional context in which it was embedded. This research suggests that there are some limits on readers’ propensity to acquire fact from fiction. Still, the research literature generates the overall conclusion that readers quite often treat fictional facts as real-world facts. 3.2 Transportation and belief change Researchers have also focused on the topic of narrative transportation (a psychological state that literary scholars might call immersion, see Ryan
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2001). Readers who are transported into a narrative world direct their cognitive and emotional attention into that world; they experience a sort of isolation from their real world (Gerrig 1993). As we reviewed earlier, when people encounter new information, they must expend effort to construct disbelief with respect to that information. Otherwise, they are most likely to encode the information as factual. Theorists have proposed that narrative transportation creates a context in which readers are unlikely to engage in strategic efforts to argue against the information (Green and Brock 2000; Prentice and Gerrig 1999; Slater and Rouner 2002). Researchers have provided abundant evidence that fictional narratives have an immediate impact on readers’ judgments with respect to what is factual in the real world (see Prentice et al. 1997; Strange and Leung 1999; Wheeler et al. 1999). Appel and Richter (2007) extended this research by testing the hypothesis that information in fictional narratives might increase its impact as time passed from the moment at which people read a text. Appel and Richter provided two rationales to support their hypothesis: “First, due to its experiential nature, narrative comprehension yields especially strong and stable representation of information encountered in a narrative. Second, memory for the source, which might serve as a discounting cue, tends to be forgotten over time” (128). In their experiment, a group of students read a text called The Kidnapping (translated and adapted from Prentice et al. 1997). The two versions of the text supported sixteen assertions that were either true or false in the real world (for example, Seat belts are/are not beneficial in case of car accidents.). Each version of the text included eight true assertions and eight false assertions. After reading The Kidnapping, the students reported their agreement with each assertion. Half of the participants provided these ratings directly after reading the text whereas the other half provided them after a two-week delay. Replicating earlier research, The Kidnapping had an immediate impact on the students’ beliefs. However, as Appel and Richter predicted, the impact on beliefs was even larger with the two-week delay. The researchers concluded that “fictional narratives can have a persistent implicit influence on the way we view the world” (129). Thus, readers’ experiences of fictional narratives have great potential to influence what readers treat as factual. Additional research has focused on individual differences in transportation. Green and Brock (2000) offered the hypothesis that readers who are more transported by a narrative should also be more likely to encode information in the narrative as factual and use that information as they make subsequent judgments. To test this hypothesis, Green and Brock developed a transportation scale to capture diverse aspects of transportation: “emotional involvement in the story, cognitive attention to the story, feelings of suspense, lack of awareness of surroundings, and mental imagery”
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(703). Using seven-point scales ranging from “not at all” to “very much,” readers address statements such as “While I was reading the narrative, I could easily picture the events in it taking place” and “I was mentally involved in the narrative while reading it” (704). In their foundational research, Green and Brock (2000) confirmed that readers who reported more transportation into the narrative were also more likely to indicate greater belief change in response to narrative information. In fact, diverse research has provided consistent evidence that greater transportation yields greater belief and attitude change (see Appel and Richter 2010; Green 2004; Murphy et al. 2011; van Laer et al. 2014). This body of research raises the question of what features of narratives and what differences among readers are likely to lead to greater transportation. With respect to narrative events, suspense, for example, appears to have a positive impact on transportation (Bezdek and Gerrig 2017; Krakowiak and Oliver 2012; Tal-Or and Cohen 2010). With respect to individual differences, readers are more likely to be transported when they have greater familiarity with a narrative’s important elements (such as the types of characters and setting) (Green 2004). Readers are also likely to be more transported when they perceive themselves to be similar to characters (Murphy et al. 2013; Murphy et al. 2011; van den Hende et al. 2012). Taken as a whole, this research literature reinforces the earlier conclusion that exposure to the same information may have quite different consequences for what people subsequently use as factual. 4. Conclusion Our discussion of the factual in psychology has engaged a diverse set of research topics. We have indicated that people’s immediate reception of information will be influenced both by ordinary cognitive processes (largely outside of conscious awareness) as well as more effortful, motivated responses. People begin with an inclination to treat new information as factual. However, their prior experiences (knowledge and biases) as well as judgments of source credibility wield an influence on their ultimate assessment of the factuality of the information. We have also suggested that people’s metamemory judgments when they retrieve information help determine the extent to which they use the information as factual. People are sometimes incorrect even when they have confidence that they are recalling information accurately. They also make source attributions that are influenced by forces such as wishful thinking. Finally, we have reviewed evidence that information regularly migrates from fictional narratives into readers’ real world repertoires of the factual.
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Prentice, Deborah A., and Richard J. Gerrig. “Exploring the Boundary between Fiction and Reality.” Dual-Process Theories in Social Psychology. Eds. Shelly Chaiken and Yaacov Trope. New York: Guilford, 1999. 529–546. Prentice, Deborah A., Richard J. Gerrig, and Daniel S. Bailis. “What Readers Bring to the Processing of Fictional Texts.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 4.3 (1997): 416–420. Rapp, David N., Scott R. Hinze, Daniel G. Slaten, and William S. Horton. “Amazing Stories: Acquiring and Avoiding Inaccurate Information from Fiction.” Discourse Processes 51.1–2 (2014): 50–74. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Seamon, John G., Morgan M. Philbin, and Liza G. Harrison. “Do You Remember Proposing Marriage to the Pepsi Machine? False Recollections from a Campus Walk.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 13.5 (2006): 752–756. Shafer, David. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. New York: Mulholland Books, 2014. Shaw, Julia, and Stephen Porter. “Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing Crime.” Psychological Science 26.3 (2015): 291–301. Slater, Michael D., and Donna Rouner. “Entertainment-Education and Elaboration Likelihood: Understanding the Processing of Narrative Persuasion.” Communication Theory 12.2 (2002): 173–191. Smalarz, Laura, and Gary L. Wells. “Contamination of Eyewitness Self-Reports and the Mistaken-Identification Problem.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 24.2 (2015): 120–124. Spry, Amanda, Ravi Pappu, and T. Bettina Cornwell. “Celebrity Endorsement, Brand Credibility and Brand Equity.” European Journal of Marketing 45.6 (2011): 882–909. Strange, Jeffrey J., and Cynthia C. Leung. “How Anecdotal Accounts in News and Fiction Can Influence Judgments of a Social Problem’s Urgency, Causes, and Cures.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 25.4 (1999): 436–449. Tal-Or, Nurit, and Jonathan Cohen. “Understanding Audience Involvement: Conceptualizing and Manipulating Identification and Transportation.” Poetics 38.4 (2010): 402–418. Tormala, Zakary L., Pablo Briñol, and Richard E. Petty. “Multiple Roles for Source Credibility Under High Elaboration: It’s All in the Timing.” Social Cognition 25.4 (2007): 536– 552. Wheeler, S. Christian, Melanie C. Green, and Timothy C. Brock. “Fictional Narratives Change Beliefs: Replications of Prentice, Gerrig, and Bailis (1997) with Mixed Corroboration.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 6.1 (1999): 136–141. Wixted, J. T., and Gary L. Wells. “The Relationship Between Eyewitness Confidence and Identification Accuracy: A New Synthesis.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 18.1 (2017): 10–65.
MARCO CARACCIOLO
Is Factuality the Norm? A Perspective from Cognitive Narratology 1. Introduction Is factuality the norm? Certainly, if one looks at the history of narratology, the answer is that it isn’t. Since the term “narratology” was coined by Tzvetan Todorov (1969) during the heyday of structuralism, fiction has been narratology’s primary object of investigation. Only much later have questions about the status of factual narratives entered narratological discussions. This interest in the factual was inspired by a separate tradition of narrative research – namely, William Labov’s (1972) sociolinguistics. Labov’s work dealt with narratives of personal experience, which make an implicit claim to factuality. Monika Fludernik’s Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996), one of the seminal contributions to cognitive narratology, played a central role in establishing a dialogue between literary research on narrative and Labov’s approach. While Fludernik’s corpus mostly consists of fictional works, her theoretical model posits a continuity between sophisticated fictional narratives such as those we find in literary texts and the narratives of personal experience analyzed by Labov. The intuition is that conversational or ‘natural’ narratives serve as a cognitive foundation for more elaborate storytelling practices by providing basic concepts of embodiment, agency, and teleology. This chapter asks, from the perspective of cognitive narratology, if the link between narrative and conversational storytelling of personal experience implies that factuality is also to be considered primary. After all, narratives of personal experience tend to be grounded in real events; do audiences take that grounding as a normative starting point when engaging with narrative? And does that mean that factuality is the cognitive norm for narrative comprehension? As / I.7 Richard Gerrig and Janelle Gagnon’s chapter in this volume shows, research on the psychology of belief suggests that all utterances are initially processed as true and, therefore, factual; only later on are some of them falsified and tagged as fictional (see Gilbert 1991). This view is opposed https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-009
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to what Gerrig calls “toggle theories of fiction” (1993, 201), which posit a separate psychological mechanism for processing fictional information. According to Gerrig, drawing too sharp a line between factual and fictional information – as toggle theories do – keeps us from accounting for the real-world effects of engaging with fiction, how fictional texts may influence readers’ everyday beliefs and values. As Gerrig puts it, if […] readers believe fictional information to be true as an ordinary – and obligatory – consequence of comprehending that information, then there is no real mystery about how fictional information can have a real-world effect. […] Information becomes tagged as fictional only as a function of readers’ conscious scrutiny. (1993, 230)
If that is true, factuality constitutes the default state for narrative processing. Yet this use of the word factuality should be qualified. In fact, we can distinguish between two meanings of the adjective factual, which I will indicate with a subscript number: factual1 means ‘involving facts that are in some relevant way real-world-like’; while factual2 means ‘involving facts that are claimed to have verifiably occurred in the real world.’ Factuality1 is a measure of verisimilitude or correspondence between narrative information and real-world cognitive parameters (the same parameters that, for Fludernik, underlie conversational narratives). By contrast, factuality2 is a function of what linguists call ‘evidentiality’ (/ II.7 Zymner), the relation between an instance of narration and the specific real-world events that are being reported. In short, a narrative is factual1 when it is consistent with what we understand to be possible in actuality; a narrative is factual2 when we take it to report on something that happened in actuality. As shown by Gerrig, there is ample evidence that – as far as the dynamic of real-time linguistic understanding goes – we do not adopt any separate comprehension mechanism for fictional texts: we map all narratives onto “situation models,” as the psychological literature calls these mental constructs (see, e.g., Zwaan and Radvansky 1998); and we build these situation models on the basis of an analogy with direct experience, as if they were factual1 scenarios – even if they are later found to be nonactual or even downright false. Yet this is only an initial step in narrative comprehension. On a more global level of discourse comprehension (as opposed to sentence-by-sentence understanding), ‘tagging’ narratives as factual2 or fictional makes a significant difference in terms of the strategies interpreters adopt as they make sense of these situation models. Pragmatic factors are crucial to this tagging activity, as we will see. This chapter argues that Gerrig is right to insist on the continuity between factual2 and fictional narratives when it comes to elementary information processing: factuality1 constitutes a baseline of narrative comprehension. Section 2 seeks to expand Gerrig’s account by reviewing research on situation models and their basis in perception. On the other hand, I claim that conscious awareness
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of fictionality may make certain interpretive strategies more likely as readers come to make sense of narrative globally. Exploring that idea is the task of section 3, which builds on research in psycholinguistics and media psychology.
2. Situation models: Grounding factuality1 Language has long been considered an abstract activity that works independently of perception and embodied action. Recent work on text processing in psycholinguistics challenges this view: it shows that language is closely bound up with sensorimotor modes of engagement with the world (Pecher and Zwaan 2005). This is particularly true for the linguistic representation of concrete situations, such as, for instance, ‘the umbrella was under the table’: the evidence offered by studies such as Zwaan and Radvansky (1998) suggests that people understand sentences of this kind by constructing a situation model – namely, a schematic representation whose organization is derived not (or not exclusively) from abstract knowledge about umbrellas and tables, but from their perceptual properties. Situation models tend to remain unconscious, yet they serve a key role in narrative comprehension: because they are updated as new textual information comes in, they enable readers to keep track of characters, objects, and locations in narrative. Bryant et al. (1992) offer evidence for this idea in an ingenious study of readers’ processing of a spatial description embedded in a mini-narrative (a character visiting a museum). The study’s stimuli were short texts describing the position of a set of objects relative to this character. When asked about the position of these objects, the participants were faster at locating objects in front of the character. This finding shows that the comprehension of spatial descriptions in a narrative context involves the construction of a mental model that is in itself spatial in nature; if the description was mentally encoded in a purely abstract way (i.e., regardless of the objects’ arrangement in space), there would be no difference in response times between objects located in front and behind the character. Building on and extending experimental results of this kind, Sanford and Emmott argue that situation models or (as they term them) “scenarios” are central to linguistic and, in particular, narrative comprehension: When a text is encountered, the reader is engaged in an attempt to match the text to a scenario. In the event of success, primary processing occurs, as elements of the text are mapped onto the currently active scenario. This is then used as a means of structuring the process of understanding. (2012, 24)
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These spatially based scenarios are the underpinnings of what narrative scholars have been calling “storyworlds,” in the wake of David Herman’s (2002) work and possible worlds accounts of fiction (Ryan 1991; Doležel 1998). But the crucial point is that situation models are virtually indistinguishable for fictional and factual2 narrative. In order to understand the narrated events, interpreters will have to map them onto a situation model that is derived from past perceptions and embodied memories – what Zwaan (2008) calls “experiential traces.” At this level of basic processing, the factuality2 or fictionality of the narrative do not matter: readers will process the textual information via inferences that are based on real-world (perceptual) knowledge and dependent on provisionally accepting the reality of the narrated events. In this respect, as suggested by Fludernik’s “natural” narratology, there is complete continuity between narratives of personal experience and fictional narratives. This is what I called above factuality1, and it is built into narrative understanding: it operates – as posited by Gerrig – before larger considerations of factuality2 or fictionality can shape readers’ responses to narrative. If we shift the focus from moment-bymoment understanding to more global modes of interpretation, however, factuality2 comes into play – even though it can no longer be seen as a cognitively privileged or basic mode of understanding. 3. Reading strategies: Factuality2 versus fictionality Our encounters with narrative are always mediated by a certain social practice and context. Factuality2, as I have been using the term in this chapter, refers to discourse genres, such as historiography or news reports, that make a claim to capturing empirically observable and/or verifiable realities. At this level, factuality2 and fictionality operate as alternative “regimes” of interpretation, to borrow Richard Walsh’s (2007, 44) terminology: factual2 communication cannot be regarded as the psychological norm from which fiction deviates, because both factuality2 and fictionality are complex sociocultural constructs, and they are tied to practices (e.g., news commentary and literary reading) that have different epistemological commitments and goals (/ I.4 Packard). Accordingly, work in social psychology suggests that awareness of factuality2 has a significant impact on how interpreters make sense of narratives at a global level – what reading strategies they are likely to adopt and how they make inferences from the storyworld to the real world. Psychologists have studied these differences by leveraging the effects of “framing” in the Goffmanian sense (Goffman 1974): what happens when we present the same narrative as fiction or as nonfiction, regardless
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of its original context and genre? Zwaan (1994), for instance, used news articles in two experiments aimed at investigating differences in reading strategies for news reports (and therefore factual2 narrative) and literature (a category that has come to be associated with fictionality). Zwaan’s conceptual framework distinguishes between three aspects of narrative comprehension: the surface structure, or the linguistic wording of the text; the situation model, as discussed in the previous section; and the textbase, which is “a propositional network that represents the meaning of the text” (1994, 920). Zwaan found that readers’ “expectation that they were reading literary stories caused them to allocate more resources to surface-level and textbase-level processes, whereas the expectation that they were reading news stories caused other readers of the same texts to allocate more resources to the construction of a causal-situation model” (1994, 930). Put differently, framing a news report as literature leads readers to pay more attention to the linguistic surface of the text (including metaphorical language and other creative uses of language) and its abstract, thematic meanings. By contrast, framing the story as a factual2 one encourages readers to construct more stable situation models, encoding – in particular – causal relations between the narrated events. Note that this is consistent with what I said in the previous section about situation models: these models underlie the real-time comprehension of any narrative text, but factuality2 and fictionality, as frames for encountering narrative, will trigger different uses of these models. According to Zwaan, this discrepancy is a function of the different genres in which literary fiction and factual2 narrative are embedded: […] college students have been exposed to both news and literary texts during their high school education. Thus, they are likely to have developed control systems for literary and news stories, either through supervised or through incidental learning. (1994, 921)
Again, this suggestion points to the fact that readers have no normative bias towards factual2 narrative: their expectations depend on the sociocultural context in which they encounter narrative; this context can be artificially manipulated in an experimental setting, through framing, but is typically self-evident in more naturalistic forms of narrative engagements. A more recent study by Green et al. (2006) also compared the effects of “tagging” a text as factual or fictional. Although Green et al. (2006) used a nonnarrative stimulus (an argumentative speech), their findings are suggestive and consistent with research on narrative persuasion – i.e., the degree to which engaging with narrative can change people’s beliefs about a certain subject (see, e.g., Green and Brock 2000). Green et al.’s (2006) conclusions are twofold. On the one hand, they posit a fundamental parity between factual2 and fictional communication in terms of persuasion: fic-
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tion’s impact on people’s beliefs is, potentially, as significant as that of factual2 narrative. That claim ties in with Gerrig’s above-mentioned critique of toggle theories of fiction (/ I.7 Gerrig and Gagnon; Gerrig 1993; see also Gerrig and Prentice 1991). On the other hand, Green et al. conclude that [even] though messages with a fact label were no more persuasive than those with a fiction label, fact/fiction label did influence whether some recipients processed the presented information. […] [I]ndividuals were more likely to scrutinize persuasive speeches labeled as fact rather than fiction. (2006, 282)
This finding is in line with Zwaan’s (1994) claim that readers of a text labeled as a news narrative pay particular attention to the situation model they have created while reading: because factual2 narrative makes an implicit claim to empirical accuracy, readers tend to adopt a more critical stance towards the facts it portrays, instead of – for instance – valuing the literary qualities of the text. One of the consequences of this critical stance towards factual2 narrative concerns the ethical evaluations that accompany narrative engagements. As Suzanne Keen puts it, “the perception of fictionality releases novel-readers from the normal state of alert suspicion of others’ motives that often acts as a barrier to empathy” (2007, 168). Thus, readers may be more willing to relate to a narrator’s or character’s perspective when they encounter them within a genre that they know to be fiction-based (such as the novel). This asymmetry comes to the fore in stories that focus on unreliable or ethically deviant characters: readers are more likely to develop an empathetic bond with these characters in a fictional context than in a factual2 one (see Caracciolo 2016, 45–46). This remains a speculative hypothesis for now; more empirical research is needed to investigate the ethical judgments that are bound up with factuality2 and how they differ from those elicited by fictional narrative. As shown by the brief survey above, psychological research tends to build on framing to study fictional versus factual2 communication: typically, an ambiguous text is taken out of its original context and labeled as either fiction or nonfiction. This approach has clear methodological advantages, because it allows researchers to control for textual factors and only study the effects of the labeling. But from the viewpoint of the empirical study of literature, this approach has clear limitations, because the effects of reading factual2 and fictional narrative are certainly, at least in part, a result of the different textual strategies they adopt: more research is needed to shed light on how these strategies may interact with factuality2 and fictionality as global interpretive frameworks.
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4. Conclusion This chapter addressed the question whether factuality can be considered a more basic stance than fictionality, one that interpreters of narrative will prefer unless they are explicitly reminded of the fictionality of a narrative. My answer revolved around the distinction between two levels of readers’ (listeners’, etc.) engagement with narrative: one of ‘online’ (i.e., momentby-moment) situation modeling and one involving more global, and more culturally specific, reading strategies. I argued that, at the former level, all narrative is processed as factual in the sense of what I called factuality1: readers will parse stories as unfolding in a naturalistic scenario (the situation model), by reutilizing patterns and schemata derived from their everyday interactions with the real world. Of course, narrative may construct situations that are ‘unnatural’ insofar as they depart from everyday experience (see Alber 2016). But these situations are always shaped by stories – and understood by readers – as a deviation from the real-world schemata that define what I called factuality1. This is what Marie-Laure Ryan’s (1991) “principle of minimal departure” posits, after all: readers will assume that the storyworld is factual1 unless this assumption is explicitly contradicted by the text (see also Alber, Caracciolo, and Marchesini 2018). Psychologically speaking, this dynamic modeling accompanies both fictional narrative and narrative that is factual2 (i.e., that makes or implies a claim to empirical truthfulness). At the level of readers’ more conscious evaluation of narrative, however, factuality2 and fictionality may prompt different reading strategies: the underlying situation modeling may be the same, but how interpreters use these models can be considerably different. The psychological literature reviewed in this chapter suggests that factual2 narrative triggers in readers heightened attention to situation models and a more scrutinizing attitude. These responses are the result of social learning within distinct cultural practices: factuality2, I have argued, does not have any cognitive precedence over fictionality. This idea points to the significance of contextual and generic factors in guiding people’s narrative understanding and shaping their interpretive strategies.
References Alber, Jan. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Alber, Jan, Marco Caracciolo, and Irina Marchesini. “Mimesis: The Unnatural Between Situation Models and Interpretive Strategies.” Poetics Today 39.3 (2018): 447–471.
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Bryant, David J., Barbara Tversky, and Nancy Franklin. “Internal and External Spatial Frameworks for Representing Described Scenes.” Journal of Memory and Language 31.1 (1992): 74–98. Caracciolo, Marco. Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction: Explorations in Readers’ Engagement with Characters. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. Doležel, Lubomír. Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996. Gerrig, Richard J. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993. Gerrig, Richard J., and Deborah A. Prentice. “The Representation of Fictional Information.” Psychological Science 2.5 (1991): 336–340. Gilbert, Daniel T. “How Mental Systems Believe.” American Psychologist 46.2 (1991): 107– 119. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Green, Melanie C., and Timothy C. Brock. “The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79.5 (2000): 701– 721. Green, Melanie C., Jennifer Garst, Timothy C. Brock, and Sungeun Chung. “Fact Versus Fiction Labeling: Persuasion Parity Despite Heightened Scrutiny of Fact.” Media Psychology 8.3 (2006): 267–285. Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Labov, William. Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972. Pecher, Diane, and Rolf A. Zwaan. Grounding Cognition: The Role of Perception and Action in Memory, Language, and Thinking. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Sanford, Anthony J., and Catherine Emmott. Mind, Brain and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Todorov, Tzvetan. Grammaire du Décameron. The Hague: Mouton, 1969. Walsh, Richard. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. Zwaan, Rolf A. “Effect of Genre Expectations on Text Comprehension.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 20.4 (1994): 920–933. Zwaan, Rolf A. “Experiential Traces and Mental Simulations in Language Comprehension.” Symbols and Embodiment: Debates on Meaning and Cognition. Eds. Manuel De Vega, Arthur M. Glenberg, and Arthur C. Graesser. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. 165–180. Zwaan, Rolf A., and Gabriel A. Radvansky. “Situation Models in Language Comprehension and Memory.” Psychological Bulletin 123.2 (1998): 162–185.
DOROTHEE BIRKE
Is Factuality in the Eye of the Beholder? Who determines whether a particular text or utterance is factual or not? Some theorists have argued that fictionality, at least, should be regarded as a mode of reception rather than a textual quality (e.g. Anderegg 1985, 113; Walton 1990, 88), which could be understood to mean that such a determination is ultimately up to the recipient. This is already highly controversial in theories of fiction – Frank Zipfel (2001, 231) describes it as the least convincing way of defining fictionality – but the problems of this approach become even more evident when thinking about factuality. Insisting that facts exist independently of one’s point of view has, in an era haunted by the specter of ‘post-truth politics,’ increasingly come to be seen as an ethical as well as a scientific stance. At the same time, there are obviously many cases where recipients of one and the same text come to different conclusions about its factuality. Readers (and recipients of other media, but the following discussion will be focused mainly on the example of readers) do have a choice to perceive a text as fact or as fiction, which of course is not the same thing as saying such a choice determines how the text should be classified. In the following, I will discuss how factual and fictional reading modes can be described, how they are constrained, and in which contexts the differences between the different modes are seen as relevant or problematic.
1. Reading factually, reading nonfictionally In order to analyze what it might mean to ‘read factually,’ it is useful to take a look at the well-established distinction between semantic and pragmatic approaches to the fact/fiction divide (Schaeffer 2013 [2012], 15–29). What Schaeffer labels the ‘semantic’ perspective and I will in the following refer to as the ‘ontological ’ perspective concentrates on the “ontological status of represented entities and/or the truth value status of the proposition or the sequence of propositions which assert these entities” (Schaeffer 2013 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-010
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[2012], 15), so that the factual is real/true and the fictional invented/false. In this sense, ‘reading factually’ is to accept the information contained in a text as true in the real world. ‘Reading nonfactually,’ at least in a simple version of the ontological perspective, would be synonymous with ‘reading fictionally’ and refer to regarding the information as invented/false. This opposition of ‘factual’ and ‘fictional’ does not work when one considers the distinction from a pragmatic perspective (Bareis 2014, 61), which shifts the attention from the status of the represented entities to the status of the representation or text itself. Pragmatic approaches (e.g. Lamarque and Olsen 1994; Walton 1990) assert that the question of referentiality is insufficient or even irrelevant if one wants to capture what distinguishes factual from fictional texts. Instead, the defining criterion for fictional storytelling is […] that it be mutually understood between tellers and listeners (or writers and readers) that the story told merely looks as if it conveyed information about matters of fact. The teller does not commit herself to the truth of what she is saying, and listeners agree to engage in a game of make-believe about […] what they were told. (Birke and Köppe 2015, 4)
From this perspective, ‘reading factually’ in opposition to ‘reading fictionally’ would mean regarding the text as one that commits to conveying matters of fact, regardless of whether one comes to the conclusion that it actually does correctly render these facts. The meaning of the term ‘reading factually,’ then, could differ quite dramatically depending on whether one takes an ontological or a pragmatic perspective. While from an ontological point of view, it clearly means taking a text to be rendering facts, a pragmatic interpretation could be that it merely refers to reading a text as designed to render facts. In the second case, then, the term could also encompass the possibility that the recipient believes that the information is erroneous, for example because the author is ill-informed or trying to deceive. To avoid confusion, I propose the following terminological distinction: where the issue is whether the information presented by the text is taken to be correct or not, I will refer to ‘reading factually’ vs. ‘reading nonfactually.’ Where the issue is the identification of a text type, i.e. the question whether a text is taken to commit to relaying facts or not, I will refer to ‘reading fictionally’ vs. ‘reading nonfictionally.’1 The scenario where a recipient thinks an author is wrong or lying, then, should be described as ‘nonfactual, nonfictional reading.’
1 This follows the terminological distinction suggested by Bareis (2014, 61).
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There is a certain affinity between ‘reading nonfactually’ and ‘reading fictionally.’ Part of the specific practice of reading a fantasy novel, for instance, is to be prepared to encounter creatures and events that do not, even could not, exist in the real world. However, there is no automatic conjunction of the different modes of reading. When reading nonfictionally, I am obviously still free to decide whether I want to accept the information that is presented as fact or to regard it as an error or even lie; in other words, I am free to read factually or nonfactually. Concomitantly, when reading fictionally, I can recognize the nonfactuality of the topography of Tolkien’s Middle-earth (even though the book features a map showing how to get from the Shire to Mordor), or I can take the itinerary of Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway as a basis for devising my own real-life walk through London (reading the information about streets in Bloomsbury factually), even though I am aware that Mrs Dalloway is a novel. 2. How do readers decide? Psychologists argue that the decision to read a text factually is the default mode in reception, and that it is influenced by a variety of mainly contextual factors, for instance prior experiences/beliefs and source credibility (/ I.7 Gagnon and Gerrig). Textual factors such as coherence and signaling of confidence surely play a role as well, but researchers have also found evidence of a tendency in recipients to regard reports confirming their own beliefs as more convincing than those contradicting such beliefs (Lord et al. 1979). Research on the factors that prompt recipients to read fictionally focuses mainly on the question of signposts (or indices, or markers) of fictionality. Zipfel (2001, 232–247) provides a systematic overview of the different approaches: firstly, he lists paratextual signals from a text’s accompanying material, such as titles, explicit genre labels, forewords, name of publishing house or series, author interviews etc. Secondly, there are textual signals, both on the level of the story and on the level of the discourse. The question of which features to regard as relevant signals, as well as to what extent those signals actually do (or should) determine the reading strategy, is hotly debated (see e.g. Zipfel 2001, 243–247; Zetterberg 2016, 10–13). It is in any case hard to find any particular textual signposts that will signal fictionality in all possible situations or contexts (/ IV.8 Lavocat). Paratextual signposts seem more binding, but there still exist some tricky cases: for example, if a work is clearly a recording of real-life conversations and encounters, with no additional textual markers of fictionality, readers might start to wonder about its pragmatic status even if it is explic-
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itly labelled a ‘novel’ (/ IV.4 Franzen on Philip Glass’s autobiographical ‘novel’ The Fabulist). 3. Don Quijote’s problem: Discourses on misattributions of factuality and nonfictionality If recipients have some leeway in their choice of reading mode, it follows that there will sometimes be misattributions of factuality and nonfictionality. To characterize an act of reception as this type of misreading is a common discursive act which can be found in different kinds of debates and serves different rhetorical goals. There are various reasons why misattribution is perceived or represented as a problem. In the case of nonfictional texts, those are easy to see, as for example in the recent debates about so-called ‘fake news.’ In these instances, misattribution is usually seen as a consequence of the media consumers’ ignorance and/or gullibility. The worries that lie at the core of these discussions can be framed in ontological terms, as the concern that readers are misinformed about the extra-textual world when they mistake nonfactual for factual references. Worries about misattribution also loom large in discourses about the reading of fictional texts, but there the issues that are at stake are more complex. For one thing, these worries are reflected in some novels in the figure of the ‘quixotic reader,’ a character who takes fiction for fact (see Birke 2016). This trope is epitomized in Cervantes’s Don Quijote (1605/ 1615), where the protagonist’s ontological misattribution is portrayed as resulting from pragmatic misattribution. Because he does not understand that his favorite books are romances rather than historical accounts, Don Quijote believes all information they relate to be factual. This leads to hilarious misunderstandings of the world around him, which he sees as populated by the princesses, sorcerers and knights featured in his favorite books. In some later variants of the topos, the quixotic reader’s misreading is no longer portrayed literally as an inability to grasp the concept of fiction – the heroine in Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), for example, knows that she is reading novels, but nonetheless makes the mistake of expecting her own love life to resemble that of the characters she reads about. I have argued that the popularity of the figure of the misled reader at different points in the history of the novel relates to its usefulness in reflecting on the purposes and effects of reading fiction (Birke 2016), especially in times of competition between media (/ IV.9 Paige). Another context in which readers of fiction are often accused of fallible attributions of factuality and/or nonfictionality to fictional texts is in discussions involving genres which have a high claim to the inclusion of
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factual detail, such as the historical novel. One typical recent example is the historian John Guy’s complaint that a new generation of history students are taking their knowledge about the Tudors from the fiction of Hilary Mantel – a “blur between fact and fiction” that he finds “troubling,” as it is “nonsense to think that Mantel’s novels were historically accurate” (Brown 2017). Such debates are frequently reduced to the ontological question of whether readers are right or wrong to believe in the factuality of specific details. By focusing on ‘accuracy,’ Guy pursues the argument in this vein. He therefore almost derails his own criticism when he fails to provide an example of factual errors in Mantel’s text and instead criticizes Mantel for the way in which she interprets historical figures like Thomas More, while at the same time conceding that the same views can also be found in some historiographical studies. However, if one broadens the perspective to include pragmatic aspects, Guy’s argument again emerges as valid; the question is now no longer ‘Should readers accept the factuality of details provided?’ but ‘What are appropriate reading strategies and expectations for a given text?’ If one’s goal is to be informed about the latest historiographical research on a topic, a historical novel is probably not the best choice of source material. Misattribution in this case arises from a discrepancy between the reader’s purpose and his or her choice of text – as with Guy’s students, who apparently read nonfictionally where they should have read fictionally. The pragmatic perspective is also often employed by authors or critics in defense of historical novels, for example when they argue that readers should appreciate the text’s literary qualities and imaginative power over and above accuracy of detail. Misattribution of nonfictionality is, moreover, more broadly evoked in interpretation theory in the context of discussions about the limits set for acceptable readings of fictional texts. One notable example of this kind of debate can be found in Kendall Walton’s concept of ‘silly questions.’ He argues that it is typical of our practice of consuming fiction that we treat “paradoxies, anomalies, apparent contradictions” (Walton 1990, 176) as unproblematic: “in countless English-language novels everybody everywhere speaks English: French taxi drivers, Burmese peasants, Roman soldiers” (177). First-person narrators in fiction have perfect recall of conversations they had twenty years previously. Walton suggests that not all questions that could reasonably be posed when reading nonfictional texts (e.g. how it is possible that someone has perfect recall) make sense in reference to fictional texts: asking them is tantamount to a failure to read fictionally. Different theoretical traditions have different ways of drawing the line between adequate and inadequate readings, often depending on the extent to which they draw on extraliterary discourses such as historiography, sociology or psychology. For example, while for a critical tradi-
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tion interested mainly in aesthetic structure the biographically oriented query “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?” (Knight 1947 [1933]) came to be seen as the epitome of a misattribution of nonfictionality (see Britton 1961), for a psychoanalytical critic this question proved to be a key to understanding Macbeth (see Calef 1969). (/ IV.7 Korthals Altes on the importance of genre and frames.) In addition to ontological and pragmatic concerns, there is also an ethical issue that is sometimes framed as a problem of readerly misattribution: how to deal with the representation of living persons in literary texts. Usually, the ethical responsibility for such representations is attributed to authors, for instance when people who recognize themselves in a character sue an author of fiction for libel (/ IV.4 Franzen on ethical licenses). The concept of misattribution is, in these cases, frequently used by an author in his or her defense, with the argument that the audience when reading fictionally should also make an ontological distinction between the factual person and the fictional character and that failing to do so results in an inadequate reading. However, there are also cases where the ethical infringement is itself tied to the concept of misattribution. A prominent example of this constellation can be seen in the behavior of fans of the nonfiction podcast Serial (2014) and the debate that was sparked in its wake. The audience engaged in passionate and detailed debates of the murder case presented in Serial, debates that had a public character because they were mainly conducted on social media. Moreover, some fans started their own investigations and contacted people connected to the crime. Erica Haugtvedt (2017) has interpreted this behavior as a misattribution of fictionality: the format of the serial narrative prompted recipients to treat real people as if they were fictional characters, failing to consider their right to privacy and the need to respect their feelings. It may well be objected that it is reductive to analyze this example in terms of the factuality/fictionality paradigm; the case clearly relates to broader questions such as the intermingling of public and private communication in social media. Nevertheless, the example nicely illustrates that the choice of perceiving a narrative as nonfictional may also involve ethical ramifications (/ IV.5 Phelan). 4. Conclusion While few would argue that readers determine a text’s factuality, the idea that recipients can choose, or refuse, to read a text factually is prevalent in both critical and everyday discourse. I have proposed a distinction between ‘factual/nonfactual’ and ‘fictional/nonfictional’ reception modes which helps to chart the issues that are at stake, in particular with reference to the
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concept of readerly misattribution. As I was able to show, the factuality/ fictionality paradigm is often invoked to address questions of misinformation, of recipients’ gullibility, of medial (in)competence and of ethics. References Anderegg, Johannes. Sprache und Verwandlung. Zur literarischen Ästhetik. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1985. Bareis, Alexander. “Fiktionen als Make-Believe.” Fiktionalität. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Eds. Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. 50–67. Birke, Dorothee. Writing the Reader: Configurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. Birke, Dorothee, and Tilmann Köppe. “Author and Narrator: Problems in the Constitution and Interpretation of Fictional Narrative.” Author and Narrator: Transdisciplinary Contributions to a Narratological Debate. Eds. Dorothee Birke and Tilmann Köppe. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. 1–12. Britton, John. “A. C. Bradley and those Children of Lady Macbeth.” Shakespeare Quarterly 12.3 (1961): 349–351. Brown, Mark. “Students take Hilary Mantel’s Tudor Novels as Fact, Says Historian.” Guardian (31 May 2017). https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/31/studentstake-hilary-mantels-tudor-novels-as-fact-hay-festival (12 October 2017). Calef, Victor. “Lady Macbeth and Infanticide or ‘How Many Children had Lady Macbeth’ Murdered?” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 17 (1969): 528–548. Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quijote. [1605; 1615] Ed. Diana de Armas Wilson. Trans. Burton Raffel. New York: Norton, 1999. Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. [1856] Ed. Margaret Cohen. Trans. Eleanor Marx Aveling and Paul de Man. New York: Norton, 2005. Haugtvedt, Erica. “The Ethics of Serialized True Crime: Fictionality in Serial Season One.” The Serial Podcast and Storytelling in the Digital Age. Ed. Ellen McCracken. New York: Routledge, 2017. 7–23. Knight, Lionel Charles. “How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? An Essay in the Theory and Practice of Shakespeare Criticism.” [1933] Explorations: Essays in Criticism. Mainly on the Literature of the Seventeenth Century. New York: Stewart, 1947. 15–54. Lamarque, Peter, and Stein Haugom Olsen. Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Lord, Charles G., et al. “Biased Assimilation and Attitude Polarization: The Effects of Prior Theories on Subsequently Considered Evidence.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 37.11 (1979): 2098–2109. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. “Fictional vs. Factual Narration.” [2013] The Living Handbook of Narratology. Eds. Peter Hühn et al. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/fictional-vsfactual-narration. Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2012. 1–39 (paragraphs numbered). (1 October 2017). Walton, Kendall L. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1990. Zetterberg Gjerlevsen, Simona. “Fictionality.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. Eds. Peter Hühn et al. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/fictionality. Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2016. 1–24 (paragraphs numbered). (1 October 2017). Zipfel, Frank. Fiktion, Fiktivität, Fiktionalität: Analysen zur Fiktion in der Literatur und zum Fiktionsbegriff in der Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2001.
MICHAEL SINDING
Metaphor, Allegory, Irony, Satire and Supposition in Factual and Fictional Narrative “Ten Theses about Fictionality” offers examples of fictionality that involve metaphorical, allegorical, and ironic-satirical supposition. “Romnesia” (Nielsen et al. 2015, 65–66) is a satirical metaphor, comparing Romney’s forgetting to a mental disturbance. Art Spiegelman’s Maus (68) is a metaphorical allegory, with Jews as mice, Nazis as cats, and so on. Obama’s Lion King birth video (67) is satirical, and has allegorical qualities, mapping one leader’s-birth story to another’s. Martin Luther King’s speech (68) uses the metaphor of a “dream” for his vision of the future. These examples indicate the embryonic presence of supposition, metaphor, allegory, irony, and satire in fictionality in popular culture and rhetoric. How do these categories relate to narrative factuality and fictionality generally? Given the large literature on these terms, discussion will necessarily be highly selective. I begin with preliminary remarks on the factual / fictional distinction in language and thought, and more broadly in connection with how my title categories operate in discourse. I then turn to a deeper analysis of an example that embodies all the categories, Jonathan Swift’s creation, in Gulliver’s Travels, of a satirical allegorical narrative by the technique of narrativizing metaphor.1 I discuss how it illustrates complex factual dimensions of fictional narrative in light of literary and cognitive research. On this basis, a more broad-ranging comparative discussion considers how these elements appear and function in factual narrative. 1. Preliminaries on language and thought Nielsen et al.’s view of “fictionality” assumes that discourse is normally factual information-transmission. A fictionalizer “adopts a distinct commu1 That is, various metaphorical mappings are projected into the storyworld. The technique is sometimes called “realizing” or “literalizing” metaphor. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-011
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nicative stance, inviting the audience to recognize that she has temporarily stopped conforming to the constraints of referentiality and actuality in order to accomplish some rhetorical end” (2015, 65). Dawson accepts this, contrasting “rhetorical devices” in speech, such as “irony, metaphor, and hyperbole” to strict “transmission of information” (2015, 79). An alternative view, from functional and cognitive linguistics (CL), provides a context for my analyses. First, two general points: 1. Language is multi-functional. Musolff notes three functionalist insights: a) “every communicative language use is multifunctional” and includes b) “reflexive and metalinguistic dimensions.” Moreover, c) “the referential function is not necessarily the primary one” (2016, 4).2 For example, in Jakobson’s early model, speech simultaneously refers to context, expresses speaker attitudes, influences hearers, and exhibits poetic, reflexive (metalingual) and phatic (social-relations) aspects (1987 [1958]). 2. Fictionality-relevant phenomena inform basic semantics and grammar. The CL principle, “language is meaning and […] meaning is conceptualization” (Geeraerts 2006, 7), emphasizes that grammar construes objective situations and that discourse creates global situation-models via networks of mini-situation-models, which are often non-factual. Next, two more specific points guide my approach, inspired by CL: 3. Models, not definitions. Lexical and semantic categories are very rarely definable in traditional terms of necessary and sufficient criteria. One commonly finds gradience in membership (not all items are clearly in or out), and in centrality (some items are more prototypical than others). Thus CL characterizes categories in terms of models for prototypical members, plus principles of extension for others (Lakoff 1987). This applies to all of the categories at issue. 4. Literary-rhetorical categories have multiple unit-levels. Figures, genres and modes occur in units at several scales of narrative (phrase, character, setting, scene, action, world, text, genre). A view of these phenomena as primarily conceptual accommodates this fact. 1.1 The CL core CL analyses reveal subjective, fictive and analogical conceptualization throughout linguistic representations of facts and reality. They offer in-
2 All italics in quotations are original emphasis unless otherwise indicated.
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sights into narrative generally;3 metaphor, which says simultaneously A is B and A is not B; allegory’s indirect (and metaphorical) reference; and satire’s simultaneous particular and general reference. 1.1.1 Grammatical construal: Perspectivization and fictivity For Langacker, grammar reveals a certain construal of the objective world, involving structuring a conceived situation in terms of viewpoint, attention, figure/ground organization, and level of schematicity (abstraction). We can contemplate several construals, and alternate among them. For example, consider “a situation in which you are standing in your back garden and you want to express where you left your bicycle. You could then both say It’s behind the house and It’s in front of the house” (Geeraerts 2006, 4). These two expressions “embody different perspectives,” the first determined by “the direction of your gaze” (blocked by the house), while, in the second, “the point of view is that of the house” in its “canonical direction” determined by its front (4). Talmy’s notion of “general fictivity” refers to extensive “nonveridical phenomena” in cognition, both language and vision (2003, 99). Many sentences “depict motion with no physical occurrence” as in “This fence goes from the plateau to the valley” (99). “Factive” and “fictive” are “two different cognitive representations of the same entity, where one […] is assessed as being more veridical than the other” (neither absolutely real or unreal), often “opposite poles of [a single] dimension,” e.g. stationariness vs. motion (100–101). Beliefs are frequently factive, in contrast to fictive “literal reference of […] linguistic forms” (we believe the fence is stationary). In vision, a factive representation of a scene is “the concrete or fully palpable percept” (101), and the fictive is a “less palpable percept” (101–102), for example, viewing a marquee fictively as a single light moving along a path but factively as “successive flashes along a row of lightbulbs” (99).
3 Semino compares mental spaces and possible worlds approaches to narrative analysis. Possible worlds theory treats literary worlds as combining a “text actual world” with “alternate possible worlds formulated by characters” (2003, 86–87), and is useful for literature-as-product: it can define fiction, its world structures, genres, plot development, and plot aesthetics (89). Mental space theory better registers “inferences and nuances of meaning” in language choices and patterns (89), and “provides a cognitively plausible account of text processing” (97).
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1.1.2 Discourse: Mental space networks For Fauconnier, thought and discourse unfold into partitioned networks of mental spaces, which contain simple models of situations. Types of spaces include beliefs (hopes, fears, etc.), periods of time, places, domains of activity (e.g. sports), counterfactuals, fictions, and possibilities. These are out of sync with the factual in various ways. Mental spaces are structured by frames and models, and linked to long-term knowledge, both schematic (e.g. walking along a path) and specific (e.g. a memory of a hike). We activate such memories variously for different purposes, e.g. using different grammar to report events, examine counterfactual situations, state beliefs, or discuss pictures (2007, 351). Elements in spaces get connected by mappings, especially for identity and analogy. Identity connections do not imply identical “features or properties” (352); rather, “an expression which names or describes an element in one mental space can be used to access a counterpart of that element in another mental space” (353). For example: “[1] Achilles sees a tortoise. [2] He chases it. [3] He thinks the tortoise is slow and that he will catch it. [4] But it is fast. [5] If the tortoise had been slow, Achilles would have caught it. [6] Maybe the tortoise is really a hare” (356). “Thinks” in sentence 3 sets up a belief space, and “will” creates a future (sub)space. In sentence 5, “if” creates a hypothetical space. “Maybe” in sentence 6 creates a possibility space in which the counterpart of the tortoise is a hare (356–362). Sentences 1, 2 and 4 seem factual, and 3, 5 and 6 fictional; the text as a whole could be either, depending on context.
2. Preliminaries on narrative Although the factual / fictional distinction becomes elusive when thus pressed, it is longstanding, pervasive and intuitive in Western culture, a major parameter for sorting semiotic categories and negotiating them effectively. Genre knowledge includes expectations about how a text constructs certain types of situation models, and how they relate to reality. Typically we recognize a global text-shaping factual or fictional intention, despite possibly extensive local uses of elements associated with the opposing category, and despite borderline and hybrid cases. Histories, news reports and life writing are globally presumed to be factual, whereas novels are globally assumed to be fictional; readers learn the nuances of their distinct referential profiles. Novels are complexly related to real experience, and factual narratives often follow cultural master-plots, and select and
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spin facts to serve psychological or ideological interests. Knowing the genre includes knowing how to judge its claims to fact. Supposition, metaphor, allegory, irony, and satire are associated more with the fiction pole of the opposition. But if they can also appear in factual narrative, how far do they tend to make it fictional? It seems they can all occur in factual narrative (even together) without transforming it into fiction, providing they are used in acceptable proportions and ways. In what follows, I take steps towards specifying what this means. Clearly ‘too much’ of these elements in ‘too extreme’ a form could flaunt decorum sufficiently to confuse readers about genre and intent. But even a modicum of these ingredients in the wrong places could unsettle fact/fiction assumptions – for example, if a report about a political debate was headlined ‘Virtue Defeats Vice’ (allegory) or ‘Clown Circus’ (metaphor, satire). We may sketch a few generalizations about how these categories crosscut one another in complex ways. First, suppositions are fictive, according to one main sense of the Latin root fictio: acts of pretending, supposing, hypothesizing (Schaeffer 2013, section 2.3.). Fictions (in the Handbook sense of narratives of imaginary worlds) might be regarded as greatly elaborated suppositions, but the term ‘supposition’ suggests something more small-scale, more general, and only weakly narrative. Such supposition occurs widely in both fictional and factual discourse. Both narrators and characters may frame experience suppositionally, by counterfactuals (whatifs), metaphors (suppose atoms are solar systems) and irony (suppose horses were rational). Allegory and satire refer to broader communicative-pragmatic phenomena: using a fiction to refer to a distinct system of conceptual or historical referents; and using ironic humor to attack some target. Second, all categories can exist independently of one another. Suppositions need not be metaphorical or ironic, metaphor need not extend to allegory, allegory need not be ironic, irony need not be satirical (though these are closely related). All can occur in non-narrative forms: different text types like description and argument, and genres like essays, emblems, and monuments. Third, all are transmedial: they can occur in discourse, images, image-sequences such as comics, and multimodal media such as drama and film. Even music can be ironic and satirical (Mozart’s “Musical Joke”). Fourth, different media associate these categories with narrative units at different scales. In linguistic media, we tend to associate metaphor with smaller units (we are more likely to call words and phrases metaphorical, rather than texts), and satire and allegory with larger ones, primarily whole texts, genres and modes. In visual and multimodal media, metaphor and allegory tend to appear in single, static scenes (paintings, emblems, monuments, political cartoons); and in relatively brief allegorical dramas, as in
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masques and morality plays. Allegory seems rare in image-sequences like comics, and in film (compared to drama), although metaphor is commonly employed for thematic emphasis, e.g. in titles, and significant shots or scenes (also in ‘realistic’ styles). Irony is common throughout all media at all scales, but satire appears only at the level of scene and above. 3. Fictional narrative As the terms allegory and satire primarily refer to literary texts, they are primarily found in fictional narratives, but even there they also purport to refer to fact. Consider how in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver describes the “Diversions of the Court of Lilliput”: This Diversion is only practised by those Persons who are Candidates for great Employments, and high Favour, at Court. […] [F]ive or six of those Candidates petition the Emperor to entertain his Majesty and the Court with a Dance on the Rope, and whoever jumps the highest without falling, succeeds in the Office. Very often the Chief Ministers them-selves are commanded to shew their Skill, and to convince the Emperor that they have not lost their Faculty. Flimnap, the Treasurer, is allowed to cut a Caper on the strait Rope, at least an Inch higher than any other Lord in the whole Empire. […] [T]he Danger is much greater when the Ministers themselves are commanded to shew their Dexterity; for by contending to excel themselves and their Fellows, they strain so far, that there is hardly one of them who hath not received a Fall, and some of them two or three. (2002 [1726], 31–32)
This passage can be analyzed in terms of its metaphoric, allegorical and satiric potential. Metaphors. To understand the scene, readers must grasp how it manifests several metaphors. Most basically, it manifests MIND IS BODY by representing psychosocial matters in physical terms. Central to the first two books is the mapping IMPORTANT IS BIG / TRIVIAL IS SMALL.4 And this particular scene manifests the quite specific mapping POLITICS IS COMPETITIVE PERFORMANCE, which entails that political skill is physical dexterity, and promotion is winning a competition. Allegory. Allegory arises from narrative specification of metaphors, blended in scenes that allude to contemporary politics. Thus, balancing corresponds to avoiding offense; dancing to ingratiating oneself; winning favor is achieved by higher jumps and failure to do so by falling. The Emperor corresponds to George I (ruled 1714–1727); and Flimnap is Robert Walpole, first Earl of Orford (1676–1745). 4 In CMT (conceptual metaphor theory), conceptual metaphors are designated by small capitals.
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Satire. A satiric attack targets by means of ridicule; it presents what purports to be positive as negative, by narrativizing metaphors in particular ways. Here, complex psychopolitical maneuvering is presented as simple and silly acrobatics. The general targets of the satire are political, especially court, behavior; the more specific targets George I and Walpole.
3.1 Metaphor It has long been recognized that metaphor is pervasive in language and thought. Lakoff and Johnson have developed this point extensively, influentially establishing conceptual metaphor theory (CMT).5 CMT’s rethinking of the relations between thought, language, and reality has deep implications for questions of how metaphor and fiction relate to fact and truth. In CMT, metaphor is primarily conceptual, and secondarily linguistic. A metaphor is a “mapping” of a source concept onto a target concept. The basis of metaphorical expressions like I’m at a crossroads is the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY, which maps the concept of JOURNEY onto the concept of LIFE, with goals as destinations, means as routes, difficulties as impediments, and so forth. CMT rejects the traditional theory of metaphor, according to which metaphor is applying words to things they do not normally designate, in deviant and novel ways, to express similarities, in poetry, rhetoric and science; hence conventional metaphors are ‘dead,’ part of literal meaning (Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 119). Instead, CMT proponents argue that linguistic expressions of conventional metaphors are related via conceptual basic metaphors: for instance, the conceptual metaphor LOVE AS JOURNEY appears in the expressions dead-end street, or at a crossroads. Such phrases are part of everyday language and thought, and hence these metaphors are ‘alive,’ continuing to inform (conventional as well as novel) metaphorical language (123–125). Metaphors do not simply express pre-existing similarities: mappings may ‘create’ similarity (e.g. that between love and a journey), or build on some other connection (the conceptual metaphor SEEING IS KNOWING is based on the fact that seeing causes knowing). Further, metaphors are asymmetric, unlike similarity (Love can be imaged as a Journey, but Journeys are not seen as Love). People also employ multiple inconsistent metaphors (126–127).
5 CMT principles are popular, but not uncontroversial. Recent research often seeks to test and revise CMT’s large claims by close examination of discourse corpora.
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This has far-reaching consequences for knowledge and truth. Metaphor enters into definition and understanding, and truth and action (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Chs. 19, 23, 24). The “experientialist theory of truth” reflects this situation (1980, 179–182, 192–194, Chs. 29, 30; later “embodied realism,” 1999, Chs. 6–8), with the principles that “an adequate account of meaning and truth can only be based on understanding” (1980, 184); and understanding is deeply shaped by body, brain and experience. As Lakoff and Johnson outline, other philosophical discussions of metaphor ask whether metaphorical expressions can be objectively, absolutely true, overlooking metaphor’s conceptual nature, contribution to understanding, and function in cultural reality (1980, 159). Instead, truth is relative to a conceptual system (159), “based on understanding,” and metaphor is “a principal vehicle of understanding” (160). Truth depends on what our minds project, especially human-centric categories, as in “the fog is in front of the mountain” (160). As categories “arise out of our interactions with the world,” their properties are not objective (163). Like categories, metaphors work by “highlighting certain properties, downplaying others, and hiding still others” (163). Thus, as Lakoff and Johnson show, metaphors can be true, whether they are conventional, as in “inflation has gone up,” or unconventional, as in “Life’s […] a tale told by an idiot […]” (170–175). To understand the first example as true, we “understand the situation” by viewing “inflation as a substance” and “MORE as being oriented UP,” deploy these two metaphors to understand the sentence, and thus “fit our understanding of the sentence to our understanding of the situation” (170–171): “We understand a statement as being true in a given situation when our understanding of the statement fits our understanding of the situation closely enough for our purposes” (179).6 From this perspective, Swift’s metaphors may be true, insofar as our understanding of them ‘fits’ our understanding of the political situation evoked. Swift’s metaphors highlight the trivial and ludicrous aspects of court behavior; downplay the mental aspects; and hide the serious aspects of politics. The question of ‘fit’ raises the possibility of disagreement. This might seem inappropriate for literature, but it is arguable that certain metaphoric portrayals are inaccurate or unfair (some decry Gulliver’s Travels as misanthropic). Yet if Walpole had been politically clumsy, Flimnap’s depic6 Lakoff and Johnson criticize “theories of reference in analytic philosophy” that say “the meaning of an expression determines what it refers to” (Frege) or “reference is determined causally,” by acts of referring (Kripke-Putnam) (1999, 98–99) (/ II.1 Klauk). Such accounts misstate the problem, assuming “that truth is a matter of correspondence between symbols and a mind-, brain-, and body-independent world” (1999, 99).
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tion would naturally be regarded as ironic, not false. Levels of generality complicate things further. We could reject the idea of Walpole as a peerless rope-dancer, while still endorsing the general metaphor for political maneuvering. 3.2 Allegory Literary scholars have seen allegory as a matter of language, rhetoric, narrative technique, genre, mode, and more.7 Allegory began as a form of interpretation (allegoresis), and developed into a form of composition. Etymologically, allegory means ‘speaking other’ (Gr. allos: other; agoreuein, ‘to speak in public’). This reflects the intuition that an allegory uses a narrative fiction to refer in some indirect but systematic way to another domain of reference, typically conceptual and/or historical, religious, moral, or political. Allegory is thus indirectly factual narrative. Prototypical techniques are extended metaphor (an organizing metaphor is developed with numerous sub-metaphors), especially including personification and topification (i.e., abstractions turned into characters and settings). However, close analysis of major allegories shows that allegory is rarely if ever fully systematic, consistent and explicit. It is often occasional or episodic rather than sustained (with text-flow controlled by the storyworld rather than the target domain); implicit rather than explicit (e.g. by avoiding obvious names); and elusive and inconsistent in its mappings, with manyto-many rather than one-to-one connections.8 Debates over whether Gulliver’s Travels is truly allegorical serve to illustrate the tensions between the referential and the fictional-narrative orbits of allegory. Early editions of the text pointed out important allusions, and ‘keys’ were soon published (Downie 2002 [1989], 342–343). The allusions listed above are generally accepted, as are a number of others, including 7 Indeed, analyses often combine or slip across these categories. C. S. Lewis saw allegory as “something always latent in human speech” that becomes “explicit in the structure of whole poems” (1959 [1936], 44). Quilligan says “the pun […] provides the basis for the narrative structure characteristic of the genre” (1979, 33). 8 With de Man, these qualities make allegory a post-structuralist symbol of language’s deferral of reference, with grand import for human destiny: “whereas the symbol postulates the possibility of an identity or identification, allegory designates primarily a distance in relation to its own origin, and, renouncing the nostalgia and the desire to coincide, it establishes its language in the void of this temporal difference” (1969, 207). For more recent discussion, see Copeland and Struck (emphasizing allegory’s historicity; 2011 [2010]), and Harris and Tolmie (emphasizing allegory as a pervasive mode of thought; 2011).
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the High and Low Heel factions as corresponding to the divide between the High and Low Church of Anglicanism (or the Tory and Whig parties). Disputes center on passages where the allegorical parallels are sporadic, inconsistent and at times obscure. For Downie, “narrative exigency rather than allegorical meaning” better explains some apparently significant details. Does the “ancient Temple” in which Gulliver lodges, where an “unnatural Murder” was once committed, allude to Westminster Hall, where Charles I was condemned to death (342–343)? Downie doubts the allusion exists, or has any point, and argues that a real “parallel is never developed” (343). Gulliver just needs a big building to sleep in. By contrast, the High / Low Heels passage has “clear pointers” to a “possible parallel,” for “good reasons” (344). Another issue concerns the confusing time-scale of the book. Gulliver’s first voyage occurs in 1699–1701; but the allegories evoke political events in several different periods, from 1713 to 1726. For Downie, Swift’s “method of alluding” is “not consistent” (349), and Swift provokes comparisons by “analogy: reasoning from parallel cases” (350). This is “parallel history” with only “local allegorical significance” (351 n5). Ehrenpreis disagrees with Downie. He points to early studies, which observe that the political references in the text are occasional, and not systematic (1989, 17). Ehrenpreis advocates a broader understanding of allegory (26), noting that few allegories are “consistent and clear,” and prototypical ones are similarly complex, “inconsistent, interrupted, and shifting in point of view” (23). According to Ehrenpreis, Gulliver’s Travels “invites” allegoresis, as “the facts delivered to Gulliver are so starkly condensed and so close to conspicuous episodes in English annals that the author could hardly have produced them as mere fictions” and “must have realized that readers would see parallels” (16). In general “a thread of allegory runs through the determining incidents of the story” (27). Similar views of the text somehow lead to opposing positions. Ehrenpreis reasonably bases his understanding of allegory on prototypes; Downie reasonably discriminates finer subcategories as variants of allegory. In this situation, CL-inspired models of conceptualization and discourse, as prompting but not determining interpretations, offer inviting analytical frameworks for rhetorical figuration.9 They examine how complex constructs blend multiple mappings, while maintaining flexible, multi-leveled
9 Fauconnier and Turner’s Conceptual Blending Theory developed partly to handle complex cases of metaphor and related figures, including (quasi-)allegories, such as the Grim Reaper, scenes from Dante and Shakespeare, political cartoons, and XYZ constructions like “Vanity is the quicksand of reason” (2003). Cf. Sinding (2002); Crisp (2005); Harris and Tolmie (2011).
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reference (to real-world topics, frames, fictions, and the interaction situation and discourse). Such models better accommodate Swift’s allegorical technique: we forego the expectation of ‘consistency’ for a looser kind of ‘reference.’ While building a fictional storyworld in which readers immerse, Swift both prompts and frustrates mappings to the actual world, to multiple spaces of time and place, at several levels of abstraction. The thread of allegory refers to fact, but the global narrative remains fictional. We process fictionality and factuality in parallel. Different interpretations emphasize different mapping patterns, which fit traditional categories like ‘metaphor,’ ‘allegory,’ ‘parable,’ etc. more or less well. 3.3 Irony and satire Irony and satire are closely related, and like allegory abut a cluster of neighboring concepts (e.g. parody, mockery). They have a range of tonalities, from gentle to savage (conventionally associated with Horace and Juvenal respectively). Irony is a more general phenomenon, widespread throughout human interaction, and possible in many genres, though expected in some and discouraged in others. The concept implies some distance between what is said and what is meant. A basic form is sarcasm, where what is meant is the opposite of what is said, e.g. deprecating something by praising it (nice weather when it is pouring with rain). In an influential formulation, satire is “militant irony” requiring “wit or humor founded on fantasy or a sense of the grotesque” and “an object of attack” (Frye 1971 [1957], 223–224). As ridicule, satire is potentially or even inherently offensive, as allegory and irony need not be. Satire has also been analyzed in terms of several dimensions (language; style; discourse; rhetoric; plot; fiction), because it too can appear in many levels of units, from phrases to genres, though, prototypically, it is a genre or mode. Satire adapts irony into narrative form, developing typical characters, situations, plots, and rhetoric. Satire’s ridicule takes form via certain typical strategies – often known generally as ‘reducing’ or ‘inverting.’10 In a conceptual view, the satirist frames as negative what claims to be positive, inverting the target’s conven10 See Bentley (1969) on reduction; Bakhtin (1968 [1965]) on “degradation” patterns in Rabelais and the carnival tradition; Frye (1971 [1957]) on satire’s “mythos”; Mack (1951) on rhetoric; Kernan (1965) on rhetorical figures projecting to scenes, actions and plots; Paulson (1967) and Seidel (1979) on plots; Connery and Combe (1995) for post-structuralist views; Griffin (1994) on satiric instability. For a historical survey of tones and types and purposes of satire, see Quintero (2007).
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tional metaphorical associations. Metaphors for positive / negative polarities of qualities like morality, rationality, aesthetics, and worldly power are often based on general scalar polarities in perceptual experience, such as verticality, size, gravity/levity, light/darkness, and order/disorder. Satirists link instances of these opposites in certain ways to magnify what is small, diminish what is large, raise what is low, lower what is high, etc. Persons, roles or institutions of conventionally high status (heroes, philosophers, politicians, artists, the wealthy) are presented as embodiments of folly and vice, controlled by lower-body urges, passions, vanity and pride, and stupidity, rather than the virtues and talents they lay claim to. Hence, satirists are not only seen as assailants but also analysts, cutting through screens of falsehood and hypocrisy to reveal the true ignoble drives of their victims. Narrativizing metaphors is a favorite technique of both allegory and satire (Sinding 2011) which tends to produce fantastic distortion of storyworld elements. Satire aggravates distortion to achieve an effect of the grotesque. It foregoes local commonsense factuality to frame targets absurdly. Regarding satire’s relation to fact and fiction, Swift and his contemporaries recognized a key point: discourse can simultaneously make general and particular “reflections” (Downie 2002 [1989], 338). This was (and remains) essential to satire’s capacity to win appreciation while avoiding open offense. Critics see different parts of Gulliver’s Travels as more and less particular: In some points the parallel is very closely drawn, as where the parties in the church and states are described, and the mode in which offices and marks of distinction are conferred in the Lilliputian court. The tone of the satire is there strictly personal; and the character of the Lord-treasurer Flimnap will be generally found to correspond with that which Swift wished to present of Sir Robert Walpole. (Scott 2002 [1824], 314)
Brobdingnag, however, “contains few personal or temporary allusions. There are no circumstances mentioned which have not been, more or less, common attributes of the British court for two centuries, either in reality or according to popular report, or, indeed, which may not be considered as applicable to courts in general” (315). With Book 4, “the wider sweep […] comprehends human nature in every stage and variety” (318). Note four levels of generality: the personal-particular (George I’s court); the historical (common attributes of the British court over time); the social (common attributes of all courts); the species (common attributes of humans). Scott also assumes that readers recognize the distinction between reality and presentation – that the metaphorical fiction distorts local facts to achieve a larger satirical aim. Indeed, ‘unfair’ local distortions may serve the purpose of deeper factuality, providing a more complete response to reality by vivid perception of
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normalized vice and folly as ridiculous and contemptible. This effect is unavailable to genres of professional and public life that follow conventions of objectivity, propriety, and distance. Grotesque distortion can defamiliarize, revitalizing awareness of habitually suppressed aspects of reality, and generating appropriate indignation.
4. Factual narrative Consider some key combinations of these categories with factual narratives. Metaphorical (and analogical) suppositions have an important function in reframing or changing perspective on topics, for example in political, scientific and educational discourse (Semino 2008), as when a state is likened to a ship, or an atom to a solar system. Indeed, a cross-register study found the highest percentages of metaphor in academic discourse, then news, fiction, and conversation (Steen et al. 2010, 194–201; this excludes non-narrative genres like poetry). However, metaphor need not become supposition, as metaphorical word-meanings are part of the normal lexicon, and may not even be recognized as metaphorical (e.g. the meaning of way, from ‘path’ to ‘manner-of-doing’ to ‘way-of-life’). It appears that the more elaborated a metaphor is, the more potential it has to enter into conscious supposition that X is (like) Y. Similarly, irony need not become supposition, as simple sarcasm only indicates an evaluation opposite to the stated one. But it too can extend to imagined scenarios (I hope it rains like this all month). Irony can also be effective in reframing topics, but compared to metaphor, has a less cognitive and more emotional-evaluative function. Factual narrative can certainly be ironic and satirical. Much ‘creative nonfiction’ (like memoirs or essays) takes such stances toward its topics. George Orwell’s memoiristic essays and New Journalism (for instance, Tom Wolfe) narrate factual experience with an inflection of satirical attitudes and styles, and do so to expose reprehensible folly. Devices of satirical fiction (exaggeration, supposition and the like) are aimed directly at evident factual targets. Similarly, the growing spate of talk shows satirizing the US political scene (notably Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, and spin-offs by his alumnae) frame factual narrative in a context of ironic commentary. More controversially, from the perspective of Hayden White’s view of history-writing, any representation of facts in narrative requires linguistic choices, which depend on interpretive choices, which in turn implicate large schemes of world-ordering emplotment. Thus history inevitably uses “fictions” to fit mere fact into schematic (and skewed) framings. Satire is
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one of the four major forms of White’s emplotment, exemplified by Jacob Burckhardt’s (realistically-intended) history (White 1975 [1973], Ch. 6). Perhaps surprisingly, sacred narratives can also be ironic and satirical. David Richter shows how the Bible’s book of Jonah can be read as an antiprophetic satire (2005, 285–288). This interpretation is resisted by Biblical literalists, as it seems to push the story into the orbit of fiction (subverting a genre, not representing events), and may result in calling other parts of the Bible into question. Those who read the story allegorically may also be uncomfortable with the satire classification, as the allegory (in the text, or the events) may plausibly be attributed to God, but it is harder to attribute satire to God. With scientific writing, subgenres matter. Scientific articles seem deeply anti-ironic, and satires of articles are satires, not science (compare the Sokal Hoax). Reviews may involve ironic mockery. Popular science narratives can be ironically witty. Theories of human nature as being chronically selfserving and self-deceiving also involve narratives that are structurally ironic (see Marxism, Freudianism), and post-structuralist thinkers push this quality into borderline-satirical playfulness. Jacques Derrida, for example, connects his text Glas to the genre of Menippean satire because of its parodic play with genres between philosophy and poetry (qtd. in Sherbert 1996, 197). Allegory also appears in factual narrative (personal, philosophical, historical, sacred, scientific), but rarely expands beyond local scenes of extended metaphor. Plato’s cave allegory occurs in a dialogue distinguishing scales of contemplation and faculties of the soul; Hobbes’s Body Politic allegory occurs in his account of the social contract as the origin of society. Extended factual narrative allegory might include early practices of allegoresis – allegorically interpreting major narratives, whether historical (the Bible) or mythical (e.g. the Ovid Moralisé) (Copeland and Struck 2011, 2– 6; Madsen 1994, 2–3; Teskey 2012, 38–39). Here, however, while the interpreted text is narrative, the interpretation is not. The same applies to satires of allegoresis. However, as Gordon Teskey observes, “the Medieval practice of allegorizing the Bible underlay literature, music, painting and architecture up to the 17th century” (2012, 39), much of which would be fictional allegorical interpretation of narrative-taken-for-fact. Allegory scholarship probes the tensions involved in combining factualnarrative, philosophical and fictional-narrative modes of thinking and textstructuring. Whitman (1987) charts the interplay of “interpretive” and “compositional” allegory from ancient to medieval culture. Some major factual writings have allegorical narrative frameworks in which the didactic overshadows the fictional.11 Whitman argues that Bernard Silvestris’s Cos11 See, for instance, Martianus Capella’s Marriage of Philology and Mercury, on the seven liberal arts; Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, on the Philosophy / Fortune debate.
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mographia, a twelfth-century poem about “the fashioning of rudimentary matter into an ordered world” (Whitman 1987, 220), fully integrates the two modes: “On the one hand, the author is explicating the story of creation. On the other hand, he is conducting that explication by creating an allegorical story in its own right. That is, he acts out his exegesis by the composition of allegorical agents” (220–221). In Whitman’s view, the interplay of fact and fiction in philosophy and rhetoric defines the cultural history of allegory. Factual allegory can be satirical in marginally narrative forms allowing for metaphor narrativization. Political cartoons are most relevant here, as ubiquitous commentary using personification and topification metaphor. Rolling Stone has a cover cartoon of Trump-as-tornado for Taibbi’s (2017) essay on “Trump the Destroyer,” and another of Trump-as-suicide-bomber (with his inner circle of advisers figured as dynamite sticks strapped to his vest). Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury and the British puppet show Spitting Image are extended political cartoons occasionally narrativizing metaphor, but more often their narrative and political interest is non-allegorical. Much advertising likewise provides (obviously biased) information about real products via brief fictional narratives, which may use metaphor, allegory, ironic humor, and satire. (/ II.4 Freitas) What seems almost non-existent is an extended factual narrative that is both allegorical and satirical. Art Spiegelman’s Maus, though, comes close to that format. The central allegorical conceit of depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats creates powerful irony, without confusing its status as Holocaust memoir, or turning it into a beast fable. The memoir is ironic in other ways, especially in the meta-memoir of Art’s relationship with his father Vladek (comic exasperation, sometimes dark, on both sides), and the metafictional story of Art’s ambivalent struggles with creating and publishing the memoir. But it is not satirical. Its status as fact or fiction has been extensively debated. Though the comic was marketed as a graphic novel, Spiegelman requested The New York Times reclassify it as nonfiction (Franklin 2011). There are explicit and continuous references to historical figures, settings and events. As regards the images, generally only the heads of characters are drawn in zoomorphic shape; otherwise, the images are realistically anthropomorphic (in sketchy comics style). Occasionally, the allegory is elaborated in the storyworld; for instance, Poles are presented as pigs, and when Vladek conceals his Jewish identity he wears a pig mask. However, more commonly, allegory operates via paranarrative elements. For example, the intertitle “the honeymoon” (Spiegelman 2003 [1996], part I, Ch. 2) refers both to Art’s parents’ relationship and to the early stirrings of Nazism. Spiegelman integrates these conflicting impulses of recording personal history, maximizing tellability (creating a satisfying dra-
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matic shape) and using ironic framing and metaphor to articulate the story’s emotional and thematic ramifications. Cognitive research supports a ‘fictionality’ view that sees ‘nonveridical’ meaning as natural (pervasive and easily handled): meaning is construal of the world, not objective reference, nor is it exhausted in truth conditions. If basic, even unconscious, conceptualization involves fictivity and metaphor, they are as much a part of factual as of fictional discourse, and our stereotypes of literal and factual are seriously flawed. However, further analysis is needed to parse fictionality and factuality at the level of narrative communication. To bridge these gaps, perhaps we should regard factuality (like fictionality) not as a natural default, but as a specific learned capacity and mode of discourse. Neither fictional nor factual narrative need include any of the other categories discussed; it is a surprising conclusion of this essay that factual as well as fictional narrative may include any and all of them. However, while in fictional narrative, all can be felicitously combined (as in the Swift example), their combinations in factual narrative create notable tensions. Given the foregoing arguments and examples, we can begin to answer the question raised earlier about what proportions or placements of these prototypically fiction-related categories tend to turn factual narrative to fictional. We may say that the more locally bounded and marked these categories are, the more comfortably they weave into factual narrative; whereas those that tend to diffuse, and can overtake a whole text to its boundaries, create greater disturbance with the typical strategies of factual narrative, and hence with the audience’s confidence in a global factual intention. Metaphor and supposition are the most localized (e.g. in particular words or expressions). An ironic (factual) remark, or joke, can be localized, set off from the rest of the discourse (e.g. by a change of tone, possibly signaled typographically). But irony tends to ripple out into the texture and tone of the surrounding discourse. We can say that’s a metaphor and that’s a supposition but not that’s an irony. Complementarily, it is more natural to call a text as a whole ironic or satirical, rather than metaphoric or suppositional. It is true that a factual narrative as a whole can be ironic without ceasing to be factual. Comedians (and ordinary raconteurs) may tell stories that highlight the ironic humor in factual situations, rather than ‘making’ them funny. But when irony is dedicated to ridiculing a target, it becomes satire, and satire’s norms grate against those of factual narrative. Allegory seems to straddle the border regions of both fictional/factual and local/global, because it prototypically involves a fiction whose point is to refer in a continued (indirect) way to facts, and it may occupy individual scenes or whole narratives. As for placement, interestingly, metaphor and supposition often seem to be used in prominent structural locations in
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factual as well as fictional narrative, e.g. at beginnings and ends, to introduce or summarize a view of the subject matter. But our examples suggest that they can generate a sense or suspicion of fictionality, which becomes stronger the more frequent and intense they are. Moreover, these categories seem to have a multiplier effect: the more of them used together in a narrative, the more strongly they pull it away from the orbit of fact and into the orbit of fiction. References Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. [1965] Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968. Bentley, Joseph. “Semantic Gravitation: An Essay on Satiric Reduction.” Modern Language Quarterly 30.1 (1969): 3–19. Connery, Brian A., and Kirk Combe. Theorizing Satire: Essays in Literary Criticism. New York: St. Martin’s, 1995. Copeland, Rita, and Peter T. Struck. Eds. The Cambridge Companion to Allegory. [2010] Cambridge Collections Online. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Copeland, Rita, and Peter T. Struck. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Allegory. [2010] Eds. Rita Copeland and Peter T. Struck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 1–11. Crisp, Peter. “Allegory, Blending, and Possible Situations.” Metaphor and Symbol 20.2 (2005): 115–131. Dawson, Paul. “Ten Theses against Fictionality.” Narrative 23.1 (2015): 74–100. De Man, Paul. “The Rhetoric of Temporality.” Interpretation: Theory and Practice. Ed. Charles S. Singleton. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969. 173–209. Downie, J. A. “The Political Significance of Gulliver’s Travels.” [1989] Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift. A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Albert J. Rivero. New York: Norton, 2002. 334–352. Ehrenpreis, Irvin. “The Allegory of Gulliver’s Travels.” Swift Studies 4 (1989): 13–28. Fauconnier, Gilles. “Mental Spaces.” The Oxford Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. Eds. Dirk Geeraerts and Hubert Cuyckens. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 351–376. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think. New York: Basic, 2003. Fletcher, Angus. Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964. Franklin, Ruth. “Art Spiegelman’s Genre-Defying Holocaust Work, Revisited.” https:// newrepublic.com/article/95758/art-spiegelman-metamaus-holocaust-memoir-graphicnovel. The New Republic. 5 October 2011 (20 April 2018). Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. [1957] Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971. Geeraerts, Dirk. “Introduction: A Rough Guide to Cognitive Linguistics.” Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings. Ed. Dirk Geeraerts. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006. 1–28. Griffin, Dustin H. Satire: A Critical Reintroduction. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994. Harris, Randy Allen, and Sarah Tolmie. Eds. Cognitive Allegory. Special Issue of Metaphor and Symbol 26.2 (2011). Jakobson, Roman. “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics.” [1958] Roman Jakobson: Language and Literature. Eds. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987. 62–94.
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Kernan, Alvin. The Plot of Satire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965. Lakoff, George. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic, 1999. Lewis, C. S. The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. [1936] Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959. Mack, Maynard. “The Muse of Satire.” Yale Review 41 (1951): 80–92. Madsen, Deborah. Rereading Allegory: A Narrative Approach to Genre. New York: St. Martin’s, 1994. Musolff, Andreas. Political Metaphor Analysis. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, Jim Phelan, and Richard Walsh. “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” Narrative 23.1 (2015): 61–73. Paulson, Ronald. The Fictions of Satire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967. Quilligan, Maureen. The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1979. Quintero, Ruben. Ed. A Companion to Satire: Ancient to Modern. Malden, MA: Wiley, 2007. Richter, David. “Genre, Repetition, Temporal Order: Some Aspects of Biblical Narratology.” A Companion to Narrative Theory. Eds. James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 285–298. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. “Fictional vs. Factual Narration.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. Eds. Peter Hühn et al. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/fictional-vs-factual-narration. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press, 2013 (14 April 2017). Scott, Sir Walter. “On Gulliver’s Travels.” [1824] Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift. A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Albert J. Rivero. New York: Norton, 2002. 311–319. Seidel, Michael. Satiric Inheritance: Rabelais to Sterne. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979. Semino, Elena. “Possible Worlds and Mental Spaces in Hemingway’s ‘A Very Short Story.’” Cognitive Poetics in Practice. Eds. Joanna Gavins and Gerard Steen. London: Routledge, 2003. 83–98. Semino, Elena. Metaphor in Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Sherbert, Garry. Menippean Satire and the Poetics of Wit: Ideologies of Self-Consciousness in Dunton, D’Urfey, and Sterne. New York: Peter Lang, 1996. Simpson, Paul. On the Discourse of Satire. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Sinding, Michael. “Assembling Spaces: The Conceptual Structure of Allegory.” Style 36.3 (2002): 503–523. Sinding, Michael. “Storyworld Metaphors in Swift’s Satire.” Beyond Cognitive Metaphor Theory. Ed. Monika Fludernik. New York: Routledge, 2011. 239–257. Spiegelman, Art. The Complete Maus. [1996] 2 vols. London: Penguin, 2003. Steen, Gerard J., Aletta G. Dorst, J. Berenike Herrmann, Anna A. Kaal, Tina Krennmayr and Trijntje Pasma. A Method for Linguistic Metaphor Identification. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010. Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels. [1726] A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Albert J. Rivero. New York: Norton, 2002. Taibbi, Matt. “Trump the Destroyer.” http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/ taibbi-on-trump-the-destroyer-w473144. Rolling Stone. 22 March 2017 (5 December 2017). Talmy, Leonard. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Vol. I. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.
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Teskey, Gordon. “Allegory.” The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. 4th ed. Eds. Roland Greene, Stephen Cushman, et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. 37– 40. White, Hayden. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. [1973] Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975. Whitman, Jon. Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
II. Truth and Reference: Philosophical and Linguistic Approaches
TOBIAS KLAUK
The Philosophical Perspective on Truth 1. Introduction Truth and factual texts (of which factual narration is a subset) are connected by the following tenet: (1)
Factual texts aim at truth.
At first glance, (1) makes truth look like an object to be found. We also say ‘the truth is out there’ or ‘to find the truth,’ but all these formulations are deceiving. When a journalist writes an article on the latest bombings in Syria, she is not looking for survivors, evidence and additionally some extra object called truth that could be found somewhere on the Euphrates. She is trying to cultivate true beliefs about the latest bombings. Her aim is given by (2): (2)
The contents expressed in her article are true.
So when we express (1), we really mean something like: (3)
The contents expressed in factual texts should be true.
or (4)
Factual texts aim at furthering true belief.
Notice how this does not claim that all sentences in the newspaper article should be true. Such a claim would be too strong since it does not take into account (counterfactual) examples, speaking not in propria persona (e.g. in quotation or in pretense), making assumptions for the sake of the argument, and many more cases for which we allow that sentences can be false in factual texts. Notice also that (1) is a normative claim: the contents expressed in factual texts should be true – but often they are not. There are even factual texts which do not aim at truth: propaganda and forged scientific studies are somehow defective in not aiming at truth, but that does not make them fictional.1 1 On speaking with no concern for the truth in general, see Frankfurt (2005), and Black (1983). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-012
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Setting such examples aside, (1) is more problematic for some types of factual texts than for others. In a report (e.g. the news, the weather forecast), a textbook, a research study (e.g. in sociology, history, or anthropology), aiming at truth seems to be a given, although there is a wide debate in history about whether and under which conditions history can or should aim to find out what really happened. Factual texts, however, can be very speculative; it can even be the very point of certain factual texts not to aim at truth. The role of the concept of truth in literary studies is discussed in more depth in / II.3 Mikkonen. Insofar as factual texts aim at furthering true beliefs, we need to keep two questions separate. One is the focus of philosophical truth theory: what is truth? An answer to this question will tell us if truth is a property or something else, what kinds of things can be true, whether truth is a metaphysically interesting concept, and so forth. The other question is how to justify that a belief is true, or what kind of reasons we might have for a truth claim. In almost all practical contexts including literary studies, we are interested in the justification of alleged truths, not in what truth is. The two questions are often confused, which leads to serious problems. Sentences can be true even if we do not have any clue as to whether they are true (think of mathematical conjectures), and we can have strong reasons to believe sentences which nonetheless turn out to be false. Truth and justification (i.e. reasons for holding true) are not the same!2 There are many more questions one can ask. What is the social role of truth talk? How is truth connected with other concepts like knowledge, possibility, reality, or correctness? In what sense is truth normative? I will touch upon some of these questions but will concentrate primarily on the central question ‘What is truth.’ Let us further distinguish an objectual sense of ‘is true’ from a propositional one. Compare (2), in which truth seems to be a property of content, to (5)
Neil is a true friend.
The thing that is true according to (5) is not some linguistic or mental item but a concrete object, Neil. Most philosophers take this objectual sense of ‘true’ to be philosophically uninteresting. When we claim that someone’s statement is true, we thereby say that (a) she made a statement and that (b) it was true. In (5), however, ‘true’ is not used to say that Neil is (a) a friend and (b) true. Being true in the objectual sense does not signify a distinct property but qualifies whether Neil is actually a friend. This use
2 For theories assuming a close connection between truth and justification, see section 6.
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merits no extra investigation of the concept of objectual truth since there is no such concept. We shall therefore concentrate on propositional truth. Heidegger famously claimed that propositional truth is ontologically dependent on non-propositional truth. Unfortunately, Heidegger never explained how to understand propositional truth in terms of that other phenomenon. His further claim that the non-propositional phenomenon is truth proper because of its more fundamental ontological status also lacks evidence.3 Modern truth theory can roughly be divided in three camps: deflationist, realist and anti-realist (/ II.2 Bartmann). There is no consensus regarding which of these theories has the best chances of being correct. Realists about a certain subject typically claim that (a) certain things exist and (b) that they do so in a mind-independent way. Truth realism, though, is not realism about truths: the question is not if truths exist but rather which ontological commitments a theory of truth carries. If it follows from your theory of truth that certain things exist mind-independently, then you are a realist about those things and your truth theory counts as ‘realist.’ For example, if you hold a correspondence theory of truth that implies the existence of mind-independent facts, then you hold a realist theory of truth and are a realist about facts. The connection here is so close that many philosophers equate correspondence theories with realism.4 I shall discuss realism and correspondence in section 5. Truth-theoretic realists have two modern opponents. The first are called anti-realists (to be discussed in section 6). They typically do not attack the existence condition but the independence condition of realism. That is only appropriate, since weaker forms of realism remain silent on the existence condition altogether: [Alethic realism’s] one and only contention is this: some true propositions which human beings are able to comprehend can never be contents of any justified human beliefs. Truth, alethic realists contend, outruns rational acceptability; it is not epistemically constrained. (Künne 2003, 20; emphasis original)
The second opponents of realists are deflationists, who typically share three ideas. Firstly, they subscribe to some kind of equivalence schema (like ‘p 3 See Heidegger (1927, § 44). Künne (2003, 104–107) sheds some light on the historical roots of the idea of non-propositional truth while pointing out the shortcomings of the idea. White (1957) concentrates on the appraisal aspect of objectual truth and tries to transfer that idea to propositional truth, thereby giving a variant of Strawson’s account, which I discuss in section 2. 4 There can be correspondence without realism if the independence condition does not hold. See the revealing quotes by James and Dewey (who are anything but realists) in Künne (2003, 171–172).
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is true if and only if p’), with sentences containing ‘true’ on one side of the equation. Secondly, for them, understanding ‘is true’ involves only understanding the relevant equivalence schema. And thirdly, understanding the meaning of ‘is true’ for them is sufficient for understanding the nature of truth (compare Burgess and Burgess 2011, 33–34; see also Rami 2009a). Therefore these truth theories carry little or no ontological commitment, which sets them apart from realists and anti-realists alike. Deflationism itself is split into two large groups, the first of which denies that truth is a property.5 This strong deflationism is the topic of section 2, while moderate deflationism is the topic of section 4. 2. Strong deflationism Imagine someone trying to convince you that Peter went to Madrid. It matters little if she says (6)
Peter went to Madrid.
or (7)
It is true that Peter went to Madrid.
The addition ‘it is true that’ surely adds emphasis to (6), but we might think that it adds nothing to the content of (6). Strong deflationism is a radical way of taking this idea seriously: (7) does not ascribe the property of being true to (6)! Notice that the concept of a property is itself contested in philosophy. To get some sense of the problems involved, ask yourself if the following predicate denotes a property: ‘is either a planet or green or sounds beautiful.’ In some sense, it does: anything which fulfils one of the three conditions will have the disjunctive property. However, one might very well think that the job of our property-talk is to sort things in convincing ways. One might feel that planets and green and beautifully sounding objects are not similar in the relevant sense. We do not have to decide between the different notions of ‘property,’ but we need to understand that in spelling out strong deflationism via property talk, the claim is that truth is not even a property in the same sense as is the disjunctive property. If ‘is true’ does not ascribe a property, what then is its semantic role in (7)? Types of strong deflationism differ in their answers to this question.
5 Other labels for strong deflationism are “nihilism” (Künne 2003, 19–20) and, confusingly, simply ‘deflationism.’
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Ramsey’s (1927) answer is that (6) and (7) express the very same proposition – they mean the same thing, and any difference between them is merely stylistic. Therefore, Ramsey holds that the truth predicate is redundant, thus the name of his theory: redundancy theory of truth. The question is, however, if truth cannot only be eliminated from (7) but from any English sentence. Blind ascriptions, i.e. taking something as true without knowing what exactly was said, turn out to be difficult: (8)
If Susan says something, it is true.
Ramsey tries to eliminate ‘is true’ from (8) by first writing it in symbolical notation: (9)
cp (Susan says p / p is true)6
This allows him to eliminate ‘is true’: (10)
cp (Susan says p / p)
Unfortunately, translating (10) back into English produces nonsense: (11)
If Susan says something, then it.
The problem is that ‘if...then...’ demands sentences while ‘for any’ demands a noun. Ramsey thought the problem was the English language, not his theory, and proposed to supplement English with quantifiers that allow for the quantification of sentence positions. But not only does Ramsey need to show that we can understand those quantifiers without first understanding ‘true,’ he also has not shown that ‘true’ is eliminable from English as it is. By contrast, Strawson (1950) claims that by uttering (7), a speaker endorses (6), for instance by saying ‘That’s what I think’ or ‘Exactly.’ So Strawson does not think (as Ramsey does) that by uttering (7) one says the same as by uttering (6). Rather, it is the case that one does something to (6), namely endorse it. This view is called the performative theory of truth in allusion to Austin (1962), whose How to Do Things with Words has given rise to the label performative. Strawson does not want to eliminate occurrences of ‘is true’ from sentences, so his theory does not fall prey to Ramsey’s problem, but there are other problems. Let us look at (12): (12)
I don’t know which percentage of things Berlusconi said in his last speech were true, but I suspect it’s well under fifty. (Burgess and Burgess 2011, 39)
6 Read: ‘For all p, if Susan says p, then p is true.’ For the following, see Burgess and Burgess 2011, 37.
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Trying to find something that we do by using “true” in (12) is hopeless. What is more, speech act theory recognizes the possibility of indirect speech acts, for instance making the request to close a window by asserting that the window is open, meaning it might be possible to embrace (6) by asserting (7). While Strawson’s theory will therefore not do as a theory of truth, it might well be combinable with other accounts. The performative point of truth talk often lies in endorsing statements. A third type of strong deflationism and the one that still has adherents today, gets inspiration from anaphoric pronouns like ‘he,’ ‘she,’ and ‘it,’ which make possible references to objects which were mentioned before. Grover et al. claim that ‘that’s true’ or ‘it is true’ are prosentences, which work analogously to pronouns (Grover, Camp and Belnap 1972, see also Grover 1992). Any occurrence of ‘true’ allegedly can be translated into them. However, compare (13) and (14): (13)
You heard what Peter said. It is justified and it is true.
(14)
You heard what Peter said. It is justified and true.
Since (13) and (14) are synonymous, the anaphoric expression can only be ‘it,’ while ‘is true’ is a predicate – contrary to the prosententialists’ idea that ‘it is true’ as a whole is anaphoric.7 Also, how do we translate blind truth ascriptions? Imagine not understanding Latin and uttering (15)
Factum fieri infectum non potest is true.
Grover at al. might construe (15) as a generalization: (16)
Whatever Factum fieri infectum non potest says, it is true.
It is at least doubtful, however, whether that is what (15) means.8 In any case, Grover’s prosententialism has the counterintuitive consequence that ‘is true’ is not a meaningful component of sentences in itself. It works rather like “soever” in “whatsoever” (Burgess and Burgess 2011, 40). Robert Brandom’s neoprosententialism evades these consequences by understanding ‘is true’ as a prosentence-forming operator (Brandom 2005). Added to phrases like ‘What Susan said’ or ‘Factum fieri infectum non potest ’ that denote a sentence, it forms a sentence that expresses the same proposition as the original sentence that Susan uttered. Nonetheless, neoprosen-
7 See, e.g. Rami (2009a, 87). Grover (1992) acknowledges as much, but wants to hold that ‘it is true’ is an anaphoric expression containing another anaphoric expression. However, no other anaphoric expression behaves that way. 8 Other paraphrases of (15) are also problematic. See, e.g. Künne (2003, 82–84).
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tentialism is also faced with at least two problems. Given that Fermat’s theorem is the most famous conjecture in number theory, on a neoprosententialist reading Fermat’s theorem should have the same content as (17)
The most famous conjecture in number theory is true. (Burgess and Burgess 2011, 41)
But (17) obviously does not have the same content as Fermat’s theorem. What is more, Brandom loses the motivation with which the prosententialism originally started, namely the analogy with pronouns. His prosentences behave quite differently. 3. Interlude: Truthbearers Turning away from strong deflationism, and thereby understanding truth as a property, we encounter a new question: of truth is a property, then what is it a property of? In the parlance of truth theorists, what are the truthbearers? In ordinary speech, we ascribe truth to beliefs, assertions, sentences, propositions, and many more. Are any of these the primary truthbearers on which the others depend? Early truth theories are often formulated in terms of beliefs. It seems, however, that (18)
There are 7 million trees in the Amazon basin.
can be true or false without anyone ever thinking about the number of trees in the Amazon basin. This kind of consideration speaks strongly against beliefs or assertions as primary truthbearers. Notice that talk of ‘belief’ as well as ‘assertion’ has an act-reading and a content-reading. The act of believing or asserting something is at most derivatively true (if the content of the belief is true). Moreover, the content seems to be something that can be shared by beliefs, assertions, and sentences alike. It is perfectly okay to say that (19)
Liz asserted what Susan believed.
or (20)
The sentence expresses what Susan believes.
According to one popular understanding of propositions they are just such contents of beliefs, utterances and the like. That is why propositions are one of the two major candidates for primary truthbearers. A sentence then is true insofar as it expresses a true proposition. Taking propositions to be the primary truthbearers has some nice benefits: since a proposition
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can be expressed in different languages, its truth value is independent of the language in which it is expressed. Two plus two is four expresses the same proposition as Zwei plus zwei ist vier. A further benefit is that we do not have to worry about indexicals. ‘You are angry,’ uttered by Susan can express the same proposition as ‘I am angry,’ uttered by Fran. However, propositions do come at a price. Introducing propositions as contents seems unproblematic enough, but following Quine, many philosophers worried about their ontological status. The sentence (21)
Fran is angry.
is about Fran being angry but expresses something else, namely the proposition that Fran is angry. That might seem unnecessarily complicated. What is more, we can start to ask unpleasant questions. Are propositions structured like sentences? And if so, what are their constituents? Russell thought that Fran herself and the property of being angry are constituents of the proposition that (21) expresses. Alternatively, we might think that the proposition is constituted by the meanings of the words. In the end, spelling out the constituents of propositions and what makes them hold together turns out to be a rather tricky business. One can evade such pitfalls by taking sentences to be the primary truthbearers. We need to be precise, however. Imagine Neil meeting Mark, and they both say (22)
Nice to meet you.
How many sentences have been uttered? Neil and Mark have uttered one sentence type, but two sentence tokens. Or take: (23)
Fran went to the bank.
In reading (23), one reads one orthographic token, but two semantic tokens, the first of which includes just the sequence of letters on paper, the second the disambiguated sequence (bank as riverbank or as financial institute). Since we are looking for primary truthbearers, it is desirable to have truthbearers which have the property of being true or false unconditionally. Since orthographic types and tokens can change truth values depending on what is meant (see (23)), they drop out of the race. With similar considerations, we can sort out semantic types. Consider the semantic type (24)
I like Fran.
It will be true if the speaker is someone who likes Fran and false if not: truth value of (24) changes with speaker. That means a sentence can only be a bearer of a fixed truth value if we understand sentences as semantic tokens. As with propositions, this choice comes at a price. A sentence is
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always a sentence in a specific language, and it is no longer as easy to move from one language to the next. We can no longer say that sentence p in language (A) expresses the same proposition as sentence q in language (B). Also one might wonder whether some of the problems with propositions are introduced by the back door on account of the necessity to disambiguate. The reasons for disambiguating the two versions of the word ‘bank’ seem to lie in their meaning. The quarrel between defenders of propositions and sentences as the primary bearers of truth is as yet unresolved and cuts across the other issues discussed here. 4. Moderate Deflationism Moderate deflationism gives up the idea that truth is not a property while refraining from the ontological commitments of realism and anti-realism. The two most famous moderate deflationisms are disquotationalism and minimalism. Disquotationalism is characterized by two main claims. The first of these is Quine’s slogan, “The truth predicate is a device of disquotation” (Quine 1970, 12). Quoting a sentence turns it into a noun (the technical term is ‘semantic ascent’) while adding ‘is true’ to that phrase yields a sentence equivalent to the original sentence.9 The second claim of disquotationalism concerns the function of truth talk: by moving from ‘Snow is white’ to ‘‘Snow is white’ is true’ we can speak about words instead of the things themselves. This allows us to quantify over the noun-like objects and thereby enriches our expressive resources. Imagine that we want to agree to all sentences of the form ‘If p, then p.’ Without the truth predicate we would have to list all these sentences and agree with them individually – an impossible task for limited beings like us. The truth predicate allows us to declare agreement or dissent in a simple sentence: all sentences of the form ‘If p, then p’ are true. The idea that this sums up the function of truth talk is shared widely beyond disquotationalism.10 Since disquotationalism takes sentences to be the primary truthbearers, it has to come up with special explanations of inter-language truth ascriptions. Thinking about such translations, especially in cases where there is no established way of translation – e.g. with Martians or a foreign tribe (Quine calls this “radical translation” [1960, 28]) – is an important part of
9 For tricky details, see Rami (2009a, 120–121). 10 See Rami (2009a) for problems of the idea.
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Quine’s program but would lead us too far from our subject. Instead, I shall point to a problem concerning the first central claim. Quine claims that the sentences ‘p’ and ‘‘p’ is true ’ are equivalent, but what does that mean? If it means that both sentences are cognitively equivalent, then one could not believe what one sentence expresses without also believing what the other expresses. A non-native speaker, if she does not know what the English word ‘true’ means, might understand and believe the first but not the second sentence. So ‘equivalence’ has to be understood differently. It is, however, not enough to claim that ‘p’ is true if and only if p, for all instances of p. While this claim is true (problems with paradoxes aside), it does not give us a theory of truth. For now we have explained truth in terms of equivalence, and equivalence in terms of truth. Disquotationalists will have to find a different way to support the equivalence claim.11 Probably the most discussed deflationist position in the last 25 years has been Horwich’s so-called minimalism. Horwich’s conception of truth actually has five parts, of which I will only mention two, the theory of truth itself and the theory of what it is for someone to understand the word ‘true.’12 Horwich’s contribution to the debate goes beyond his own conception of truth in that he tries to spell out clear criteria for what a successful theory of truth would have to accomplish. A theory of truth, says Horwich, should “specify the explanatory fundamental facts about truth” (Horwich 1998, 37). According to him, a theory of truth is adequate if all true sentences (or propositions) about truth which can be formulated solely by using the truth predicate follow from the truth theory (in combination with other theories, which can be formulated without the truth predicate). Horwich’s theory takes axiomatic form. Its axioms are all (nonparadoxical) sentences or propositions which are instances of the equivalence schema (ES): (ES )
The proposition that p is true if and only if, p.13
11 For modern proponents of disquotational theories, see, e.g., Leeds (1995), Field (2001), Williams (1999). 12 See Horwich (1998, 36). Horwich later tried to defend a position that does not include the theory of truth proper, see Horwich (2001). However, if that conception can really do without the theory of truth is doubtful, see Rami (2009a, 200–202). 13 There is a second, more problematic way to specify the axioms, see, e.g. Künne (2003, 322–323). Also, using (ES) to specify the axioms is not as straightforward as might seem. In the first instance, it allows for substituting ‘p’ with English sentences. But that is not enough since we cannot express all possible propositions in contemporary English (think e.g. of future theories including concepts we do not have yet). See Horwich (1998, 19).
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According to Horwich, we understand the word ‘true’ if we have the disposition to accept any instance of (ES) which we recognize. Now one question for Horwich’s conception is whether in fact all fundamental truths about truth can be derived from the axioms. Predicative and attributive uses of ‘true’ are systematically connected: (PAT ) x is a true belief if and only if x is a belief and x is true. As simple as (PAT) looks, Horwich has problems deriving it from the axioms of truth. And that means that his theory would fail its own standards of adequacy.14 However, the most pressing problems for minimalism may stem from some impending paradox. Deflationism centrally relies on some kind of equivalence schema like (ES), which can be shown to lead into paradox. This is a problem not only for deflationism, since almost all truth theories subscribe to some such schema. Paradoxes have been the driving force behind most of the more technical work on truth. Reviewing that work goes well beyond an introductory article, but I want to stress the importance of these considerations. Every theory of truth relying on the schemas has to include some idea of how to avoid the paradoxes (or why it is no problem to embrace them). Truth theory needs to confront these paradoxes. Opinion on how to do that is divided.15 Despite its problems, moderate deflationism is one of the main modern contenders for a theory of truth. Its attractiveness will become clearer once we have looked at its main rivals, realism and anti-realism. 5. Realism and correspondence One might feel that deflationism, for all its important insights, cannot account for the most important aspect of truth, the correspondence intuition: (CI)
Whenever a sentence or proposition is true, there is a certain part of the world which is responsible for its truth.
The responsibility does not work in the other direction: snow is not white because it is true that snow is white. In contrast, any deflationist equivalence principle will always be symmetric. Therefore, realists about truth claim, deflationism is inadequate. 14 There is still room for argument and finesse here, but similar problems can be construed for general truths like “Every provable proposition is true,” the noun “truth” or complex phrases like “to accept as true” (Rami 2009a, 221–232, 258–261). 15 Good places to start reading on the paradoxes are Tarski (1983 [1935]), Kripke (1975), or Burgess and Burgess (2011) with further literature.
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Deflationists will counter this argument by saying that it falsely assumes that symmetric principles cannot justify and explain asymmetries. However, there are examples for this. A symmetric principle like ‘A woman is a widow if and only if her husband is dead’ can justify and explain asymmetries in colloquial language: if a woman’s husband is dead, that makes her a widow, but that she is a widow does not make her husband dead. Similarly, says the deflationist, if snow is white, that makes “snow is white” true, but the truth of the proposition does not make snow white (Burgess and Burgess 2011, 69). Correspondence theorists claim that the asymmetry they have in mind is not of this trivial kind but metaphysically important. Deflationists either deny that such an asymmetry exists, or alternatively, claim that the important asymmetries are real enough but have nothing to do with truth after all. In any case, it is no easy task to turn (CI) into a full-blown theory because on one hand, such theories often make implausibly strong assumptions while on the other hand, sloppy formulation results in triviality: (25)
If a sentence is true, it corresponds to the facts.
(25) is a truth, but one most deflationists would light-heartedly subscribe to.16 It therefore does not quite capture the spirit of the correspondence theory, despite assurances of many correspondence theorists who time and again have expressed the idea that correspondence is just a triviality.17 Compare (26)
Ben fell into the swimming pool.
with (27)
Ben fell into oblivion.18
If (26) is true, then there is something Ben fell into. Not so for (27), from which it only follows that no one thought of Ben any more. Only if one thinks that from (25) it follows that there is something a true sentence corresponds to, is one a correspondence theorist. Deflationists, on the other hand, will interpret (25) along the lines of (27).19
16 The same goes for anti-realists. Wright calls (25) the “correspondence platitude” (1992, 25). 17 See e.g. Kirkham (1992, 135–136). 18 The Ben examples are Künne’s. See Künne (2003, 93–94). 19 But see Hill (2001) for an attempt to combine deflationism and the correspondence intuition.
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A correspondence theory is more than a deflationist account; it understands truth as a relational property. The thesis is that we have one relatum, a truthbearer, and a second, different relatum, the truthmaker, typically some well-defined part of the world, which is said to be responsible for the truth of the truthbearer. The truthbearer is true if and only if it stands in the right type of relation to the truthmaker. Different correspondence theories differ in their choice of truthbearer, relation and truthmaker. Most philosophers before the twentieth century took spatio-temporal objects (like churches, trees, or persons) to be truthmakers. The main problem with such accounts is to provide acceptable analysis of sentences which do not simply ascribe a property to an object. In the twentieth century, the most prominent choice for the role of truthmakers was facts (/ II.2 Bartmann).20 The most important distinction in the correspondence camp is that between correspondence as congruence and correspondence as correlation (Kirkham 1992, 119). Congruence theories think of truthbearers and truthmakers as complex entities. A truthbearer is true if and only if it somehow mirrors the structure of the truthmaker, the fact. Consider a simple example: (28)
Fran’s hair is black.
We can analyse (28) as having two components, one the singular term ‘Fran’s hair’ which refers to an object, namely Fran’s hair, the other the predicate ‘is black’ which ascribes a property to the object, namely being black. The corresponding fact consists of Fran’s hair and the property of being black. Just as the proposition is composed of two elements, so is the fact. More complex examples work analogously. This model is, however, deeply problematic. Fran’s hair and the property of being black can exist without Fran’s hair having the property (it is Liz’ hair which is black, Fran is blond). So the existence of the components is not enough for (28) to be true. Adding some relation like instantiation ([28] is true if and only if Fran’s hair instantiates the property of being black) seems to make instantiation a further element of the fact. But then we can ask what glues together object, property, and instantiation (Lewis 1998)! Even worse, the structural similarity idea cannot deal with sentences about objects at different times: (29)
Socrates lived long before Wittgenstein. (Künne 2003, 122)
20 See Künne (2003, 94–112, 145–148) for an elaborate discussion of object and event correspondence.
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If a fact contains objects and these are bound to some point in time (as humans, sadly, are), then the fact can exist at time t only if all his components exist at time t. Since there is no point in time when Wittgenstein and Socrates were both alive, there is no point in time when a fact that contains both could hold, yet there can be no doubt that (29) is true. Finally, congruence theory has problems with negative existentials like (30)
Unicorns do not exist.
What is the structured complex that supposedly corresponds to (30)? Do Unicorns have the property of non-existence? Most philosophers are wary of understanding non-existence as a property.21 But it seems equally inadequate to take the whole world as our object and absence of unicorns as a property of it.22 In light of these difficulties, the second type of correspondence theory seems considerably more attractive. Correlation theories can operate with a lightweight notion of facts.23 Therefore they have no problem with tensed sentences, negative existentials and the question of what glues objects and properties together to produce facts. Correlation theories propose little more than that a certain fact has to hold for the corresponding truthbearer to be true, e.g.: (31)
The proposition that snow is white is true if and only if the fact holds that snow is white.
Notice, however, how very much (31) sounds like an equivalence schema! For correspondence as correlation the central question is if it adds anything other than rhetoric to deflationism. As long as we do not subscribe to a heavyweight notion of fact, it seems to be the case that ‘the fact that snow is white holds,’ or that ‘snow is actually white,’ or that ‘the fact that snow is white exists,’ and so forth, are merely stylistic variants of saying that snow is white. There does not seem to be any special relation over and above that of the sentence describing the world in a certain way. Correspondence theorists would often agree with this argument. The question is if they can do so without collapsing their theory into some kind of deflationism. If the world is the way a proposition says it is, the proposition is true, and deflationists want to say as much. If a correspondence theory of truth is
21 Meinongians beg to differ. For a modern version, see e.g. Priest (2005). 22 Russell (1956 [1918]) and Wittgenstein (1961 [1921]) anticipated many of these problems and have tried to evade at least some of them, although to my mind not very convincingly. 23 Classical formulations can be found in Moore (1910) and Austin (1950).
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to be successful, it needs to sail between the Scylla of making implausible assumptions about the role of facts and the Charybdis of saying no more than a moderate deflationist would. Stepping back and looking at correspondence theories in general, let us dwell one more time on the correspondence intuition (CI), which motivated the whole endeavor. There are sentences (like logical truths and negative existentials) for which it does not have the same force as for other sentences. Logical truths, for example, are true no matter what the case is in the world. Why should there be some fact that makes them true? Sidestepping these difficulties for the moment, the idea motivating the correspondence theory was that there is something in the spatiotemporal world that is responsible for truth and falsity. Strawson (1950) asks the embarrassing question whether or not facts are even good candidates to play that role. Pretheoretically, the elements of the spatiotemporal world seem to be objects, properties, or events. Facts, on the other hand, are abstract entities, which are not spatiotemporally locatable. If this is correct, then choosing facts as truthmakers will do nothing to satisfy the correspondence intuition. The early Wittgenstein identified this problem, which is why he famously claimed that the world is not the totality of things but of facts (Wittgenstein 1961 [1921]). The question remains why that should be the case. Russell, on the other hand, leans toward using the word ‘facts’ for events: “If I say ‘Socrates is dead,’ my statement will be true owing to a certain physiological occurrence which happened in Athens long ago” (Russell 1956 [1918], 182). However, the physiological occurrence is not a fact, but an event, and event-based correspondence has its own serious problems.24 Finally, we can ask whether (CI) is about truth at all. Assume for a moment that we spell out (CI) as a truthmaker principle (TMP): (TMP ) Whenever p is true, there is some x such that x makes p true, and that one can find adequate truthmakers for each and every truth. The word ‘true’ appears on both sides of (TMP). However, it is actually eliminable from (TMP): (TMP- ) If p, then for some x, the existence or occurrence of x (topicspecifically) ensures that p.25
24 See Künne (2003, 145–148). 25 This version of deflating (TMP) is Künne’s (2003, 164). The point is usually attributed to Lewis (2001, 278–279), but has been made before, see Bigelow (1988, 127), and Fox (1987, 189).
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(TMP-) still expresses the correspondence intuition, but is no longer about truth. This insight is a shiny feather in the cap of the opponents of correspondence theories of truth.26 6. Anti-realism Anti-realists posit that truth is somehow epistemically restrained. Antirealist positions from the nineteenth and early twentieth century like idealism, coherentism or pragmatism tend to be as radical as they are implausible. For example, Bradley’s coherentism claims, in a slogan, that p is true if and only if p belongs to a maximally coherent set of beliefs. Ignore for the moment the problems of taking beliefs as primary truthbearers and ask what the coherence condition implies. To be coherent, a set of beliefs has to be at least consistent, i.e. it cannot contain a belief and its negation. It is, however, easy to show that there can be consistent sets of belief of which at least one must contain a false belief (Schlick 1979 [1934], 376).27 Therefore, coherence has to be more than consistency. Adherents of coherence theories of truth have seen as much and have proposed further conditions that a coherent set has to fulfil. Unfortunately, there are counterexamples to all of these proposals, and over time people have given up on trying to find ever new conditions (Künne 2003, 381–393). Or take Pierce’s version of pragmatism, which claims that p is true if and only if all investigators would finally share the belief that p if only they kept up their research long enough: science converges on truth. There are many beliefs for which this is wildly implausible. How often did Dinosaur Donny (whose skeleton has been found) drink water exactly today 67 million years ago? There is a definitive answer, but since there is no evidence left, there is no reason to assume that science will ever settle on an 26 Truthmaker theory is still interesting independently of its contribution to truth theory. For an introduction, see Rami (2009b). 27 Imagine, for example, that our old belief set includes the beliefs [P] and [P / ¬ Q]. We now acquire the new belief [Q]. We cannot just add this belief to our old beliefs, since the set {[P], [P / ¬ Q], [Q], …} is inconsistent. Instead there are three possible ways of dealing with the situation in order to keep the set of our beliefs consistent. We can reject the new belief [Q] after all, we can reject [P / ¬ Q], or we can reject [P]. If we now look at the resulting belief sets for the last two options, we have: (New 1) {[P], [Q], …} and (New 2) {[P / ¬ Q], [Q], …}. Both sets are consistent, but at least one of them contains a false belief. (The example is Künne’s. See Künne 2003, 382).
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answer. Also, how long is long enough? Scientists might agree on an answer which later turns out to be wrong. One gets the nagging feeling that for pragmatism ‘long enough’ means: until the truth is found – making the theory essentially circular. Modern variants of Pierce’s theory, like Habermas’s consensus theory of truth (Habermas 1973), fall prey to very similar arguments, which is why Habermas has ended up discarding his theory (Habermas 1999). Even more radical are relativist positions like those of Foucault, Rorty, Nietzsche and others. Such accounts claim that truth is always a question of power, the society you live in, the discipline you work in, your conceptual scheme, or your language.28 The motivation behind such views is understandable. First, often what is presented as the truth by authorities of all sorts is not at all the truth: the more emphasis somebody puts on being in possession of the one and only truth, or claims that everybody who holds a different opinion is lying, the more alert we should become to question that thesis. Secondly, people have personal or political interests that can interfere with their truthfulness and with their determination to seek the truth, an observation that proves to be equally apposite for everyday investigations as for the endeavors of judges, scientists, and literary critics. Thirdly, disparate backgrounds, different ways of thinking about the world, and distinct languages can all produce further differences in opinion about the world. Fourthly, it may be difficult if not impossible to find the truth; thus, many questions will never be decided (that was the argument against Pierce’s theory above). However, such difficulties in finding the truth, in staying with the truth and in resisting those who deliberately try to fool us, do not add up to the idea that truth is relative, i.e. that sentences or propositions are not true or false simpliciter but only true relative to some social group (e.g. experts or authorities), language, or conceptual scheme.29 What is more, the idea of truth relativism is beset with particularly grave problems. The most obvious of these is the circularity objection: is truth relativism itself a true claim? Relativists cannot just say yes, since they deny that sentences can be universally true. They will have to say that their truth theory is true only according to their own standards. (Some relativist positions fail even this criterion. For example, the idea that a sentence is true
28 For an introduction that takes such ideas as seriously as possible without succumbing to them, see Engel (2002). 29 Do not confuse this kind of truth relativism with the extreme but respectable claim that goes by the same name. That truth relativism proposes that different contexts call for different analyses of ‘true.’ Locus classicus is Wright (1992).
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if the majority of experts on its subject say that it is, is self-defeating, according to its own standards: most experts on the subject think that this thesis is wrong.) But this raises the question why we should prefer the weak relativist standards to our own, according to which there is nonrelativist truth. The relativist owes us an argument as well as an answer to the question what she is arguing for when trying to convince us if not the absolute truth of truth relativism. Another objection concerns the often implausible implications of truth relativism. No plausible theory should imply that the falsehood of propositions like Belgium started World War One hinges on which language you speak or your conceptual scheme or on being part of some social group. Despite such overwhelming difficulties, in literary studies truth relativism is a common position. However, the appeal of relativism mostly stems from two sources of confusion. As mentioned in the introductory section above, the question of what truth is is often mistaken for the question of what reasons we have for our truth claims. And differences in opinion are often mistakenly treated as a diversity of truths. However, ‘That is your truth, but I have mine,’ should not be interpreted as an argument for truth relativism. It simply means, ‘That is your opinion, but I have mine.’ Modern anti-realism nearer to the mainstream is far more cautious in its formulations. Dummett, who coined the term, has the idea that every truth can, in principle, be the content of a justified human belief. It should not come as a surprise that Dummett’s position is actually much more complicated. Dummett’s discussion with Davidson on truth and meaning has dominated truth debate for a long time. Davidson takes truth to be primitive and unanalyzable but wants to use elements from Tarski’s truth theory in order to do (truth-conditional) semantics. In short, the meaning of a sentence is given by its truth conditions. Dummett, on the other hand, is driven by the question of what grasping truth conditions (for example for tacit knowledge) could possibly consist of. As an alternative, he proposes that meaning is essentially determined by verification conditions. For lack of space, I cannot discuss this debate in these pages. However, I would like to mention one other anti-realist position. At least between 1981 and 1992, Hilary Putnam held a position called internal realism. Despite its name, this is an anti-realist position in the sense that it denies alethic realism (see the quote by Künne in section 1). It holds that x is true if and only if it would be rational to accept x provided the epistemic conditions are good enough. While this may sound like equating truth with rational acceptability, Putnam opposes such a simple equation. One reason for this is that justification can change over time but truth does not. Consider the claim that
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the earth is flat. It was rationally acceptable 3000 years ago but not today, but we do not want to say that it was true 3000 years ago but not today. By 1992, Putnam gave up his internal realism for reasons that pose a problem for any anti-realist position. He came up with the idea of possible truths for which we will never have justification. Putnam’s example is (32)
There is no intelligent extra-terrestrial life.
Suppose that (32) is true, but not because extra-terrestrial life is impossible but, so to speak, due to an accident of nature. Since the universe is simply too big to ever scan completely, we would not have conclusive reasons to believe (32), although, qua assumption, that proposition happens to be true. (32) would therefore be an example of a sentence that is true but not rationally acceptable. The obvious anti-realist reply is that there might be no actual examples of such sentences, but Künne (2003, 437–443) further strengthens this argument by proposing that actually true sentences can be shown not to be rationally acceptable. This poses a serious problem for any anti-realist position. Anti-realists are typically motivated by their dissatisfaction with deflationary and realist positions. Realist positions often make unreasonably strong assumptions, and anti-realism is a way of avoiding these.30 I have already mentioned the longstanding debate between Davidson, who takes truth to be a primitive, and the anti-realist Dummett. One anti-realist argument that is directed against deflationism and realism alike is that these positions cannot account for the norm of truth (Dummett 1959, Wright 1999). Truth, says Dummett, is a norm of assertion; it is the pragmatic point of engaging in assertion. An assertion which is not true is open to criticism, yet neither realism nor deflationism can explain why truth is a norm of assertion. Thus, Horwich, for example, cannot deduce the norm from the axioms. Correspondence also does not explain why we criticize speakers whose assertions fail to exhibit that correspondence. The argument, however, is not as strong as it might seem: “Being 94 feet long remains a neutral, value-free notion even though it is taken as the norm for courts in professional basketball” (Burgess and Burgess 2011, 80). For truth to be intrinsically normative, being a norm of assertion must be part of the very meaning of ‘true.’ As it stands, however, the norm seems to presuppose the concept of truth instead of being a part of it.31 This brings us full circle to (1) (‘Factual texts aim at truth’). That factual texts aim at
30 See, e.g., Putnam (1981), and the discussion in / II.2 Bartmann. 31 Such considerations might not solve the problem for Horwich’s version of deflationism. The norm should still be inferable from the axioms (plus other theories).
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truth is a consequence of truth being treated as normative. Unfortunately, this fact alone does not settle the debate between realism, anti-realism and deflationism. References Austin, John Langshaw. “Truth.” Philosophical Papers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950. 117–133. Austin, John Langshaw. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Bigelow, John. The Reality of Numbers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988. Black, Max. “The Prevalence of Humbug.” The Prevalence of Humbug and Other Essays. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983. 115–146. Brandom, Robert. “Expressive versus Explanatory Deflationism about Truth.” Deflationary Truth. Eds. Bradley P. Armour-Garb and J. C. Beall. Peru, IL: Open Court, 2005. 237– 257. Burgess, Alexis G., and John P. Burgess. Truth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Dummett, Michael. “Truth.” Truth and other Enigmas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959. 1–24. Engel, Pascal. Truth. Chesham: Acumen, 2002. Field, Hartry. Truth and the Absence of Fact. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Fox, John. “Truthmaker.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 65.2 (1987): 188–207. Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. Grover, Dorothy. A Prosentential Theory of Truth. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Grover, Dorothy, J. L. Camp, and Nuel Belnap. “A Prosentential Theory of Truth.” Philosophical Studies 27.2 (1972): 73–124. Habermas, Jürgen. “Wahrheitstheorien.” J. Habermas: Vorstudien und Ergänzungen zur Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1973. 127–183. Habermas, Jürgen. “Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung.” J. Habermas: Wahrheit und Rechtfertigung. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1999. 230–270. Heidegger, Martin. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1927. Hill, Christopher. “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: Reconciling Deflationary Semantics with Correspondence Intuitions.” Philosophical Studies 104.3 (2001): 291–321. Horwich, Paul. Truth. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Horwich, Paul. “A Defense of Minimalism.” Synthese 126 (2001): 149–165. Kirkham, Richard L. Theories of Truth. A Critical Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Kripke, Saul. “Outline of a Theory of Truth.” Journal of Philosophy 72.19 (1975): 690–716. Künne, Wolfgang. Conceptions of Truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Lamarque, Peter, and Stein Haugom Olsen. Truth, Fiction, and Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Leeds, Stephen. “Truth, Correspondence, and Success.” Philosophical Studies 79.1 (1995): 1– 36. Lewis, David. “A World of Truthmakers?” Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 215–220. Lewis, David. “Forget about the ‘Correspondence Theory of Truth’.” Analysis 61.4 (2001): 275–280. Moore, George Edward. Some Main Problems in Philosophy. London: Allen & Unwin, 1910.
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Priest, Graham. Towards Non-Being. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. Putnam, Hilary. Reason, Truth, and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Quine, Willard van Orman. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960. Quine, Willard van Orman. Philosophy of Logic. Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1970. Rami, Adolf. Wahrheit und Deflation. Eine kritische Untersuchung deflationärer Wahrheitskonzeptionen. Paderborn: Mentis, 2009a. Rami, Adolf. “Introduction: Truth and Truthmaking.” Truth and Truth-Making. Eds. E. J. Lowe and A. Rami. Stocksfield: Acumen, 2009b. 1–36. Ramsey, Frank P. “Facts and Propositions.” Aristotelian Society Supplement 7 (1927): 153–170. Russell, Bertrand. “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism.” [1918] Logic and Knowledge. London: Allen & Unwin, 1956. 177–281. Schlick, Moritz. “On the Foundation of Knowledge.” [1934] Philosophical Papers. Vol. 2. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979. 370–387. Strawson, Peter F. “Truth.” Aristotelian Society Supplement 24 (1950): 129–156. Tarski, Alfred. “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages.” [1935] Logic, Semantics, Metamathematics. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983. 152–278. White, Alan R. “Truth as Appraisal.” Mind 66.263 (1957): 318–330. Williams, Michael. “Meaning and Deflationary Truth.” Journal of Philosophy 96.11 (1999): 545–564. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. [1921] London: Routledge, 1961. Wright, Crispin. Truth and Objectivity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Wright, Crispin. “Truth: A Traditional Debate Reviewed.” Truth. Eds. Simon Blackburn and Keith Simmons. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. 203–238.
MARIUS BARTMANN
Facts and Realism in Philosophy The traditional and still prevalent approach in philosophy characterizes realism as a metaphysical topic, i.e. as concerning the nature of (a particular aspect of ) reality, its fundamental structure and composition. There are realist positions in many different areas of philosophical discourse. The fault lines between realists and their respective opponents are numerous; there is no one giant battlefield on which two warring parties confront one another. This chapter is divided into three parts. In the first part I will outline in a very broad way two main types of debates about realism. The first kind of debate (1.1) is one of the most perseverant in the history of philosophy and concerns the existence of a particular domain of objects, namely universals. The second kind of debate (1.2), which emerged in the eighteenth century and is still dominant in contemporary philosophy, concerns the question whether reality is mind-independent. In the second part (2.) of the article I will present two of the most important and still prevalent conceptions of facts as well as their connection to realism. In the third and final part, I will present some important modern realism debates. I will discuss one of the most influential conceptions of anti-realism in contemporary philosophy (3.1), which also proposes to recast the realism debate, against the orthodoxy, as a semantic and not a metaphysical topic. I will then give a rough overview over the core arguments of two very recent realist movements called speculative realism and new realism (3.2).
1. Realism 1.1 Realism about universals and abstract objects The so-called problem of universals dates back to a fundamental disagreement between Plato and Aristotle. It was a major topic in medieval philosophy and is still extensively discussed in contemporary philosophy. The reasonhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-013
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ing leading Plato to acknowledge the existence of what he calls forms or ideas (what philosophers nowadays call universals) is a train of thought sometimes called the One Over Many Argument. It starts with the simple observation that the world we experience contains (what philosophers nowadays call) particulars. Particulars are the concrete objects of ordinary experience such as cherries, rubies, and sunsets. All of the listed objects, though, also bear a strong resemblance to one another: they are all red. Hence there must be something all of them have in common, something in virtue of which all of them are red. The single common nature underlying all these red objects is what Plato calls a form – the form of redness. Plato applies the same reasoning to all cases in which different objects can truly be said to share the same properties. This is, in essence, Plato’s socalled theory of forms. One of the main arguments against universals is the so-called Third Man Argument. This moniker and some versions of the argument are tied to Aristotle (1984, Met. 990b17), but the argument can already be found in Plato’s dialogue Parmenides (1997, Parm. 132a–b). The basic form of the argument is as follows: according to Plato’s theory of forms, any set of objects sharing a certain property does so in virtue of participating in a certain form. One of the crucial assumptions of the theory is what is nowadays called the Self-Predication Assumption. It means that a form, in virtue of which the objects participating in it possess a certain property, itself possesses that property: the form of largeness is itself large, the form of justice is itself just, and the form of beauty is itself beautiful. The SelfPredication Assumption can now be used to generate an infinite regress. For example, a man (call him ‘M’) possesses the property of being a man in virtue of participating in the form of man (call it ‘F1’). Since, according to the Self-Predication Assumption, the form of man itself possesses the property of being a man, we now have a new set of objects (M and F1) sharing a certain property (being a man). Hence there must be another form (call it ‘F2’) in virtue of which the man (M) and the form of man (F1) possess the property of being a man. According to the Self-Predication Assumption, it follows that F2 itself possesses the property of being a man – the third man. Now we have again a new set of objects (M, F1, and F2) sharing the same property (being a man) and the reasoning just outlined can be applied again ad infinitum.1
1 The question of how exactly to understand the argument and whether it is valid is still highly controversial. Most advocates of universals reject the Self-Predication Assumption. For discussion cf. Vlastos (1954).
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The medieval problem of universals has been shaped in particular by the third-century philosopher Porphyry, a student of Plotinus’s. His formulation of the disagreement between Plato and Aristotle in his Isagoge (his introduction to Aristotle’s Categories) became a standard reference point in the debate.2 A famous medieval realist was Johannes Duns Scotus, a prominent nominalist was Peter Abelard. Abelard characterizes his conception of nominalism, which is also widespread among modern nominalists, as attributing “universality only to words” (quoted in Spade 1994, 37). This means that unlike realists, for whom universality is a feature of reality, nominalists instead claim that universality is rather a feature of language, and thus merely an aspect of how we talk about particulars. In contemporary philosophy, universals are often considered a subset of what are nowadays called abstract objects, but both categories do not necessarily coincide. The basic distinction is that universals are entities that can be instantiated, exemplified, or shared by particulars (e.g. properties such as redness), whereas abstract objects are entities that are not spatiotemporal (e.g. mathematical objects such as numbers and sets). The view that acknowledges abstract objects as a genuine ontological category is sometimes called realism about abstract objects, or simply Platonism. One standard argument against abstract objects is the so-called access problem (Hale 2009, 71). It presupposes a broadly causal theory of knowledge and then argues on this basis that it is impossible to acquire knowledge about abstract objects. The following is a reconstruction of the argument in its most simple and basic form (Benacerraf 1973, 673): (P1)
Knowledge of entities of any kind requires the possibility of standing in causal relations to these entities.
(P2)
Abstract objects are not spatiotemporal and thus causally inert, i.e. abstract objects cannot stand in causal relations.
(C)
Knowledge of abstract objects is impossible.
Obviously, the conclusion that knowledge of abstract objects is impossible is highly problematic because it undermines our justification for believing in their existence. If knowledge of a certain kind of entity is impossible, how could one believe in its existence? Platonists (Hale and Wright 2002) and anti-Platonists (Field 1989) have attempted to address this conundrum and refined the analysis of the argument. These debates focus mainly on
2 Cf. Spade (1994), a volume containing important texts regarding the medieval problem of universals and a useful introduction to it.
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(P1), namely on the question of what epistemological constraints on ontological considerations are reasonable to accept. 1.2 Realism about the external world In the eighteenth century, there is a significant shift of focus in the conception of realism (cf. Halbfass 1992). This new conception, which is still prevalent in contemporary philosophy, characterizes realism as the general thesis that reality is independent of the mind. A realist position concerning a particular domain of objects or facts thus typically involves two aspects: (1) the commitment to the existence of a particular domain of objects or facts, and (2), the claim that the nature and existence of the particular domain of objects or facts in question depends in no significant way on the activity or capacity of the human mind. Accordingly, for every realist position concerning a particular domain of objects or facts there are two possible ways to assume an anti-realist position. The anti-realist can either deny (1) and argue that the particular domain of objects or facts does not exist in reality. This is sometimes called eliminative anti-realism. Or the antirealist can deny (2), conceding the existence of the particular domain of objects or facts but argue that their existence depends significantly on the activity or capacity of the human mind. This is sometimes called idealist anti-realism.3 In contemporary philosophy, there are many realism debates. In fact, there are (at least) as many realism debates as there are disputed domains of objects or facts, such as the domain of moral facts, of theoretical entities, and of fictional objects. In each realism debate it is possible, and in many debates it is actually the case, that the question arises as to whether the proposed entities exist and, if so, whether the entities exist in a mindindependent manner. One of the most widespread instances of the general thesis that reality is independent of the mind is what nowadays is called realism about the external world. This is the thesis that there is a mind-independent reality composed of the middle-sized objects that we perceive and with which we interact, independently of whether we perceive and think about them (Koch 2016, 3).4 A traditional and representative expression of realism about the external world is given by Bertrand Russell: 3 For the distinctions and the terminology introduced in the preceding paragraph cf. Willaschek (2003, Ch. 1). 4 However, Koch’s (2016) own hermeneutic realism criticizes the attempt to reduce realism to realism about the external world, and Gabriel’s (2015a) neutral realism criticizes the
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There is no doubt that common sense regards tables and chairs and the sun and moon and material objects generally as something radically different from minds and the contents of minds, and as having an existence which might continue if minds ceased. We think of matter as having existed long before there were any minds, and it is hard to think of it as a mere product of mental activity. (Russell 2001 [1912], 19)
Here it is impossible to give even a rough survey of the arguments against realism about the external world that have been developed and discussed over the past centuries. Given that there are two possible major anti-realist positions regarding realism about the external world, namely eliminative or idealist anti-realism, I will in the following briefly present two famous arguments targeting, respectively, the existence and the mind-independence of ordinary objects. Perhaps the most notorious and most radical form of anti-realism about the external world is the position of George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne. His position can be categorized, with some qualifications, as a form of eliminative anti-realism. Although Berkeley does not reject outright the existence of ordinary objects such as apples, stones, and books, he does claim that these ordinary things do not exist in the common sense way as material objects, but are rather constituted by (collections of ) ideas. What Russell takes to be a mere platitude of common sense, Berkeley considers a curious prejudice: It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects have an existence natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. […] For what are the forementioned objects but the things we perceive by sense, and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations. (Berkeley 1949 [1710], 42)
Berkeley’s argument in this passage is quite simple and runs as follows: (P1)
The object(s) of sensory perception are (collections of ) ideas.
(P2)
Ordinary objects such as houses, mountains, and rivers are the objects of sensory perception.
(C)
Ordinary objects such as houses, mountains, and rivers are (collections of ) ideas.
This argument is the basis for Berkeley’s (in)famous thesis that with regard to ordinary objects, esse est percipi, i.e. their “being” consists in “being perceived.” For Berkeley, ordinary objects cannot exist without the mind and hence the idea of an unperceived object represents for him a contradiction
idea that realism is to be understood primarily in terms of the problem of the external world. Cf. section 3.2.
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in terms. Although he is aware of the possibility to imagine trees or books no one perceives, he immediately goes on to point out that the imagined trees and books are nothing but ideas perceived by the mind and therefore no objection to his thesis that ordinary objects cannot exist without the mind. To show this would require to conceive of ordinary objects as “existing unconceived” (Berkeley 1949 [1710], 50), which for Berkeley is a contradiction. Generally, Berkeley’s position has not been well received, and there is a large consensus nowadays that his argument is flawed. The main problem with Berkeley’s position is taken to consist in an ambiguity in his conception of ideas. Berkeley conflated, so the objection goes, two fundamentally different things, namely the act of perceiving and the object of perception. Whereas, for example, the act of perceiving a tree is a subjective mental act involving ideas of various kinds, the object of perception is not necessarily the idea of a tree but may be the tree itself. Critics thus reject (P1) of Berkeley’s argument and point out that although perception may involve ideas, this does not entail that these ideas are the objects of perception.5 Another philosopher who has significantly shaped the conception of, and the debate about, realism is Hilary Putnam. He developed highly sophisticated and much-discussed arguments against various kinds of realism, most of which are too complex to reproduce here.6 But there is a comparatively accessible argument given by Putnam, which challenges the belief in the mind-independence of ordinary objects in a profound way, and which is still the topic of controversial debates. The argument runs as follows (Putnam 2004, 38–39). First, Putnam asks us to imagine a world containing the individuals x1, x2, and x3, and then poses the seemingly simple question how many objects the imagined world contains. The obvious answer to this question is, of course, “three,” but Putnam goes on to point out that this answer is not the only possible one. He asks us to assume the perspective of mereology, a branch of logic that studies the relation between parts and wholes. The basic assumption of mereology is that any combination of two or more objects is itself to be considered an object. Applied to the world containing only the three individuals x1, x2, and x3, the mereological answer to the question how many objects there are in this world is not three but seven: besides the
5 Cf. Nagel (1986, 93–99) for elaboration and discussion. Further arguments against the identification of thoughts with private mental ideas will be presented in section 2.1. 6 Two of Putnam’s most famous arguments against realism are called the Brains-in-a-Vat Argument and the Model-Theoretic Argument (Putnam 1981, Ch. 1–2). For a condensed reconstruction and assessment cf. Khlentzos (2016).
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individuals x1, x2, and x3, we would also have to count the respective sums of the individuals, namely the sum of (x1 + x2), the sum of (x1 + x3), and so forth. The conclusion Putnam draws from these considerations is that there is not one single correct answer to the question how many objects there are in the world containing only x1, x2, and x3. The correct answer, Putnam argues, depends essentially on the conceptual scheme we employ (e.g. our ordinary conceptual scheme or the conceptual scheme of mereology). Since it is up to us which conceptual scheme we employ, the answer is to some extent arbitrary and not forced on us by reality. Putnam calls this phenomenon conceptual relativity: “the fact that in certain cases what exists may depend on which of various conventions we adopt” (Putnam 2004, 39). Critics have objected to Putnam’s analysis of the example. They focus on, and typically reject, the conclusion Putnam draws from his considerations. For example, Paul Boghossian (2006, 37) argues that the common sense answer (three objects) and the mereological answer (seven objects) to Putnam’s question are not only not arbitrary, but also do not even contradict each other. According to Boghossian, the different answers are consistent with each other because each answer involves a different conception of what is to be counted as an object. It would be similar to saying either that there are eight people at a party or that there are four couples at the very same party. But this does not show that what objects exist at the party depends on the conceptual scheme we employ. All that Putnam’s example shows is that “there can be many equally true descriptions of the world” (Boghossian 2006, 37).7 But this result in itself is not enough to establish a substantive anti-realist position, just as the example about the couples at the party does not establish an anti-realist position about people.8 Markus Gabriel (2015a, 190) presents a different critique of Putnam’s example. Just like Boghossian, he acknowledges the possibility of employing different conceptual schemes and therefore the possibility of giving different yet equally valid answers to the question how many objects there are. But Gabriel rejects the idea that the kind of relativity involved in Putnam’s example is merely a matter of conceptual conventions with no metaphysical implications. On the contrary, Gabriel holds that, given the 7 For more discussion and arguments for the general realist point that the involvement of linguistic conventions does not necessarily have anti-realist implications cf. Benoist (2014). 8 For further discussion of anti-realist maneuvers such as Putnam’s cf. section 3.2. For discussion of the status of conceptual schemes specifically within the context of analytic philosophy, cf. the collection of essays contained in Willaschek (2000).
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respective conceptual schemes, there really are three objects when we employ the common sense scheme and there really are seven objects when we employ the mereological scheme. There is no compelling reason to locate plurality only in conceptual schemes and not also in reality (cf. Gabriel 2013 [2012], 343). This is what Gabriel calls ontological pluralism, “the view that there are different domains of objects” (Gabriel 2015a, 189), which forms an integral element of his neutral realism (cf. section 3.2). Modern debates about realism and anti-realism tend to focus not so much on the existence and/or mind-independence of particular domains of objects, but rather on whether facts about a particular subject matter are (socially) constructed, relative, or subjective (cf. Boghossian 2006, 17). This shift of focus from objects to facts has to do with a prominent disagreement between Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell regarding the nature of facts in particular and cognitive content in general, which Frege calls thoughts and Russell propositions. Since their respective conceptions are still prevalent in contemporary philosophy, it is vital to consider their respective positions in order to better understand modern debates about realism and anti-realism (cf. section 3). 2. Facts 2.1 Fregean thoughts and the identity theory of truth “What is a fact? A fact is a thought that is true” says Frege (1997 [1918], 342). A simple answer to a simple question, or so it seems. But then again, what is a thought? Frege calls a thought the sense of a declarative sentence (a statement or judgment). A thought is essentially something for which “the question of truth can arise at all” (Frege 1997 [1918], 328). For Frege, thoughts expressed by sentences, and not sentences themselves, are to be considered the primary truth-bearers, i.e. the entities possessing the property of being true or false. Thus truth-aptitude – the capacity for being true or false – is the most distinctive feature of a thought. But what exactly is a thought? Is it a private mental entity in my head to which only I can have access? Throughout his philosophical career, Frege argues against this psychological conception of thoughts as private mental entities that cannot be intersubjectively communicated. This conception looms large not only, as we have seen, in Berkeley’s theory but also, in a more or less explicit manner, in the positions of René Descartes, John Locke, and David Hume. Most importantly, Frege employs reductio ad absurdum arguments intended to show how conceiving of thoughts as private mental entities (1) compromises, or even obliterates, the objectivity of truth, and (2) makes communi-
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cation and (dis)agreement impossible. This way, Frege wants to establish what nowadays is called alethic realism (Künne 2003, 20), according to which truth is completely independent of the mind (/ II.1 Klauk). I will present Frege’s arguments in turn. (1) In order to preserve the objectivity of truth, Frege insisted on strictly separating the objective question of the truth of a judgment from the psychological question of believing a judgment to be true. Frege’s argument simply consists in pointing out the logical possibility that something may be true although everyone takes it to be false (Frege 1997 [1893], 202– 203). Even if it were never to occur, a situation still remains conceivable in which all of humanity was in error about a particular matter. For example, it is perfectly imaginable that everyone believes that there are no aliens (for whatever reason), and yet it could be true that there are aliens (and vice versa). At least, and this is Frege’s fundamental point, there is no logical contradiction between the truth of a judgment on the one hand and global error about the truth of that very judgment on the other. (2) Frege’s second worry about conceiving of thoughts as private mental entities concerns the possibility of communication and (dis)agreement. Frege argues that if what is expressed by sentences consists of private mental entities, then communication and (dis)agreement are impossible. Paradigmatically, the role of private mental entities is played by ideas. Frege characterizes ideas as private, which means that no two persons can have the same idea. This is largely consistent with how ideas are construed in the philosophical tradition (e.g. in Descartes, Locke, and Hume). The argument runs as follows (Frege 1997 [1918], 336): (P1)
The thoughts expressed by sentences are (collections of ) ideas.
(P2)
If thoughts expressed by sentences are (collections of ) ideas, then thoughts are private.
(P3)
If thoughts are private, then no two persons can grasp the same thought.
(P4)
If no two persons can grasp the same thought, then no two persons can recognize the truth (or falsity) of the same thought.
(P5)
If no two persons can recognize the truth (or falsity) of the same thought, then no two persons can communicate or disagree with each other about the truth (or falsity) of the same thought because communication and disagreement presuppose that two persons communicate the same thoughts or disagree about the truth (or falsity) of the same thought.
(C)
Communication and disagreement is impossible.
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Frege’s conclusion from his argument is simple: (P1) must be abandoned. In addition to the realm of things in the external world and the realm of ideas in the mind, a “third realm must be recognized” (Frege 1997 [1918], 337), the realm of thoughts. Frege conceives of thoughts as objectively existing entities, which possess a determinate truth-value quite independently of whether people take them to be true or false. Thoughts are neither objects of the external world (because they are imperceptible, unchanging, and eternal) nor are they private mental ideas (because they are intersubjectively sharable). Since thoughts are not in space and time, they belong to the ontological category of abstract objects (though Frege himself does not call them abstract). Frege is thus a realist about abstract objects, or a Platonist. Critics of Frege therefore often level very similar objections against his theory as critics of abstract objects do (cf. section 1.1). For Frege, true or false declarative sentences express true or false thoughts, and he calls the true subset of thoughts ‘facts.’ This means that, when a declarative sentence is true, then the true thought it expresses is itself a fact and not made true by a fact. For example, the true thought that rubies are red expressed by the sentence ‘Rubies are red’ simply is the fact that rubies are red. This makes Frege’s conception of truth a version of what nowadays is called an identity theory of truth, according to which true truth-bearers (whether conceived of as Fregean thoughts or as some other kind of entity) are identical with facts and not made true by them, as is instead distinctive of the correspondence theory of truth (/ II.1 Klauk). 2.2 Russellian propositions and the correspondence theory of truth Russell – who was, together with Frege, a defining figure in analytic philosophy – developed a version of the correspondence theory of truth, according to which truth is explained as the holding of a relation between a truth-bearer and a certain portion of reality that makes it true, which is sometimes called a truth-maker. The correspondence theory of truth has a quite venerable pedigree, going back at least to Aristotle (1984, Met. 1011b25–b27). There is a wide variety of correspondence theories, depending on what exactly is taken to play the role of truth-bearers and truth-makers, and how the correspondence relation is spelled out. Whereas Frege calls the content of a declarative sentence a thought Russell calls the content of a declarative sentence a proposition (and later a fact when the proposition is true). Russell’s propositions play the same theoretical role as Frege’s thoughts: they are completely mind-independent, objectively existing entities. But despite this similarity, Fregean thoughts and Russellian propositions differ crucially with respect to their ontological composi-
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tion. Whereas, for Frege, the thoughts expressed by declarative sentences are located in the abstract realm of sense, composed of the respective senses of the expressions making up a declarative sentence, for Russell, the propositions expressed by declarative sentences are composed of the objects that a declarative sentence is about. For example, for Frege, the thought expressed by the sentence ‘Sally is six feet tall’ is composed of the sense of the proper name ‘Sally’ and the sense of the predicate ‘is six feet tall,’ whereas for Russell the proposition expressed by ‘Sally is six feet tall’ is composed of the actual person Sally and the property (the universal) of being six feet tall. Accordingly, for Russell, the belief that Sally is six feet tall is a complex composed of the believing subject, Sally, and the property of being six feet tall. If the belief is true, then there exists a unity (a true proposition or fact) composed of Sally and the property of being six feet tall; if the belief is false, then there is no such unity (no such fact) but only the belief involving the otherwise disconnected objects. This forms the basis of Russell’s correspondence theory of truth, variations of which are still widespread: Thus a belief is true when there is a corresponding fact, and false when there is no corresponding fact. (Russell 2001 [1912], 75)
A correspondence theory of truth is an integral element of many realist positions (cf. Putnam 1978, 18). This means a general argument against such a type of truth theory will simultaneously undermine many realist positions. Again, it is impossible to present even a rough survey of all the arguments against the correspondence theory here, so in what follows I will only present one of the most prominent and most frequently used arguments against it. The argument is sometimes called the comparison objection (Künne 2003, 126). There are many versions of this argument, but the thrust of it is nearly always the same, namely that the dualism between thought/belief and reality is in the last instance self-defeating because it involves a contradiction. Here is a succinct statement of the comparison objection in general terms: It is an indefensible thesis because thought cannot get outside itself in order to compare the world as it is ‘in itself’ to the world as it is ‘for us’, and thereby distinguish what is a function of our relation to the world from what belongs to the world alone. Such an enterprise is effectively self-contradictory […]. (Meillassoux 2008 [2006], 3–4)
Applied to the particular case of the correspondence theory the argument is thus as follows: a correspondence theory requires that in order to know whether one of our beliefs is true we would have to compare this belief with that portion of mind-independent reality to which it is supposed to correspond, i.e. a fact. But in order to compare our belief with a fact
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requires as precondition that we be able to get outside our system of beliefs and determine from an independent vantage point whether there is a fact in reality making our belief true or false. And this, so the comparison objection concludes, is simply incoherent.9 3. Modern realism debates 3.1 Semantic realism and semantic anti-realism Michael Dummett is one of the most influential anti-realists in contemporary philosophy.10 Set against the traditional and still prevalent conception of realism debates as metaphysical debates, i.e. as a debate about the nature of (a particular aspect of ) reality, Dummett proposes to conceive of realism debates as semantic debates, i.e. in terms of the objective truth-aptitude – the capacity for being true or false – of a certain class of disputed or undecidable statements, e.g. statements about regions of space-time in principle inaccessible to us, statements about the future, infinity etc. (Dummett 1978a [1963]). In other words, a criterion for a realist position is whether the principle of bivalence – which states that a statement is determinately either true or false – applies to a certain class of disputed or undecidable statements. Semantic realism, according to Dummett, is thus the thesis that the truth-conditions of the disputed or undecidable statements are potentially evidence-transcendent, i.e. that a statement could be true even if, in principle, there were no possibility to find out whether the statement was true or not. Semantic anti-realism denies this thesis and demands that only those statements be considered meaningful for which we can muster evidence or justification. Dummett’s main argument against semantic realism is called the manifestation challenge (cf. Dummett 1978b [1973]). It is based on a reasonable assumption few philosophers today would deny, namely the so-called Manifestability Principle. The Manifestability Principle requires that the understanding of the meaning of statements be somehow manifest in the practical ability of speakers to use that statement. For the class of statements whose truth-conditions are not evidence-transcendent, i.e. for decidable statements, the practical ability manifesting their understanding simply consists in being capable of verifying (or at least in being capable of mustering evidence for the truth of ) a particular statement. The manifestation
9 Cf. Künne (2003, 126–129) for a critical assessment of the comparison objection. 10 Another important contemporary anti-realist is Crispin Wright (1992).
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challenge now demands of the realist to cite a practical ability manifesting the understanding of statements whose truth-conditions are potentially evidence-transcendent, i.e. for statements for which we have no means to determine their truth-value (undecidable statements). Since it is impossible, even in principle, to verify (or to muster evidence for) undecidable statements, it is also impossible to manifest understanding of undecidable statements. Dummett therefore thinks the challenge cannot be met and concludes that the realist conception of meaning must be replaced with a justificationist theory of meaning, according to which the understanding of a statement consists in knowing how a statement can be recognized as true.11 There have been many replies to the manifestation challenge, but most of them attempt to defuse it by arguing that the challenge would not be a threat to realism even if it could not be met. John McDowell (1998, 322), for example, claims that the absence of a decision procedure to determine the truth-value of undecidable statements does not militate against potentially evidence-transcendent truth-conditions because a speaker knows that the truth-conditions of decidable statements can obtain without our knowledge, and would have the same expectation in cases where such knowledge were impossible. Even so, both realists and anti-realists are not entirely satisfied with the current replies to the manifestation challenge, so that it continues to represent a challenge to semantic realism. 3.2 Speculative realism and new realism Many participants of realism debates are or have become dissatisfied with the ‘linguistic turn’ taken by Dummett. Critics of Dummett’s conception of how to conduct realism debates are primarily concerned that framing realism debates in semantic terms loses sight of what is actually at stake. Realism, many insist, is a metaphysical thesis about the nature of (a particular aspect of ) reality, and not a semantic thesis about the meaning of a particular class of sentences and statements. There are also other, more general misgivings about anti-realist tendencies in contemporary philosophy, tendencies that derive from a variety of sources. One such source is identified by Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor (2015, 2) as the still widespread Cartesian picture of knowledge as mediational, according to which our grasp of reality is always mediated by
11 For a detailed reconstruction and assessment of the manifestation challenge cf. Loux (2003).
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some kind of representational vehicle, such as ideas, thoughts, sentences, and the like. This picture opens up the possibility of radical skepticism because it implies the possibility that we are somehow trapped in our representations and thus may be completely cut off from the world. To overcome the Cartesian picture, they propose to replace mediational theories of knowledge with contact theories, which conceive of knowledge as an unmediated grasp of reality (Dreyfus and Taylor 2015, 17). One example of a contact theory in a broad sense is Anton Friedrich Koch’s hermeneutic realism, according to which reality is independent of our perceptions of and our beliefs about it, but not completely independent from the fact that there are beings with perceptions and beliefs (Koch 2016). A central element of Koch’s hermeneutic realism is what he calls the readability thesis (Koch 2016, Ch. 7), which states that the logical space of reasons (i.e. roughly the realm of language and thought) and the space of causal explanation (i.e. reality) share the same logical structure such that we can, in general, directly ‘read’ the facts off the world. This means that, although it is, of course, possible to form false thoughts that ‘miss’ the world, this does not imply, Koch maintains, that thoughts will in principle be cut off from the world. In contemporary philosophy, there are, in particular, two recent movements defending realist positions against various forms of anti-realism. The first is called speculative realism, founded by Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, Ian Hamilton Grant, and Ray Brassier; the second is called new realism, founded by Markus Gabriel and Maurizio Ferraris.12 Even though ‘speculative realism’ and ‘new realism’ are umbrella terms for a variety of authors with very different philosophical positions, one can detect a common argument template regarding the thrust of both movements, uniting otherwise quite different thinkers such as, for example, Meillassoux and Boghossian. This common argument template is what Gabriel calls the argument from facticity, which “shows that every position at some point must meet realist requirements” (2015a, 185). The argument can assume different forms, but in general the argument tries to establish that, at some point, absolute facts – facts that are not subjective, relative, or (socially) constructed – are inevitable: Both Meillassoux and Boghossian have recently made a compelling case that no position in ontology or epistemology can avoid acknowledging absolute facts: Something is the case regardless of whether we acknowledge it or not, for even if almost all facts were interest-relative, this fact would not be interest-relative. (Gabriel 2015b, 44–45)
12 Cf. Bryant et al. (2011) and Gabriel (2014), two volumes with important collections of essays regarding speculative realism and new realism, respectively.
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Boghossian’s version of the argument from facticity targets various forms of anti-realist relativisms and constructivisms. According to a prominent form of constructivism that Boghossian calls description dependence of facts (Boghossian 2006, 28), there are no objective descriptions of the world because descriptions are always relative to a particular conceptual scheme; which scheme is employed is, in turn, relative to the arbitrary needs and interests of different social groups. Hence there is no objective reason to prefer one conceptual scheme to another. Against this anti-realist dualism between conceptual scheme and reality, Boghossian points out a fundamental flaw also besetting many other constructivist positions (cf. Boghossian 2006, 35). By distinguishing between multiple and possibly radically different conceptual schemes on the one hand, and reality somehow shaped by these conceptual schemes on the other, the constructivist implicitly presupposes the existence of a mind-independent reality. For, if there is no mind-independent reality to begin with, then what is it that conceptual schemes allegedly shape? Boghossian thus concludes that we must commit ourselves to what he calls objectivism about facts, the idea that reality exists largely independently of us and would possess the properties usually attributed to it even if thinking beings had never existed (Boghossian 2006, 22). Meillassoux develops a similar but different version of the argument from facticity. His target is a more general form of anti-realism that he considers representative of a large part of post-Kantian philosophy. Meillassoux calls this form of anti-realism correlationism: “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (2008 [2006], 5). The argument template for correlationism is to argue that any object of thought whatsoever must be understood in terms of the thinking subject because it would be naïve to believe we could abstract from the thinking subject while thinking something. Hence whatever is the object of thought is inextricably linked to the thinking subject.13 Meillassoux argues against correlationism by considering what he calls ancestral statements (2008 [2006], 10) – statements referring to events that have taken place before the emergence of the human species – and then showing that the correlationist cannot make sense of such statements. According to Meillassoux, the correlationist is forced to distinguish be13 Cf. also Nagel, who similarly characterizes modern forms of idealism as holding “that what there is is what we can think about or conceive of, or what we or our descendants could come to be able to think about or conceive of – and that this is necessarily true because the idea of something that we could not think about or conceive of makes no sense” (1986, 90).
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tween two senses in which ancestral statements such as ‘Earth formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago’ can be understood: a literal (realist) and a correlationist (anti-realist) meaning. The correlationist concedes the realist (in this case the scientific) sense but adds that the fact that earth formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago must be relativized to the human species because it is fact for humans. Meillassoux then points out the incompatibility of the literal and the correlationist sense of the statement: Since the event referred to by the statement has no connection whatsoever to thinking beings, and the correlationist claims that something that has no connection to thinking beings is inconceivable, the correlationist must admit that the statement ‘Earth formed approximately 4.5 billion years ago’ ultimately makes no sense. However, this is obviously an absurd result (cf. Meillassoux 2008 [2006], 17). Harman, another prominent speculative realist, has introduced a useful terminology to characterize and analyze common anti-realist maneuvers such as those targeted by Boghossian and Meillassoux. Harman (2011, 24) distinguishes between two widespread theoretical treatments of ordinary objects in philosophy, both of which deny the reality of ordinary objects but for different reasons. The first approach, reductionist in character, dismisses ordinary objects by undermining them, i.e. ordinary objects are considered unreal because they are nothing but the byproduct of an underlying, more fundamental reality (such as elementary particles). The second approach, anti-realist in character, dismisses ordinary objects by overmining them, i.e. ordinary objects are considered unreal because they are merely mind-dependent and thus could not be granted autonomous existence apart from how they are thought about. Many speculative and new realists particularly argue against the idea that the mind-dependence of a certain subject matter prevents a realist treatment of it. The point they make is that there are mind-independent facts about a particular subject matter regardless of whether the subject matter involves human activity or not. For example, Ferraris (2014, 71) argues that social objects such as money become mind-independent once they are created. The fact that social objects are created by humans does not make them less real, just as a table created by a carpenter is no less real than the tree from which it is made. Gabriel develops a version of the argument from facticity to defend a position he calls neutral realism, a form of realism that, unlike many other realist positions, does not involve particular metaphysical commitments to the existence of a certain domain of objects or facts: […] neutral realism is therefore neutral with respect to any metaphysical commitment to the existence of some single totality of objects or facts, or to the world in the sense of a unified all-encompassing domain that might be identified with nature. (Gabriel 2015a, 182)
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The rationale behind the neutrality of this position is to separate questions pertaining to realism from questions pertaining to naturalism, both of which are often conflated. That is also why Gabriel rejects a conception of realism debates in terms of the problem of the external world because the concept of the external world is very often fraught with naturalistic assumptions, which makes it difficult to engage in unbiased realism debates. For example, moral values are often viewed with anti-realist suspicion right from the start because they cannot be easily integrated into a naturalistic world view, and this makes it harder for participants to discuss the precise status of moral values in a neutral manner (cf. Gabriel 2015a, 182). This example is one instance of a larger point Gabriel makes against anti-realist tendencies, and it is also representative and characteristic of a central aspect of new realism: namely, that thoughts are just as real as anything else that is a genuine part of reality (cf. Gabriel 2014, 192). The rejection of any particular metaphysical commitments is also a result of a reflection on the status and scope of the argument from facticity. The argument states that even the most anti-realist position cannot help acknowledging absolute facts at some point (cf. Gabriel 2013 [2012], 335– 336). For example, even if our sensory equipment were subject to systematic error such that all information gathered by it would be systematically wrong and therefore the gathered information would not be facts, then it would still be a fact about the faulty sensory equipment that it is systematically wrong. This fact is an absolute fact because it is not relative to or constructed by anyone. The fact that the sensory equipment is systematically wrong would have been a fact even if no one had ever stated or thought about it. Hence even an anti-realist about our sensory equipment has to acknowledge absolute facts. But the argument from facticity only goes so far. It only establishes the inevitable recognition of absolute facts at some point, but not which facts (cf. Gabriel 2015a, 185–186). For this reason, Gabriel points out a tension between Boghossian’s objectivism about facts – the idea that reality exists largely independently from us and would possess the properties usually attributed to it even if thinking beings had never existed – and his privileging the facts established by the modern sciences over the ‘facts’ established by creationism. For example, Boghossian wants to claim against the creationist that it is a plain fact that animals and mountains and rivers have existed millions of years before the emergence of the human species. But the commitment to the modern sciences may involve a commitment to microfundamentalism, i.e. the view that recognizes only elementary particles as real. Strictly speaking, this implies that in reality there are no such things as animals and mountains and rivers. Gabriel therefore concludes that a more modest version of realism is called for because “the argument from facticity only establishes
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a ground for neutral realism and leaves it open which facts obtain” (Gabriel 2015a, 188). 4. Conclusion In contemporary philosophy, there is a wide variety of realism debates about many different domains of objects and facts. These debates focus on whether objects such as abstract and ordinary objects exist and, if so, whether they exist in a mind-independent manner, as well as on whether facts about a particular subject matter are (socially) constructed, relative, or subjective. Particularly in the second half of the twentieth century, antirealist tendencies became popular and attacked realism from (at least) two sides: for one thing, anti-realists took a ‘linguistic turn’ and attempted to recast realism debates in semantic terms, challenging realists by means of considerations pertaining to the workings of language. For another, antirealists argued for the mind-dependence of reality on the grounds that the conceptual schemes we employ would profoundly shape or even distort reality. In opposition to these anti-realist tendencies, realist movements have recently been gaining momentum by defusing hitherto accepted antirealist argument templates. They emphasize the reality of thoughts in particular and the reality of the mental in general, toppling old and new antirealist dogmas alike. References Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. Jonathan Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. Benacerraf, Paul. “Mathematical Truth.” The Journal of Philosophy 70.19 (1973): 661–679. Benoist, Jocelyn. “Realismus ohne Metaphysik.” Der Neue Realismus. Ed. Markus Gabriel. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2014. 133–153. Berkeley, George. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge. The Works of Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne. Vol. 2. [1710] Ed. Thomas Edmund Jessop. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1949. Boghossian, Paul. Fear of Knowledge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. Bryant, Levi, et al. Eds. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re.press, 2011. Dreyfus, Hubert, and Charles Taylor. Retrieving Realism. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2015. Dummett, Michael. “Realism.” [1963] Truth And Other Enigmas. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1978a. 145–165. Dummett, Michael. “The Philosophical Basis of Intuitionistic Logic.” [1973] Truth And Other Enigmas. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1978b. 215– 247.
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Ferraris, Maurizio. “Was ist der Neue Realismus?” Der Neue Realismus. Ed. Markus Gabriel. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2014. 52–75. Field, Hartry. Realism, Mathematics, and Modality. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Frege, Gottlob. “Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, Volume I: Selections.” [1893] The Frege Reader. Ed. Michael Beaney. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. 181–194. Frege, Gottlob. “Thought.” [1918] The Frege Reader. Ed. Michael Beaney. Oxford: Blackwell, 1997. 325–345. Gabriel, Markus. Die Erkenntnis der Welt – Eine Einführung in die Erkenntnistheorie. [2012] Freiburg and Munich: Alber, 2013. Gabriel, Markus. Ed. Der Neue Realismus. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2014. Gabriel, Markus. “Neutral Realism.” The Monist 98 (2015a): 181–196. Gabriel, Markus. Fields of Sense. A New Realist Ontology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015b. Halbfass, Wilhelm. “Realismus II.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Eds. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer. Basel: Schwabe, 1992. 156–162. Hale, Bob. “Realism and Antirealism about Abstract Entities.” A Companion to Metaphysics. Eds. Jaegwon Kim et al. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 65–73. Hale, Bob, and Crispin Wright. “Benacerraf’s Dilemma Revisited.” European Journal of Philosophy 10.1 (2002): 101–129. Harman, Graham. “On the Undermining of Objects: Grant, Bruno, and Radical Philosophy.” The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Eds. Levi Bryant et al. Melbourne: re.press, 2011. 21–40. Khlentzos, Drew. “Naturalism and the Question of Realism.” The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism. Ed. Kelly James Clark. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. 150–167. Koch, Anton Friedrich. Hermeneutischer Realismus. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016. Künne, Wolfgang. Conceptions of Truth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Loux, Michael J. “Realism and Anti-Realism: Dummett’s Challenge.” The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics. Eds. Michael J. Loux and Dean W. Zimmerman. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. 633–664. McDowell, John. “Anti-Realism and the Epistemology of Understanding.” Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998. 314– 343. Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude. An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. [2006] London and New York: Continuum, 2008. Nagel, Thomas. The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Plato. Plato: Complete Works. Ed. John Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. Putnam, Hilary. Meaning and the Moral Sciences. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Putnam, Hilary. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Putnam, Hilary. Ethics without Ontology. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2004. Russell, Bertrand. The Problems of Philosophy. [1912] Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Spade, Paul Vincent. Five Texts on the Medieval Problem of Universals: Porphyry, Boethius, Abelard, Duns Scotus, Ockham. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1994. Vlastos, Gregory. “The Third Man Argument in the Parmenides.” The Philosophical Review 63 (1954): 319–349. Willaschek, Marcus. Ed. Realismus. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2000. Willaschek, Marcus. Der mentale Zugang zur Welt. Frankfurt/Main: Klostermann, 2003. Wright, Crispin. Truth and Objectivity. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1992.
JUKKA MIKKONEN
Truth in Literature: The Problem of Knowledge and Insight Gained from Fiction 1. Introduction The cognitive value of literature – literary works’ ability to convey knowledge and insight – is perhaps the oldest topic in philosophical aesthetics; after all, Socrates already addressed it as the “ancient quarrel” between philosophers and poets (Plato, The Republic, X: 607b3). While there has not been continuous philosophical research on the matter, literature’s contributions to knowledge and cognition have been explored in different eras and philosophical traditions. This essay focuses on contemporary AngloAmerican analytic philosophy which is particularly concerned with the issue. Literature, because of its linguistic nature, has been an obvious object for analytic philosophers interested in language and matters such as meaning and truth; fictionality, in turn, has perplexed philosophers and offered them logical and ontological conundrums. In pursuing their interest in fictional literature analytic philosophers fall into roughly two groups: the aestheticians among the philosophers study literature as a form of art, whereas philosophers coming from areas such as the philosophy of language, metaphysics or moral philosophy, have used literary works often merely to illustrate theoretical points they have formulated independently of the works.1 The distinction between these two groups is arbitrary; in theories of fictionality, for instance, their interests converge.
1 For example, reference in fiction and the nature of fictional entities are major issues in philosophy (/ II .5 Tilmann Köppe and / III.15 Wolfgang Freitag).
Note: This article was written as a part of the research project “Cognitive Relevance of Aesthetics” (2016–2018) funded by the Finnish Cultural Foundation. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-014
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Analytic aesthetics is strongly influenced by Arnoldian humanism and its underlying romanticism (see Zamir 2007, 44–45). The humanistic view, which maintains that works of art tell us something important about ‘the human condition,’ is very much alive in the analytic tradition (for recent defenses of the humanistic view, see Lamarque and Olsen 1994; Gaskin 2013; and Harrison 2015). However, the question of whether the works’ purport ought to be addressed in terms of truth and knowledge forms a dividing line between philosophers. Cognitivists argue that literary works may furnish us with knowledge and insights, whereas anticognitivists consider literary works’ epistemic contributions trivial, subjective, and irrelevant for the works’ literary value.2 Both camps rely on strong intuitions. In fact, the intuitions are so deeply lodged that cognitivists have not made much effort to find evidence for literature’s cognitive contributions. They tend to merely cite a few specific cases, citing particular thinkers’ situations and the impact literature had on them. A common example is that of John Stuart Mill who overcame his depression in the wake of reading Wordsworth and learnt that “there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation” (Mill 2009 [1873], 98).3 Philosophers, in turn, have defended the cognitive value of literature and exemplified their claims with reference to works that have an explicit communicative aim, such as allegory, parable and satire. A focal theoretical issue is the modus operandi of literary communication, that is, the question of how literary works convey truths and insights. In addition to such didactic works – which have also interested scholars working on fictionality – philosophers have explored or at least acknowledged works that have philosophically, psychologically or ethically interesting content but which do not convey obvious messages or present definite ideas or unambiguous views and attitudes. The philosopher is interested in what we can learn from such works (or literature tout court, if the works exemplify good literature) and how that learning happens.
2 Further, cognitivism comes in roughly two forms: basic cognitivism maintains that artworks can make significant contributions to knowledge (the epistemic thesis), whereas aesthetic cognitivism asserts that an artwork’s cognitive value at least partly determines its aesthetic value (the aesthetic thesis). This essay focuses on the epistemic version. 3 Other frequently cited cases are those of Freud, who supposedly found his psychological theories anticipated in Sophocles and Shakespeare, and Wittgenstein, who recommended Tolstoy’s Hadshi Murat to Norman Malcolm, who had characterized war as “a boredom” (Malcolm 2001 [1958], 95), with the intention of opening his friend’s eyes to the real nature of war.
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One could say that philosophical problems regarding the epistemology of art are partly self-inflicted and have arisen as the result of philosophers conceiving knowledge in a frame of comparative narrowness. The modern analytical puzzlement over literature, for instance, was initially caused by the logical positivist distinction between “scientific” (referential) and “poetic” (emotive) use of language (see e.g. Ayer 1934, 57; see also Ogden and Richards 1969 [1923], Ch. VII, esp. 149). After logical positivists granted the natural sciences the monopoly on truth and knowledge and limited poetry to the expression of emotions, the status of art became problematic. Philosophers found it difficult to explain artworks’ ethical value, or the worldviews which artworks embody or represent, without referring to truth or terms related to truth. This gave rise to alternative epistemic terms. Theodore M. Greene, for instance, argued in the 1930s and 1940s for the arts’ cognitive value in terms of “artistic truth” (e.g. Greene 1938; Greene 1940). One of his critics, W. T. Stace, dismissed such an epistemic oddity outright: My view is that there is only one kind of truth, which consists in the correct ascription of a predicate or relation to a subject. Accordingly, every artistic truth is or contains a judgment. If this is not the case, then there is no justification for calling it ‘truth.’ It may be, for all I know, something very valuable, something perhaps even more precious than truth. But truth it can not be, for only that which is capable of being expressed as a judgment can be true or false. (Greene and Stace 1938, 656; emphasis added)
As the passage shows, philosophers may concede a high value to art – “something perhaps even more precious than truth” – and yet mistrust its epistemic value. It is characteristic of the debate that there are two divergent notions of ‘cognition’ employed in it. Dorothy Walsh nicely summarized the two intuitions in the 1940s: The arts have customarily been regarded as sources of intellectual nourishment. They have been accepted as vehicles of insight, revelation, and enlarged comprehension. Dissenting voices have, however, been raised from time to time, voices which express with indignation a denial of the value of art as a means to any adequate knowledge. (Walsh 1943, 433; emphases added)
Cognitivists typically, but not always, rely on a non-orthodox concept of truth, such as “insight,” “revelation” or “enlarged comprehension” – or “artistic truth,” “poetic truth,” or “literary truth.” They maintain that such truths cannot be expressed by means of propositions. Anticognitivists, by contrast, equate cognitive value with truth and think of it in terms of judgments or propositions. They argue that a work has cognitive value to the extent that it makes claims that are true (in terms of correspondence or coherence theory of truth) (/ II.1 Klauk, / II.5 Köppe, / II.2 Bartmann).
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In what follows, I will introduce three variations of cognitivism which attempt to describe the epistemic value of fictional literature employing either a standard or a non-orthodox concept of truth and knowledge, followed by criticism expressed toward them. The three approaches defend the epistemic significance of literature in terms of (i) propositional knowledge, (ii) experiential knowledge, and (iii) ‘conceptual enrichment’ or understanding.4 2. Propositional knowledge Since analytic philosophers tend to consider propositional knowledge as the principal or only form of knowledge, cognitivists have also attempted to describe the cognitive value of literature in terms of propositional knowledge.5 Literary knowledge has been identified with factual descriptions on historical and geographical matters, or authors’ explicit generalizations (gnomic sentences) or implicit theses on moral, psychological or philosophical issues. The traditional propositional view maintains that authors can make assertions in their works. Gregory Currie, for one, says that works of fiction may contain authors’ assertions that are intended for the readers to believe. Currie points out that Walter Scott “breaks off the narrative of Guy Mannering in order to tell us something about the condition of Scottish gypsies, and it is pretty clear that what he says is asserted” (Currie 1990, 48–49). At the same time, in analyzing the distinction between fiction and literature, it has been proposed that a work of literature might not consist entirely of fictional discourse but could also include the author’s genuine assertions (Searle 1975, 332), or that an utterance in a fictional text can be used both to elicit imaginings and to claim truths (Walton 1990, 71, 79). Currie writes that “[t]he author of a fictional work may intend his audience to believe what he says and also intend that the audience (perhaps a different audience) will take the attitude of makebelieve toward what he says. He engages simultaneously in acts of fictionmaking and assertion” (1990, 35). The problem with this argument lies in the circumstance that the institution of literature breaks the bond between the author and the utterance 4 Several philosophers argue that fictions may convey different kinds of knowledge. Indeed, as Peter Lamarque (2009, 226) says and as this chapter aims to show, a philosopher of literature may have different conceptions of ‘literary truth,’ without a consistent concept of truth underlying them all. 5 See Mikkonen (2013) for an overview and partial defence of the propositional approach.
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and introduces a narrator or speaker role. It is difficult, if not impossible, to identify the author’s genuine assertions in fiction (or a characteristically fictional work), for one cannot say when an author asserts propositions or when they merely express them; the same goes for their tone, e.g. whether they are sincere or ironic. Anders Pettersson thinks that if there are assertions in fiction, “their affirmative character is weakened and somewhat dubious” and they are “aetiolations” rather than “full-blown assertions” (2000, 122). Indeed, in writing fiction authors are freed from the standard speech act commitments. And as they are not understood to be making assertions but to be inviting the readers to use their imaginations, they are not expected to provide evidence for their apparent assertions or to support them with arguments. Without evidence and argument assertions are considered to be banal, and if there are assertions in fiction, they are akin to proverbs (Stolnitz 1992, 193–194). Critics of the propositional view also claim that the apparent assertions in literature are too general to be relevant for truth-assessment; “All the world’s a stage” (Shakespeare, As You Like It II, vii), for example, is simply too vague to be assessed as true or false (Lamarque 2009, 234). Another version of the propositional approach maintains that authors could imply assertions through their fictional utterances or the work as a whole. John Hospers, for one, argues that Jonathan Swift’s point in A Modest Proposal was “devastatingly effective” because Swift did not state it but “said, with multiplied examples just the opposite” (1960, 39). Hospers insists that such “implied truths” seem to “contain the most important things in the novel, and are often the novel’s chief excuse for existing; yet they seem to operate entirely behind the scenes” (39) Likewise, Noël Carroll maintains that the political, philosophical, and moral points which authors put forward in their works are “often secured through oblique techniques,” such as implication, irony, allegory, presupposition, and illustration without explicative commentary (1992, 108). ‘Implication’ and ‘suggestion’ are, however, extremely problematic notions. Even cognitivists find philosophical concepts of implication too strict to be of much help in explaining the alleged implied truths in literature, while ‘suggestion’ is generally left unexplained in the cognitivist theories. Moreover, implications require interpretation, which makes the work’s ‘point’ subject to debate. Stein Haugom Olsen (1985 [1978], 71) asserts that when asked what truths a given fiction conveys, readers typically give inarticulate answers and fail to agree among themselves. Olsen maintains that in order to be generally acceptable, the work’s thematic claims (understood as implied truths) have to be rendered very broadly, but when rendered broadly, they become trivial.
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Further, cognitivists have proposed that authors could furnish their readers with hypotheses (see e.g. Kivy 1997), and that literary works could function as thought experiments akin to those used in science and philosophy (see e.g. Carroll 2002).6 Critics of these views argue that the “literary stance,” the appropriate mode of response to literary works qua literary works, does not include truth-assessment (see Lamarque and Olsen 1994, 256, 436–437). Rather, the criticism continues, attempts to verify hypotheses embodied in or derived from a literary work necessitate a shift from literature to psychology, sociology, philosophy or some other discipline which ‘yields knowledge.’ The forms of cognitivism that operate on standard notions of truth and knowledge can also be criticized since the search for propositional knowledge in literature subordinates art to knowledgeseeking disciplines that characteristically aim at discovering and communicating truths. Finally, the propositional approach accords very little value to the works’ distinctive literary features, such as those related to narrativity. 3. Experiential knowledge The majority of cognitivists think that the cognitive value of literature ought not to be conceived of in terms of propositional knowledge. Partly inspired by Gilbert Ryle’s (1949) seminal distinction between knowledge-that and knowledge-how, cognitivists have maintained that literary works could provide non-propositional knowledge for their readers. However, few cognitivists argue that fictions could teach their readers skills, at least any of a practical kind (cognitive skills will be discussed in section 4). Rather, a new form of nonpropositional knowledge is introduced: knowledge of what it is like to go through certain kinds of experience or to be a certain sort of character. Literary works are thus seen to offer their readers phenomenal or experiential knowledge. Fictions are regularly praised for offering different perspectives on their subject matter. As D. Z. Phillips puts it, “[w]hat separates Archer and his son [in Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence] is not a matter of different tentative beliefs within a common notion of reason but, rather, different ways of looking at the world, different conceptions of what is important in life” (1982, 25). Hilary Putnam, in turn, says that in reading Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night one does not learn that “love does not exist, that all
6 The cognitivist’s standard example for such a thought experiment is Jorge Luis Borges’s “Pierre Menard” (1939), which is taken to show that literary works cannot be identified with texts.
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human beings are hateful and hating,” but what it is “to see the world as it looks to someone who is sure that hypothesis is correct” (1978, 89). Martha Nussbaum argues that the experiences we gain in reading fiction are much richer than those we have in our parochial lives. [L]iterature is an extension of life not only horizontally, bringing the reader into contact with events or locations or persons or problems he or she has not otherwise met, but also, so to speak, vertically, giving the reader experience that is deeper, sharper, and more precise than much of what takes place in life. (Nussbaum 1990, 48)
The idea of ‘virtual experience’ is often associated with modal knowledge. For instance, fictions are thought to help us “to see possibilities which otherwise we might not recognize” (Phillips 1982, 10), or fiction is seen as a place within which readers can acquire, train and enjoy their modal dispositions, i.e. their disposition to determine what is possible or not (Pouivet 2011, 26). Moreover, it is suggested that fictions could enlighten us as to what we might possibly do in situations similar to those depicted in the work (Currie 1997 [1995], 56). It is regularly argued that we gain experiential knowledge from fiction via our emotional responses to the (mis)fortunes of literary characters – the response typically being that of empathy. Jenefer Robinson, for example, argues that the reader can genuinely learn from a work of literature only through an emotional experience of it. Further, she maintains that the reader’s emotional responses are themselves a way of understanding a fictional character and their situation. Robinson claims that in reading Anna Karenina, “[a]n examination of the sources of our emotional responses to Anna reveal important facts about Anna and her situation as described in the novel” (2005, 108–109). She writes: When we read the scene of the visit to Seryozha, we feel an intense urge to help Anna, an intense distress and sorrow at her predicament, an intense desire and hope that her predicament will be resolved. The passage is so poignant indeed that it easily provokes tears and other physiological symptoms of sadness and distress. If, however, we experience the passage emotionally in this way, then we are in a good position to try to discover why we respond emotionally as we do, and this in turn can lead us to seek in the work the origins of this response. (110–111; emphasis in original)
Nevertheless, it is a long way from fictional scenarios, virtual experience, and imagination to genuine knowledge. The critics point out, for instance, that the subjective experience which a literary work gives rise to does not represent a form of knowledge; that the cognitivist theories do not distinguish between genuine and putative knowledge nor provide means for distinguishing between what is true or false; and that the theories do not demonstrate an intrinsic link between literary response and learning (Lamarque and Olsen 1994, 371). We are further led to question the authority and accuracy of literary descriptions. Does the author have knowledge of
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the experiences which they are depicting, and if not, can their imaginative constructions be considered reliable? Further, one ought to keep in mind the textuality of the representations, that is, the “opacity” of literary descriptions: the content of a literary work is presented in rich and nuanced fictional descriptions (narration), and abstracting characters and situations from a work and applying them metaphorically to the world risks making them woefully flat (Lamarque 2014, ix; 68). The idea of gaining knowledge via empathy or other emotional responses is also much disputed. It is questionable whether an empathic response is common among readers in the first place. Peter Lamarque argues that empathy is genre-relative and that while certain popular genres (fantasy, romance, horror) might encourage such responses, others might not (2009, 246). He claims that empathy is reader-relative and tends to rely “too much on first-time reading rather than careful and prolonged study” (247). Further, because a fiction does not require the reader to take action, the sceptics, at times citing psychological studies, argue that fictional scenarios are likely not to inform the reader about what they would actually do in a situation akin to the one represented; the reader is an observer and not a participant. Works of literature are expected to promote idealism (or false beliefs) rather than genuine self-knowledge. The role of empathy in literary interpretation has also been questioned. Lamarque claims that empathic engagement with fictional characters is not part of a proper literary response to the works. He supports this claim by pointing out that emotional responses do not play any substantial role in the practice of academic literary criticism (2009, 247). In addition, he considers empathic engagement with a particular character a very narrow response to the work as an artwork. Lamarque and Olsen argue that “it is most unlikely that literary works taken as a whole – as works – will present situations that could provide a coherent and unified experience describable as ‘knowing what it is like’” (1994, 378; emphasis in original). Further, they argue that a “Hamlet-situation, for example, is far too complex and specific to give rise to any single and sustained experience of this kind, certainly not one that will be relevant to a reader’s daily life” (378). A recurrent criticism of the cognitivist view is that looking for truths or ethical guidance in fiction fails to take into account the subtlety and complexity of literary works. In criticizing Nussbaum’s view of literature as moral philosophy, Richard Posner asks “[w]hat moral guidance does The Golden Bowl offer its readers?” and answers: It seems to invite a variety of incompatible moral responses. One can side with the adulterers, finding Maggie the insufferable rich girl from start to finish and thinking it wrong that Charlotte should lose out to her merely because Maggie is rich and Charlotte poor. One can look upon the prince as a golddigger (for it is plain that he married
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Maggie for her money, his excuse being that his aristocratic status obligates him to support his relatives in Italy) and think Maggie poor-spirited both for marrying him in the first place and for condoning his adultery. (Posner 1997, 12)
Posner remarks that these interpretations of the work may coexist happily, for “The Golden Bowl is richly ambiguous, and exerts no pressure on the reader to select the one ‘right’ reading” (12). Moreover, Posner remarks that empathy, conceived of as a better understanding of other people, does not necessarily make a person better or more just (see e.g. Posner 1997, 10). Talent in social cognition may be used for various purposes, including manipulation. And perhaps empathy is not even morally desirable, for – as Gregory Currie puts it – [h]elping behaviour produced by unreflective empathy tends to be arbitrarily disposed, favours those close to us with whom we empathise easily, and proceeds without regard to justice or economy of means; it makes us sensitive to the individual victim of a policy and indifferent to the many whose lives the policy saved. (Currie 2016a, 55)
Currie provides various reasons to doubt the enthusiastic views on the effects of fiction on moral cognition and behavior. Perhaps empathizing with fictional characters is different from empathizing with real people, as the stimuli available in fictional cases (direct access to a character’s thoughts and feelings) is much richer than the stimuli available in real life; or perhaps empathy and helping behavior are only weakly connected, if at all; or perhaps empathizing with fictional characters merely primes readers for empathizing with real people; or perhaps empathizing with fictional characters is actually rare in reading fiction. Further, he suggests that empathizing with fictional characters might even have a significant but negative effect on helping behavior. Perhaps empathizing with fictional characters eats into readers’ empathy capital and gives them a sense of responding right, lessening their desire to empathize with real people; or perhaps empathizing with fictional characters weakens the psychological connection between empathy and helping behavior, as response to fiction lacks the action part (Currie 2016a, 58–59).
4. Conceptual enrichment and understanding In recent decades, many philosophers have argued that the cognitive value of literature lies less in the works providing their readers with new knowledge than in their operating on and enhancing the knowledge which readers already possess; this is taking the claim that art gives us “insight,” “revelation” or “enlarged” comprehension a step further. Currently views are held that literary works may “advance” or “clarify” readers’ understand-
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ing of things they already know (Elgin 1993; Carroll 1998); or “enhance” or “enrich” their existing knowledge (Graham 2000); or help them to “acknowledge” things (Gibson 2007). These ‘neocognitivist’ theories speak of understanding instead of knowledge. David Novitz, for one, thinks that literary works may help their readers to become aware of conceptual relationships which they have not thought of before: by reading Jane Austen’s Emma, people may observe that pride breeds self-deception (Novitz 1987, 137). In Novitz’s view, fiction “enables us to ‘rearrange’ our world, to ‘remodel’ it and fashion it anew” (137). Likewise, in his theory of “clarificationism,” Noël Carroll maintains that works of art may deepen their readers’ moral understanding by rehearsing the readers’ moral knowledge and emotions. Carroll thinks that in interpreting a (narrative) work, readers access and mobilize their cognitive, emotive and moral repertoire, and in applying and engaging this repertoire, they may come to explore and augment it. A literary work thus becomes an “occasion for exercising knowledge, concepts, and emotions that [readers] have already, in one sense, learned” (Carroll 1998, 140, 142). One of Carroll’s examples is Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), which he interprets as offering a possibility for white audiences to ‘deepen’ their understanding of the principle that all people should be treated equally no matter what color they are. In other words, the audience already recognizes the general principle, but the play makes them realize it (see Walsh 1969, 102–103). Nelson Goodman and Catherine Z. Elgin, in turn, argue that art is a genuinely significant epistemic enterprise. Goodman famously goes so far as to state that “the arts must be taken no less seriously than the sciences as modes of discovery, creation, and enlargement of knowledge in the broad sense of advancement of understanding” (1978, 102). In their view, the cognitive progress is not about gaining new knowledge but deepening our understanding. As Goodman puts it, “the truth of the laws of a theory is but one special feature and is often [...] overridden in importance by the cogency and compactness and comprehensiveness, the informativeness and organizing power of the whole system” (1978, 19). For Goodman and Elgin, understanding is a cognitive faculty that includes “the collection of abilities to inquire and invent, discriminate and discover, connect and clarify, order and organize, adopt, test, reject” (1988, 161); elsewhere, Elgin reminds us that “perception, recognition, classification, and pattern detection” (2000, 219) are all cognitive activities. Furthermore, Elgin considers understanding non-factive, claiming that not all truths are worth knowing and not all falsehoods worth dismissing; as she sees it, some truths are trivial and some falsehoods “useful approximations or idealizations” (2002, 11).
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Approached in terms of understanding, works of literature may contribute to cognition in various ways. Works of fiction may provide their readers with new categories, such as that of “whitewoman” in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (Elgin 1996, 186–187). In turn, extreme (and ‘unrealistic’) fictional characters may help us to understand abstract concepts: In everyday life we do not encounter the simple goodness of Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov, or the unadulterated evil of Iago in Othello, or the blind obsession of Ahab in Moby Dick. But by devising a suitable context, the authors can investigate the characters and their impacts on others in a way that reflect back on reality, perhaps enabling us to recognize the less pure cases we are apt to encounter in fact. (Elgin 2002, 9)
In addition to enhancing conceptual knowledge or reorganizing conceptual relationships, Goodman thinks that artworks can increase the audience’s “acuity of insight” or their “range of comprehension” (1978, 21–22). Elgin, for her part, maintains that artworks may heighten the audience’s sensitivity and help people to “discriminate increasingly fine differences” (2000, 221). She proposes that “fictions sensitize us to delicate differences in degree, demeanor, and detail that affect moral standing. If they thereby make moral deliberation more demanding, they also make moral judgment more acute” (1996, 186; emphasis added). What is interesting here is the idea that fiction, by showing the moral complexity of certain situations, for example, may make deliberation more demanding, and that art’s epistemic gains are thus not straightforward. Eileen John proposes that, rather than supplying new ways of thinking, literary works sometimes “lead us to places of obscurity or untested areas in entrenched ways of thinking” (1998, 340). Further, she thinks that in such cases, “the work provides a context in which we can think fruitfully about the conceptual issues raised, where the line of inquiry we pursue is integrated into our efforts to judge the characters and events” (340). As her example John uses Grace Paley’s short story “Wants” (1974), which depicts the encounter of a divorced couple during which the ex-husband and the ex-wife employ the word “want” in different, and thus mutually confusing ways (wanting as ‘desiring something’ and as ‘lacking something’). In John’s view, “the ex-husband and the narrator each use different senses of the term ‘want,’ and thereby summon up different networks of associated concepts” (340). The confusion caused by the characters’ different uses of the word, so John proposes, leads the reader to explore the nature of the concept of want. Novitz asserts that fiction “often explores, teases, and tests our moral standards and attitudes” (1987, 139). Elsewhere, he argues that much of what we consider we learn from fiction does not square with our established beliefs; rather, fiction “flouts, fragments, and disturbs them – and yet we have little doubt that we have learned something useful from the
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fiction” (2004, 992).7 Likewise, Bernard Harrison thinks that literary works challenge and disrupt our thinking. He claims that the cognitive gains of literature are first and foremost gains in self-knowledge and as such “of an essentially negative kind” (1991, 50). For Harrison (2015, xvii), literary knowledge is “dangerous knowledge,” as “it may possess the power to destabilize the possessor’s conceptually enshrined understanding of the limits of human possibility and, in consequence, to destabilize his or her self-image.” Elgin, in turn, states that [a]rt [...] challenges complacent assumptions, not just about matters of fact, but also about how problems and proposed solutions should be framed. It pushes the boundaries, reconfigures domains, highlights unusual perspectives and stances. It thus leads us into terra incognita, where the route to cognitive advancement is nowhere clearly marked. It does not, and does not purport to deliver literal, descriptive truths. It seeks, rather, to challenge, to disorient, to disrupt, to explore and thereby to reveal what more regimented approaches lack the resources to attempt. (Elgin 2002, 12)
The neocognitivists’ shift from knowledge to understanding encapsulates many popular conceptions about the value of literature, and the view has a good deal of appeal. That literary works may provide their readers with new perspectives on familiar things, sophisticate the readers’ perception, and offer them new categories for classifying objects – these are commonplaces in literary culture. Moreover, many anticognitivists are happy to grant art such functions. Of course, artworks ‘broaden our horizons’ and so on. But from an epistemic point of view, the anticognitivists argue, notions such as ‘enhanced understanding’ or ‘enriched knowledge’ depart too far from the standard notions of truth and knowledge and obfuscate rather than clarify the matter. Neocognitivist theories are accused of seeking refuge in metaphors, which are not typically considered sufficiently explanatory in analytic philosophy. Thus in his critique of Greene’s “artistic truths,” W. T. Stace says that “if the esthetician insists on claiming for art a separate and peculiar kind of truth, inaccessible to the common conceptual ‘intellect,’ he will in the end achieve nothing except to bring ridicule upon his branch of philosophy” (1938, 658). Similarly, Hilary Putnam argues that if the cognitivist’s claim of the existence of artistic knowledge as “knowledge of man” additionally maintains that this knowledge is more important than scientific knowledge, “we have a full-blown obscurantist position – not the position of the serious student or critic of literature [...] but the position of the
7 Here, one can observe how cognitivists defend art’s epistemic value with various claims: artworks can have epistemic value in both clarifying our concepts and in problematizing our conceptions.
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religion of literature” (1978, 89). And Roger Pouivet, while defending art’s cognitive value, thinks that Goodman’s view of art’s epistemic value is simply exaggerated: The world I step into when I leave the Centre Georges Pompidou is the same vale of tears I quitted before entering the building to see an exhibition. To say that the world has changed is just a way of saying that I have been impressed; it is not a genuinely ontological remark. (2011, 16)
Finally, it has been argued that cognitivist theories do not establish a distinction between a reader recognizing a conception in a work and then actually adopting it (Lamarque and Olsen 1994, 384). It is one thing to say that literary interpretation requires conceptual adjustment and quite another thing to say that this carries over from the fictional world and contributes to the reader’s knowledge and thinking in general. Also, anticognitivists have pondered how much general readers are actually interested in learning. Lamarque assumes that “the expectations readers have in coming to a novel or poem for the first time are seldom cognitive expectations: readers are not commonly motivated to read by the thought that they will learn something” (2010, 382). Gregory Currie, for his part, has recently criticized cognitivists for what he thinks is unfounded optimism: cognitivists maintain that literary works change readers for the better, but they do not provide any evidence for their claims nor look at empirical research on the topic. And yet cognitivists speak of the effects which literary works have on their readers. In addition, cognitivists do not explore the possibility of fictions changing their readers for the worse; rather, they tend to dismiss this possibility outright. What justification is there for the claim that literary works can only improve one’s understanding and not harm it (see Currie 2014; Currie 2016b)? Some philosophers that have been labeled ‘anticognitivists’ in this essay believe that literary works may have significant cognitive value, but they state that this value is reader-related and not integral to the works as literary works. Richard Posner thinks that [i]nstead [of providing practical tips about life] literature helps us, as Nietzsche would have put it, to become what we are. The characters and situations that interest us in literature are for the most part characters and situations that capture aspects of ourselves and our situation. Literature helps us make sense of our lives, helps us to fashion an identity for ourselves. If you don’t already sense that love is the most important thing in the world, you’re not likely to be persuaded that it is by reading Donne’s love poems, or Stendhal, or Galsworthy. But reading them may make you realize that this is what you think, and so may serve to clarify yourself to yourself. (1997, 20; emphasis in original)
Lamarque, in turn, suggests that literary works “can shape the [reader’s] mind by inducing and guiding thoughts and thought processes” and thus
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“reconfigure our minds, usually, although not inevitably, in positive ways” (2014, 166). However, he continues: What we go on to do with the thoughts thus accumulated is another matter altogether. They might affect our subsequent actions and attitudes or they might re-order our conception of ourselves. They might have no practical effect whatsoever. But any effects they do have will be contingent and largely dependent on local psychological dispositions of individual readers. (166–167)
5. Conclusion It is difficult for the cognitivist to show that learning from literature is integral to literary interpretation and happens as a result of reading the work. As John Gibson puts it, the question of cognitivism is two-place: it not only calls on us to show that there is something we can learn from art; to be cognitivists about art we further have to show that what we claim to have learnt from an artwork is a point, insight, or truth, that is to be found in the artwork itself. (2008, 575; emphases in original)
Then again, one can reasonably doubt to what extent literary “insights” reside in the works themselves and exist independently of an interpretative framework. Further, the notion of understanding underlying certain neocognitivist theories seems to suggest that the cognitive gains of literature are at least partially subjective, as they depend on the reader’s antecedent knowledge and skills. Some philosophers, such as Goodman and Elgin, are suspicious of the notion of a ‘pure aesthetic response’ and maintain that artworks may have significant epistemic value when used in discovery and exploration. It is likely that the ancient quarrel will continue.
References Ayer, A. J. “The Genesis of Metaphysics.” Analysis 1.4 (1934): 55–58. Carroll, Noël. “Art, Intention, and Conversation.” Intention and Interpretation. Ed. Gary Iseminger. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. 97–131. Carroll, Noël. “Art, Narrative, and Moral Understanding.” Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection. Ed. Jerrold Levinson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 126– 160. Carroll, Noël. “The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature, and Moral Knowledge.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 60.1 (2002): 3–26. Currie, Gregory. The Nature of Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Currie, Gregory. “The Moral Psychology of Fiction.” [1995] Art and Its Messages: Meaning, Morality, and Society. Ed. Stephen Davies. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. 49–58.
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Currie, Gregory. “On Getting Out of the Armchair to Do Aesthetics.” Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory? Ed. Matthew C. Haug. New York: Routledge, 2014. 435–450. Currie, Gregory. “Does Fiction Make Us Less Empathic?” Teorema 35.3 (2016a): 47–68. Currie, Gregory. “Methods in the Philosophy of Literature and Film.” The Oxford Handbook of Philosophical Methodology. Eds. Herman Cappelen, Tamar Szabó Gendler, and John Hawthorne. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016b. 641–656. Elgin, Catherine Z. “Understanding: Art and Science.” Synthese 95 (1993): 13–28. Elgin, Catherine Z. Considered Judgment. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Elgin, Catherine Z. “Reorienting Aesthetics, Reconceiving Cognition.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58 (2000): 219–225. Elgin, Catherine Z. “Art in the Advancement of Understanding.” American Philosophical Quarterly 39.1 (2002): 1–12. Gaskin, Richard. Language, Truth, and Literature: A Defense of Literary Humanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Gibson, John. Fiction and the Weave of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Gibson, John. “Cognitivism and the Arts.” Philosophy Compass 3.4 (2008): 573–589. Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1978. Goodman, Nelson, and Catherine Z. Elgin. Reconceptions in Philosophy and Other Arts and Sciences. London: Routledge, 1988. Graham, Gordon. Philosophy of the Arts: An Introduction to Aesthetics. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2000. Greene, Theodore M. “Beauty and the Cognitive Significance of Art.” The Journal of Philosophy 35.14 (1938): 365–381. Greene, Theodore M. The Arts and the Art of Criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940. Greene, Theodore M., and W. T. Stace. “Comments and Criticisms.” The Journal of Philosophy 35.24 (1938): 656–658. Harrison, Bernard. Inconvenient Fictions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Harrison, Bernard. What is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015. Hospers, John. “Implied Truths in Literature.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 19.1 (1960): 37–46. John, Eileen. “Reading Fiction and Conceptual Knowledge: Philosophical Thought in Literary Context.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56.4 (1998): 331–348. Kivy, Peter. “On the Banality of Literary Truths.” Philosophic Exchange 28.1 (1997): 17–27. Lamarque, Peter. “Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the Boundaries.” Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Matthew Kieran. London: Blackwell, 2006. 127–139. Lamarque, Peter. The Philosophy of Literature. Malden: Blackwell, 2009. Lamarque, Peter. “Literature and Truth.” Companion to the Philosophy of Literature. Eds. Garry Hagberg and Walter Jost. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 367–384. Lamarque, Peter. The Opacity of Narrative. London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2014. Lamarque, Peter, and Stein Haugom Olsen. Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Malcolm, Norman. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. [1958] Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001. Mikkonen, Jukka. The Cognitive Value of Philosophical Fiction. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Mill, John Stuart. Autobiography of J. S. Mill. [1873] New York: Cosimo Classics 2009. Novitz, David. Knowledge, Fiction, and Imagination. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1987.
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WOLFGANG FREITAG
Reference in Philosophy Whether or not a sentence is true depends on what it says and on what the world is like. The sentence Aristotle invented the syllogism, though true as a matter of fact, could have been false under different circumstances. If Aristotle had died in early childhood, he would not have become the inventor of the syllogism. And likewise, if linguistic meaning were different and Aristotle referred to, say, Socrates, the sentence would be false too: however great Socrates’s philosophical achievements, the invention of the syllogism is not amongst them. Reference connects linguistic expressions and the things they are about, and hence determines part of the truth-conditions for assertions. Therefore, reference is a, or perhaps the, crucial concept in philosophical semantics. This essay discusses the structure of reference (Section 1), the problems of reference (Section 2), and reference in fiction (Section 3).
1. The structure of reference While reference is a general concept applying to different kinds of linguistic expression, it has been primarily investigated with respect to singular terms, i.e., to linguistic constructions intended to denote individual objects. Most prominently, reference has been discussed for proper names, such as Aristotle or Churchill, definite descriptions (e.g., Plato’s most famous student), and indexical expressions (e.g., this man, now, I). I will here focus on proper names. Names refer to objects. Thus, reference for names can be understood as a binary relation between the linguistic expression and its referent. What is the structure of this relation? Is it immediate and direct, or is there a further, mediating entity involved? A naïve view, presented by John Stuart Mill (1865), holds that reference is a direct relation: the semantic function of names is exhausted by their reference. This appears to be obvious for Churchill, whose semantics does not indicate any connotation. But even for https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-015
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names which do seem to possess a descriptive content, such as Dartmouth, this content does not, according to Mill, have any semantic, referencedetermining function. Dartmouth would continue to refer to the same city even if the mouth of the river Dart should move. Gottlob Frege (1892) rejects the theory of direct reference primarily on the grounds of the problem of informative identity statements. If the semantic value of names is exhausted by their referents, then two names with the same referents have the same semantic value. But, Frege claims, while statements of the form a = a (e.g., Hesperus = Hesperus) are a priori, containing no factual information whatsoever, true identity statements of the form a = b (e.g., Hesperus = Phosphorus) might often contain a valuable extension of our factual knowledge. However, this seems impossible if the semantic values of a and b are identical, as the theory of direct reference maintains. In response to the puzzle, Frege suggests that meaning comes in two forms. In addition to having a referent or denotation, a name also possesses a sense, a way by which one conceives of the reference. Sense determines reference. Two expressions with the same sense also have the same reference. However, expressions with the same reference may have different senses. The names Hesperus and Phosphorus denote the very same planet, namely Venus, but express different ways of conceiving of Venus and so have different senses. Given the semantic compositionality principle, the principle that the sense of a complex is a function of the senses of its parts, Frege is able to claim that the sense of a = a differs from the sense of a = b, and hence to properly address, perhaps even solve, the problem of informative identities. Bertrand Russell (1905) objects to Frege’s introduction of sense. He agrees with Frege that ordinary proper names cannot be understood in Mill’s fashion. Yet he conceives of ordinary proper names as definite descriptions in disguise: Aristotle might be just an abbreviation for Plato’s most famous student. This is the first part of Russell’s theory of ordinary proper names, the second being the famous theory of definite descriptions. A definite description is a denoting phrase of the form (or translatable into the form) the F, where F is a noun phrase or a common noun, such as the most famous student of Plato or the greatest prime number. Russell claims that a definite description does not have a reference by itself but must rather be analyzed in the context of the sentence in which it occurs: a definite description is an ‘incomplete symbol’ and not a referring expression at all. Consider the sentence Plato’s most famous student invented the syllogism. A proper analysis shows, according to Russell, that the sentence is not a simple predication, as its surface grammar suggests. Instead, it comprises a (hidden) quantification and says, roughly, that there is exactly one person who is
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Plato’s most famous student and that he or she has invented the syllogism – in predicate logic it has the form, dx(Fx & cy(Fy / x = y) & Gx). This analysis straightforwardly explains the informativity of identity statements. Hesperus is Phosphorus translates into something like ‘There is exactly one planet that can be first seen in the evening, and it is identical to the last planet visible in the morning,’ which is surely more informative than the perhaps trivial ‘There is exactly one planet that can be first seen in the evening, and it is identical to the planet that can be first seen in the evening.’ Despite this apparent success with respect to the problem of informative identities, it is doubtful whether Russell’s theory of names delivers the correct results. Let me begin with his analysis of definite descriptions. Russell holds that with The F is G the speaker asserts the unique existence of an F. For example, with The present king of France is bald the speaker claims that there is such a king, and only one such king (and that he is bald). According to Russell, then, the statement is false, because there is no such king, bald or not. But, as Peter Strawson (1950) objects, existence and uniqueness are not asserted in such an utterance. They are presupposed. As the presupposition is not satisfied in this case, the statement is not false but rather has no determinate truth value at all.1 There are also weighty objections to Russell’s description theory of ordinary proper names, the most important ones of which were famously presented by Saul Kripke (1980).2 Kripke observes, first, that if a name were only an abbreviated definite description of a suitable sort, the name would refer to different individuals under different circumstances, or in technical terms, in different possible worlds. (Think of possible worlds as possible universes corresponding to the infinitely many ways things might have been.) For example, if Aristotle functioned semantically like Plato’s most famous student, it would pick out different individuals in different worlds, as Aristotle could have died in early childhood, or never have come to Athens, thus leaving the preeminent position as Plato’s most prominent student to someone else. Aristotle would then refer to Aristotle in the actual world but, say, to Speusippos in another world, and to Xenocrates in a third. Yet this is highly implausible. The sentence Aristotle could have died in early childhood is true, and it is true because in some other possible world something bad happened to the young Aristotle. This strongly suggests that if Aristotle had died as an infant or had never gone into philosophy,
1 For a defense of Russell on this point, see his own response (1957) and Neale (1990). For further objections against Russell’s theory of descriptions, see also Kripke (1979a). 2 The arguments against Russell’s theory of proper names can mutatis mutandis be leveled also against Frege.
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the name Aristotle would still refer to Aristotle. An ordinary proper name is, as Kripke says, a “rigid designator” (1980, 3 et passim), referring to the same object in all possible worlds in which the pertinent object exists. While this modal argument does not, strictly speaking, rule out descriptivist theories – one can also rigidify definite descriptions (see, e.g., Kaplan 1978) – it strongly suggests a theory of direct reference, according to which proper names refer to objects without any mediating ‘sense’ and without the detour via descriptive predicates. And there are other objections to descriptivism: often even competent speakers are not in possession of sufficient information to uniquely identify the referent of some particular name. Many of us know little more about Cicero than that he was a Roman orator. But this description equally applies to other people, whose names we do not even care to remember. Certainly we are then not in possession of an identifying description that might fix the reference for us. That we nevertheless confidently and competently use the name Cicero shows that Russell’s description theory of names is incorrect and, more generally, that theories of indirect reference of the sort he considered must fail and theories of direct reference prevail. Kripke was identified as early as Plato refers us back to a Millian theory of direct reference, with the consequence that the problem of informative identities, which motivated theories of indirect reference in the first place, still stands out as an unresolved anomaly of the old and the new paradigm. (See, however, the critical remarks concerning the problem of informative identities in Section 2.) 2. Problems of reference A name refers directly to its object. This by itself does not tell us how reference is established. So, what determines that Aristotle refers to Plato’s most famous student, and Churchill to Britain’s most important twentiethcentury politician? The depth and difficulty of this question is often underappreciated, so let me try to demonstrate its intuitive force. Language is in a sense transparent. We can speak about the most distant objects just as easily as we speak about those which are right in front of us. We can speak about the end of the universe – and perhaps also about what lies beyond. We can refer both to objects of the future and to those of the distant past. And we do so without effort or temporal delay. It seems that all objects are simply there for us to be referred to, no matter how distant – spatially or temporally – they may be. But how is that possible? It is well-nigh incredible that our words, spatio-temporally confined things constituted by a series of ink marks on a piece of paper or
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by a sound pattern coming out of our mouths, can achieve this extraordinary feat. The semantic relation of reference is practically unnoticeable in everyday discourse but extremely puzzling from a theoretical point of view. It is sometimes suggested that theories of indirect reference, while problematic on other grounds, have an advantage in this respect. The descriptivist, for example, claims that the function of an ordinary proper name is to refer to the particular object of which the descriptive predicates occurring in the definite description associated with that name are true.3 The suggestion is therefore that if, instead of Aristotle, we were to use the words Plato’s most famous student, these words would find their referent by themselves – this being the object which has that preeminent philosophical status. But of course the words do no such thing! The reference of the definite description Plato’s most famous student plainly also depends on the reference of the name Plato, and that stands itself in need of explanation. A descriptivist might hope that this name, as well as any further names occurring in an analyzing definite description, in turn receive a descriptivist analysis such that, at the end of analysis, we are always left with a complex definite description that does not contain any proper names anymore. But even if this hope materialized, it would not solve the problem of reference: the remaining description will still have to contain predicates or relation terms (or deictic terms such as this and that), and thus it will depend on as-yet-unexplained meanings or references concerning the object it is true of. The intentional distance, the semantic gap, between an expression and its object, which is to be bridged by the notion of reference, is no smaller for the descriptivist than for the proponent of direct reference. Insisting on a tu quoque by maintaining that a theory of indirect reference has the same problem as one of direct reference may be justified, but it does not help the proponent of direct reference in solving the noted difficulty. A positive solution to the problem of reference is needed. Kripke (1980) famously introduces the idea of a causal-historical chain, according to which the reference of a name is established by an original act of baptism, in which the object to be named is indicated by a demonstration or a uniquely referring expression. The name is then transferred from one speaker to the other in the following manner: a later speaker intends to refer to the same entity that the former speaker referred to. While many have accepted this thesis at least in rough outline, I think that the causalhistorical account of reference determination faces severe problems. One worry is that the account seems to be crucially incomplete: the act of
3 Ignore here that Russell himself holds that ordinary proper names do not refer at all, but are only incomplete symbols.
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baptism is still underexplained. Even if the reference of my use of Aristotle can be traced back to some act of baptism twenty-five centuries ago, there remains the question: what, in this act of baptism, determines that the name Aristotle was tagged onto the baby that would become Plato’s most famous student, and not someone or something else? As long as there is no answer to this basic question, the theory is not a theory of reference determination, but only one of reference transmission. There is a deeper worry, however, which has also been brought to our attention by Kripke – although, curiously, he does not explicitly relate it to the problem of reference. Taking up a famous theme from Wittgenstein (1953), Kripke (1982) discusses the so-called rule-following problem, using (like Wittgenstein) a mathematical example: suppose that you have never added numbers greater than 50 before, but are now asked to provide an answer to the question, What is 57 + 68? Our natural inclination is that you will apply the addition function and calculate that the correct answer is 125. But now imagine there to be a radical skeptic who claims that the meaning of ‘+’ is context-dependent in the following way: in the context of numerals that stand for numbers smaller than 50, it refers to the addition function. Otherwise it refers to some different function, call it quaddition, which maps all pairs of numbers (greater than 50) on 5. Even if all your calculations in the past were correct, your past behavior is perfectly consistent with the possibility that the symbol ‘+’ is context-dependent in just this way. But if the skeptical hypothesis is true, the correct answer to the question What is 57 + 68? is not 125, but 5. As the skeptical hypothesis cannot be ruled out, there seems to be no fact of the matter that determines that you ought to answer ‘125’ rather than ‘5.’ The meaning of ‘+’ is crucially underdetermined. Observe that it does not help to point out that the meaning of ‘+’ is defined not in isolation, but in relation to other mathematical rules: the formulation of these rules will again contain terms that may be context-dependent in this pernicious way, and the problem then resurfaces in a different place. Just as a description theory of names makes no headway with respect to the problem of reference, more rules will not resolve the rule-following problem. It is important to note that, although Kripke chooses a mathematical example, the problem is not specifically about mathematics, but about linguistic reference in general. The past use of ‘+’ does not determine that, in the present context, it refers to addition rather than quaddition. To clarify the connection with ordinary proper names, suppose that, in the past, the name Aristotle has never been used in the context of the predicate ‘has invented the syllogism.’ (This supposition is not true for this predicate specifically, but it is true of an indefinite number of other predicates. So let it pass.) A Kripkean skeptic might therefore say that if the question
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‘Did Aristotle invent the syllogism?’ were posed, we could not give a determinate answer to this question: the past use of the name is perfectly compatible with the hypothesis that Aristotle was meant to refer to Aristotle in the context of all predicates except for ‘has invented the syllogism,’ where it refers to, say, Socrates. Our question then receives a negative answer despite the fact that Aristotle is the most famous student of Plato and that this student indeed invented the syllogism. In the light of these considerations, therefore, the causal theory of reference seems problematic: it may well be that I am using the term Aristotle intentionally in the same way as my predecessors did, but that the word as used by me now picks out Socrates, contrary to what the causal-historical theory of reference should yield. While the rule-following problem puts the causal-historical theory of reference in danger, it does not jeopardize the theory of direct reference as such. On the contrary, it might even relieve that theory of some pressure in that it sheds new light (or new obscurities) on Frege’s puzzle. Recall that Frege, and the tradition following him, assumes that a = a and a = b differ with respect to information value, the former being a priori while the latter can be a posteriori. But in view of the rule-following problem, it is not determinate that two occurrences of a refer to the same thing. Hence a = a might be false. And even if a = a should be true, it might not be a priori.4 But if there is not, as such, any difference in cognitive value between a = a and a = b, the Frege problem might require an analysis very different from what has usually been supposed. And this in turn might indirectly lend support to the theory of direct reference. The rule-following problem threatens a reductive analysis of semantic notions in general and of the reference relation in particular. So, if semantic skepticism is to be avoided, the rule-following problem might point to the autonomy of semantics: facts about reference would then be brute, unexplainable facts. However, as the meaning of semantic autonomy is as yet only ill understood, I think we must still strive for a constructive solution to the rule-following problem and hence for a positive account of reference determination under the presupposition of direct reference. 3. Reference in fiction Reference in factual discourse is problematic because it is unexplained. Fictions add to this problem because they allow for reference without 4 This is also suggested by Kripke’s famous Paderewski example (Kripke 1979b): when we get to know that Paderewski (the pianist) is identical to Paderewski (the politician), we learn, according to Kripke, an a posteriori, informative truth.
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referents: the object referred to need not exist. In fiction, we use the same syntactical constructions, the same words and sentences, and we use them also, it seems, for expressing the same meanings. But we do not, or not necessarily, use language in fiction to refer to real entities. When Arthur Conan Doyle describes Sherlock Holmes, he does not intend to give an adequate description of reality. He uses the proper name Sherlock Holmes to provide an individual anchor for the many fictional descriptions he is about to give. But how can he (or we) refer to non-existent objects? Before I turn to this issue, observe that not every part of fictional discourse need itself be fictional: Winston Churchill is both a famous politician of the past and a character in present-day fiction. It seems plausible, therefore, to assume that reference in such a case is as factual as in the ordinary use of the word. A writer using the name Winston Churchill refers to the real figure – even if she portrays him in a way not intended to be literally true. Indeed, the very point of choosing the name Winston Churchill will be that of making the famous political figure assume a role in the plot. What makes the description fictional is that the writer takes the liberty of deviating in some cases from the known historical truth about Churchill, or of fictionally determining epistemically indeterminate features. (For a different view see / II.5 Köppe.) The problem of fictional reference seems to arise only with respect to ‘purely fictional’ entities. In contrast to Churchill, there is no historical Sherlock Holmes. No real person, present or past, has ever met him. He has not solved any actual crimes. So, what happens when the name is used in fiction? How can Doyle’s sentences then express a proposition his readers could understand? Descriptivist theories of names appear to have an answer. According to Frege, empty names such as Sherlock Holmes have at least a sense, and therefore can contribute to the thought expressed by a sentence containing these names. Doyle’s fictions have sense, but no reference. They are neither true nor false. Russell’s description theory allows for an equally antirealist position with respect to objects while avoiding such truth-value gaps. If Sherlock Holmes is a definite description in disguise (say, ‘The genius detective who lived in 221b Baker Street’), any statement of the form Sherlock Holmes is G is to be analyzed as an existential statement (‘There is exactly one genius detective who …, and he or she is G’) which is perfectly meaningful but false: the existence condition stated is not satisfied. As noted above, Frege’s and Russell’s theories of names have fallen into disrepute, but it is still worth emphasizing that they do not offer an attractive solution to the problem of fictional reference either. The following illustrates their defects. With respect to a given fiction, we can distinguish fiction-internal from fiction-external truths. The former are determined
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by the semantics of the fiction together with some assumptions about the actual world.5 For example, Holmes lives in London, 221b Baker Street is a fiction-internal truth. Fiction-external sentences, on the other hand, such as Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character in Doyle’s work, can constitute ordinary truths. But if Frege and Russell were correct, such fiction-external sentences would not possess a truth value (Frege) or simply be false (Russell). Fiction-external truths seem to require the existence of fictional entities, and hence a realist conception after all. To these I will now turn. Alexius Meinong (2013 [1904]) distinguishes between being and existence and argues that any object, even a fictional one, is, but that it need not exist in order to be an object of thought and fiction. Sherlock Holmes does not exist, but he nevertheless is, and can therefore be the object of fictional reference. While Meinongian realism escapes the problem of fiction-external truths, it is nevertheless caught in a dilemma. Either the view requires two different modes of what we today would call existence; it is then an apparently extravagant metaphysical speculation devised as an ad hoc solution to the problem of empty names. Or the view violates the laws of logic when it claims that there is something that does not exist. Possibilism, a realist position defended by David Lewis (1978), claims (roughly) that fictional objects are real, but not actual: they exist in those possible worlds in which the story is told as known fact rather than fiction. (Lewis assumes that all possible worlds – all versions of what might have been – are as real as the actual world is.) Sherlock Holmes exists in a number of possible worlds. The fiction-internal truths about him are the sentences that are true in all of those worlds. Purely fictional entities, while real, are not actual. This explains why there is some sense in saying that they do not exist: they do not actually exist. While this position appears more appealing than Meinongianism, it still suffers from major problems. One objection is based on the fact that Lewisian possibilia have all of their properties essentially. You cannot alter a property without changing the individual. This, however, has the counterintuitive consequence that Doyle could not have developed his leading character in a different way without talking about some altogether different individual (Thomasson 2009, 16): a piano-playing Sherlock would be a different character. Another problem stems from fiction-external truth: that Sherlock Holmes is a fictional character created by Doyle is a truth of the actual world which cannot be accounted for by reference to counterfactual situations.6
5 For some suggestions on the determination of fiction-internal truths, see Lewis (1978). 6 Lewis (1978, 38) readily acknowledges this second problem and the fact that he is unable to provide a solution.
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A more promising stance with regard to fictional entities is a form of realism which puts these entities into the actual world. A prominent view of this sort is artifact theory, according to which fictional objects are created in the act of creating a fiction (Kripke 2013; Thomasson 1999, 2003, 2009). The existence of fictional objects is dependent on the production and the enduring existence of the respective fictional medium. Fictional entities are in a sense abstract, even though their existence is only temporary: they exist from the act of creation of the fiction until the last copy or memory of the fiction has been erased. Fictional objects such as the character Sherlock Holmes are artifacts and exist in the actual world. And it is true about them that they have been created by the respective writers. However, the position of creationism is not quite satisfying as it stands. (This type of objection could also be formulated for Meinongianism and possibilism.) Recall that there are objects which are both fictional and factual. While the fictional Churchill is, according to the view under consideration, ontologically dependent on the existence of a certain fiction, the historical Churchill is certainly not. He did exist and he occupied some important positions, and even when all memory and all traces of his existence in human minds will be lost, Churchill will still exist (in the atemporal sense of existence). It follows that the fictional Churchill and the factual Churchill are distinct entities, which appears to be the wrong result: it is true about Churchill that he was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice and that he was a writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, but also that he himself is the hero of fictional stories. Many fictions derive their motivation and interest precisely from the fact that they construct a fiction around some historical figure, not from the fact that they use a famous name for another, newly created entity. In response to this problem, one might restrict artifact theory to purely fictional objects such as Sherlock Holmes,7 which would have the unappealing consequence that there is no unified account of reference and referents in fiction. But there are other problems, deriving once again from fiction-external discourse. Assume that we propose the hypothesis that there has been a fictional character Y in Z ’s by now forgotten novel. According to the creationist, Y does not any more exist – since the novel no longer exists –, or it has never even existed if Y has not been part of Z ’s (or any other author’s) fictional work. But if Y is inexistent (or has never even existed), how can we think and talk about Y ? Creationists appear committed to the implausible view that metafictional discourse of this sort is impossible, i.e., that we cannot meaningfully entertain and dis-
7 This appears to be Thomasson’s (1999, 104–109) reaction.
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cuss the hypothesis that some, possibly purely fictional, object has been part of a forgotten novel. I do not want to preclude that the mentioned problems for artifact theory can be circumvented. But they justify yet another approach, which I will briefly describe. According to this view, fictional objects are objects simpliciter, possibly abstract in the sense that they need not be in real space and time.8 Fictions refer to antecedently existent objects, real persons or abstract entities, use their old names or give them new ones. Fictions create fiction-internal truths, but not the objects those truths are about. Sherlock Holmes, thinly conceived, the object pure and bare,9 is not Doyle’s invention. Indeed, his existence is independent of Doyle’s work. He has existed before Doyle’s fictions and will continue to exist after these fictions have long been forgotten. Holmes is an abstract object, i.e., is not in real space and time. Yet he is as real as it gets and he has, actually and really, the properties of living in London according to the fiction, playing the violin according to the fiction, etc. It is a fiction-external fact that he has these according-to-fiction properties. And these facts have come into existence by the fact that Doyle has attributed fictional properties to the antecedently existing object Sherlock Holmes. Similarly, Churchill, our real Churchill, is in possession of a great number of according-to-fiction properties, properties attributed to him in fictions. The fictional features (say, that he has never had a career in politics) might conflict with his real properties, but that does not matter, as the fictional properties, the properties fictionally ascribed to Churchill, are not real. The according-to-fiction property (that, according to some fiction, Churchill never became interested in politics) is a real property, but does not conflict with the fact that Churchill has been a most important politician: a real F can be a non-F-according-tosome-fiction. This conception of fictional entities resolves one problem for creationism. It is Churchill himself who is the object of fiction, not some other object that happens to bear the same name. Nor need we postulate a difference between Churchill and any purely fictional entities with respect to their existence. What distinguishes Churchill from Holmes is not their status with regard to existence pure and simple, but that Churchill, unlike Holmes, is also in real space and time: Holmes has never really lived in London and does not really play the violin. Churchill really is, while Holmes
8 Wolterstorff (1980) also claims that fictional objects exist independently of any fiction. For reasons of space, however, I will not compare his views to mine. 9 In my view, a name refers to what David Armstrong (1978a, 1978b) calls a thin particular, i.e., an object in abstraction from its (contingent) properties.
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is only portrayed as, a real object in space and time. This is not a difference with regard to existence but a difference with regard to the real properties of existing entities. With fictional entities understood as real entities, logically and temporally independent of any fictions, also the second problem discussed above vanishes: Y is an object independent of Z ’s fictions. If our metafictional hypothesis about Y is true, and Y is indeed part of Z ’s forgotten fiction, Z ’s act of creation consists in inventing a fictional story with Y at its center. And if Y has no part in Z ’s (or anyone else’s) forgotten play, our claim will be false – not because Y does not exist, but because the existing Y has not even so much as entered the world of fiction. But if fictional entities exist, how can we account for the fact that we can truly say that they do not exist? I can here only hint at the type of answer I favor: quantification can be, and usually is, restricted. When we announce at 2 a.m. that there is no more alcohol, we (normally) speak about the fact that our supply is now exhausted and the party about to come to an end. Even if our announcement is true, it does not mean that we are in the midst of an alcoholic drought. There is – in an unrestricted sense – still beer and wine somewhere (in the brewery, the supermarkets etc.). Similarly, I suggest that ordinary factual discourse about, say, persons restricts quantificational domains in a manner so as to consider only ordinary objects to be met in space and time. In this sense, it is true to say that there is no Sherlock Holmes. But when we do metaphysics, logic, or – for that matter – literary studies, we use unrestricted quantification, speaking about anything whatsoever. In this second sense, Holmes indeed exists and hence is a referent for the name Sherlock Holmes. Thus, realism about fictional entities can be reconciled with the common-sense idea that the statement Sherlock Holmes does not exist is true. I am not at liberty to defend the theory of abstract, creation-independent fictional objects in full detail here. But I am confident that we can square our ordinary intuitions with the necessities of the theory of direct reference as applied to fictional discourse. Fiction does not, therefore, present a problem for reference in addition to those acknowledged for factual discourse.10
10 I am grateful to Christopher von Bülow for the proof-reading and to Nadja-Mira Yolcu for helpful research and editing. I want to thank especially the participants of the handbook conference, the editors of this volume, and Alexandra Zinke for a number of suggestions and improvements on earlier drafts.
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References Armstrong, David M. Universals and Scientific Realism. Vol. 1: Nominalism and Realism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978a. Armstrong, David M. Universals and Scientific Realism. Vol. 2: A Theory of Universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978b. Frege, Gottlob. “Über Sinn und Bedeutung.” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Philosophische Kritik 100.1 (1892): 25–50. Kaplan, David. “Dthat.” Syntax and Semantics. Vol. 9. Ed. Peter Cole. New York: Academic Press, 1978. 221–243. Kripke, Saul. “Speaker Reference and Semantic Reference.” Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language. Eds. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1979a. 6–27. Kripke, Saul. “A Puzzle about Belief.” Meaning and Use. Ed. Avishai Margalit. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979b. 239–283. Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980. Kripke, Saul. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. Kripke, Saul. Reference and Existence. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Lewis, David. “Truth in Fiction.” American Philosophical Quarterly 15.1 (1978): 37–46. Meinong, Alexius. “Über Gegenstandstheorie.” [1904] Alexius Meinong: Über Gegenstandstheorie. Selbstdarstellung. Ed. J. M. Werle. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2013. 1–52. Mill, John Stuart. A System of Logic. London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1865. Neale, Stephen. Descriptions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Russell, Bertrand. “On Denoting.” Mind 14 (1905): 479–493. Russell, Bertrand. “Mr. Strawson on Referring.” Mind 66 (1957): 385–389. Strawson, Peter F. “On Referring.” Mind 59 (1950): 320–344. Thomasson, Amie. Fiction and Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Thomasson, Amie. “Speaking of Fictional Characters.” Dialectica 57 (2003): 205–223. Thomasson, Amie. “Fictional Entities.” A Companion to Metaphysics. 2nd ed. Eds. Jaegwon Kim, Ernest Sosa and Gary S. Rosenkrantz. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. 10–18. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell, 1953. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Works and Worlds of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.
TILMANN KÖPPE
Reference in Literature/Literary Studies 1. Introduction Linguistic reference, in most general terms, is a relation that holds between two entities, namely a referring expression and its referent. In linguistics and the philosophy of language there is a fairly precise notion of reference such that the referential expression is a singular term (e.g. a proper name or a demonstrative) that uniquely picks out a thing (an individual). Reference in this sense is to be distinguished from the denotation of a linguistic expression (i.e., its conventional meaning), from exemplification (a double semantic relation between some entity and a ‘label,’ see Goodman 1976), and from any reference an expression has primarily by means of the speaker’s intentions (i.e., speaker’s reference, see Donnellan 1966).1 No such terminological unambiguousness has been established in literary studies. Here, reference is used to designate different sorts of relations between different sorts of referring expressions (including predicates, sentences or even texts) on the one hand, and both linguistic and extra-linguistic referents on the other hand. Talk of reference thus ultimately collapses with talk of meaning, as is the case if reference is explained as the “concept or thought represented by a word or expression” (Harris 1992, 330). As will be clear from the next section, the distinction between fictional and factual narratives is often taken to be intimately bound up with questions of reference in that fictions are held to be special concerning their referential relations to reality. In the present context, the distinction between fictionality and factuality is important mainly for three reasons. Firstly, fictional narratives are the prevalent object of literary studies. So whenever a literary scholar starts to think about reference, fictional narratives may come to her mind first. Secondly, reference, in some of its varie-
1 For introductory details, see Lamarque and Olsen (1996, Ch. 5); for the notion of reference narrowly understood, see Reimer and Michaelson (2017). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-016
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ties, is a disputed concept, especially for fictional narratives. Thus it is a matter of debate whether parts or aspects of fictional narratives do indeed refer to reality, and if so, how they might achieve this. Thirdly, the (possibly unconstrained) kinds of reference associated with some forms of poststructuralist intertextuality have their greatest plausibility within the study of texts that are commonly taken to be governed by ‘polyvalence’ concerning their meaning, namely literary fictions. In what follows, three referential relations that have received a substantial amount of work within literary studies will be examined in some more detail. They revolve around the claim that fictions do, or do not, refer to reality (section 2); the more extreme claim that no text, fictional or otherwise, ever refers to anything but another text or texts (section 3); the multiple referential relations to be found within (literary) texts (section 4); and, finally, intrafictional references, i.e. referential relations that do obtain only according to some work of fiction (section 5).2 2. Reference and reality The claim that narrative fiction refers to reality is disputed in literary studies. Some accounts of fiction have tried to define fiction in terms of being somehow cut off from reality in that it does not refer to reality in the way nonfictional discourse does. Thus it has been held that the fictionality of a text lies in its reference to fictive objects, rather than real objects. In this spirit, Lubomír Doležel (1998) claims that “fictionality is primarily a semantic phenomenon located on the axis ‘representation (sign) – world’” (2). Of course such an account remains hopelessly imprecise as long as it does not specify what kind of referential relation between ‘sign’ and ‘world’ is under discussion, and whether the presence or absence of this relation is taken to be a necessary or a sufficient condition for fictionality. As Lamarque and Olsen have argued, it is perfectly possible for an author to make up a story about some real entity (1994, 108–112). This is what happens in satire, for instance. The referential relations in question may include denotation or speaker’s reference (such that the satirist uses a conventional name in order to refer to his target, or intends to identify it by some form of definite description), allusion (see Irwin 2001), or demonstration (see Clark and Gerrig 1990). In all these cases, the satirist no doubt
2 Compare Naschert (2003), and the roughly corresponding distinctions between ‘proreference,’ ‘no-reference’ and ‘anti-reference’ views in Lamarque and Olsen (1994, Ch. 5).
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refers to reality, and in doing so she makes a point about reality by means of telling a fictional story. Similarly, many novels are praised for their giving a faithful portrait of society or manners at a particular place and time. As an example, consider Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). While the characters of the novel are certainly fictions, the place and time are not. The novel can be said to relate in multiple ways to Alabama in the 1930s, and by doing so to give a lively portrait of the prevalence of racial injustice at that time and in that place. The referential means by which this is achieved are, amongst others, the following. The novel certainly contains intended allusions; there are also referring expressions such as ‘Alabama.’ Third, there is a striking similarity between situations as they are depicted in the novel and situations which, from independent resources, we know happened in reality, which in turn helps us to identify the intended reference. It is clear from the examples of satire and the novel, then, that the absence of referential relations is not necessary for fictionality. But we must not be too hasty here. A position that is often held in literary studies maintains that what is characteristic of all fictional texts is the absence of a particular sort of referential relation, namely that of firstperson pronouns, such as ‘I.’ Thus it has often been held that ‘I’ never refers to the author of the fiction, but rather to some fictional narrator (see e.g. Jannidis 2003, 320; see also Margolin 1991 on the specifics of what he calls “literary” narratives). Indeed, there is an even stronger counterfactual variant of this claim such that, for every fiction, if it were to contain first-person pronouns, then these would not refer to its author. Is this, then, a way to account for the “distinction of fiction” (Cohn 1999) in terms of referential relations? The answer must be No. It is of course possible for an author to make up a story about herself. Thus it is perfectly possible for me to ask you to imagine that I have a number of properties that I do not actually have, and to spin a yarn about my having them. You will of course know that this is a fictional story, and at the same time you will know that it is about me, and thus that by uttering ‘I,’ I will straightforwardly refer to myself.3 There is no need, theoretical or pragmatic or otherwise, to assume that this reference must fail (i.e. that I cannot refer to myself by using a first-person pronoun) or that it is not what it seems to be but some (quasi-)referential relation to some made-up fictional entity called ‘the (fictional) narrator.’ It seems, then, that even the claim that (the
3 Theorists who have defended the possibility of authorial self-reference in fiction include Wolterstorff (1980, 175–178); Currie (2010, 67); Eckardt (2015, 179–180). See also Walton (1978).
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failure of ) this special (first-person) referential relation is necessary for fiction is false. What is more difficult to assess is the claim that reference to some special class of fictive objects is sufficient for fiction. Here the idea is that fictive objects constitute a special domain to which works of fiction uniquely make reference. The assessment of these views is a hot topic in current philosophical ontology and philosophical semantics and cannot be undertaken here (see Sainsbury 2010). Setting aside matters of the definition of fiction, there is also considerable dispute about the proper interpretation of names such as ‘Napoleon’ in fictional contexts. Should we assume that this name in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869) refers to Napoleon, or rather to some fictional entity that has been invented by the novelist as, say, a fictional counterpart of Napoleon? As has been argued above, there is no theoretical reason that precludes our interpretation of the name as picking out (the real) Napoleon, rather than some fictional counterpart. However, it seems that those who wish to deny that the proper name ‘Napoleon’ in War and Peace refers to Napoleon can maintain that by inventing a counterpart Napoleon, Tolstoy alluded to the French Emperor after all. Accordingly, the thorny question of the reference of ‘Napoleon’ can be separated from its function within (an interpretation of ) the novel. (For a different view see / II.4 Freitag.) Beginning, perhaps, with the works of Plato and Aristotle and hence long before the advent of literary studies as an academic discipline, the theoretical discussion of fiction has been concerned with the functions of (fictional) literature, and in particular with the question whether it may serve as a source of knowledge (see John 2001). Knowledge is intimately bound up with truth, and the question whether fictional discourse can be true or not involves questions of reference: “To express a true statement about reality, a sentence needs to refer to real things” (Zemach 1997, 190). The question, however, is what is meant by “express” here. As many have noted, a work of fiction can convey a true statement even while containing a literal falsehood, or by containing a sentence that (due to reference failure) is neither true nor false. Thus, the cognitive value of fiction does not depend on referential relations such as speaker’s reference or denotation (see Köppe 2008). Are any of the topics discussed in this section of special interest for factual narrative? In the simplest case, a factual narrative recounts a sequence of events which actually happened. It thus consists of a concatenation of true sentences. For a sentence to be true the author has to undertake an act of reference by making a predication which is actually satisfied by that referent. But note that there are all kinds of exceptions to the rule. For instance, an author may accidentally say something true (although she
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actually intended to say something false), or an author may say something false because, unbeknownst to her, things are not what they appear to be to her. Neither turns her utterance into fictional discourse, for neither the intention to say something false (or to refer to a thing one believes does not exist) nor the actual falsehood of one’s utterance nor referential failure are sufficient for fiction.4 Factual narratives, in other words, may or may not refer to reality; as has been pointed out above, the ‘distinction of fiction’ must be sought at some other level of discourse, including its pragmatic context. But, as we will see in the next section, the claim that there is such a thing as a nonfictional narrative at all is sometimes disputed, especially in literary studies. 3. Referential skepticism and the proliferation of reference What the accounts that have been discussed in the previous section have in common is the assumption that, principally, fictional discourse and factual discourse need to be distinguished. There is controversy about how exactly this distinction can be carried out, of course. But the general assumption that both kinds of discourse are importantly different remains untouched. This is different from what is often called ‘panfictionality’ (/ I.6 Zipfel), an account or thesis claiming that all texts are, somehow, fictional.5 As has been noted by Lamarque and Olsen (1994), anti-referentialists of the semiological kind tend to combine their blunt skepticism concerning referential relations to reality with an embracing of intertextual relationships (112). As John M. Ellis summarizes the deconstructivist’s view, the signs that make up a sentence or text, rather than corresponding to a fact as its truthmaker and/or being governed by a speaker’s intentions that secure both a referential relation and a stable meaning, “play infinitely against each other” (1989, 115).6 Accordingly, a text is not a finite linguistic entity but rather some sort of knot in an intertextual web. We can at least try to untangle this metaphorical talk by assuming that, firstly, reference is here taken to be transitive, such that if some text A refers to some text B and text B refers to text C, then A also refers to C. Secondly, we are here dealing with a recursive relation. Moreover, thirdly, that reference is here completely independent of the respective speakers’ intentions. 4 For an elaboration on different varieties of reference failure, see Margolin (1991). 5 The label has been introduced by Ryan (1997) into the English speaking debate. For previous usages and a thorough discussion see Konrad (2014). 6 Ellis, who is an ardent critic of said view, in his book discusses both this view and its application in literary criticism at some length.
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Three comments on this post-structuralist doctrine must suffice here. First, it is not well supported by the evidence but rests on dubious assumptions about language (see Ellis 1989). Second, the idea that any sign or text infinitely refers to other signs or texts makes the notion of reference to other texts practically useless. If this “play” of signs is indeed a ubiquitous phenomenon, then nothing has been achieved by pointing out that a particular text refers to some other text or texts. It would be something that we already knew to be a structural feature of the text, something that is part and parcel with its textuality. Third, the idea seems to fly in the face of our actual encounters with texts. Of course one can stipulate any number of referential relations between texts if one takes relations such as similarity or analogy to be sufficient for reference. Nothing but the ingeniousness (or imaginativeness) of the interpreter will set the boundaries here. It seems, however, that outside the circles of literary critics influenced by post-structuralism, not too many people adhere to such a practice of decoding references or ascribing meaning. In particular, factual narratives usually have a ‘setting in life’ that determines their functions, notably including that of conveying information, and this function in particular would be lost (and cannot even be made intelligible) under the auspices of extreme post-structuralist intertextuality. In fact, one can argue that post-structuralist notions of intertextuality are not about reference at all but about linguistic connotation and association. 4. Intratextual references The last type of referential relations to be briefly mentioned here are to be found exclusively within a narrative text. Some of these are the concern of grammarians and, most importantly, include anaphoric relations. An anaphoric relation refers ‘backward’ or ‘forward’ to its discourse referent, i.e. some entity that is mentioned earlier or later in the text or, in a limiting case, must be stipulated on the basis of textual cues and background knowledge (see Margolin 1991, 540–541). Other types of text-internal reference are more elusive in their nature, and depend on the rhetorical and stylistic complexity of – especially literary – narratives. For instance, it has been claimed that (some aspect of ) the ‘form’ of a text may refer to its ‘content.’ We can think here of the stylistic complexity of Henry James’s The Ambassadors (1903), which has been said to mirror the complexity of the protagonist’s thought, or of the idea that a literary text reflexively refers to itself by proposing a mode or manner in which it is to be read. While these and other phenomena are important facets of literary complexity that may call for a more or less elaborate interpretation, doubts
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may be raised as to whether they really should be subsumed under the notion of reference (see the last section for a generalization of these doubts). Moreover, it should be noted that the phenomena in question are not limited to either fictional or factual discourse. Their presence is neutral as regards this distinction. Nevertheless, it seems that in interpretation there are pragmatic constraints in play, such that the phenomena in question are only taken seriously as possible objects of interpretation within the literary institution, i.e. when one treats the text as a work of literature rather than, say, a mere source of information (see Olsen 1978). 5. Intrafictional references Finally, we need to distinguish intrafictional reference from the types of reference discussed so far. Fictional narratives create fictional facts or, to use another prevalent phrase, create what is true according to some fiction or, for short, what is fictionally true (see Walton 1990). Thus it is fictionally true in the Sherlock Holmes novels that a certain detective bears the name ‘Holmes’ and is called by this name by his friend Watson. In this framework, does Watson refer to his friend Holmes? The answer is clear: Watson does not exist, and since existence surely is a precondition for doing anything, we must deny that Watson refers to Holmes. It is only according to the Holmes novels that Watson does anything, including calling his friend Holmes by his name, thereby referring to him. Generalizing over this, one can argue that there is no type of reference to be analyzed here; rather, we need to remind ourselves of the simple fact that the referential relations discussed so far can also obtain according to some fiction, which makes it fictionally true (rather than true simpliciter) that they obtain. 6. A brief outlook Reference in both literature and in literary studies is a multifaceted phenomenon. Indeed, taking the term, as many have done, in its broadest possible sense such that it includes any kind of meaning or meaning-constituting aspect of a text, fails to generate a sharp boundary for the term reference. One way to retain the term’s analytical grip would be to restrict the definition of ‘reference’ and hence the scope of its applications. It might be helpful to employ the use of linguistic reference established in linguistics and philosophy (where ‘reference’ designates the semantics of singular referring expressions). Other semantic phenomena of fictional or factual narratives could then be called by different names.
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References Clark, Herbert, and Richard J Gerrig. “Quotations as Demonstrations.” Language 66.4 (1990): 764–805. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Currie, Gregory. Narration and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Doležel, Lubomír. Heterocosmica. Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Donnellan, Keith. “Reference and Definite Descriptions.” Philosophical Review 75 (1966): 281–304. Eckardt, Regine. “Speakers and Narrators.” Author and Narrator. Transdisciplinary Contributions to a Narratological Debate. Eds. Dorothee Birke and Tilmann Köppe. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2015. 153–185. Ellis, John M. Against Deconstruction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art. An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1976. Harris, Wendell V. “Reference.” Dictionary of Concepts in Literary Criticism and Theory. New York: Greenwood Press, 1992. 330–337. Irwin, William. “What Is an Allusion?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (2001): 287–297. Jannidis, Fotis. “Polyvalenz – Konvention – Autonomie.” Regeln der Bedeutung: Zur Theorie der Bedeutung literarischer Texte. Eds. Gerhard Lauer, Matías Martínez and Simone Winko. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2003. 305–328. John, Eileen. “Art and Knowledge.” The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics. Eds. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. 329–340. Konrad, Eva-Maria. “Panfiktionalismus.” Fiktionalität: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Eds. Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. 235–254. Köppe, Tilmann. Literatur und Erkenntnis: Studien zur kognitiven Signifikanz fiktionaler literarischer Werke. Paderborn: Mentis, 2008. Lamarque, Peter, and Stein Haugom Olsen. Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Margolin, Uri. “Reference, Coreference, Referring, and the Dual Structure of Literary Narrative.” Poetics Today 12.3 (1991): 517–542. Naschert, Guido. “Referenz.” Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft. Vol. III. Ed. JanDirk Müller. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003. 239–241. Olsen, Stein Haugom. The Structure of Literary Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Reimer, Marga, and Eliot Michaelson. “Reference.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reference/. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Stanford: Stanford University, 2017 (15 April 2018). Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Postmodernism and the Doctrine of Panfictionality.” Narrative 5.2 (1997): 165–187. Sainsbury, Richard Mark. Fiction and Fictionalism. London: Routledge, 2010. Walton, Kendall L. “Fearing Fictions.” Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978): 5–27. Walton, Kendall L. Mimesis as Make-Believe. On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Works and Worlds of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Zemach, Eddy. Real Beauty. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
DANIEL JACOB
Reference in Linguistics The aim of this chapter is threefold: section 1 tries to make clear different usages of the term reference; sections 2 to 4 aim at giving an overview of some of the most discussed issues in reference theory and the solutions that have been proposed. At the same time, section 4 tries to show that reference is a highly dynamic, constructive process which requires a complex modeling of the domains (‘worlds’) in which reference operates. The consequences of this insight for narration and ‘factuality’ are briefly discussed in section 5.
1. Terminological remarks The term reference, despite its status as a key concept in philosophy and linguistics, in fact is far from displaying a clear or uniform meaning or use in either of these two disciplines, with the result that there exists a profusion of adjacent terms, synonyms and antonyms, all linking to the term reference.
1.1 Reference as relation of the (linguistic) sign The most general definition of reference describes it as the relation between a sign and the objects and facts that the sign users intend to denominate by its means or between the sign and what they want to communicate by using it. The most commonly known model for this relation is the socalled semiotic triangle, whose triad of categories has been identified as already underlying the linguistic theories of Antiquity (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics), and which we reproduce here in its best-known version, proposed by Charles Ogden and I. A. Richards (1923, 11), likewise meant to apply to linguistic expressions: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-017
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Stands for (an imputed relation) z TRUE
z
SYMBOL
TE s) UA o on EQ s t ati AD efer l vel R sa au rc he (ot
CO R (a Sym REC ca us boli T z s al rel es ati on )
THOUGHT OR REFERENCE
REFERENT
Fig.1: Semiotic triangle proposed by Ogden and Richards
Independently of some terminological problems attaching to this version of the model,1 we can state that there is a distinction between what we usually call the meaning of a linguistic expression and the referent, i.e., the extra-linguistic entity denoted by the linguistic sign.2 Even if we take the distinction linguistic/extra-linguistic to be the crucial criterion for distinguishing between the meaning and the referent of an expression, there are different interpretations of what that extra-linguistic entity might be. The example chosen by Gottlob Frege (1892, 37) for explaining the difference between sense and reference, namely the two names Evening Star and Morning Star to denominate the same physical entity, namely the planet Venus, at first glance seems to propose a distinction between entities in the mind and entities in an external, physical and historical world. However, Frege was primarily interested in mathematical objects like numbers or functions, which tend to consist in abstract mental constructs rather than external physical reality. Just like Frege, linguists, when talking about extra-linguistic
1 Does the top of the triangle stand for an entity (“thought”) or for a process (“reference”)? What does it mean to say that a “reference” “refers to” a “referent”? 2 Note that we use the term meaning (as most authors do) not in the sense of Frege’s Bedeutung (usually translated by reference) but rather as analogous to Frege’s Sinn (sense). It is usual for introductory manuals (cf., e.g., the German Wikipedia s. v. Extension und Intension) to more or less equate Frege’s distinction with other pairs, such as meaning/ reference (W. V. O. Quine), connotation/denotation (J. S. Mill), intension/extension (R. Carnap), Bedeutung/Bezeichnung (‘signification/denotation’) (G. Klaus, E. Coseriu) and others. In my opinion, these equations cause more confusion than they achieve by way of insight.
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Reference in Linguistics language-specific
extralinguistic
sign (lexcial knowledge)
concept sign expression
sign content
(ponological knowledge)
(language-specific sememic knowledge)
c sound concrete
(encyclopedic knowledge)
abstract
referent
concrete
Fig. 2: Model of the linguistic sign proposed by Blank (translation DJ)
entities, are not so much concerned with objects of an external world as with mental entities, namely with language-independent concepts. Throughout the history of Western philosophy since Antiquity it has been questioned whether mental entities independent of language could exist, and the linguistic mainstream of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries (from Humboldt via Sapir and Whorf to post-Saussurean structuralism) has been quite categorical in denying that there could exist mental entities that might be independent of language. Yet, despite this denial, linguistics, at least at a theoretical level, needs to distinguish between, on the one hand, meanings which are clearly attached to linguistic expressions such as words, morphemes or syntactic constructions of a specific language and, on the other, concepts for which we could claim an at least relative independence from a specific language. In order to disentangle the different distinctions addressed up until now, let me present the schema proposed by Blank (1997, 102) reproduced in Figure 2.3 But even this more precise model is still ambiguous in at least one respect. By talking of knowledge at the abstract level, it seems to address a general quality of the linguistic sign (at the level of the system, or langue, in
3 The English terms used in Figure 2 are my own, translated from the German version given by Blank (1997, 102), which is based on a model originally proposed by Raible (1983, 5).
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Saussurean terms) and a general capacity of the users making use of this sign (competence). At the same time, when talking of a referent (in the singular), the model seems to in fact address the object (or idea) that is intended in a concrete situation of use (i.e., at the level of discourse or parole, as it was explicitly stated in the original model proposed by Ogden and Richards (1923, 10)). The consequences of this distinction become clear when we try to define the referent as extension, i.e., as the set of objects described by the linguistic expression. At the system level, the extension of, say, a lexical item is easily defined as the totality of objects/facts to which this item could ever apply. But would it make sense to say that this word refers to all of them? On the other hand, if in a concrete discourse situation I use the words my sister, it is clear to which individual this expression refers. What would it mean to say that sister in this case addresses all individuals to which the term sister could be applied? Hence, we can conclude for the moment that talking of extension makes more sense at the level of the linguistic system, the langue, while it is easier to understand in what consist reference and referent when considering a concrete discourse situation. This distinction between discourse and system has become somewhat blurred by the practice of most classical authors; they tend to examine isolated nominal expressions or sentences, without taking any context into account. However, context is crucial to interpreting reference in natural language, and, a fortiori, in narration. Even if the relevance of context is more evident at the discourse level, it is by no means impossible to state general rules at the system level about how a linguistic element or class of elements may be used in discourse relating to its context; see, for instance, the grammatical rules for using the definite article.
1.2 Reference vs. predication as speech acts and reference to situations Another crucial terminological problem consists in the fact that the relation described in 1.1. is not equally obvious for just any kind of linguistic expression. In philosophy, discussion has so far to a large part been based on nominal expressions: proper names, deictic or personal pronouns (‘indexicals’), and so-called ‘definite descriptions,’ i.e., expressions made up of a head noun, possible adnominal modifiers and a definite article (for instance, the man in the blue mackintosh), demonstrative or possessive pronoun. For such expressions it is obvious that they apply to a segment of the referential domain (‘the world’), namely to specific persons or objects, classes of objects or to continuous, non-countable substance; only a fraction of these expressions designate situations, whether dynamic or of a
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certain temporal stability. By contrast, verbs often refer to situations (mainly situations that are at least potentially temporally dynamic). When investigating reference, it is therefore intuitively more natural to focus on the nominal expression(s) within a proposition as constituting the expression whereby “the speaker picks out or identifies some particular object which he then goes on to say something about, or to ask something about, etc.” (Searle 1969, 81 on “definite referring”; see also 27). By using the term referring expression “as short for ‘singular definite used for referring to particulars’” (28), and thus opposing reference to predication4 as two kinds of propositional acts, Searle to some extent perpetuates the classical dichotomous segmentation of the minimal utterance into a subiectum as the term that designates the substance or individual, and a praedicatum5; it is only in combination with one another that these two make up a complex entity (the proposition) that is capable of conveying truth or falsity. Searle is far from denying that referring expressions can, besides things, also refer to processes, events and actions (cf. 26). This may be seen from definite nominal expressions containing nominalized verbs, such as the landing of man on the moon. Intuitively, one could argue that this expression successfully refers when the proposition Man has landed on the moon is true.6 Thus, we might argue that the truth of a propositional expression corresponds to the existence of the referent of the nominal expression. Correspondingly, the grammatical devices used within nominal expressions, which signal existence or non-existence (mainly articles, demonstratives and other determiners), seem to display a functional congruity with the verbal grammar that signals the truth or untruth of a proposition, for instance in the morphemes of tense, mood and aspect (TMA) as part of the finite verb. I will return to those parallelisms in section 3. This parallelism between objects and situations (events, processes, states) has been formulated in formal semantics by the introduction of the so-called event variable by Donald Davidson (1967): in analogy to the variables representing the individuals referred to by the nominal expressions to which the verb is applied, the
4 Predication is described (rather than defined) by two crucial elements: ascription of property (“The use of a predicate expression to ascribe a property” – 100); and truth. Says Searle: “To predicate an expression «P» of an object R is to raise the question of the truth of the predicate expression of the object referred to” (1969, 124). 5 Understood as parts of an utterance or a sentence, these terms should better be related to Aristotle’s terminological pairs νομα/μα or τι`/κατα` τινο ς (e.g. On Interpretation, Part 5) than to the pair ποκεμενον/κατεγορομενον, which are used in a more ontological sense (e.g. throughout Categories); cf. Rehn (1998, 433–434). 6 For Frege, the reference of a proposition is its truth value (1892, 33).
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event variable represents the individual event to which a proposition refers.7 Note, however, that regarding the use of TMA morphemes it is not the verb whose reference is at issue, but the entire proposition: an irrealis sentence like Man could have landed on the moon denies man’s (humankind’s) landing on the moon but does not concern the more general activity or process of landing.8 That is why most syntactic theories start out from the assumption of a hierarchical structure of the sentence, where the finite verb governs the nominal expressions as its arguments, and where the reference of the arguments is placed inside the scope of the reference conveyed by the verb and its morphology (namely, that the former is at least partly interpreted dependent on the latter). Summarizing this section, we can say that it has been and still is common to restrict the term reference to nominal expressions (and to proper names and definite descriptions in particular), although the relation of reference (in the sense of section 1.1.) is by no means confined to those items, but includes other linguistic entities as well, in particular the proposition, where it is closely related to the notion of truth. Moreover, it should be emphasized that linguistic expressions that seem to resist a straightforward account of reference (indefinite articles, indeterminate pronouns, generic markers, nouns and verbs referring to non-countable, abstract entities, modal and evidential markers, and any expression denying existence or truth) are still concerned with reference, either by negating it or by making it more complicated (cf. sections 2 and 4 below). Let me add that modern linguistics is less concerned with truth than with assertion: what a finite verb in indicative mood and in non-subordinate position does is not really to claim truth, but rather to proffer a claim of validity (“Geltungsanspruch,” Habermas 1973, 219). Alternatively, in a neoGricean perspective of discursive cooperation, asserted propositions signal the mutual acceptability of a statement, namely the consensus among interlocutors that the fact denoted by the statement should be part of the assumptions that form their common ground (e.g., Sperber and Wilson 1995, Clark 1996, Krifka and Musan 2012). Thus, from a linguistic point of view, the
7 Shem kicked Shaun: (dx) (kicked (Shem, Shaun, x). This modeling was based on an idea of Reichenbach (1947). The symbol for the event variable was later changed into e in order to distinguish it from the variables representing the individual arguments. For further discussion of the referential parallelism and interaction between propositions and nominal expressions cf. e.g. Higginbotham (1983), Krifka (1989). 8 Searle dedicates a lengthy chapter (1969, Ch. 5) to discussing the possible extra-linguistic correlate of a predicative expression (e.g. concepts or universals), concluding that there is no point in saying that predicates refer or identify.
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metaphysical notions of truth and existence should be replaced by pragmatic notions; theorems based on them, for instance in logics or truth-conditional semantics, should be reconstructed on that basis. 2. Reference to objects: Classical distinctions and issues 2.1 Reference as ‘quantification’: Existence and uniqueness Let us turn to predicate calculus in the tradition of Russell (1905), which tried to approach the reference of nominal expressions in terms of quantity. In modern notation, a proposition like the king of France is bald appears as (1)
dx[KoF(x) o cy[KoF(y) / x = y] o bald(x)]9
In this formula, the operator d is not so much about existence as about quantity: dx KoF(x) can be translated as ¬cx ¬ KoF(x). Not only is Russell-style predicate calculus quite distinct in its structure from the corresponding linguistic expressions;10 it has also been shown to be inadequate in that it leads to assumptions that are not intended when uttering that proposition. Thus, the expression in (1) suggests that there exists a King of France and that he is the only individual that qualifies for the description of being King of France in the ‘world’ (better: in the referential domain that we are talking about). Peter Strawson warned against confounding the presuppositions on which the definite description relies (existence and uniqueness) with the information that is conveyed by the sentence (namely that the individual referred to is bald). What a speaker does when using a definite description is not telling the hearer that there exists one, and only one, individual in the referential domain that meets the given description, but rather that he or she is signaling to the hearer that the descriptive information conveyed should be sufficient to identify the individual within the referential domain (Strawson 1950, 336). One can add that it is due to observance of the (Gricean) principle of cooperation that the speaker normally would not allow his statements to depend on such presuppositions unless he or she were convinced that they apply.
9 ‘There exists an individual x, such that x is king of France, and for any individual y, from meeting the description king of France it follows that y is identical to x, and x is bald.’ 10 Like many other mathematicians and philosophers (e.g., Frege, Carnap, Quine, Tarski), Russell was mainly interested in establishing a calculus which would be more explicit, more exact than natural language and which would allow for complex deductive processes.
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Once one has understood the relationship between definiteness, existence and uniqueness, it is not so difficult to describe the functioning of the definite article in the case of plural terms, where uniqueness is replaced by inclusiveness (a term like the royals refers to all individuals described by the noun that can be found in the referential domain). This also explains why definite plural terms can have a generic meaning (when there is no restriction in the referential domain, the description covers the potential totality of individuals described by the term: the Republicans support their candidate). Likewise, this description covers the use of definite descriptions in the case of non-countable concepts (the snow is melting: ‘any portion of the referential domain that corresponds to snow’), including even abstract terms (the principle is unconditional ). Note, finally, that the indefinite article could be interpreted as pertaining to the identification process as well, although in a negative way, namely by signaling that there is no means for the hearer to identify the individual the speaker is talking about (Strawson 1950, 341). This likewise very general characterization of the function of the indefinite article covers a quite diverse range of uses: mutually unknown individuals, individuals only known to the speaker (a friend of mine, both types without previous mention, since this would have introduced them and made them known), non-specific reference (cf. section 3 below), or any individual of a class in universal statements (A boy scout doesn’t lie).11 2.2 Identification vs. characterization Strawson’s more pragmatic version of the conditions of existence and uniqueness makes salient also the subjective and context-dependent character of identifying reference: “The requirement for the correct application of an expression in its referring use to a certain thing [...] is [...] that the thing should be in a certain relation to the speaker and to the context of utterance,” the latter being “of an importance which is almost impossible to exaggerate” (1950, 336).12 Thus, the task of referring is twofold, requir11 Cf., e.g., Jacob (1992). Of course, there are languages which can do without overt articles, e.g., Russian or Latin, where the hearer has to find out on purely contextual grounds whether the conditions for unique reference are given. This is just one element added to the huge cognitive task that the hearer is faced with when processing reference terms. 12 Strawson follows this up with: “by ‘context’ I mean, at least, the time, the place, the situation, the identity of the speaker, the subjects which form the immediate focus of interest, and the personal histories of both the speaker and those he is addressing” (1950, 336).
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ing “some device, or devices, for showing both that a unique reference is intended and what unique reference it is; [and] some device requiring and enabling the hearer or reader to identify what is being talked about” (336, italics original, underlining DJ). In other words: even when accumulating a maximum of descriptive information (e.g., the small brown Chippendale mahogany tea table), or giving highly specific information (king of France), an expression will only become uniquely referring when we add an individuating element that situates the referent with respect to the concrete situation, experience or knowledge of the interlocutors (the table over in the dining room, the last king of France). There is some terminological confusion about this double task; in order to avoid any misunderstanding, I propose to distinguish between characterization and identification. Characterization is the act of describing the intended individual(s) or ‘world’ element by means of general concepts (‘universals’); identification is the act whereby the speaker relates this concept to the common experience or knowledge of both interlocutors, inviting the hearer to look up this common ground for the intended individual(s) or segment, based on the characterizing information given. Let us look at a definite nominal expression: here the lexical elements (the noun and possibly one or more modifying adjectives) contain the characterizing information, while the use of the definite article constitutes the identifying act, relating the expression to the common experience of the interlocutors. (It may be shared because the referent has been mentioned before, for instance we mentioned a table earlier; or it is perceptible in the current situation – there is a table in the dining room before our eyes. It may also be part of a frame that has been instantiated in the preceding context 13; it may even be described in combination with a term that refers uniquely (e.g., the table in Peter’s office). More generally, I would like to distinguish between linguistic expressions and devices with a purely characterizing function (lexical adjectives, common nouns) and those that function in an (almost) purely identifying manner (pronouns, proper names, articles, demonstratives). Note, however, that even pronouns, proper names and determiners in most languages are not totally free from descriptive information (this is mainly ‘classifying’ information which categorizes objects by reference to gender, animacy, social status and the like).
13 So I can readily speak of the table, provided that we talked about a dining room in the preceding context. Cf. also example (4b) below. For frames cf., e.g., Minsky (1975), Schank and Abelson (1977), Fauconnier and Turner (2003).
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3. Sources of ‘shared’ knowledge: Anaphora and deixis As we saw in 2.2., the relation of referring expression to the context or the common ground can be manifold, not only because the common ground in itself is constituted of many levels and fed from many sources. Both classical text linguistics and newer approaches (e.g., Sperber and Wilson 1995) agree in distinguishing three sources of information for shared knowledge: general knowledge, discursive co-text and immediate situational environments.14 Note that ‘shared’ is a metaphor for the mutual assumption of analogous views of the world and the context of utterance. Explicit previous discourse (often termed co-text) is naturally a highly reliable supplier of the common experience on which identifying reference is based. Any individual mentioned in the preceding discourse can be the referent of an ulterior utterance, for example in the form of a definite nominal term. Depending on the ‘accessibility’ or the degree of activation of a referent, this anaphora (reference to a previously mentioned object, person or concept) can even be achieved without characterizing information, merely by pronouns. In the case of clear and straightforward anaphoric reference, some languages (so-called pro-drop languages like Spanish or Italian) even allow for anaphora without a nominal element just leaving vacant the subject slot of the finite verb (Hablé con Pedro. Viene mañana. ‘I spoke to Peter. He is coming tomorrow’). For more intricate, ambiguous situations of anaphora, we dispose of demonstratives (determiners or pronouns), for which there are stricter rules of interpretation. Besides relying on preceding co-text, identifying reference can also be based on any other form of shared knowledge. It seems evident that, within the infinite universe of knowledge and experiences shared (or supposed to be shared) by the interlocutors, the most reliable, most accessible and most relevant common experience is the situation of utterance itself. It is therefore not surprising that the current communicative situation has a privileged status in establishing reference. The strategy of addressing directly elements of the current situation of utterance is called deixis (‘pointing’), although it is only the physical spatial domain which allows occasionally for the practice of literal pointing as a part of an utterance. But there are other domains of direct situational reference where ‘pointing’ 14 It is not easy to delimit and keep these domains separate: general knowledge can range from very generalized cultural ‘world-knowledge’ down to very personal shared experiences and assumptions within a family, a couple, or any other pairwise shared experiences. Likewise, it is difficult to delimit at which point the micro-discursive cotext shifts to a macro-discourse whose contents are the most powerful base for shared long-term knowledge and experiences.
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is just a metaphor for purely linguistic expressions whose reference has to be interpreted with respect to the current situation, namely the domain of personal involvement and the constellation of communicative partners (personal deixis, i.e. reference to the speaker, the hearer, to third parties, or to groups containing one or some of these; social deixis, i.e. reference to socially superior/inferior persons). This holds also true for reference to situations or events (cf. above in section 1.2.) which are positioned in relation to the situation of utterance within a temporal dimension. Anaphora can also be employed here: we can refer to an event or a situation by relating it to one referred to previously. The most popular model for describing time-anaphoric relations has been proposed by Reichenbach (1947), who proposed the distinction between a point of utterance, a point of action or event and a point of reference. Depending on the coincidence or distinction of the reference point with the other points, this model allows us to distinguish between simple deictical relations (present, future, past) and relative relations such as anteriority, posteriority or synchrony. In the case of relative reference, the model remains neutral regarding the factuality of the situation: it does not matter whether the point of reference concerns a situation previously stated in the context of the referential expression, or whether it is an imagined situation treated as if it were present by means of the hic et nunc of linguistic deixis in alignment with Karl Bühler’s Deixis am Phantasma (1982 [1934], 132, 138). In the Indo-European languages, these temporal relations are grammaticalized into different tense categories, namely the relational ones like pluperfect, anterior, posterior, imperfect. The strategy of basing reference on co-text, by making reference terms dependent of other co-textually given reference terms, can be found regularly in the domain of individuals (cf. section 4). On the other hand, anaphora whether temporal or personal (i.e. in reference to individuals) is subject to a number of implicit default assumptions: thus, a sequence of narrative statements, without anaphorical signals to the contrary, will automatically be read as a temporal sequence of events. As for deixis, the use of the present tense in European languages is often interpreted not as an explicit reference to the present, but as a temporally non-specified verb form that triggers an implicit default relation of synchrony to the situation of utterance.15
15 For references see Declerck (1991, 69–70). For poetic effects of using present tense in fictional narrative, see Fludernik (1996, sect. 6.3.1, 249–256).
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4. Domains of reference 4.1 Branching and discontinuities in the referential domain In certain contexts, however, the straightforward definition of the function of definite nominal terms, namely to locate the referents which the expression is meant to help recuperate by inspecting the ‘world’ which is talked about, emerges as overly simplistic, as can be seen from the following example: (2)
French: Trois fois Pierre a perdu son porte-monnaie. ‘Peter has lost his wallet three times.’
There are several readings for (2), as the different possible continuations of (2) show: (3a) (3b)
La troisième fois il ne l’a plus retrouvé. ‘The third time, he wasn’t able to retrieve it.’ Le troisième, il ne l’a plus retrouvé. ‘He was unable to retrieve the third one.’
Son porte-monnaie (‘his wallet’) in (2) may refer to either one object which was lost several times or to three different objects (each one of which had been lost). This appears to be a matter of scope hierarchy: while, in the reading corresponding to (a), the singular term son porte-monnaie refers independently, in the reading of (b), it is subordinate to the quantification three times, causing a kind of multiplication of the referent in spite of its singular form. In the (b) reading, the referential universe appears to have branched into several sub-domains, even if in both readings the referent(s) of le portemonnaie seem to be accessible as objects pertaining to the personal sphere of Peter.16 Such accessibility is not given in (4): (4a) (4b)
An excellent university should have a competent president. In an excellent university, the president should be competent.
At first glance, this example seems paradoxical in that the choice of the article (a president/the president) does not seem to have any consequences
16 This kind of branching or distributed reference is not restricted to definite descriptions, but concerns pronouns as well, as has been shown in a lengthy discussion about the so-called donkey-sentences (every farmer that owns a donkey beats it, introduced by Geach 1980 [1962]) and (hardly more up-to-date) examples like the man who gave his paycheck to his wife was wiser than the man who gave it to his mistress, where the pronoun it by no means refers to the same referent as its antecedent.
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for the referential analysis. This effect is due to the modal context introduced by the auxiliary should; thanks to this deontic element we encounter a modal ‘hedge’ or ‘barrier’ which separates both referential terms from the immediate hic et nunc situation: they only refer to a so-called ‘possible world.’ It would be easy to continue (4) by saying: Unfortunately, we don’t have an excellent university, which would be an utterance referring to the immediate, ‘actual world.’ The indefinite nominal expression an excellent university accounts for the impossibility to identify any actual referent in this purely suppositional context.17 Similarly, the indefinite term for the president in (4a) works in the same way (there is no concrete university and there is no concrete president we are talking of ).18 In (4b), on the contrary, the definite article accounts for the fact that once the idea of a university has been introduced, be it in a purely hypothetical way, this is an instantiation of a frame (cf. footnote 13), in which certain generalized expectations can be argued to obtain (e.g., that in universities, there exists (!) and there exists only one (!) president). So, the president can somehow be identified as ‘the president of the mentioned university,’ even if the university fails to be identified. Note that the term can even serve as an antecedent for identifying pronominal anaphora (and she should have a vision of her task), albeit in a very limited manner. In linguistics, this use of the article has been termed non-specific reference. Despite its infelicitous terminology,19 the distinction ± specific accounts for a series of linguistic phenomena. Compare: (5a) (5b)
Span. busco a un estudiante que sabe vasco ‘I am looking for a (precise/certain) student who knows Basque’ busco un estudiante que sepa vasco ‘I am looking for a (i.e. any) student who knows Basque’
In (b), the absence of the (otherwise obligatory) preposition for the direct object and the subjunctive mood of the relative clause accounts for the
17 Deontic modality is a typical context for non-specific or generic subjects. In fact, we have to do here with another strategy of generic reference: the indefinite term an excellent university works by selecting an arbitrary specimen in order to make a statement about the species in its totality. In some way (4a/b) are statements about the definition of the term excellent university. 18 Even if linguists would say that in (4a) an excellent university is generic while a competent president is non-specific (cf. below), this distinction, as it is clearly orthogonal to the definiteness distinction, does not say anything about the function of the indefinite article here. 19 It is precisely not the question of species that is concerned (this belongs to characterization), but of individuation and identity.
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fact that the reference term un estudiante just denominates the idea of an object, while in (a) un estudiante refers to a concrete person the speaker has in mind. The English translations show that other languages as well have their devices for distinguishing between these two ways of referring. In approaches committed to truth conditional calculus, this type of referential situation has raised an intense discussion. Predicate logic in the tradition of Russell struggled with the fact that certain verbs like want, look for or seek invalidate certain rules, e.g., the existence condition (John is looking for a unicorn cannot be represented as dx[unicorn(x) o seek(x, John)]) or the interchangeability of extensionally identical terms: Oedipus wants to marry Iokaste cannot be paraphrased by Oedipus wants to marry his mother. Predicate logic tried to distinguish these contexts as ‘opaque’ or ‘intensional,’ but neglected to acknowledge that there exist quite a few other contexts in which similar ‘paradoxes’ occur, namely within the scope of propositional attitudes, negation, questions, future reference, ‘intensional verbs,’ or generic reference. In fact, there is only one very specific contextual situation where these effects are definitely excluded, namely in asserted, non-modalized, non-fictional propositions, when the term is in subject position and not syntactically or positionally subordinated to any other referring term (cf. Jacob 1992, 310). Another problem connected to the strategy of declaring these contexts as ‘opaque’ or ‘intensional’ lies in the fact that nonspecific terms allow for pronominal anaphora: we could continue (5b) saying (...) in order to entrust the translation of my book to her. She would receive a good remuneration. Does it make sense to deny reference to a term that apparently does evoke an entity that can be treated as an individual (even if only in a limited syntagmatic context)? Our extremely brief and selective exemplification of some apparent paradoxes in the process of reference should be sufficient to demonstrate that the universe to which we refer when using reference terms is far from being a plain, homogeneous collection of objects and facts, with stable identities, where it suffices to look for the objects to which the linguistic expressions refer, and to check for their existence, uniqueness and identity. Rather, we have to do with linguistic reference as a construct displaying bifurcations, breaks, multiple levels and parallel domains. This is not only a matter of complexity, but of dynamics. The breaks demonstrated in (2)− (5) all emerge ad hoc in discourse, de dicto. As Saul Kripke put it, “possible worlds are not discovered by powerful telescopes, they are stipulated” (1999, 44). As linguists, we have to ask why these processes, which appear paradoxical from a more theoretical point of view, are so natural and do not cause any cognitive or communicative problems in every-day discourse.
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4.2 Towards a dynamic model of referential domains Hintikka and Carson (1979) have proposed an approach that accounts for the dynamic and hierarchical character of reference; their description of the mutual dependency of referential terms is analyzed in a game-theoretical model. However, in my eyes, Hintikka’s approach is not entirely satisfactory in explaining cases like in (4) or (5b), where there is a complete break between referential domains (cf. Jacob 1992, 318–319). Possible Worlds has been another idea proposed in order to cope with the discontinuities and their ad-hoc-character exemplified above (e.g. Kripke 1999). Possible worlds are established when speakers utter propositions that are counterfactual to the ‘actual world,’ which are a mere content of mental states or so-called propositional attitudes, i.e., modal or intentional hedges around propositions. It might appear somehow counter-intuitive to resolve the problem of referential discontinuity by multiplying worlds, rather than by questioning the idea of ‘world’ as an ordered, all-encompassing referential domain. On the other hand, this theory accounts for the fact that even in ad-hoc universes, nearly anything behaves in similarity to the actual world (e.g., that universities have just one president), except the fact marked as counterfactual or open (e.g., that any excellent university has a competent president). (Marie-Laure Ryan (1991) calls this the Principle of Minimal Departure.) This is not only the precondition for supposing stable identities and rules for truth conditions across worlds, it is also crucial for the understanding of fictional discourse, where most of the information (presupposed or conveyed) relies on our experience of the actual, real world, including the reference to certain real individuals (persons, cities, historical events, ...). Within the current Dynamic Semantics (cf. Nouwen et al. 2016), the most elaborated model is Discourse Representation Theory (DRT; see Kamp et al. 2011). This approach aims at combining the algorithmic, truth-conditional qualities of classical predicate calculus with a more linguistic, context-based analysis. Each processed input sentence receives a truth-conditional description which is then ‘merged’ with the description representing the preceding context: thus, referential processes are calculated based on previous discourse; at the same time, they also modify this representation. This discourse representation is organized in a hierarchical manner that represents the relative scope dependencies of the objects and situations evoked during the discourse. It was relatively late that DRT integrated a propositional attitudes component for describing the contents of mental states like belief, intention or desire; in this model, reference conditions can depend on certain anchors and on ‘secondary contexts,’ to which certain references are
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limited. Hence, DRT has all the components for describing the dynamic and non-continuous nature of reference. While DRT is extremely cautious regarding mentalist assumptions, the Mental Spaces approach proposed by Fauconnier and Turner (2003) foregrounds the cognitive process20 from the very start. Mental spaces are situation models that are constructed and co-elaborated by interlocutors during the discourse exchange. This process relies on the integration of longterm knowledge/experience, which is organized in complex structures, either of general (frames, idealized cognitive models) or of episodic character. During the unfolding of the discourse, the attention can switch to new spaces that are spontaneously built up, on the basis of certain triggers or space builders. Besides the classical ‘opaque’ or ‘intensional’ contexts (intentional or epistemic verbs like seek, think, mood, verbs or adverbs introducing counterfactual information), these include factors like a switch in time or space and expressions that evoke represented events, for instance verbs of saying or reference to situations represented by media (in this picture, in this novel, in this film, ...). The most original idea in this approach concerns the situation in which reference can switch abruptly between two spaces as long as they present analogous structures (in this film, the girl with blue eyes has brown eyes; In some universities the president is competent, while in others he is a failure). This kind of structure allows for a highly complex and dynamic system of parallel, partly independent, partly connected, interlocked or even blended domains of reference. With DRT and Mental Spaces we have mentioned two models that satisfy the claims of the dynamic, ad-hoc character, hierarchical organization (including referential islands) and discourse-orientation of reference. The only point of critique might be that both models still seem to consider these discontinuities as special cases bound to special contexts, instead of recognizing them as a common, a basic feature of reference in language, where any reference term has the potential to serve as a basis for a referential chain within the frame it evokes (Jacob 1992).
5. And narration? What we learn from looking at the classical problems of reference theory is that reference is much less concerned with talking about the world than with constructing it, or better, with constructing a multitude of local ad-
20 They even consider regarding mental spaces as neuronal assemblies.
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hoc universes which often do not extend farther than over two or three individuals. Of course, in the context of a discussion about fictionality and factuality, the purely virtual, constructed character of the ‘world’ we talk about does not cause us any surprise. What seems to be unexpected is the ubiquity, the normality and the smoothness of these processes: instead of singling out certain stubborn contexts that resist our elegant and straightforward models, we have to accept that these breaks and discontinuities are a normal feature of any reference procedure. For reasons of space, I must here refrain from further elaboration of the idea, already put forward by Fauconnier and Turner, that language processing (which includes production) might essentially coincide with the construction of an imaginary world model.21 In such a model, questions of existence and truth only emerge as secondary problems, namely in those situations where the pragmatic impact of a particular discourse on our life and our environment is at issue. This emphasis on construction moreover suggests that the rigid distinction between fictionality and factuality could be set aside; at least it could explain why fictional discourse is so easily processed without having to learn it, why it is so efficient and so free from the alleged scandalous nature that philosophers of language tend to attribute to it. Searle, for instance, speaks of “parasitic forms” (1969, 78), where the author “pretends to refer” (cf. Kablitz 2014, 94). Instead, we should rather ask how the constructed and relative nature of reference accords with, or can be harmonized with, the truth claims of factual discourse. This consideration raises two further reflections: 1. It seems a promising enterprise to investigate whether factual narrative discourse shows a more coherent reference domain and contains fewer contexts in which the ruptures described in sect. 4.1. above tend to occur. We could hypothesize that acts like addressing alternatives to the facts, talking about obligations, about things that fail or failed to happen, about general truths or generic objects are less frequent in (factual) narration than in more pragmatic forms of discourse. 2. A claim of truth (or, as we said, of the acceptability of an assumption as part of a common ground, cf. 1.2.) is normally conveyed by the assertive form of the finite verb, where it is exposed to refutation or negotiation by the hearer. Thus, the battlefield of truth is clearly the domain of asserted verbal forms. Definite descriptions, by contrast, refer by means of a pre-
21 Cf. Barsalou: “[...] simulation is a basic computational process in the brain, not only in conceptual processing, but in all cognitive processes, ranging from perception to social cognition” (2017, 17).
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supposition – even in case of non-specific reference as in (4b). Thus, definite descriptions, even when they are non-specific, depend on a consensus concerning the presence of their referent within a common ground, either in the interlocutors’ factual episodic knowledge or as part of an abstract frame. Their presence in the common ground is simply not at issue; and the opposition between the fictional and the factual is then somehow neutralized. The named considerations allow us to expect that factual narrative discourse is not put at risk by the virtual, constructive character of nominal reference as pointed out in section 4. References Blank, Andreas. Prinzipien des lexikalischen Wandels am Beispiel der romanischen Sprachen. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1997. Barsalou, Lawrence. “Cognitively Plausible Theories of Concept Composition.” Compositionality and Concepts in Linguistics and Psychology. Eds. Y. Winter and J. A. Hampton. Special Issue of Language, Cognition, and Mind 3 (2017): 9–30. Bühler, Karl. Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. [1934] Stuttgart: Fischer, 1982. Clark, Herbert. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Davidson, Donald. “The Logical Form of Action Sentences.” The Logic of Decision and Action. Ed. N. Rescher. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1967. 81–95. Declerck, Renaat. Tense in English. Its Structure and Use in Discourse. London: Routledge, 1991. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. The Way We Think. Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: BasicBooks, 2003. Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996. Frege, Gottlob. “Über Sinn und Bedeutung.” Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Philosophische Kritik 100.1 (1892): 25–50. Geach, Peter Thomas. Reference and Generality: An Examination of Some Medieval and Modern Theories. [1962] Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980. Habermas, Jürgen. “Wahrheitstheorien.” Wirklichkeit und Reflexion. Walter Schulz zum 60. Geburtstag. Ed. H. Fahrenbach. Pfullingen: Neske, 1973. 211–265. Higginbotham, James. “The Logic of Perceptual Reports: An Extensional Alternative to Situation Semantics.” Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983): 100–127. Hintikka, Jaako, and Lauri Carlson. “Conditionals, Generic Quantifiers, and Other Applications of Subgames.” Game-Theoretical Semantics. Ed. E. Saarinen. Dordrecht et al: Reidel, 1979. Jacob, Daniel. “Relative Referenzbereiche oder: Was ist Definitheit?” Texte, Sätze, Wörter und Moneme, Festschrift für Klaus Heger zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. S. Anschütz. Heidelberg: Heidelberger Orientverlag, 1992. 301−324. Kablitz, Andreas. “Referenz und Fiktion.” Linguistics and Literary Studies / Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft. Eds. M. Fludernik and D. Jacob. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. 93–125. Kamp, Hans, Josef van Genabith, and Uwe Reyle. “Discourse Representation Theory.” The Handbook of Philosophical Logic. Eds. Dov M. Gabbay, and Franz Guenthner. Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2011. 125–207. Krifka, Manfred. “Nominal Reference, Temporal Constitution and Quantification in Event Semantics.” Semantics and Contextual Expression. Eds. R. Bartsch, J. van Benthem, and P. von Emde Boas. Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1989. 75–115.
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Krifka, Manfred, and Renate Musan. “Information Structure: Overview and Linguistic Issues.” The Expression of Information Structure. Eds. M. Krifka, and R. Musan. Berlin and New York: Mouton De Gruyter, 2012. 1−43. Kripke, Saul. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Minsky, Marvin. “A Framework for Representing Knowledge.” The Psychology of Computer Vision. Ed. P. H. Winston. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975. 211–277. Nouwen, Rick, Adrian Brasoveanu, Jan van Eijck, and Albert Visser. “Dynamic Semantics.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/ entries/dynamic-semantics/. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Stanford: Stanford University, 2016 (20 December 2018). Ogden, Charles K., and Ivor A. Richards. The Meaning of Meaning. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1923. Raible, Wolfgang. “Zur Einleitung.” Zur Semantik des Französischen. Eds. H. Stimm and W. Raible. Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1983. 1–24. Rehn, Rudolf. “Subjekt/Prädikat I. Antike.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Vol. 10. Eds. J. Ritter and K. Gründer. Basel: Schwabe, 1998. 433–437. Reichenbach, Hans. Elements of Symbolic Logic. New York: Macmillan, 1947. Russell, Bertrand. “On Denoting.” Mind 14.56 (1905): 479–493. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1991. Schank, Roger C., and Robert P. Abelson. Scripts, Plans, Goals and Understanding. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1977. Searle, John. Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969. Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. Relevance. 2nd ed. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1995. Strawson, Peter F. “On Referring.” Mind 59 (1950): 320–344.
RÜDIGER ZYMNER
Evidentiality in Linguistics and Rhetoric Evidentiality is a grammatical category. It addresses a special type of communicative information by means of linguistic source-of-information markers – so-called evidentials. Evidentials are elements (morphemes) in the grammatical structure of several languages which are or were spoken (and/ or sometimes written) largely in the two Americas, in Australia, in Asia and in Africa.1 Some languages have evidentials at their disposal while others do not. However, both categories of languages show lexical or rhetorical ‘strategies of evidentiality’ as functional equivalents.2 1. Evidentiality in rhetoric Rhetorical strategies of evidentiality are reflected in the theory of ancient western rhetoric under the Latin keyword evidentia. Here evidentiality does not refer to communicative information by means of linguistic source-ofinformation-markers but describes the effect of a textual description perceived as convincing and factual in the sense of being concerned with real things and factual issues. It was Cicero who introduced the word evidentia as a translation of the Greek Stoic expression enargeia (Cicero 1995, 17), which means ‘clarity’ and ‘lucidity.’ In the ancient theory of rhetoric, evidentia denotes the certainty of what is descriptively presented or of our inner impressions. It correlates with ‘matters of fact’ becoming evident. Evidentiality can (theoretically) be achieved when a speaker develops his or her theme in such a striking and vivid manner that a hearer can have the illusion of seeing it with their own eyes (cf. Kemmann 1996, 33).
1 First descriptions in Boas (1911, 43 and 496); important Jakobson (1971 [1957]); Chafe and Nichols (1986); Willet (1988); see also e.g. Johanson and Utas (2000); Helin (2004); Holzapfel (2006). 2 See e.g. Dendale and Tasmowski (2001); Haßler (2002); Volkmann (2005); Diewald and Smirnova (2011); de Haan (2012); Murray (2017). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-018
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In ancient rhetoric the figures of detailed description in general are recommended as techniques of evidentia. Ancient rhetoric theory addresses evidentia in relation to elocutio and defines its main place in narratio, i.e. in the second part of a speech in classical legal oratory. In the rhetoric theory of the Renaissance we find further differentiations between the following: – effictio (description of the human appearance) – conformatio (introduction of one person’s voice, their direct speech or their thoughts) – ekphrasis (description of an object, esp. of an art object) – topographia (description of the location) – topothesia (description of a location of fantasy) – chronographia (description of the chronological circumstances; cf. Kemmann 1996, 45) An example of rhetorical evidentia in a narrative text which has been discussed frequently over the centuries is the Aeneid by Virgil. It presents a number of descriptions (of the ekphrasis type), for instance that of the depiction of the downfall of Troy painted on the walls of the temple of Iuno in Carthage (book I, lines 453–493). One can also mention the description of the images representing the motif of the labyrinth in a temple of Apollo (book VI, lines 20–33). A third example is the description of Aeneas’s shield, which displays episodes of the future history of Rome (book VIII, lines 626–728). This description of the shield in the Virgilian Aeneid is patterned on a similar and even more famous description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad by Homer (book XVIII, lines 468–608).3 2. Evidentiality and narrations Linguistic evidentials and ‘evidentiality in a wider sense’ are obviously important elements in the structure of narratives throughout the world. Roman Jakobson has described evidentials as [a] verbal category which takes into account three events – a narrated event (En), a speech event (Es) and a narrated speech event (Ens), namely the alleged source of information about the narrated event. The speaker reports an event on the basis of someone else’s report (quotative, i.e. hearsay evidence), of a dream (relative evidence), of a guess (presumptive evidence) or of his own previous experience (memory evidence). (Jakobson 1971 [1957], 135)
3 Homerus (1924). For the development of a historical practice of evidentia in narration see Welsh (1992); Solbach (1994); Schramm (2000); Wimböck (2007).
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Strategies of evidentiality have their functions in several cultures of narration. According to Aikhenvald, quotations can be a rhetorical device: In Aguaruna narratives […] quotations highlight participants and events: important information is often presented in the form of quoting what some other participant said about the event. In Yucatec Maya a quotative verb ki- follows the reported direct speech, and has a variety of functions in discourse: it foregrounds the form of the quoted utterance, marks the boundary of a quotation, signals the shift of speaker, and serves various other rhetorical ends. (2004, 137)
Kham (a Tibeto-Burman language) uses a reportative evidential which is obligatory in every narrative, with every final verb being marked. Specifically, a reportative evidential is a stylistic token of folk tales (137). In some American languages (like Shoshone, Omaca or Ponca), […] every sentence in a story has to be marked with a reported evidential. […] [The] reported marker in Baniwa of Içana and in Piapoco, two Arawak languages from South America, typically occurs just once, on the first sentence in a paragraph. (34)
In some languages evidentials can even be genre-defining; they “are often conceptualized as genre markers, or ‘tokens’ of a narrative” (310). In the Australian language Mpartntwe Arrernte, for example, a certain reportative particle (kwele) occurs in Dreamtime narratives, “which are said to ‘have been handed down to the present generation from their ancestors’” (Wilkins 1989, quoted in Aikhenvald 2004, 33): Pmere arrule-rle kwele ne-ke; artwe nyente […] ‘A long time ago, so they say, there lived a man’
In American Tariana (an Arawak language), the evidential -sina is “conventionally used in origin myths if one can observe traces of the things that are assumed to have happened” (Aikhenvald 2004, 78). In Potawatomi (Algonquian) the reportative evidential is the mark of “a certain style, namely that of story-telling” (310): If the evidentiality choice is linked to the choice made in a tense system, or if evidentiality marking is fused with tense, the combination of a tense plus an evidential marker becomes a typical feature of a narrative. In Estonian, past reported is a salient feature of folk tales and legends. A typical beginning of a folk tale is elanud kord […], which sounds as formulaic as ‘once upon a time’ […]. A similar formula, containing the nonfinished evidential, is the standard beginning of Turkish fairy tales: bir var-mıs¸, bit yokmıs¸ […] ‘there was and there was not.’ (310–311)
The type and the frequency of evidentials in narrations may correlate with the gender of the speakers. Female speakers of Salar (a Turkic language) […] tend to use more non-firsthand forms than male speakers. In narratives told by women, even direct quotations are cast in non-firsthand, while men favour the firsthand form (Dwyer 2000: 57). Partly, this has to do with what the stories told by men
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and by women are about. Men often talk about important things like history and legends, which ‘they may have perceived as relatively factual, direct, and based on reliable information’ [Dwyer 2000, 57] – hence the preference for firsthand. In contrast, women tend to tell ‘tales of fantasy, which they in turn may have perceived as so far beyond immediate experience’ that they have to be couched in non-firsthand [57]. This could well be due to the existing cultural stereotypes and conventionalized perception of stories and narratives. (315)
In some languages (like the Jarawara, an Arawá language, in Wanka Quechua, in Amdo Tibetan or in some Turkic languages) dreams are treated as directly observed experience. The speakers cast dreams in firsthand evidentials and the dreams are recounted as if they were everyday experienced reality, while all activities performed when a person is asleep are marked with non-firsthand evidentials. There are languages, however, in which dreams are not treated as ‘seen’ and marked as unconsciously acquired information with non-firsthand evidentials (like in Cree, Montagnais or Nakapi). In Shipibo-Konibo (a Panoan language in South-America) the reportative evidential is used to mark the ‘events’ of a dream when recounted as being not part of reality, while shamanic hallucinations under the influence of a special drug are cast in direct evidentials (346). Similarly, the accounts of the prophetic dreams of (Arawakian) Tariana shamans use visual evidentials (because these shamans are believed to be omniscient and to have supernatural experiences). New avenues of information acquisition lead to new uses of evidentials. In Shipibo-Konibo, for example, speakers use the reportative evidential -ronki for the “information they read in a book, or in a newspaper because ‘the newspaper says it’” (351). 3. Linguistics and evidentiality Every language has some way of indicating the source of information and the relation of the speaker to this information. In languages which do not have grammatical (i.e. morphematic) systems of evidentiality (in particular Indo-European ones), there are evidentiality strategies as functional equivalents to evidentials, appropriately termed ‘evidentiality in a wider sense.’ Evidentiality strategies are also used in languages which have evidentiality systems, generally with the function of reinforcing the evidentials. Evidentiality strategies have several linguistic possibilities at their disposal; they can take the form of elements whose primary grammatical tasks are not to indicate evidentiality, such as non-indicative moods and modalities (for instance, past tenses, resultative and perfect tenses or the passive), nominalizations, complementation, markers of person or demonstratives encoding auditory and visual information (see Aikhenvald 2004, 104–105).
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The conditionnel de l’information in French is an example of a form which acquires additional meaning relating to the evaluation of non-firsthand information source. It is frequently used in newspaper reports to mark a certain distance, as in the following sentence discussed by Aikhenvald: La flotte britannique aurait quitté ce matin le port de Portsmouth. ‘The British Navy would have left the port of Portsmouth this morning (we are told)’ (2004, 106; original emphasis)
In a similar way the Konjunktiv I (subjunctive I) in German can be used to report something someone has said: Er erzählte mir, dass er aus Berlin gekommen sei. [He told me that he came from Berlin.]
Reportative speech seems to be one of the strategies of evidentiality which are especially interesting from a narratological point of view. In reportative speech, speakers can use their own words or quote other people’s. These two options are similar in function to reportative and quotative evidentials. A language with reportative or quotative evidentials may display different ways of marking reportative speech than do languages without reportative or quotative evidentials. Some languages in Brazil (like Kwaza), some Australian languages and some languages from Papua New Guinea have direct speech quotations as their only option (see van der Voort 2004; Larson 1984, 367–368). One major strategy of evidentiality in its wider sense is what we could call ‘lexical evidentiality.’ Lexical evidentiality operates below the level of evidential overtones in ‘normal’ grammatical categories and involves the explicit formulation of information equivalent to that which is given by (morphematic) evidentials in words and sentences in languages possessing evidentials. Evidential marking can be described as “a species of indexicality in which the evidential form indexes the relation between the speaker, the object or event spoken about and the linguistic act of producing the ‘evidential utterance’” (Nuckols and Michael 2014, 1). According to Aikhenvald (2004) there are four evidentiality systems worldwide, differentiated by the number of choices they have. (I) Evidentiality systems with two choices differentiate between a) firsthand and non-firsthand information; b) non-firsthand and ‘everything else’; c) reported (or hearsay) information and ‘everything else’; d) sensory evidence and reported (or hearsay); or e) auditory (acquired through hearing) information and ‘everything else.’ Languages with the opposition firsthand/ non-firsthand, for example, refer typically to information acquired through vison or hearing or other senses (firsthand), while the non-firsthand covers
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everything else. An example of an evidential which covers firsthand information comes from the Cherokee (see Aikhenvald 2004, 26). It is the suffix v i. In the sentence “wesa u-tlis-v i ” it means: “‘A cat ran’ (I saw it running)”; in the sentence “un-atiyohl-v i ”: “‘They argued’ (I heard them arguing)”; in the sentence “uhy;dla u-nol;n-v i ”: “‘A cold wind blew’ (I felt the wind)”; and in the sentence “uyo ges-v i ”: “‘It was spoiled’ (I smelled it).” (II) Evidentiality systems with three choices, which involve always at least one sensory specification, comprise the following types: a) direct (or visual) information, inferred, reported; b) visual, non-visual sensory, inferred; c) visual, non-visual sensory, reported; d) non-visual sensory, inferred, reported; e) reported, quotative, ‘everything else.’ Examples can be taken from the Quechua languages which have evidential specifications for direct evidence (-mi ), for inferred evidence (-chri; chr[a}), and reported evidence (-shi ) as in the following sentences: (II.1)
Chay-chruu-mi achka wamla-pis walashr-pis alma-ku-lkaa-ña ‘Many girls and boys were swimming’ (I saw them)
(II.2)
Daañu pawa-shra-si ka-ya-n-chr-ari ‘It (the field) might be completely destroyed’ (I infer)
(II.3)
Ancha-p-shi wa‘a-chi-nki wamla-a-ta ‘You make my daughter cry too much’ (they tell me) (quoted from Aikhenvald 2004, 43, Aikhenvald’s emphasis)
(III) Evidentiality systems with four choices always involve sometimes one, sometimes three sensory specifications. Three types have been found (Aikhenwald 2004, 51): a) visual information, non-visual sensory, inferred, reported; b) direct (or visual), inferred, assumed, reported; c) direct, inferred, reported, quotative. In the Shipibo-Konibo language one can find the evidentials -ra, -bira, -ronki and -mein, which exemplify the type III.b as in the sentences: (III.1) westíora nete-n-ra ka-a iki nokon yosi betan e-a, piti bena-i … ‘One day my grandfather and I went to look for fish …’ (III.2) mi-n bake pi-kas-bira-[a]i, oin-we! ‘Your child must be hungry (inferred on the basis of [hearing] him crying), come and see!’ (III.3) [Someone knocks on the door] tso-a-mein i-ti iki ‘Who could it be?’ (III.4) a-ronki-a iki ‘It is said that s/he did (it)’ or S/he says that s/he did (it)’ (quoted from Aikhenvald 2004, 55–56, Aikhenvald’s emphasis)
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(IV) Evidentiality systems with five or more choices, which are attested for very few languages, “may have two sensory evidentials, one inferred and one assumed evidential, and also one reported marker” (Aikhenvald 2004, 60). One rare example might be the Wintu language (‘traditional Wintu’). Depending on how the information was acquired, the meaning of ‘he is chopping/chopped wood’ could be expressed with the following different evidentials: (IV.1)
upa-be ‘he is chopping wood (if I see or have seen him)’
(IV.2)
upa-nthe ‘he is chopping wood (if I hear him […])’
(IV.3)
upa-re ‘he is chopping wood ([I inferred that because, e.g.] I have gone to his cabin, find him absent and his axe is gone)’
(IV.4)
upa- el ‘he is chopping wood’ (I assume that this is the case because I know his circumstances – [my paraphrase])’
(IV.5)
upa-ke ‘he is chopping wood (I know from hearsay)’ (quoted from Aikhenvald 2004, 60, Aikhenvald’s emphasis)
Evidentiality is a possibility to indicate both the source of information and the relation of the speaker to this information. It is a grammatical and/or lexical procedure to express degrees of certainty about the narrated or reported issue and thus to give an appraisal of its factuality. The study of evidentials and (descriptive, lexical) ‘evidentials in a wider sense’ might be a good approach to outline some differences between western narration practices and so-called narratio aliena,4 since western languages normally do not feature grammatical systems of evidentiality and generally use strategies of functional equivalents to evidentials. References Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. Evidentiality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Boas, Franz. Ed. Handbook of American Indian Languages. Part 1. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1911.
4 See Conermann (2011).
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Chafe, Wallace and Johanna Nichols. Eds. Evidentiality. The Linguistic Coding of Epistemology. Norwood, New Jersey: Ablex, 1986. Cicero, Marcus Tullius. Akademische Abhandlungen. Lucullus. Lateinisch-deutsch. Ed. and Trans. Christoph Schäublin. Hamburg: Meiner, 1995. Conermann, Stephan. Ed. Narratio Aliena? Studien des Bonner Zentrums für transkulturelle Narratologie. Berlin: EBVerlag, 2011. de Haan, Ferdinand. “Evidentiality and Mirativity.” The Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect. Ed. Robert I. Binnick. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. 1020–1046. Dendale, Patrick, and Liliane Tasmowski. Eds. Evidentiality. Amsterdam et al.: Elsevier, 2001. Diewald, Gabriele, and Elena Smirnova. Eds. Modalität und Evidentialität. Modality and Evidentiality. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2011. Dwyer, Arienne. “Direct and Indirect Experience in Salar.” Evidentials. Turkic, Iranian and Neighbouring Languages. Eds. Lars Johanson and Bo Utas. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000. 45–59. Haßler, Gerda. “Evidentiality and Reported Speech in Romance Languages.” Reported Discourse. A Meeting Ground for Different Linguistic Domains. Eds. Tom Güldemann and Manfred von Roncador. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2002. 143–172. Helin, Irmeli. … so der Wetterbericht. Evidentialität und Redewiedergabe in deutschen und finnischen Medientexten und Übersetzungen. Frankfurt/Main et al.: Peter Lang, 2004. Holzapfel, Anne. Evidentialität im Japanischen. Berlin: LitVerlag, 2006. Homerus. The Iliad. Trans. A. T. Murray. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924. Jakobson, Roman. “Shifters, Verbal Categories and the Russian Verb.” [1957] Selected Writings. Vol 2. The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1971. 130–147. Johanson, Lars, and Bo Utas. Eds. Evidentials. Turkic, Iranian and Neighbouring Languages. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000. Kemmann, Aansgar. “Evidentia, Evidenz.” Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik. Vol. 3: EupHör. Ed. Gert Ueding. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1996. 33–47. Larson, Mildred L. Meaning-Based Translation. A Guide to Cross-Language Equivalence. Lanham: University Press of America, 1984. Murray, Sarah E. The Semantics of Evidentials. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Nuckolls, Janis, and Lev Michael. Eds. Evidentiality in Interaction. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2014. Schramm, Jan-Melissa. Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Law, Literature, and Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Solbach, Andreas. Evidentia und Erzähltheorie. Die Rhetorik anschaulichen Erzählens in der Frühmoderne und ihre antiken Quellen. Munich: Fink, 1994. Vergilius Maro, Publius. Aenead. Trans. Frederick Ahl. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Volkmann, Gesina. Weltsicht und Sprache. Epistemische Relativierungen am Beispiel des Spanischen. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2005. Voort, Hein van der. A Grammar of Kwaza. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004. Welsh, Alexander. Strong Representation. Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. Wilkins, D.P. Mparistwe Arrernte (Aranda): Studies in the Structure and Semantics of Grammar. Ph.D. dissertation. Canberra: ANU, 1989. Willet, Thomas. “A Cross-Linguistic Survey of the Grammaticalization of Evidentiality.” Studies in Language 12.1 (1988): 51–97. Wimböck, Gabriele, Karin Leonhard, and Markus Friedrich. Eds. Evidentia. Reichweiten visueller Wahrnehmung in der Frühen Neuzeit. Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2007.
III. Factuality across Disciplines and Media
CARL EDUARD SCHEIDT/ANJA STUKENBROCK
Factual Narratives and the Real in Therapy and Psychoanalysis 1. The real, internal and external reality, and the reality principle in psychoanalysis According to Sigmund Freud in his paper “Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning” (1958 [1911]), the development of psychic functions can be organized according to two fundamental principles: the pleasure principle and the reality principle. While he identified the reality principle – the adaptation of humans to a reality or an external environment of sorts – as a constitutive element of psychic development, he understood the pleasure principle as an inherent functional principle of a human nature ruled by drives and a striving for wish fulfillment (1958 [1911]). The reality principle is not identical with external reality but is a principle of mental functioning that refers to the necessity of adapting to such a reality. The ego thus evolves along the boundary between these two antagonistic principles of the reality principle and the pleasure principle. As the psychic structure that mediates between the internal drives and the demands of the external world, the ego is also tasked with continually checking reality. Freud later revisited this idea in his essay “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1990 [1920]) where he stated that the pleasure principle is replaced by the reality principle which […] does not abandon the intention of ultimately obtaining pleasure, but it nevertheless demands and carries into effect the postponement of satisfaction, the abandonment of a number of possibilities of gaining satisfaction and the temporary toleration of unpleasure as a step on the long indirect road to pleasure. (7)
The reality principle thus represents the inner entity responsible for ensuring that we adapt to the demands of external reality. From a historical perspective, Freud developed his first theories on the pathogenesis of neurotic (hysterical) symptoms based on the assumption that mental illness was the direct result of a real experience. This was also the substance of his “seduction theory” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-019
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587–592). In this first version of psychoanalytic theory, external reality played a key role in the cause of neuroses. Today, we know that childhood sexual abuse is highly prevalent in these cases and in fact significantly affects the development of mental disorders. According to recent studies (Plener et al. 2017), two percent of all children and adolescents become victims of sexual abuse, and of those among them who reported cases of abuse, maltreatment or neglect in the six months prior to the assessment, 95.1 % display some form of mental disorder (De Rose et al. 2016). Freud’s assumption that sexual abuse is an important cause of neuroses has therefore been corroborated. What proved more important for the subsequent development of psychoanalysis, however, was the insight that it was often not the event itself that directly caused the psychic symptom, but the inner processes of working through the real experience in the imagination: “In other cases the connection [between trauma and symptom] is not as simple; all that is present is what might be called a symbolic relation between the cause and the pathological phenomenon, a relation such as healthy people form in dreams” (Freud and Breuer 2004 [1893], 9). The connection between the external event and the memory of experiences in the past associated with shame, fear, guilt, and/or disgust thus triggers defense mechanisms that help us to avoid mental anguish, while forming the basis from which the psychic symptom evolves. 2. Reality and the realm of creativity (Donald W. Winnicott) While Freud’s thinking was characterized by the opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality principle – a constellation in which the reality principle acted as a ‘disciplinarian’ for the drives – later psychoanalytic theories posed the following question: what conditions of mental development are necessary for an emotionally meaningful reference to external reality to evolve in the first place? The differentiation between self and non-self thus became a primary condition for acquiring a sense of reality (Lichtenberg 1983, 56–63). In 1982, Donald W. Winnicott identified an intermediate space between internal and external reality that enables us to create a meaningful relationship between the two: […] the third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore, is an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute. It is an area that is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting-place for the individual engaged in the perceptual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet interrelated. (3)
This intermediate area of experience allows us to establish connections between inner and outer reality and is where transitional objects and phe-
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nomena belong. These objects stand for the external objects they symbolically represent. According to Winnicott, the referential structure of these transitional objects can be understood as such: a child can create a transitional object, provided it already has a living internal object, and provided this internal object is ‘good enough.’ The internal object and its qualities are defined by the existence, aliveness, and behavior of the external (real) object. The internal object is thus not primarily defined by the child’s imagination, as assumed by other psychoanalytic theorists (such as Melanie Klein). Rather, it depends on the quality of the real object experience. If the external object fails on an essential level, this will result in the internal object becoming ‘dead’ or ‘persecutory,’ in which case it loses its significance for the child. Then, and only then, does the transitional object also become meaningless and empty for the child. The transitional object thus refers indirectly to the perception of an external object: It is the representation of the quality of the internal object that was formed through the child’s real experience with an external object (Winnicott 1982, 11). In his work “Playing: A Theoretical Statement” Winnicott expands his idea of the transitional object into the idea of a “potential space” (1982, 44–61). This refers to the space within the relationship between mother and baby that can be separated from the internal world on the one side and the external world on the other; it is where playing and creativity are located (1982, 48): The important part of this concept is that whereas inner psychic reality has a kind of location in the mind or in the belly or in the head or somewhere within the bounds of the individual’s personality, and whereas what is called external reality is located outside those bounds of the individual’s personality, playing and cultural experience can be given a location if one uses the concept of the potential space between the mother and the baby. (62)
An analogy can thus be drawn between the representational structure of the transitional space according to Winnicott and the referentiality of fictional texts, as opposed to factual texts. Just as transitional objects refer to a world of internal objects that indirectly indicate the quality of external objects, we could propose the hypothesis that fictional texts also primarily refer to a world of internal objects, or an internal reality. The quality of this reality, however, reflects the characteristics of external objects. Without the possibility of creating a relation between internal and external reality in a transitional space, external reality remains dead and lifeless. Therefore, successful fictions originate in the realm of creativity, while keeping the transitional space open, enlivening and enriching it. In addition, the epistemic dimension of fictional texts could be understood as questioning the distinction between phantasy and reality, between internal and external space. Winnicott’s theory of transitional space focuses less on this episte-
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mic dimension, however, and more on the development of the mental ability to create a meaningful emotional connection between the self and the world – a connection he believed to be founded on early object experiences. The absolute dominance of reality in thought and experience can also be a factor in psychopathology. People who cling to external reality in an extreme manner can no longer take a constructivist approach to the question of how close to reality their narratives actually are. For instance, if their depiction of reality is referred to as the result of a certain perspective, they interpret this as a challenge and a form of attack. The liveliness that grows out of the ambiguity of language is lost in such cases. When experience is too strongly anchored in external reality, the connection to potential space – the realm of creativity – is broken (Winnicott 1982, 78). This phenomenon has also been referred to in psychoanalytic literature as alexithymia, or “pensée opératoire,” by Marty and de M’Uzan (1978, 977) and describes a mechanical and automaton-like way of thinking and feeling that is no longer connected to unconscious phantasies and emotional experiences, but has instead become ossified and lifeless. Hence, the reference to external reality is still present – albeit hypertrophied to a certain extent –, but it has become alienated as a result of the perception of reality, including social reality, only in terms of categories of things. 3. The real as the core of the subject (Jacques Lacan) According to Jacques Lacan (1982 [1975]), the child enters the world of the imaginary in the mirror stage, when it first sees its own image as a whole in the mirror. Through the child’s realization of the (apparent) wholeness of itself, the disparate and fragmented core of its subject is formed into the ego. This world of the imaginary, within which the ego evolves as a whole, fundamentally represents a transformation of the subject – of its original diversity and fragmentation – and follows the desire for unification and completion. The mirror image, or the child’s identification with the mirror image, thus conveys the ideas of the unity of its body and the ability to control its world. It is the foundation of all future identifications and of the ego within the order of the imaginary. For Lacan, the child’s early experience of the body’s fragmentation and helplessness (corps morcelé) represents the real against which the ego develops as a defensive structure (Muller 1982, 235): The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation – and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image
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to a form […] to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject’s entire mental development. (Lacan 1982 [1975], 5, emphasis in original).
While Freud also explored the idea of the ego as a defensive structure and regarded the external world as something that the child must adapt to (reality principle) and thus as a stimulus for constraining the pleasure principle, Lacan took the opposite approach and regarded the developmental stage of fragmentation that occurs before the mirror stage as the real. In his criticism of American ego psychology, which held the autonomous functions of the ego, which was the result of a gradual integration, to be the basis for adapting to the natural and cultural environment, Lacan regarded this integrating entity as a problem and primarily emphasized its defensive aspect. Instead of understanding the real as a reference to the external world (as necessary for mental development), Lacan regarded it rather as the subject’s origin, its disparate and fragmented center before it identifies with the image of the unified self (ego) and hence before it enters into the world of the imaginary. 4. The temporality of reality: The present moment (Daniel Stern) An attempt to analyze how we experience reality – an attempt deeply rooted in phenomenology – was proposed by Daniel Stern (2004) in his theory of the present moment. Based on an investigation of the temporal structure of consciousness, Stern’s theory of the present moment attempts to capture the smallest units – metaphorically speaking, the ‘molecules’ – of human experience. These units in which we experience the self and the world in the present moment are made accessible thanks to a specific interview method. When a person is encouraged to talk, this initiates a narrative in which a mundane, everyday situation (for example, breakfast) is described, along with any thoughts and emotions connected to it. Based on the way the event is described, ‘affect contours’ appear in these narratives. In his theory, Stern takes into account that the narrative of the present moment must be distinguished from its experience, and that the narrative is naturally only a reproduction of the original experience. Stern thus borrows the idea from psychoanalysis that each present moment reveals the entire complexity of a person’s behavioral and experiential pattern (2004, 39). Stern argues that present moments are the building blocks of “composing a lived story” (55) from which a person’s life story can be developed with the help of a narrative. The ability to verbalize present moments is based on the narrative structure of the experience itself, which can be separated into three different levels: a) the narrative format, a structure for (nonverbal-
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ly) mentally organizing our experience; b) lived stories, in other words experiences that are internally formatted as narratives in the mind, without being put into words or narratives; and c) told stories, which are lived and intersubjective stories that are told to other people – meaning narratives in a stricter sense. The development of the narrative format through which autobiographical memories are stored begins during early childhood development, already before the eighteenth month. The narrative format includes the ability “to perceive and interpret the human world in terms of intentions” and begins before language acquisition is completed (Stern 2004, 55). The narration of lived stories requires the child to have access to language and begins at the age of three or four. Present moments are thus the building blocks for narrating lived stories and developing the autobiographical narratives that evolve from them. In contrast to Winnicott, who derived his theory of how our reference to reality develops from the idea of potential space, Stern focuses on how the child grows and becomes part of a symbolically (narratively) mediated practice of social action in which the narrative structures of the psyche are rooted. However, in both theories we find that the ‘real’ only exists in human experience as what is symbolically unmediated in the most severe forms of psychopathology. This is because, when there is no reference to the imagination or no connection to the transitional space, reality is dead and empty. It is only when external reality is reconnected to the intermediate space and the realm of creativity that our relationship to reality can be alive and meaningful. 5. Reality and constructions of reality in the psychoanalytic encounter In another approach to the real in psychoanalysis, the here and now of the psychoanalytic situation is also taken into consideration. This particular situation is undeniably structured by certain key external conditions, including (for example) the beginning and end of the sessions, their agreedon length and frequency, payment, and not least the physical encounter between patient and therapist, who engage in an embodied interaction. While patients’ narratives about their lives refer to a reality outside the sessions, which the analyst does not participate in directly and which they can thus only access indirectly, a (relationship) narrative evolves in the psychoanalytic situation in which both the patient and the therapist are directly involved. What happens in the psychoanalytic setting can be perceived and evaluated by both parties directly. Furthermore, it relates to the patient’s life outside the therapeutic space, because both inside and outside
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the space, patterns of structuring a relationship can be observed that run through the patient’s life story. 6. Reality and construction of reality in patients’ narratives People usually seek out a psychotherapist because they have experienced a crisis in their lives. The loss of a loved one, rejection in a primary attachment relationship, physical illness, or a traumatic, violent experience are all examples of such a crisis. Talking about these experiences plays an important role in psychotherapy because it can help the patient come to terms with them (Lucius-Hoene and Scheidt 2017). In the process of narration, burdensome life experiences are given structure, the emotions connected with them are communicated, and ultimately the experience is integrated into the patient’s biographic continuum. In this process, the therapist naturally plays an important role as a listener. Through his or her encouragement to talk, either implicitly or explicitly, the therapist helps to move the narrative along and therefore supports the process of narrative reconstruction. The focus of therapeutic communication thus lies on the narratives told by the patient that refer to their experiences of external reality. The experience of a crisis in the real world, which has caused the patient to seek psychotherapy in the first place, emerges in the patient’s narratives only through the filter of their subjectivity. It reflects the patient’s subjective view of their world: “The world does not appear in the narrative in a documentary sense, but as a personal space, as an overall situation of environmental elements, props, and sets” (Boothe 2010, 165). This enables the therapist to become familiar and empathize with the patient’s world. More importantly, patients’ narratives lend the therapist insight into their construction of reality – in other words, the particular way they perceive, interpret, evaluate, and shape external reality, and how they represent this in language. Patients’ narratives also reveal the fundamental and practical assumptions on which their perception and interpretation of the social world is based, their experiences and abilities to interpret interpersonal and social interactions, and the values and norms that define their behavior. How patients understand and reconstruct subjective patterns of perceiving reality and of experiencing and interpreting actions in a social context – in other words, their personal principles of constructing social reality – play a significant role in psychotherapy. In this conversation, the factual content of the patient’s narrative to a certain extent remains outside the therapist’s reach. The question of
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whether an event actually happened exactly in the way the patient describes it cannot be answered by the therapist with certainty. For this reason, while the therapist usually in general does not question the factuality of the patient’s narrative, they do not take it at face value either. The main focus of therapy lies primarily on the unique way a patient subjectively experiences, shapes, and represents their external reality. This does not mean that the social reality and reality content of the narrative should be ignored. Quite the opposite is true: the patient’s external reality is often very important for understanding the reason for therapy. Regarding traumatic experiences, realizing and acknowledging the reality of the narrative – in other words, the fact that a severe injury has occurred – can even be a decisive moment (more on this below). This is why it is imperative for us to discuss how the therapist is able to assess the realism of a narrative referring to the reality outside the consulting room somewhat reliably. 7. The negotiation, transformation, and representation of reality We can sketch the process in which the two people involved in the therapeutic dialog set out to negotiate what constitutes ‘reality’ in the following way. The client talks about an event that has happened in the external world, describing it in the way they experienced it and as it corresponds to their perception of reality (A). The therapist then forms an idea of the patient’s subjective experience (A'). In this process, the therapist takes into consideration that small details, or possibly even larger parts, of the narrated sequence of events – and perhaps also the evaluation and interpretation of these events – may seem incomprehensible or incoherent. In order to verify and complement their understanding, the therapist proposes to clarify interpretations and additions as a form of narrative co-construction, thereby filling the gaps and inconsistencies in the story. Because patients are often unable to tell the whole story on their own without such support, negotiating the ‘shared narrative,’ or reconstructing the patient’s subjective experience, plays an important role. This narrative, which will serve as the foundation for further hermeneutic work, is represented as AA' in diagram 1. The therapist adds their comments to the AA' narrative as a way of questioning or interpreting the patient’s experiential perspective, while also enriching it through their own horizon of understanding. The therapist’s comments can refer to the content of the narrative, the behavioral patterns and motives of the protagonists, or to the manner in which the narrative is staged in the present time and space of the therapeutic interaction. Ultimately, these comments can also place the patient’s narrative in a larger biographi-
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Therapeutic Interaction and the Construction of Meaning
Levels of Representation Changes of Reference
A
Clients Narrative
A'
Therapist’s Understanding
Enriching and Interpreting
Validation Co-Construction
Changes of Meaning in the Here and Now
AA'
AA'BB'
AA''BB''
Fig. 1: Therapeutic Interaction and the Construction of Meaning
cal context and link it with narratives and interpretations from other stages of therapy. Up to this point, all schools of therapy share similar ideas regarding processes of understanding the therapeutic interaction. However, the following step is characteristic and specific to how this understanding is treated in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis assumes that the process of working through and reconstructing the patient’s narrative constantly and fundamentally changes the relational context of the narrative situation. This means that both participants are able to tap into new possibilities of constructing meaning that are not predefined. Associations, phantasies, and emotions are triggered in the minds of both dialog partners that may only be loosely associated with the original event A but emerge in the context of the evolving relationship of transference and countertransference. The complex of meaning generated through the interactive co-construction and by the deepening of the emotional relationship in the process of narration is indicated as AA'-BB' in diagram 1. Based on the common ground established in the therapeutic relationship the AA'BB' complex can then be further elaborated and enriched (AA''BB''). As we can see from this schematic description of the gradual creation of a common representation of the event (‘reality’) and its enrichment and performative restructuring by both participants in the therapeutic dialog,
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therapy is characterized by the continual transformation of ‘reality’ on a symbolic and linguistic level. This transformation is embedded in the communication process in which the patient’s original narratives are complemented and modified in a reciprocal exchange. 8. Pragmatic conditions of interactive constructions of reality: Believability and the ability to pass judgment In both psychotherapy and everyday communication, we can pragmatically assume two things in a conversation: (a) that we can believe our conversation partner; and (b) that they are able to pass judgment. The assumption that someone can be believed is based on the idea that patients in therapy usually use their (subjective) judgment when they tell the therapist what they hold to be the truth to the best of their knowledge and belief. We do not assume, and indeed do not need to assume, that patients seeking help in psychotherapy deliberately lie to the therapist. This would conflict with their desire to receive help and would parallel the situation in which a patient experiencing pain seeks a doctor only to deliberately deceive him or her regarding the location and/or recurrence of the pain. The fact that it can be difficult in certain communication situations to address areas of experience or behavior that are connected to shame or guilt or other causes of mental anguish does not contradict the fundamental assumption that our conversation partner is believable or is speaking truthfully. We therefore do not fundamentally question this assumption. In forensic psychology today, however, there have been studies investigating the manner in which a person’s believability and the trustworthiness of their statements can become undermined (Birck 2015, 17). The assumption that the believability of a statement can be best guaranteed by judging the personality of the person giving it has been proven empirically unsound (Birck 2015, 17). The term believability, in the sense of a personal characteristic, is therefore now being questioned in forensic psychology as a criterion for evaluating the truth of a statement (Greuel 1997, 154). The assumption of believability, as intended here, refers not so much to the ascription of a personal trait, but more to the assumption of an implied mutual expectation of behavior. It is thus comparable to the principle of cooperativity as postulated by H. Paul Grice (1975), who defined the four maxims of quantity, quality, relation, and manner as the building blocks of understanding in everyday conversations. The assumption that someone possesses the ability to judge is based on the idea that our conversation partner is, by and large, able to perceive and judge reality and to make well-informed decisions. There are naturally
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exceptions to this rule, as well as situations in which the assumption that a patient has the ability to judge is proven incorrect – for example, when it is discovered that a patient is suffering from an acute psychosis in which their sense of reality has been lost or impaired. However, even such cases as these do not countermand our fundamental operating assumption that a person has the practical ability to judge. Psychotherapists thus work on the assumption that a patient is both believable and is endowed with discrimination and competence to make judgments. Therefore the patient’s narratives are conceived as founded in reality until proven otherwise. As already explained, however, one also has to contend with the fact that narrators use their individual narrative strategies to represent their personal views of the world. Narratives are constructions of reality into which the narrators write themselves as who they are – with all their wishes, fears, and hopes – and often as the person they want to be. Studying the founding principles of this construction of reality and of the self is thus constitutive of psychotherapeutic treatment and is where psychotherapy and narratology converge. 9. Cognitive conditions of interactive constructions of reality: The seven sins of memory (Daniel Schacter) The autobiographical narratives that constitute a major part of psychotherapy naturally also depend on the reliability of the patient’s memory. There is now much evidence to argue that even individuals with intact brain functions do not always have a completely reliable memory, at least not if we take an exact and naturalistic reproduction, like a photograph, of external reality as a benchmark for evaluating memory performance. The capacity of human memory has been criticized primarily in forensics, where it has been discussed under the term ‘false memory syndromes.’ In the 1990s, several spectacular cases were reported in which people succumbed to the pressure of police interrogation and incriminated themselves of serious crimes that they had not committed. Gisli Gudjonsson describes the case of a 32-year-old man in Iceland who made a false confession and claimed he was a murderer in 1976 (Gudjonsson 2017). On the other hand, supposed victims who thought they had been sexually abused as children also made false, unfounded accusations that resulted in charges being pressed against their parents, though these later turned out to be unsubstantiated (Mendez and Fras 2011; Raitt and Zeedyk 2003). In well-known publications by Schacter (1999) and Schacter et al. (2003), the authors describe the “seven sins of memory.” Three sins include three different forms of forgetting: transience (the decreasing accessi-
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bility of memory over time), absent-mindedness (lapses of attention that result in forgetfulness), and blocking (information is present but temporarily inaccessible). Three additional sins relate to various forms of distortion: misattribution (memories that are attributed to an incorrect source), suggestibility (implanted memories about things that never occurred), and bias (current knowledge and beliefs that distort our memories of the past). The last sin is persistence (unwanted recollections that we can never forget) – in other words, the inability to forget certain memories, especially traumatic ones (Schacter 1999, Schacter et al. 2003). Suggestibility, for example, is thought to cause the large number of socially induced memory mistakes that primarily appear in a forensic context, especially if a memory must be recalled under social pressure. This also overlaps with the problem of misattribution, because when a memory is recalled, it is also allocated to the source that generated it. This means that the person decides, for example, whether a memory is based on a perception or on an idea, or whether it was their own immediate perception of reality or a photograph. This socalled source monitoring (Johnson 2006; also see / I.7 Gerrig and Gagnon) plays an important role in distinguishing whether a memory derives from the perception of reality or from ideas and fantasies possibly resulting from pictures or films. Recent research indicates that autobiographical memories can be deliberately implanted if they are supported by credible witnesses, for example parents, who can confirm the supposed reality of an implanted memory (Shaw and Porter 2015). Interestingly, Schacter et al. (2003) also argue that memory errors can affect a person’s self-image – for example, when in the forensic context or a similar situation, they must ascribe actions to themselves that fundamentally contradict, and can therefore seriously disturb, their self-image from one moment to the next. Memory’s shortcomings and the manner in which memory functions not only affect the self; the way the self functions also has an effect on how memory works. This becomes especially apparent when blocking occurs in the form of memory slips. According to psychoanalysis, these slips develop less through cognitive processes than through motivational ones (Freud 1914 [1901], 43). Freud understood these slips as the result of conflicts in which an unconscious impulse cannot be fought off completely and thus finds symbolic expression (Freud 1914 [1901], 43). Slips are faulty actions that primarily reflect modifications of intentionality. However, as in the case of blocking, they can also refer to memory or perception. As such, they concern the relationship between self and reality.
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10. Linguistic methods of representation for the intersubjectivation of experiencing reality Because interaction research is still in a nascent stage in psychotherapy, larger text corpora do not yet exist that could be used as a basis for a linguistic analysis in which methods of using language are explored in order to verify the validity of a narrative that is factual – in other words: adequate to reality. The following compilation is therefore based more on individual observations gathered in clinical material than on a systematic evaluation of larger text corpora. The following four forms of representation in language can be distinguished: a) an episodic narrative, rich in detail; b) the use of direct speech with prosodic imitation, c) renarration, and d) metacognitive framing. Concerning episodic narrative, both in therapy and in everyday communication the episodic structure and richness of detail of an oral first-person narrative, which usually begins with a time and place (Labov and Waletzki 1967) and possibly an explicit reference to the fact that the narrator has personally experienced the following story, is a clear indication that the story is a factual narrative. This practice of considering a detailed narrative as more believable in its reference to reality, which is also the case in the forensic context, is based on the assumption that memories “that are derived from perception tend to have more perceptual detail than memories that are derived from imagination” (Johnson 2006, 761). Episodic narratives of autobiographical experiences based on critical life events often cause the emotions associated with an experience to resurface. This can lead to significant strain in the case of a traumatic experience. The feelings of helplessness or guilt and shame connected with the trauma can be overwhelming and can result in a retraumatization. For this reason, these situations must be treated with special care. Often, however, the sharing of episodic memories in therapy also indicates an opening in the therapeutic relationship. By sharing the detailed narrative, the patient reveals the emotions connected with the event, thus demonstrating that they trust the therapist enough to share this expression of feeling with them. Detailed episodic narratives also emphasize the believability of the narrator. As mentioned in the beginning, the psychotherapist has two initial assumptions about the patient: that they are believable, and that they have the ability to judge. Naturally, these assumptions are also tested in the course of therapeutic communication. The aim, however, is not to prove that a patient cannot be believed, but to test how comprehensibly and how precisely they represent reality in their narratives. Although the therapist is not able to do a ‘fact check,’ he or she will still form their judgment
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based on how open, authentic, accurate in detail, and differentiated the experiences in the real world are in the patient’s narrative. As noted, there are significant differences in the individual constructions of reality in terms of reliability and complexity, and although it is not possible to directly assess just how close to reality a patient’s narrative is, therapeutic communication can nonetheless provide a clear picture of the patient’s personality over time regarding their attitudes about themselves and other people and how they present these in their narratives. Therefore, by offering an especially vivid picture of the patient’s experience, episodic narratives of personal experiences are very important in this context. The second form, direct speech, is used as a special tool in episodic narratives to make them livelier. As a rhetorical device, direct speech emphasizes the factual character of the narrative by lending it a strong dramatic quality. In a factual narrative, direct speech is also often accompanied by the resurfacing of strong emotions, including negative feelings. In the third form of representation, renarration, the factual content of a narrative is emphasized through the multiple repetition of a narrative during therapy. Retelling a story highlights those experiences that are regarded as critical turning points in the patient’s biographical development. These are often relationship experiences that the patient regards as decisive for their development (Scheidt and Lucius-Hoene 2015). As to structure, the retelling of a story relies on the same modes of representation that we have already mentioned: namely, detailed episodic narratives and the use of direct speech. Interestingly, narratives that are told over and over again frequently change in the course of therapy, as representation shifts, for example, according to the level of agency the narrators ascribe to themselves. In this context, an increase in agency – for example, in a dream narrative – should be understood as the narrators’ twofold (re-)gaining of self-efficacy and authorship over the narrative and over their own life. As such, this indicates progress in their gradual acquisition of improved coping strategies. The factuality of an experience can also be indicated through the fourth form of representation, metacognitive framing, in which the narrator assumes an explicitly constructivist perspective: ‘at the time I was completely overwhelmed by what happened, and I thought about it for many years. Looking back, I think X acted that way for these reasons. Today, I can step back from the situation.’ As we can see here, by using metacognitive framing to refer to themself and to how a certain experience has affected them personally, the narrator indirectly emphasizes the narrated experience as the representation of a lived reality. In this way, the person narrating affirms the reality status of the experience, while also sharing their selfassurance with the therapist through the metacognitive focus. Thus, the
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experience that is told (and retold many times) and the patient’s cognitive processing of this experience through narration becomes intersubjective.
11. Conclusion Depth psychological therapy and psychoanalytic psychotherapy are fundamentally based on a dialogical process in which patients are guided toward an understanding of their own self and how they react to and experience the world. The patient’s experiences of external reality, which are often at the core of the patient’s treatment, are also addressed in this context. What is verbalized in a therapeutic situation acquires multiple references. The narrative refers not only to the patients’ external reality and living environment, but also to their inner and unconscious experiences. In this situation, the double character of the narratives that refer to external reality while also remaining rooted in subjective experience are constitutive of psychotherapy. Therapists neither disregard the reality referred to in the narratives, nor do they assume the dominance of reality. Instead, their focus is directed at processes of transformation: the transformation and assimilation of external reality into subjective experiences, and the transformation of inner experiences into constructions of reality. From this perspective, Winnicott’s theory of an intermediate space offers an important theoretical framework that can help us understand the psychological basis that subtends an individual’s creative relating of internal and external reality as well as the intersubjective field of the psychoanalytic dialog.
References Birck, Angelika. Traumatisierte Flüchtlinge. Wie glaubhaft sind ihre Aussagen? Heidelberg und Kröning: Asanger Verlag, 2015. Boothe, Brigitte. “Der Patient erzählt in der Psychotherapie.” Erzählen in den Wissenschaften. Positionen, Probleme, Perspektiven. Ed. Balz Engler. 26. Kolloquium der Schweizerischen Akademie der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften. Fribourg: Academic Press, 2010. 163–178. De Rose, Paola et al. “Current Psychopathological Symptoms in Children and Adolescents Who Suffered Different Forms of Maltreatment.” The Scientific World Journal. (2016): 1– 6. DOI 10.1155/2016/8654169. Freud, Sigmund. Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens. [1901] [The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.] Trans. A. A. Brill. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1914. Freud, Sigmund. Formulierungen über die zwei Prinzipien des psychischen Geschehens. [1911] [Formulations on the Two Principles of Mental Functioning.] Trans. M. N. Searl. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 12. Trans. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1958.
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Freud, Sigmund. Jenseits des Lustprinzips. [1920] [Beyond the Pleasure Principle.] Trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990. Freud, Sigmund, and Joseph Breuer. Über den psychischen Mechanismus hysterischer Phänomene; Vorläufige Mitteilung. [1893] [Studies in Hysteria.]. Trans. Nicola Luckhurst. London: Penguin, 2004. Greuel, Luise. “Glaubwürdigkeit – Zur psychologischen Differenzierung eines umgangssprachlichen Konstrukts.” Praxis der Rechtspsychologie 7.2 (1997): 154–169. Gudjonsson, Gisli. “Memory Distrust Syndrome, Confabulation and False Confession.” Cortex 87 (2017): 156–165. Grice, Herbert Paul. “Logic and Conversation.” Syntax and Semantics Vol. III: Speech Acts. Eds. Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan. New York: Academic Press, 1975. 41–58. Johnson, Marcia K. “Memory and Reality.” American Psychologist 61.8 (2006): 760–771. Labov, William, and Joshua Waletzky. “Narrative Analysis.” Essays on the Verbal and Visual Arts. Ed. June Helm. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967. 12–44. Lacan, Jacques. Das Spiegelstadium als Bildner der Ichfunktion, wie sie uns in der psychoanalytischen Erfahrung erscheint. Schriften 1. [Écrits]. [1975] Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York and London: WW Norton, 1982. 61–70. Laplanche, Jean, and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. Das Vokabular der Psychoanalyse. Vol. II. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973. Lichtenberg, Joseph. Psychoanalysis and Infant Research. London: The Analytic Press L Erlbaum, 1983. Lucius-Hoene, Gabriele, and Carl Eduard Scheidt. “Bewältigen von Erlebnissen.” Erzählen. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Ed. Matías Martínez. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2017. 235–242. Marty, Pierre, and Michel de M’Uzan. “Das operative Denken.” Psyche 32.10 (1978): 974– 984. Mendez, Mario F., and Ivan A. Fras. “The False Memory Syndrome: Experimental Studies and Comparison to Confabulations.” Med Hypotheses 76.4 (2011): 492–496. Muller, John P. “Ego and Subject in Lacan.” Psychoanalytic Review 69.2 (1982): 234–240. Plener, Paul L., Anita Ignatius, Markus Huber-Lang, and Jörg. M. Fegert. “Auswirkungen von Missbrauch, Misshandlung und Vernachlässigung im Kindesalter auf die psychische und physische Gesundheit im Erwachsenenalter.” Nervenheilkunde 36 (2017): 161–167. Raitt, Fiona E., and M. Suzanne Zeedyk. “False Memory Syndrome: Undermining the Credibility of Complainants in Sexual Offences.” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry 26.5 (2003): 453–471. Schacter, Daniel L. “The Seven Sins of Memory: Insights from Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience.” American Psychological Association, Inc. 54.3 (1999): 182–203. Schacter, Daniel L., Joan Y. Chiao, and Jason P. Mitchell. “The Seven Sins of Memory: Implications of Self.” New York Academy of Sciences 1001 (2003): 226–239. Scheidt, Carl Eduard, and Gabriele Lucius-Hoene. “Die Wieder-Erzählung prototypischer Beziehungserfahrungen in der Psychotherapie.” Wiedererzählen: Formen und Funktionen einer kulturellen Praxis. Eds. Elke Schumann, Elisabeth Gülich, Gabriele Lucius-Hoene, and Stefan Pfänder. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2015. 227–244. Shaw, Julia, and Stephen Porter. “Constructing Rich False Memories of Committing Crime.” Psychological Science 26.3 (2015): 291–301. Stern, Daniel N. The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. London and New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. Winnicott, Donald W. Playing and Reality. Aylesbury: Penguin Education, 1982.
MARK FREEMAN
Authenticity in Sociology and Psychology 1. Exploring the riddle of authenticity What does “authenticity” mean? Perhaps the most basic way of getting hold of the idea is to consider its use in the context of artworks and the like. As Lionel Trilling put the matter long ago, “]t]he work of art is itself authentic by reason of its entire self-definition: it is understood to exist solely by the laws of its own being, which include the right to embody painful, ignoble, or socially inacceptable subject-matters” (1971, 99–100). Similarly, Trilling adds, “the artist seeks his personal authenticity in his entire autonomousness – his goal is to be as self-defining as the art object he creates” (100). When one discovers a painting that looks like it may have been painted by Jackson Pollock (for instance), one will immediately want to learn whether it is an ‘authentic’ Pollock or some ersatz, comparably splattery replica. And when it comes to people, in this case Pollock, this most basic conception would essentially translate into the idea of his being an ‘original’ in some way. There is of course the issue of audience, too – its expectation being “that through its communication with the work of art, which may be resistant, unpleasant, even hostile, it acquires the authenticity of which the object itself is the model and the artist the personal example” (100). Authenticity, in this most basic context, then, is about one’s refusal to hew to the demands of taste, propriety, and convention and, instead, to follow one’s own inner lights, wherever they may lead. Inauthenticity, in turn, is about being captive to these demands and in such a way as to erase the very possibility of choosing one’s own way in the world. We might think of Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilych (1960 [1886]) in this context, who had bought his clothes at “the fashionable tailor,” eaten at a “firstclass restaurant,” bought whatever else he needed at “the best shops” (1960 [1886], 103), and did everything else he was supposed to do in order to live that sort of life deemed ‘good’ by conventional standards: “It was all done with clean hands, in clean linen, with French phrases, above all https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-020
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among people of the best society and consequently with the approval of people of rank” (104). Ivan Ilych would thus appear to be the very picture of inauthenticity, the meaning of his life being determined by little more than those crude bourgeois standards circulating at the time. It should be noted that Ivan Ilych himself had not really been aware of his inauthenticity – at least not until the home-decorating mishap that would eventually leave him staring in the face of death. Only then, looking backward, could he see that “what had appeared perfectly impossible before, namely that he had not spent his life as he should have done, might after all be true.” So it was that […] his scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might have all been false. He tried to defend all those things to himself and suddenly felt the weakness of what he was defending. There was nothing to defend. (149)
This passage complicates things, because what it implies is that, happy though Ivan Ilych had seemed to be with the niceties of his life, there had in fact been intimations of falsity, “scarcely perceptible” clues that had never fully entered his awareness. Would he deserve to be considered inauthentic if the “impulses” at hand had not existed? Is the person who is utterly and completely conventional in his or her tastes and aspirations and perfectly happy about it inauthentic? If we define authenticity primarily in terms of originality, then yes; this person, far from being one of a kind (as in a genuine Pollock), is a replica, enacting a way of being in the world that is wholly determined from without. Nevertheless, we might feel some sympathy for this sort of person, mainly because his or her particular brand of inauthenticity seems innocent, guile-free; there is no deceit, no social strategizing, just plain, unadulterated capitulation to the status quo. With Ivan Ilych confessing that, appearances notwithstanding, he had actually felt occasional twinges of his own duplicity, we encounter another, more complicated, way of conceptualizing authenticity, having to do with the degree of harmony that exists between one’s words or deeds and what one actually thinks, feels, or believes. Drawing on this basic idea, one can consider the issue of authenticity in the context of how one relates to others (whether, for instance, one is being ‘who one truly is’ or is playacting), or how one relates to oneself (whether one is being ‘true to oneself’ or is either lying or betraying oneself ). As we shall see, the issue at hand will turn out to be more complicated still, but this brief sketch will do for now. If in fact I am relating to others in a way that is palpably false or that rings hollow (‘How nice to see you again; I’ve missed you so!’ or
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‘Could those be Versace?’ [etc.]), I am behaving in a way that is commonly regarded as inauthentic – the only qualification being that I or others know that what I think, feel, and believe is contrary to these words. If, on the other hand, my warm embrace of the person in question is in keeping with the clear fact of my having missed her, deeply, then there will likely be no questioning its authenticity. The same with the Versace: if I really think those (shoes, pants, whatever) are Versace, and the question is an earnest one, issuing from my unabashed wonder, then here too, there will be no questioning the authenticity of my query. ‘Why, yes!’ the answer may be, ‘I’m so glad you noticed!’ The same basic situation holds for the intra-personal dimension of authenticity. If I have committed myself to some cause – saving some endangered animal, for instance – mainly because I know that I will be respected and loved all the more by those whose opinions I care about, then my commitment is an inauthentic one; it is founded on other, less noble, motives than the ones I have professed. (‘I could not care less about white rhinos’). If, however, my commitments grow organically from my character (‘It’s high time I went and did something about those poor creatures, and that time is now’), then I will be able to reassure myself that these commitments are authentic ones. There always exists the possibility, of course, that one is deluding oneself owing to unconscious wishes and the like. But insofar as we may be the last to know about these, our authenticity – compromised, in the end, though it may be – may remain. Notice that, on the basis of what has been said thus far, we have considered the idea of authenticity not on the basis of ‘the facts’ but rather on the basis of one’s motives – specifically, the degree of concert between one’s true motives and what one actually says or does. I suppose one could call this, cautiously of course, a kind of ‘correspondence’ theory. But the correspondence in question is not about the relationship between propositions and reality (/ II.1 Klauk, / II.2 Bartmann); it is about the relationship between what one professes to be the case regarding this or that or that state of affairs and what one holds to be so in one’s ‘heart of hearts.’ Bearing in mind this brief sketch of the idea of authenticity, let us explore in greater detail some of its dimensions, focusing especially on its relationship to the idea of factuality.1
1 For the concept of authenticity in narratology and literary studies, also see / IV.3 Martínez.
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2. Originality, plagiarism, and the challenge of ‘being oneself’ There may be no more revealing case for addressing the challenge at hand than Helen Keller’s well-known autobiography, The Story of My Life (1988 [1902]). Having contracted a disease that left her deaf and blind at nineteen months of age, Keller had been left in a highly primitive psychological state. This would change with the arrival of her teacher, Anne Sullivan, who, after numerous false starts, finally succeeded in helping Keller understand the miracle of language, which in turn led to her “soul’s sudden awakening” (1988 [1902], 48). Wondrous and formative though those early years with Sullivan were, there had been some significant problems too, not the least of which included Keller’s being accused of plagiarism at age twelve. If Keller is to be believed, the accusation came as a shock. When writing the story that had brought the charge, she writes, “[m]y thoughts flowed easily. I felt a sense of joy in the composition. Words and images came tripping to my finger ends” (48). As it turned out, most of those words and images had come from another story, which had apparently been read to her sometime before. With this painful discovery, Keller arrived at a startling, and disturbing, realization: “I cannot be quite sure of the boundary line between my ideas and those I find in books” (48) – or those derived from Sullivan, spelling the world out on her hand. Perhaps this is so, she ventures, “because so many of my impressions come to me through the medium of others’ eyes and ears” (48). In doing so, they become “the very substance and texture of my mind” (53). They also become the substance and texture of her writing: “Consequently, in nearly all that I write, I produce something which very much resembles the crazy patchwork I used to make when I first learned to sew, […] made up of crude notions of my own inlaid with the brighter thoughts and riper opinions of the authors I have read” (53). Keller’s only hope is that she will someday “outgrow [her] artificial, periwigged compositions. Then, perhaps, [her] own thoughts and experiences will come to the surface” (53). In view of these troubling issues, one cannot help but wonder who is speaking here. Who is the “I” reflecting on her own quiltedness, bemoaning the seemingly inevitable clutter of the many others occupying her mind and self? Keller so wants to be her own self, all the while knowing, perhaps, that, strictly speaking, it cannot be. There can be no authenticity – not, at least, if what we mean by it is an unfettered originality, issuing from the depths of Being. Troubled though Keller was by her predicament, she is also immensely grateful for the gifts that have come her way, especially from Sullivan. Indeed, [m]y teacher is so near to me that I scarcely think of myself apart from her. How much of my delight in all beautiful things is innate, and how much is due to her
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influence, I can never tell. I feel that her being is inseparable from my own, and that the footsteps of my life are in hers. All the best of me belongs to her – there is not a talent, or an inspiration or a joy in me that has not awakened by her loving touch. (30)
Keller’s situation proved to be troubling to others too. She was a “dupe of words,” one critic had said (cited in Lash 1980, 571). Another had complained that “she talks bookishly” (cited in Lash 1980, 573). As yet another had written, “[o]ne resents the pages of second-hand descriptions of natural objects, when what one wants is a sincere account of the attitude, the natural attitude towards life of one whose eyes and ears are sealed.” Poor woman. “[I]f only she could realize that it is better to be one’s self, however limited and afflicted, than the best imitation of somebody else that could be achieved!” (cited in Herrmann 1998, 136–37). Keller’s situation is surely unique in some ways. Owing to the fact that she had to rely so extensively on external sources to learn about the world, the very possibility of her authenticity – qua originality – would appear to be severely diminished. We should nevertheless ask: how unique was her situation? And what can it possibly mean to be ‘one’s own’ person? 3. Outer facts, inner facts, and true stories Thus far, we have explored the idea of authenticity mainly in terms of the first and most basic criterion identified earlier – that of “self-defining” originality (as Trilling had put it). Just as there can be ersatz Pollocks, there can, it would seem, be ersatz people, largely devoid of that sort of authentic signature often associated with the idea of being one’s own person. Closely related to the idea of originality, we observed, is the issue of how one relates to one’s ‘audience,’ whether it is the actual audience one wishes to acquire through one’s art works or the rather more diffuse audience comprising the world of others (see especially Goffman 1959). As we noted in our brief encounter with the story of Ivan Ilych, inauthenticity, in this second context, has less to do with the sources of one’s self than with the stratagems one might employ, whether consciously or unconsciously, as one makes one’s way through the world. However inauthentic Keller may have been, she tends to incite sympathy in most of her readers, even when she appears like a recycled version of Sullivan. By all indications, she had no choice in the matter. Ivan Ilych, on the other hand, generally comes off as both a crude avatar of the haute bourgeoisie, fiercely intent on assuming those roles, postures, and statuses exhibited by his desired models, and an equally crude play-actor, variously kowtowing to his superiors and employing any number of other deceitful, manipulative schemes in order to shore up his own hollow, ever-needy self.
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In this latter context, sincerity – as manifested in Ivan Ilych’s insincerity – might be a more appropriate term than authenticity (Trilling 1971). Either way, he is likely to appear to most readers as a decidedly less sympathetic character than Keller. His world is one of superficiality, calculation, and guile; and although he cannot quite see this world for what it is until after his fateful accident, it is difficult to avoid feeling that he really ought to have known better. Ivan Ilych’s recognition that those “scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people,” along with “those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed” (1960 [1986], 149), lead us further into the idea of authenticity. For, with this recognition, he had essentially realized that his duplicity extended well beyond his relations with others and into the very heart of his own self-understanding and self-appraisal. Alongside the ‘outer’ facts of his life, therefore – his marriage, his promotions, his lovely home, and so on – were inner facts. Gauging the former, before the accident, he could only conclude that he had been living the good life. Gauging the latter, in its aftermath, however, he could only conclude that he had been living a lie. He had been happy, or so he had thought. But it was a faux happiness that had emerged from what turned out to be a faux life and, in turn, a faux story about that life. Only upon realizing the duplicity of his narrative ways could he begin to live authentically – that is, with some measure of fidelity to his true self, as constituted by the inner facts of his life. And only upon living authentically, brief though his time to do so was, could he begin to discern and to craft the true story of his life. In her book The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living (2013), Mari Ruti speaks of “the enigmatic specificity of desire that urges us to follow certain life directions rather than others.” As she quickly notes, “it is important to realize that when we cannot find a way to honor this specificity – when our satisfactions do not match the uniqueness of our desire – we risk losing our vitality; we risk feeling that our lives have ceased to be meaningful” (2013, 11). As a consequence, we may fall into a “vague existential malaise,” signaling “that there is a fundamental misalignment between desire and satisfaction; there is too large a gulf between the longings of the spirit and the mundane realities of daily life” (12). Fear of our own passions is one reason. But it may also be that we are for one reason or another incapable of accurately reading our desire, perhaps because we have never learned to do so or because we have been overrun by social norms to such an extent that our desire gets swallowed up by the kinds of desires our culture would like us to have. It would in fact be difficult to overestimate the degree to which we tend to adopt desires that saturate the social space around us. As soon as we enter the world, we are bombarded by networks of socially condoned desire that train us to want what everyone else wants, so that it
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becomes virtually impossible for us to tell the difference between desires that originate from our private universe and ones that originate from the pool of publicly sanctioned yearnings. (12–13)
Intrinsic to this “private universe,” Ruti asserts, is “the experience of being summoned to a higher ‘calling’ – a vocation, purpose, or prophetic revelation beyond our normal way of going about our lives. Such a calling jolts us out of our complacency, seizes our entire being, and makes us singlemindedly preoccupied by the insight we have been granted” (125). This calling is to our innermost character, and “being called to our character in this manner rescues us from being entirely engulfed by conventional definitions of the good life” (126). Ruti is not claiming here that authenticity entails wholly divesting oneself of such conventional definitions and demands. Indeed, “there is no way around the fact that there are times when we need to strike a compromise between our idiosyncratic passions and our social investments.” Nevertheless, “we should be able to find a means of weaving strands of eccentricity into our otherwise somewhat conventional lives” (134). And it is important that we do so: “No matter how ‘constructed’ our self, there is a specificity to our ideals that allows us to distinguish between satisfying and unsatisfying existential itineraries” (135). In many respects, this is a classic conception of authenticity, one that cuts across both psychology and sociology. It is very much about paying heed to and honoring what I earlier referred to as one’s ‘heart of hearts.’ Ruti recognizes that being called to character is “rarely a purely individualistic endeavor”; rather, it is “one that connects us to a cause larger than ourselves” (142). But there is no mistaking the individualistic strain of her conception. Beyond the confines of the social world there is a “private universe.” In aspiring toward authenticity, there is bound to be “compromise” between the specificity of our desires and the requirements of social life. Inevitable though such compromise is, it is imperative that we clear a space for those “strands of eccentricity” that characterize our innermost self. There is much to recommend in Ruti’s view. At times, however, it seems that the most authentic self is the one that is most “eccentric,” most detached from the social world. Trilling’s self-defining artist comes to mind once again. It may be that this basic conception of authenticity remains too bound up with individualism and too tightly tethered to those sorts of art-fully crafted characters that are so integral to the mythology of the modern self. How else might we think about it?
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4. From eccentricity to ex-centricity In The Ethics of Authenticity (1991), Charles Taylor argues forcefully that authenticity has something to do with some sphere of meaning, significance, and indeed goodness beyond the perimeter of the self. For Taylor, authenticity is not just about ‘originality.’ Nor is it about being true to ourselves or freeing ourselves from all of the social conventions and demands foisted upon us so as to become our own persons. What we see in many of these conceptions are at best debased forms of authenticity. What is needed, therefore, is a more capacious conception, one that rescues the ethical charge that has been buried beneath the debris of the modern view. Authenticity, Taylor insists, emerges against a background, or “horizon,” of significance. “It follows that one of the things we can’t do, if we are to define ourselves significantly, is suppress or deny the horizon against which things take on significance for us. This is the kind of self-defeating move frequently being carried out in our subjectivist civilization” (1991, 37). Nor, I would add, can we carry on as if there were no horizon – as if my interest, my choice, my will were all that mattered. Indeed, “[e]ven the sense that the significance of my life comes from its being chosen – the case where authenticity is actually grounded on self-determining freedom – depends on the understanding that independent of my will there is something noble, courageous, and hence significant in giving shape to my own life” (38–39). As Taylor goes on to explain, [t]he agent seeking significance in life, trying to define him- or herself meaningfully, has to exist in a horizon of important questions. That is what is self-defeating in modes of contemporary culture that concentrate on self-fulfillment in opposition to the demands of society, or nature, which shut out history and the bonds of solidarity. These selfcentred “narcissistic” forms are indeed shallow and trivialized. [...] But this is not because they belong to the culture of authenticity. Rather it is because they fly in the face of its requirements. To shut out demands emanating beyond the self is precisely to suppress the conditions of significance, and hence to court trivialization. (40)
As Taylor continues, I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter. But to bracket out history, nature, society, the demands of solidarity, everything but what I find in myself, would be to eliminate all candidates for what matters. Only if I exist in a world in which history, or the demands of nature, or the needs of my fellow human beings, or the duties of citizenship, or the call of God, or something else of this order matters crucially, can I define an identity for myself that is not trivial. Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from the self; it supposes such demands. (40–41)
In an important move, Taylor goes on to link one prominent strand of contemporary culture to nihilism, “a negation of all horizons of significance” (60). He also brings us back one final time to the connection be-
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tween artistic creation, especially those modes of it that enshrine originality, and self-creation: “Artistic creation becomes the paradigm mode in which people can come to self-definition. The artist becomes in some way the paradigm case of the human being, as agent of original self-definition.” So it is that there would emerge “a tendency to heroize the artist, to see in his or her life the essence of the human condition, and to venerate him or her as a seer, the creator of cultural values.” Moreover, Taylor adds, there would emerge “a new understanding of art. No longer defined by imitation, by mimēsis of reality, art is understood now more in terms of creation” (62). The work of art aspires to be ever more autonomous, freestanding, unbeholden to the world beyond it; it becomes its own reality, characterized by the free play of its own unadulterated forms. The equivalent in the realm of persons: the self-made man, Nietzsche-style. Following Taylor, authenticity – authentic authenticity – involves substantially more than this. It involves being true not to oneself, and certainly not to oneself alone, but to some Other, to some sphere of otherness beyond the self (Freeman 2010, 2014). I have referred to this view of the self as an ex-centric one, seeing it as a kind of counterweight to the largely ego-centric view still dominant in contemporary psychology and in the wider culture (Freeman 2004). Consider once more the case of Ivan Ilych. Seen from one angle, his inauthenticity would appear to be a function of his inability to step beyond the bounds of social convention and propriety and to follow his own inner lights. Seen from another, more substantial angle, however, it is a function of his utter self-enclosure, his inability to find in the Other anything but an obstruction to his own willful desire. This suggests that authenticity may be more appropriate framed as a social virtue than a purely personal one (Guignon 2004), and that there may be no separating the idea from “deliberation about how one’s commitments make a contribution to the good of the public world in which one is a participant” (163). In this respect, Guignon notes, authenticity, socially and ethically conceived, is as much about “self-loss,” or “releasement,” as it is about the kind of self-gain frequently associated with the term. If there is an image of authenticity of this sort in the story of Ivan Ilych, it is found in the figure of Gerasim, the butler’s young assistant, “a clean, fresh peasant lad, grown stout on town food and always cheerful and bright” (Tolstoy 1960 [1886], 132), who would do all that he could to make the suffering Ivan Ilych comfortable during his darkest days; “That must be very unpleasant for you,” Ivan Ilych had said one time as Gerasim performed one of his tasks (133). “‘You must forgive me. I am helpless.’ ‘Oh, why, sir,’ and Gerasim’s eyes beamed and he showed his glistening white teeth, ‘What’s a little trouble?’” (133). Everything he did had been done “easily, willingly, simply, and with a good nature that touched Ivan
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Ilych” (134). This is in stark and painful contrast to Ivan Ilych’s family. Owing to that very decorum which he had served all his life long, […] he saw that no one felt for him, because no one wished to grasp his position. Only Gerasim recognized it and pitied him. [...] Gerasim alone did not lie; everything showed that he alone understood the fact of the case and did not consider it necessary to disguise them, but simply felt sorry for his emaciated and enfeebled master. After all, ‘We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?’ (135)
Here, then, we have an image of authenticity largely in keeping with the kind of perspective advanced by Taylor and Guignon and also by Heidegger (1962 [1927]), whose reflections on the relationship between death and authenticity are not unrelated to Tolstoy’s. Authenticity, as embodied in the figure of Gerasim, is about a kind of selfless purity, a mode of existence utterly shorn of pretense, guile, and duplicity. Far from being akin to the heroically self-defining artist, eager to cast off the ugly artificialities of conventional society, he is a social being through and through, who performs his various tasks naturally and with admirable ease. Others are not obstructions but opportunities for sympathy and care. And death, rather than being met with dread and denial, is simply a fact of life, only to be feared if one has fallen prey to Ivan Ilych-style inauthenticity. From this perspective, the idea of practicing fidelity to one’s heart of hearts remains relevant. But the heart in question is not so much that of the ‘true self’ of innermost desire and enigmatic specificity as it is that of the earthy, good-hearted soul who knows what is most real and acts accordingly. William James’s (1950 [1890]) discussion of the “potential social self ” takes this set of ideas one significant step farther: When for motives of honor and conscience I brave the condemnation of my own family, club, and “set”; when, as a protestant, I turn catholic; as a catholic, freethinker; as a “regular practitioner,” homeopath, or what not, I am always inwardly strengthened in my course and steeled against the loss of my actual social self by the thought of other and better possible social judges than those whose verdict goes against me now. The ideal social self which I thus seek in appealing to their decision may be very remote: it may be represented as barely possible. I may not hope for its realization during my lifetime; I may even expect the future generations, which would approve me if they knew me, to know nothing about me when I am dead and gone. Yet still the emotion that beckons me on is indubitably the pursuit of an ideal social self, of a self that is at least worthy of approving recognition by the highest possible judging companion, if such companion there be. This self is the true, the intimate, the ultimate, the permanent Me which I seek. This judge is God, the Absolute Mind, the ‘Great Companion.’ (315–316)
Whether we ought to follow James in this divinely-inspired version of authenticity is open to question. It may be that, not unlike the individualism-inspired version we encountered earlier, this one will appear too ex-
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treme, albeit in a quite different direction, such that being true to oneself becomes inseparable from being faithful to the Good and even to God (“if such companion there be”). Be that as it may, the idea that authenticity may be more than either a personal virtue or a social virtue is a compelling one. And if James is right, the ‘facts’ about which it speaks are, in the end, matters of truly ultimate concern. References Freeman, Mark. “The Priority of the Other: Mysticism’s Challenge to the Legacy of the Self.” Mysticism: A Variety of Psychological Approaches. Eds. Jacob Belzen and Antoon Geels. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003. 213–234. Freeman, Mark. Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Freeman, Mark. The Priority of the Other: Thinking and Living Beyond the Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959. Guignon, Charles. On Being Authentic. London: Routledge, 2004. Herrmann, Dorothy. Helen Keller: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. [1927] New York: Harper & Row, 1962. James, William. The Principles of Psychology. [1890]. Vol. 1 New York: Dover, 1950. Keller, Helen. The Story of My Life. [1902] New York: New American Library, 1988. Lash, Joseph P. Helen and Teacher: The Story of Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan Macy. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1980. Ruti, Mari. The Call of Character: Living a Life Worth Living. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991. Tolstoy, Leo. The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories. [1886] New York: New American Library, 1960. Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.
GREGOR DOBLER
Factuality in Anthropology Anthropology’s claim to relevance rests largely on its claim to factuality and factual accuracy. While being problematic for almost all scholarly endeavors, this claim to factuality is more precarious and more difficult to uphold for anthropology than for neighboring disciplines. Anthropologists typically use methods whose results are so closely tied to personal experience and everyday life as to make them impossible to reproduce. They rely on anthropologists’ participation in social situations, on their own observation of these situations, and on informants’ utterances that often do not leave recorded traces outside the anthropologist’s memory or notebooks. As a consequence, the discipline cannot very well base its claim to factuality on the objectifying effect of its methodology. If earlier travel writings had been suspicious because readers did not have the means to see the strange customs in foreign countries for themselves (see e.g. Neuber 1989; Stagl 1995), today’s anthropological accounts remain suspicious because the moments which they relate and the situations in whose factual representation they anchor their claims are always already in the past. Very often, the anthropologist’s account is the only proof of their existence, and no independent means of authorization is (even in theory) available to a reader. At the same time, the very personal nature of anthropological research also turns the factuality of anthropological accounts into a personal, and simultaneously a very political, question for the anthropologist. The factuality of the account is intimately linked to the credibility of the anthropologist as a person, to the reality of her or his experiences, and to the feelings of solidarity or anger towards people who continue to live in the world we share. This increases the stakes involved in discussing anthropological factuality. In the following, I will first explore this precariousness of factuality in anthropology in slightly more depth and will then address a number of ways in which anthropologists establish factuality in their accounts. The https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-021
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third concluding section returns to the cause of the precarious nature of factuality in anthropology, and the relation between text and experience.
1. Anthropology’s precarious claim to factuality Anthropology’s main method, and the core of its identity as an academic subject, is ‘participant observation.’ Much has been written about this rather curious practice. It rests on the assumption that, if we want to understand a society, we cannot simply ask its members to explain it to us. Too much remains unsaid or unspeakable; too many components of human agency do not lend themselves to be easily put into words; too much of our everyday life consists of routines, taken-for-granted assumptions and tacit knowledge about our world. In order to understand human beings, therefore, we have to share their lives. We have to participate in them; live through the situations we want to understand, listen to everyday conversations in the wild (not the tamed and officialized interpretations offered to us in explicit interviews), and acquire as much of the knowledge shared by the people we study as we can. Instead of a given corpus of preexisting data, we rely on our own fieldnotes – on our own accounts of situations we experienced and conversations we had. And what is even more difficult to objectify: we also rely on our own incorporated knowledge about a societal context so that after fieldwork we can become our own informant for things we never realized we knew and never wrote down in our fieldnotes. Most social sciences methods are designed to produce an explicit set of data that addresses a specific set of questions. Whether the psychologist proposes an experiment, the political scientist choses variables, the qualitative sociologist asks questions in a semi-structured interview: they all either have the answer to a given question in their explicit data, or they cannot in good conscience address it. Not so for the anthropologist. She often finds that a new set of questions makes her realize a fact about her research she had never known she knew. Prompted by a new question, tacit knowledge can become explicit (Förster 2001; Kesselring 2017; Dobler 2015). This creates unique opportunities and makes anthropological data very flexible and very rich in context, but it also makes any claim to truth precarious. How do we know that we know something if all we can rely on is our own subjectivity as shaped by the experiences in another society? This runs counter to every rule of scientific method. Externalizing a claim to factuality by pointing at the rules of procedure defined by objectifying methods becomes impossible.
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Hermeneutic, text-based disciplines have long learned to accept such insecurity. Anthropology, however, is not just a hermeneutic endeavor intent on producing a possible and plausible meaning. Anthropologists write about human beings who have often become their friends and for whom they feel affection and solidarity. With solidarity comes responsibility and relevance; factuality, for the anthropologist, takes on an ethical and a political dimension. What we write can have real-world consequences for the people we write about. For better or worse, their world might change as a consequence of our work. (Sometimes, the subjects of our writings can even talk back and explain to us, and to the world, that we got it wrong – an experience that rarely occurs to the interpreters of eighteenth-century novels.) In short, anthropology’s claim to factuality is more difficult to sustain than the claim of other, more formalized sciences; but it is, at the same time, crucial to the self-image of the researcher and to the entire discipline. Anthropology is a hermeneutic discipline that cannot be content with merely a plausible or interesting interpretation, but has to strive for factuality. How, then, is this crucial claim established in texts, if the objectifying procedure of method is but a frail support to it? 2. How anthropological texts establish factuality In the 1980s, the realization that even ethnographies have authors hit anthropology hard. Writing Culture, a volume edited by George Marcus and James Clifford in 1986, hammered home the fact that ethnographies are written texts that establish their own truth by narrative means, “that academic and literary genres interpenetrate […]” (2). The authors drew “the attention to the historical predicament of ethnography, the fact that it is always caught up in the invention, not the representation of cultures” (Clifford and Marcus 1986, 2). The volume’s focus was on anthropology’s narrative and fictional elements. Stopping short of claiming that anthropology “is ‘only literature’,” the authors asserted that “it is always writing” (26). This may sound commonplace today, but it elicited strong responses in 1986. The main problem that the more scientifically-minded members of the discipline had with this approach was that it turned attention from ‘facts’ to narrativity. Ernest Gellner, for example, writing a review of Clifford Geertz’s (1988) brilliant Works and Lives, feared that “while the author comes to be conspicuously present on the List of Ingredients affixed to the anthropological jam jar, the object of inquiry may virtually disappear”
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(Gellner 1988, 26). Gellner – like Malinowski, whose dependence on Ernst Mach he rightly points out – is no naïve empiricist. His fear was that Writing Culture tore apart the specific pact between the anthropologist and the reader which stipulated that ethnographies had to be taken as an objective representation of the world – or at least as an attempt to be objective, whose proof was in the data, not in the writing. To regard ethnographic texts as fictive seemed to open the door for readings of them as contingent representations which blur the difference between science and literature. The focus on writing, he thought, would distract from the more serious discussions about ethnography’s factual basis and relevance. The problem Gellner and others failed to acknowledge was of course that the line between science and literature had been blurry from the start. The truth of anthropological knowledge had always been contested, and authority had always been established by textual means. Analyzing narrative strategies of ethnographies provided a clearer image of how anthropologists did the trick – how they managed to produce texts which could be read as factual representations of reality. The more careful attention given to ethnographic writing after Writing Culture produced clear insights into ethnography’s strategies of factuality. Before turning to these strategies, it is necessary to differentiate between two aspects of factuality in ethnographic texts. First, like the authority of every travelogue, ethnographic authority rests on the claim that the writer has been there and has witnessed what she or he writes about. The first level of factuality is thus the factual as experienced by the author: What I write is a factual account of what I experienced in the lifeworld,1 not of things I invented. Since its authority rests on this factuality of experience and hence on the author’s presence, anthropology cannot completely eliminate the author from the text to let the facts speak for themselves. This creates, secondly, the possibility of a conflict between factuality and objectivity. If the factuality of the text rests on the author’s presence, but that presence carries with it a subjective standpoint – a position in the field linked to his or her person, and hence to all the idiosyncrasies produced by growing up and being trained in a different society than the one
1 Experience is of course a rather difficult concept to base factuality on. We might experience things through hallucinations, vivid dreams or a lively imagination. These variants of experience would not form a valid basis for a claim to factuality of the things which were experienced (although we might not be able to doubt the factuality of the experience itself ). Without fully discussing this problem, I think it can provisionally be resolved with Schütz and Luckmann (1975) by anchoring experience in the everyday lifeworld.
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at the center of the description –, how then can ethnographies claim factuality of interpretation? If factuality of experience is not established through any objective scientific instrument, but through the sentient being of the ethnographer, how can he or she simultaneously claim the privileged factuality of a scientific observer interpreting facts in the most meaningful manner? In practice, these two claims to factuality are usually intertwined and depend on each other. Readers doubt the factuality of experience if they are not convinced of the factuality of the interpretation, and vice versa. In theory, however, both could be separated, and (as we will see below) the possibility of such a separation in itself lends credence to the idea of factuality. As in other scholarly genres, the most important strategy for establishing factuality in ethnography is proclamation backed by institutions. Through a variety of hints – paratexts, affiliations, footnotes, literature review, style, level of abstraction, graphs and tables, … – ethnographers claim factuality by inscribing their ethnographies into a social sciences discourse and, by extension, into the realm of factuality. The authority established through such inscription is partly independent from the text. It rests on the belief that an interlinked set of institutions centered around universities guarantees factuality through method and process, selection and peer control. It guarantees both the writer’s reliability as an observer and his or her accuracy as an interpreter. These guarantees are more powerful and less precarious than innertextual means alone could be, but they can still break down for individual texts. If that happens, it can also put the viability of the claim into question. The factuality of Carlos Castaneda’s books, for example, had been validated by a PhD from UCLA. When it became clear that he had invented Don Juan, his teachings, and his entire fieldwork, this not only damaged the belief in the factuality of his books but at least marginally threatened the credibility of the institution on which this belief was based and the authority of ethnography as a genre. (The continuing success of his books is a puzzling example of the possibility of separating factuality of interpretation from factuality of experience.) The second strategy of establishing ethnographies’ factuality is more specific to the discipline. In order to prove the factuality of one’s account, ethnographies constantly add what could be called “local flavor”: ethnographic details that add plausibility to the claim of having been there. The color of an informant’s dress; the buzz of flies and the cries of gulls; the haziness of a humid tropical evening – such details function to establish factuality. They do so in two ways: by providing context which the reader could not have filled in for him- or herself and which seems to support
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the account’s factual basis in experience;2 and by rounding up the narrative and making it more complete so that the reader is no longer tempted to explore the cracks in the story. Very often, such details are not really data. They do not carry meaning and are of very little importance to the facts which are then interpreted. They are important solely as narrative devices intended to create interest and trust. Data, of course, matters as well. Accounts of social situations as experienced by the ethnographer simultaneously offer proof of the ethnographer’s presence – i.e. establish factuality of experience – and, as the raw material for analysis, help to establish factuality of interpretation. Both are doubly true for quotations by informants, which multiply authority by using an informed third party outside of the text as witness – even if we will only ever meet this third party within the text. Thirdly, ethnographies establish factuality by plausible narration. This goes for factuality of experience as much as it goes for factuality of interpretation. Narration, in that sense, first applies to the overall structure of the account. An ethnography that orders the chaos of social reality in a way that every aspect of it relates to a common theme is much harder to question than a merely additive account of different scenes. The plausibility of the overall thesis adds credibility to the detail and vice versa (see e.g. White 1973; Roth 1989). Apart from creating such overarching plausibility, narration is also an inner-textual strategy to keep questions about factuality at bay. Many ethnographies, for example, hinge on a few figures whose personalities and histories the reader gets to know in the course of an ethnography. If such figures are credibly constructed, they take on a factual life of their own in the reader’s imagination and emerge as figures independent from the author. Often, in reading ethnographic accounts of a person’s actions and words, I feel tempted to say: ‘But this is not what she wanted to say!’ – a clear indication that I accept the presentation of that person as factual, even though (or perhaps because) I do not agree with the interpretation by the ethnographer. Perhaps the most ethnographic variant of establishing factuality by narrative means is a strategy I call puzzlement resolved: to stress how little one understood when first arriving in a society. This sometimes comes in the guise of the arrival story. Clifford Geertz, in his famous essay on the Balinese Cockfight, tells us how he and his wife were completely ignored
2 Here I would argue that those details create more than an effet de réel (Barthes 1968): they create reference to a specific reality different from the reader’s lifeworld at the same time as establishing the text’s realism.
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by the village they were living in until they, like all other people present, fled from the police in a raid. From then on, they became an accepted and esteemed presence of the village (Geertz 1972). Bronislaw Malinowski, in Argonauts, publicly remembers “the feeling of hopelessness and despair after many obstinate but futile attempts had entirely failed to bring me into real touch with the natives,” when he “had periods of despondency, when I buried myself in the reading of novels, as a man might take to drink in a fit of depression and boredom” (1922, 4). Such accounts do much more than add flavor and human interest. They claim authority by stressing a learning process. The ethnographer’s path, they tell us, has not been easy. He has had to learn the hard way and has earned the right to our trust. His interpretations are proof of a learning curve. “I did not understand that until years later” (here cited from Herdt 1988, 183) is a figure that runs through many ethnographies, and it makes a strong claim to factuality of both experience and interpretation. Experiencing something one did not understand is a sign of an unprejudiced mind; coming to an understanding later is a sign of deeper insight and learning. Denouncing one’s earlier self thus valorizes one’s current one: He who was able to learn from experience has to be right. (Fortunately for everybody involved, the learning process obviously came to an end well before the ethnography was written, turning puzzlement into certainty.) Fourthly, ethnographic factuality can be maintained by strategically refusing to resolve all existing puzzlement. Ethnographic accounts should never explain everything smoothly. Some situations have to remain questionable, uncertain or ambiguous, some interpretations have to be marked as preliminary and open to debate. These elements of reflexivity enhance the factuality of the entire account. If the author knows the boundaries of his or her experiences and interpretations, he or she becomes more trustworthy. If some things are uncertain, others emerge as all the more reliable. Markers of reflexivity and doubt thus establish factuality just as strongly as markers of objectivity and certainty. They serve to separate (and simultaneously link) factuality of experience and factuality of interpretation. Bronislaw Malinowski turned the possibility of such a separation into the foundation of anthropology’s claim to scientific value in a key phrase of Argonauts, the foundational monograph of modern anthropology: I consider that only such ethnographic sources are of unquestionable scientific value, in which we can clearly draw the line between, on the one hand, the results of direct observation and of native statements and interpretations, and on the other, the inferences of the author, based on his common sense and psychological insight. (1922, 3)
Writing Culture has unmasked the clarity of this distinction as a myth, but it has not managed to abolish it.
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3. Conclusion These four strategies of factuality in ethnographic writing can by no means exhaust the field. I have singled out these particular strategies because I find them essential to ethnographic factuality and because they might be interesting to readers who care about the factuality of texts. They should not detract us from the fact that the construction of factuality begins much earlier. Ethnographies build on ethnographic experience: on the perception of situations by the ethnographer and on the integration of this perception into his or her self. Factuality of ethnography, and the ethnographer’s need to convey it, emerge from lived experience (Erlebnis) and predicated experience (Erfahrung). It is nurtured through fieldnotes and field memories, through narrations and drafts, and is finally converted into a book or an article that has to use textual strategies to convey what, to the ethnographer, is most crucial: however close to fiction the final form, its function is to convey what has been real in the world. So, thirty years after Writing Culture, what is left of the long discussions about the relation between ethnographers and the ethnographed? Are ethnographies factual, are they fictional? Can they claim to describe what has been? Some literary scholars may indulgently smile and claim that nothing outside of the text is of interest to them; it is enough to know that the text gives us signals that make us read it as factual narrative. In spite of anthropologists’ skepticism and awareness of the subjectivity of our knowledge, our standpoint and the irreducibility of our prejudices (Gadamer 1990, 281), we ethnographers are not ready to give up the ideal of factual accuracy regarding our own texts or concerning those topics or human beings that we care about. We know well that predicated experience as expressed in the text is never the same as lived experience that preceded it and that writing is one of the ways in which Erleben solidifies into Erfahrung, transforming it on the way. But still, ethnographies remain linked to the world and to our lived experiences in it. Ethnography’s claim to factuality is expressed in but does not rest on the textual strategies ethnographers use. It relies on the lived experience ethnographers have had before composing the text – precarious and difficult to grasp and convey as it may be. Factuality is grounded in our human engagement with a world that can hurt us, fill us with joy or simply bore us, and which we take seriously in a different sense from the texts we write about it. The question of factuality springs from this hierarchy – a hierarchy we partly construct but from which I find it difficult to escape. I might lose myself in a book, but I will not be killed in the accident about which I read. I might feel close to Gesine Cresspahl when reading Uwe Johnson’s Jahrestage or to Okonkwo
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when reading Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, but I will never meet them in person. There is a real-world proof of this: all textual signals of factuality can break down through a single exposure. If Castaneda never met Don Juan, all textual strategies of factuality turn into so many signs of clever fictionality. The relation between text and facts is certainly strengthened by textual strategies, but it is not created by them. Factuality is anchored in our lifeworld and our experiences in it; in institutions we trust to inform us about the world; and in our own consciousness of our ability to tell right from wrong, honed in real-world encounters as much as in texts. Without this real-world grounding, or in opposition to it, textual claims to factuality will remain precarious. References Barthes, Roland. “L’effet de réel.” Communications 11.1 (1968): 84–89. Castaneda, Carlos. The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Clifford, James, and George Marcus. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Anthropology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Dobler, Gregor. “Fatal Words. Restudying Jeanne Favret-Saada.” Anthropology of this Century 13 (2015). http://aotcpress.com/articles/fatal-words-restudying-jeanne-favretsaada (30 October 2017). Förster, Till. “Sehen und Beobachten. Ethnographie nach der Postmoderne.” Sozialer Sinn 2.3 (2001): 456–486. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Wahrheit und Methode. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1990. Geertz, Clifford. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Daedalus 101 (1972): 1–37. Geertz, Clifford. Works and Lives. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Gellner, Ernest. “Conscious Confusion.” (Review of Works and Lives by Clifford Geertz). Times Higher Education Supplement 22. 4 (1988): 26. Herdt, Gilbert. “The Ethnographer’s Choices.” Choice and Morality in Anthropological Perspective: Essays in Honour of Derek Freeman. Eds. George N. Appell and N. Maclan Tirok. New York: State of New York Press, 1988. 159–192. Kesselring, Rita. Bodies of Truth: Law, Memory and Emancipation in Post-Apartheid South Africa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. Malinowski, Bronislaw. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: Routledge, 1922. Neuber, Wolfgang. “Die frühen deutschen Reiseberichte aus der Neuen Welt. Fiktionalitätsverdacht und Beglaubigungsstrategien.” Der europäische Beobachter außereuropäischer Kulturen. Ed. Hans-Joachim König. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1989. 43–64. Schütz, Alfred, and Thomas Luckmann. Strukturen der Lebenswelt. Konstanz: Universitätsverlag, 1975. Roth, Paul. “How Narratives Explain.” Social Research 56 (1989): 449–478. Stagl, Justin. A History of Curiosity. London: Routledge, 1995. White, Hayden. Metahistory: Historic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.
STEPHAN JAEGER
Factuality in Historiography/Historical Study 1. Introduction: Narrative factuality and historical/historiographic facts Historiography is the representation of history (historia rerum gestarum). History encompasses the represented facts (res gestae). Historiographic narration gives coherence to the historiographic text and to the narrated history (Fulda 2014). When comparing fictional and factual narration, historiography, as the representation of history, is often taken as the prototype of factual narration. This is because – especially since the linguistic turn in the 1960s and 1970s – it has been widely accepted that historiography is a narrative genre. There is an ongoing heated debate between proponents of the thesis that there is no fundamental difference between historiographic and fictional narration, and those who maintain that there is a defining difference. This depends on the question of whether all knowledge is relative since it needs to be expressed in language. At the same time it depends on whether professional standards and methods allow the historical discipline to establish objectivity and explanations of the past. If one sees historiography as factual narration, it is important to understand that it is a secondary narrative about reality, while people living in the actual world and narrating their experiences perform primary everyday narration. In contrast to narratives of personal experience, historiography formally functions as a narrative (historiographic discourse) about narratives (narrative sources) relating to events and human acts in the actual world (Jaeger 2009, 132–133; van Dam 2016, 49–50). The latter primary narratives exist before they become part of history, and are narrated and referenced in historiography. The observation that historiography is a secondary factual narration is crucial to understanding the various debates about the distinction between historiographic and fictional narrative. This understanding of historiography allows a clearer distinction from other forms of factual narrative as well as from fiction. Historiography neither creates self-referential worlds, nor are its narrative and narrator situated directly in an ‘actual’ world. It https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-022
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holds a hybrid status between referential factuality on the one hand and the poietic construction of arguments and its own worlds on the other, which explains why historiography’s narrativity and situatedness between factuality and fictionality often dominate in scholarly comparisons of factual versus fictional discourses. If one analyzes the representational means of an actual historiographic text then it is impossible to posit a defining difference between historiography as factual narration and as fictional narration. However, if one takes the different concepts of reference to the extra-textual world as a basis, a straightforward distinction becomes evident. For example, Jean-Marie Schaeffer (2014) sees three competing distinctions between factual and fictional narrative when defined as a pair of opposites: a semantic definition, in which factual narrative is referential, whereas fictional narrative has only textual reference; a syntactic definition that assumes factual and fictional narrative can be distinguished by their logical-linguistic syntax; and a pragmatic definition, according to which “factual narrative advances claims of referential truthfulness whereas fictional narrative advances no such claims” (240). (/ I.9 Birke) To arrive at an understanding of the complexities of discussing historiography as factual narration, with its similarities and differences to fictional narration, this essay will examine the argument that historiographic narrative is ‘fictional.’ It will then analyze the different, but overlapping concepts of reference in fictional and factual narrative forms, before discussing how historiography establishes historical facts and claims of factuality and objectivity. The subsequent section discusses signposts and relative indices of factuality in historiographic narration. The final part of the essay presents different forms and modes of historiographic narration and their factuality in conjunction with a number of case studies: these include ‘traditional’ argumentative, popular, and experimental historiography, as well as multimedial forms of history writing. 2. The interweaving of historiography and fiction Between the 1970s and 1990s, scholars debated vigorously over whether all history is fictional and whether historiography is based on historical facts. Hayden White has often been criticized for his equation of historiographic narrative with fiction as “verbal fictions” (White 1978, 82). He was seen as having challenged the epistemological claim of historiography to express historical truth or truthfulness (see most recently Gabriel 2013), or as having emphasized the linguistic constructedness of all history within the framework of postmodern theory. In his 1976 essay “The Fictions of Factual Representation,” White characterizes historiography as a form of
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fiction-making, using the historical argument that prior to the French Revolution, historiography was seen as an art form that was assessed equally on literary and on scientific principles (1978, 123). White’s idea of fiction or fancy relates to the observation that for facts to emerge in historiographic discourse, the historian needs some imaginative capacity. White points out that any historiographic narrative is a “fiction,” in the sense that it is constructed and narrated, and uses techniques such as “rhetorical devices, tropes, figures, and schemes” (123; see Jaeger 2011b, 52–55; Haas 2014). White does not deny that there is a possible difference between fact and fiction, the latter being seen as invention or make-believe. However, he draws attention to the need to discuss the rhetoric and textuality of historiographic texts, and emphasizes that facts only exist through historical narration. In her careful analysis of White, Ann Rigney has demonstrated how he used the word fiction polemically to blur the difference between the fictive, the fictitious, the fictional, the novelistic, the literary, and the aesthetic (2001, 5–6), so that the historian’s narration becomes refocused from the factual to the textual or constructive level. History only exists if somebody narrates or creates it in language (Fulda and Matuschek 2009, 215; Jaeger 2011a).Yet this can happen in different modes, for example, in explanatory, descriptive, narrative, or argumentative modes. Because White focuses exclusively on the way in which the discourse of historiography is written, the concept of reference as a marker of historiography’s factuality is hardly discussed. This is different in Paul Ricœur’s work: he highlights the insights of the Annales School that “facts” are not given in documents, but selected by the historian from documents “as a function of a certain problem” (Ricœur 1984–1988, I, 108). Nor do documents exist as such; formal archives are based on institutional rules and values. Because the selection mechanisms of the archive are often not explicit, the illusion can be created that the historian receives facts from historical documents as such (Ricœur 1984–1988, I, 108). Unlike White, Ricœur maintains the Aristotelean distinction between history and fiction and discusses the importance of reference, while observing an “interweaving of history and fiction” (Ricœur 1984–1988, III, 181). Unlike fiction, historiography can assume a reference which originates in the empirical world, even if it only refers to traces of past reality (Ricœur 1984–1988, I, 82). Like White, Ricœur emphasizes the poietic potential of historiographic narrative, situating it mainly in the configurational act of mimesis that anchors it in the prefigured world, and refigures the narrative through the act of reading. Thus, a simple dichotomy between historiography (which is referential) and fiction (that has reference only within the fictional) underestimates the constant overlapping of both domains. Similarly, Beatrix van Dam uses the dichotomy of reference and inference to explain the
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dynamic relationship of factual and fictional narrative. Reference allows the narrative to refer to the (empirical) reality outside of the text, while inference refers inner-textually (2016, 28). Reference and inference always co-occur. This observation does not negate the difference between fictional and factual narrative, but allows for an understanding of how factual narrative develops its own characteristics on the paratextual, textual, and thematic levels of historiographic narration (van Dam 2016, 15). To understand further the establishment of facts in the discipline of history, the postmodern challenge to the factuality of history needs to be contextualized. The eighteenth century experienced the establishment of the modern fact in science and history. This in turn led to the development of methodological criteria for how facts can be established in history and the humanities (Brendecke 2002; Patzig 1977; Poovey 1998). Methodologically, the discipline of history highlights the unreliability of the data the historian uses; historical sources and documents are full of subjectivity and partiality, and display ideological prejudices and interests (Patzig 1977, 319). Moreover, historical sources quickly blur memory and history. To a certain extent, every narrative of historical events reflects the ideological, moral, and aesthetic preferences of the author. Historians need critical methods and standards to assess the reliability of eyewitnesses and establish the factuality of the data. On the level of primary sources, just as on the level of the production of history, facts are always mediated through more or less biased narrators. Nevertheless, through source criticism, the historian can establish the reliability of the witness narrator or the source and arrive at reliable evidence. Two alternative assumptions can be made. One can either assume that the unavoidable circumstance through which history constructs or even produces the past makes all historian-narrators ‘equally unreliable.’ Or one can assume that – although there is no absolute history or truth – historiographic narration can establish a measure of pragmatic reliability or credibility from the account of the historian-narrator. The latter assumption leads to a more pragmatic view of history, so that despite the challenges to achieve objectivity and suspend subjectivity, a pact of trustworthiness is established between the historian-author and the reader (Jaeger 2009, 110–101; Jaeger 2015a, 372–379; Ricœur 1984–1988, III, 129; Rüth 2005, 48–51). The reader believes that the historian attempts to represent historical reality in the best possible way (see van Dam 2016, 50–52). Trustworthiness is defined through an undisputed relation of equivalence between the historiographic text and the reality outside the text. The pragmatic truth or trustworthiness claim makes historiographic discourse a narration of reality, as opposed to fiction. Up to a certain point, this endeavor is epistemologically, ideologically, and linguistically possible, depending on
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different theoretical approaches. With argumentative, reconstructive, simulative, constructionist, and meta-reflexive claims to represent, simulate, or reflect upon the past, the reader believes that he or she can test the truth claim of the historiographic text (while allowing for a variety of representational styles of historiography). Objectivity in historical studies is always a matter of gradation (Patzig 1977, 335–336). Thus, the pact of trustworthiness guarantees the academic or scientific validity of the historiographic narration and is situated outside the actual historiographic text. Historical arguments always occur within a framework defined by the tension between pure mimesis – the bringing to life of the past in a vivid way – and the development of criteria for historical theory and truth claims (Jaeger 2015a, 379; Rüth 2005, 49; Rüth 2012). 3. Signposts of factuality One of the most significant differences between the discourse of historical studies and fiction emerges from the assumption that historical studies deal with infinite traces of a past world, one that can never be complete or fully mirrored in any kind of narrative. The historian’s narration is an analysis or simulation of the past. Fiction, in contrast, allows for the control of the invented world (which only comes into being through the fiction itself ). Readers can use world knowledge to evaluate whether the fictional world is probable or realistic, but in the end, they use their reading competency to evaluate the reliability of the representation of the fictional world, independent of its referencing capacities to a world outside the text (see Doležel 2010, 29–44; Jaeger 2011a, 31–33). Because of this difference, every historian must admit that the narration of history is necessarily incomplete. Doležel argues that “[h]istory reconstructs the actual past by constructing models of the past, which have the status of possible worlds” (2010, 33), whereas fictional worlds are imaginary alternatives to the actual world. Historical worlds must also be physically possible; the concept of impossible worlds is reserved for fiction. Furthermore, unlike fiction, “[t]he cast of agents in the historical world is determined by the set of agents involved in the reconstructed past event(s)” (Doležel 2010, 36). For example, the introduction of fictional characters, who intermingle with characters that have a historical equivalent in a historical fiction, immediately invalidates the text as a cognitive model of a historical world. The referential truth claim collapses; the pact of truthfulness with the recipient is broken. Dorrit Cohn (1999, 109–131) and Gérard Genette (1988; 1990) have attempted to define textual criteria, “signposts of fictionality,” on the story
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(histoire) and the discourse (discours) levels of historiography. This list has been extended by Ansgar Nünning (1999), who added other differences such as the larger freedom of fiction in the selection of material and its narrative construction. Historiography selects from a more defined and limited pool of events; unlike fiction, it must make its selection plausible (van Dam 2016, 50). It also often uses a ‘natural’ and realistic style. The historian cannot be omniscient and there is usually a distance between the historian-narrator and the historical events and structures narrated (see van Dam 2016, 38–39). Such approaches explain how historical discourse differs from fictional discourse. However, these signposts can never be necessary or sufficient conditions for historiographic factuality. They are only indices; in most theoretical frameworks they are seen as relative signs of fictionality (Zipfel 2014, 106–117). Paratextual signposts, i.e. extra-textual signposts such as genre identification in subtitles or the book cover text, can point to fictionality or factuality. However, they can also serve to subvert any clear distinction between fiction and historiography. Fictional narrative can fake or stage features of factuality on the discourse level so that it has the potential to mislead the reader about a text’s factual quality. The most important signpost of factuality developed by Dorrit Cohn and Gérard Genette is that historian and narrator are identical by name (A = N according to Genette). Yet even this standard criterion of historiographic narration can be undermined in order to create differences in time and ideology between the position of the author and the narrator: Fulda and Matuschek give the example of Leopold von Ranke who, in his History of the Popes: Their Church and State (Die römischen Päpste in den letzten vier Jahrhunderten, 1834–1836), narrates from the perspective of the historical power of Catholicism, but also judges from his own confessional protestant point of view (2009, 212; see also the example of Brokken’s Retribution below; and Jaeger 2009, 124–125 and 133). Nevertheless, Cohn’s observation establishes a relative signpost for factual narrative, insofar as most historiographic narratives do not emphasize the mediating role of the narrator; the narrative structure and discourse are not usually meant to divert attention from the verifiable referential historical structures or events. Van Dam calls this the ‘low-levelness’ (“Niedrigschwelligkeit”) of the historiographic narration (2016, 37). Unlike in fiction, the text-external author takes responsibility for the narration and its arguments. Thus, it seems that there are no absolute criteria on the level of the text and syntax, but only gradual markers to distinguish historiography from fiction. Historiographic narrative can focalize historical agents, individual and collective ones, so that they represent the past from their points of view (cf. Rüth 2005; Jaeger 2009; Jaeger 2011a). Whereas historiographic fictional narrative can use any narrative technique in its different genres
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from popular to experimental historiography, its dominant modes have been described as implying a low degree of narrativity in a scalar model of narrativity (see Fludernik 2001; 2010). Monika Fludernik sees the distinction primarily explained through different kinds of agency, since fictional protagonists and quasi-agents in everyday life storytelling configure text through their consciousness and intentions, while historical people are merely used as part of the argument of historical actions, making them less or non-experiential (1996, 24–25; 2010, 41–42). Historiographic narrative can vary in perspective, types of focalization, and the constructed mentalities and beliefs of individuals and collectives. These narrative devices allow the reader to be close to the historical events in space and time. Historical people often do not seem to be agents by themselves; they are controlled by the knowing and synthesizing historian-narrator. For there is no autonomous agency for historical people or characters. Nonetheless historiography can produce the consciousness of historical people on its own terms, as well as construct the perspectives of collectives. This is possible in a variety of genres, whether traditional, popular, or experimental historiography (see Rüth 2005; Munslow 2007, 17; Jaeger 2015b; 2009; 2011a; Lagoni 2016; as well as the case studies below). 4. Forms and modes of historiographic narration There are various ways to describe different modes of historiographic expression. Alun Munslow distinguishes between three forms: the reconstructionist, constructionist, and deconstructionist (2007, 10–15), taking into consideration academic, popular, and experimental forms of historiographic writing. Reconstructionist historiographic writing is primarily concerned with the referential connection between historical writing and the past. It attempts to represent the past as realistically, objectively, and truthfully as possible. Munslow describes constructionist historiographic writing as a theory-laden social science approach, which proceeds not only empirically but also analytically, in an explanatory manner. Unlike reconstructionist historiographic writing, which often focuses on historical individuals, constructionist historiographic writing develops hypotheses about the causes of regularities and structures of the past. Munslow’s third and clearly favored form of expression is that of deconstructionist historiographic writing. This form maintains that past events acquire their meaning as much through historiographic representation as through their “knowable actuality” derived by empiricalanalytical means, which allow for continuous reflection on the relativity of historical knowledge (2007, 14). Munslow’s three forms could also be called more simply narrative mode, argumentative-explanatory mode, and reflexive
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mode. These terms seem more dynamic. This is because most historiographic texts entail elements of all three modes, with varying importance and differing relations. To understand how the variety of historiographic genres establishes facts and factuality, the remainder of this essay will analyze four forms of historiography: traditional (argumentative), popular, experimental, and multimedial / non-narrative historiography. One of German historiography’s bestsellers in the centenary year of the beginning of the First World War, Jörn Leonhard’s Die Büchse der Pandora: Geschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs (2014, ‘Pandora’s Box: History of the First World War’), can be categorized as ‘traditional’ argumentative historiography. For instance, the historian presents a subchapter about the mobilization of soldiers and the development of modern mass armies. He analyzes how the mobilization took place across Europe and what compulsory military service meant for specific collective groups: for example, for Armenian women and children in the South Caucasus who lost their men, earners of the family’s income as peasant laborers (156–157). The text describes new or changing structures in the relationship between the state and its people. Individuals, whose historical existence is verified, appear rarely, and usually serve exemplary functions. Most perspectives and agency are presented as collective: “On the Gold Coast in French West Africa, many local chiefs, who were in charge of the recruiting and selecting of soldiers, tried to protect their own tribes to keep workers for their own agriculture” (159, translation S.J.). The claim is supported through an endnote, referencing other historiographic studies about the topic. Further observations on the changes in society through recruitment follow, likewise supported through references. How does Leonhard’s text establish the validity of facts? Why does the reader in all likelihood have no difficulty in recognizing the factuality of this historiographic narration? The narrative refers to a pre-existing world. Nowhere in the text does the historian give details or provide the perspective of individuals which would allow the reader to imagine a concrete world resembling life in French West Africa, or any other region. This means that the reader can implicitly recognize that the world represented is referential, that it refers to a world outside of the narrative. The intention of the text is to establish a narrative argument about the impact of the mobilization on civil societies across the world, not to have the reader experience this world. The chapter ends with the sentence: “Yet the soldiers often found that their rights and status had not improved through their military service, as they had hoped, but that instead racist segregation and consequently the social hierarchy of colonial societies remained in place” (160, translation S.J.). There is only a collective, the soldiers, who have a constructed belief that their hopes did not materialize. In other
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words, the historian-narrator does not necessarily know more than the soldiers, yet he is the only one who can construct the collective perspective of “the soldiers” from his sources. Because the main mode of Leonhard’s text is argumentative, rather than narrative, such perspectives do not dominate the narrative; they appear and work towards arguments, structures, and conclusions. Leonhard’s text is full of collective entities that are elements of the argumentative and constructionist First World War narrative. One could argue that the historiographic narrative works as a hybrid between referential claims to the actual world and constructed arguments of the colonial soldier collective. If one looks at how popular historiography establishes the idea of facts and factuality, it is evident that the pact of trustworthiness remains in place. The narrative mode dominates over the argumentative mode. This can lead to the criticism that popular historiography lacks the reflexive tools to truly evaluate historical arguments, or to be self-reflexive in establishing and justifying a historiographic methodology. It tends to simulate historical presence, historical atmosphere, and collective perception. For instance, in describing the moment when Hitler entered Paris during the Second World War, Michael Sontheimer (2005) writes that almost all Germans “stand united behind their ‘Führer’.” This factual sentence is followed by a sentence that focalizes the collective beliefs and mind-set of the Germans: “He has succeeded in overturning the abhorred Treaty of Versailles” (54, translation S.J.). Popular historiography deploys familiar narrative means, such as voice, perspective or distance, in manifold forms. It can create experientiality in historiographic narratives (Jaeger 2011a; Jaeger 2015b). Normally, popular historiography does not display any form of reflection on the historiographic method. Its narrative discourse is characterized above all by the creation of historical worlds, which, prototypically, are shaped by one clear interpretation of history. The reader is informed about actual events in the past, and the discourse highlights this factuality. At the same time, the popular historiographical narrative may employ a vivid presentation style in order to give the reader the illusion of almost witnessing the historical events in question on scene. Experimental historiography frequently reflects on the fact that historical knowledge is infinite and never complete. Historiography can create the effect of open multiperspectivity, allowing the reader to experience and interpret the space that emerges in the narrative between different value systems, and different interpretations of the same events, with or without reduced authorial power (Jaeger 2000, 332–335). In general, unreliability is emphasized because different lifestyles and value systems come into conflict with one another. The reader’s world knowledge, interests, and emotional reaction will shape their reading and interpretation of reliabilities in
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the text (Jaeger 2015a, 387). Historiographic narrative can also simulate historical atmosphere; this means that it does not focalize individual minds or collectives. Instead, history unfolds before the eyes of the reader as an effect of abstract forces, loosely connected. Factuality remains a given, since the text creates the illusion of presence, so that the reader can experience the forces, space, feelings, mood, and atmosphere of the past. A more recent example of experimental historiography also corroborates the insight that different styles do not change the factuality of historiographic discourse. Jan Brokken’s Retribution (De Vergelding 2013) gives a precise reconstruction of a historical event and its aftermath, namely the killing of a German soldier in the Dutch, German-occupied village of Rhoon on October 10, 1944. The Germans retaliated by killing seven men from the village; their houses were burned; and their wives and children expelled from the village. Right up to today, the community of villagers continues to speculate who killed the German soldier, why, and whether it was an accident or a political act. At the beginning of his study, Brokken includes three brief paratextual indicators that mark the narrative as factual. First, he establishes that the text is a reconstruction based on true events, and is distilled from oral interviews. The second paratext questions the validity of the book’s reconstructive claim: “Yet it is true: Every truth is only an interpretation of what really happened” (6, all translations S.J.). The third paratext poses the question, “Why has the past remained so painful?” Thus, right from the beginning, the historian addresses his own and his witnesses’ possible unreliability, as well as adding an emotional factor to the text. The factual as such is not in question. Nevertheless, the text opens in novelistic style, with a mixture of perspectives on Sandrien de Regt, a Dutch girl going out with an enemy soldier, the German Ernst Lange, who ends up being electrocuted by a cable hanging over the road: “She had a broad face, open as a book. Her eyes betrayed a love of life that was not in harmony with the grey seriousness of the life around her” (9). The reader has the illusion of being present at the scene when Sandrien eats an apple. Only the occasional first-person voice of the historian-narrator in the third-person narrative, who questions the reliability of oral witnesses and speculates on what really happened, underlines that this is a historiographic text. The text does so because it foregrounds the fact that the presentist description in the historical past tense is based on historical sources. The text resembles a detective story; it depicts the events following the death of Lange and the retribution from multiple perspectives; at the same time, the historian-narrator attempts to solve the puzzle of what led to the event. Several times he is convinced that he has enough evidence for a case, only to end up with new perspectives and interpretations. The style of the narrative is realistic, interspersed with the reflections of the
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historian-detective. Although factuality within the text is constantly questioned, the pragmatic factuality of Brokken’s text is not; it definitely counts as a factual historiographic narrative. The reader experiences the time of the occupation period, its emotional toll on the population, and the problematization of right and wrong. Additionally, the reader experiences the impact of the episode on the lives of the people in the village, up to the present, through the lens of oral history and the author’s historiographic imagination. The imaginative element is embedded in the realistic framework established by the historiographer-detective. It is clear that this piece of writing is not mere invention, but rather a highly reflexive historiographic text which engages in the continual interpretation of the different historical traces. Brokken’s most astounding narrative strategy is the construction of the figure of a historian-narrator who is clearly different from the author-historian, since this narrator consistently seems to err in his interpretations of history. Brokken uses his historiographic research to create a two-fold experience of the text: a) the readers are immersed in the reconstruction of the atmosphere of the past; b) they understand the process and complications of writing, interpreting, and understanding history, as the historiographic endeavor unfolds before their eyes. Some readers and reviewers might deem the text ‘literature’ in the sense of fiction, on account of the imaginative conjectures it uses; however, though not every detail can be proven, the historical factuality of the study as a whole is not in question. My last example addresses the question of how historical factuality and facts are established in other media and genres. The historical museum can serve as an example here, although historiographic films, performances such as re-enactment or games, graphic novels, and history magazines, function in similar ways (cf. Munslow 2007, 64–79). In a historical exhibition, it cannot be doubted that the narrative refers to an actual historical reality by means of selection, construction, material objects, and images and texts, deployed in the displays. Even the most immersive museums that aim at creating a historical atmosphere for the visitor relate to an extra-textual past (cf. also Fulda 2005). Across the western world, historical museums are very conservative in using fictional techniques in the shape of invented history. The Bastogne War Museum, re-opened in 2014, is one of the few historical museums that explicitly invent characters. However, this does not seem to harm its factuality. Through the audio-guide, the visitor automatically hears the narrative voices of four characters: Émile, a 13-year old student, Mathilde, a 25-year old teacher and casual member of the Belgian resistance, Hans, a 21-year old Wehrmacht Lieutenant, and Robert, a 20-year American soldier of the 101st Airborne Division. The characters are constructed out of many eyewitness accounts and other
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historical sources about the Battle of the Bulge, the German counter-attack in the Ardennes in December 1945, from the American, German, and civilian perspectives. Despite their visualization as cartoon characters, the visitor feels that the characters are real historical figures. The visitor listens to the four fictive and constructed eyewitnesses in three scenovisions, three-dimensional theaters where the visitor enters a space in which he or she is immersed in the events of the war. The visitor learns many historical facts about the war in Bastogne, the Battle of Bulge, and the context of the Second World War on the world stage. Through the combination of numerous media for different effects, the multimedial form of historiographic narration demonstrates its differences from a linear historiographic account. For example, a museum, a film, or a historical art installation allow for new forms of simulation, yet the establishment of factuality functions in a very similar way to that of a written text. The invention of characters does not impair the factuality of the exhibition, since the possible historical characters are constructed from historical sources. Consequently, they fulfill the factual mandate of the museum. Although on the surface, the four characters are individualized, they express an exemplary, collective form of experience that the historiographic narrative can express without risking the loss of its credibility or factuality. Here the fictive still works towards a cognitive model of a historical world in a historiographic frame, a finding which is at variance with Doležel’s argument above. However, it is unlikely that the same method would be accepted in ‘traditional’ argumentative historiography unless it was clearly marked as a thought experiment. In the example of the Bastogne War Museum, narrative dominates the non-narrative, because the museum tells stories of the Second World War. Non-narrative media, such as exhibited objects and photographs, function at least partially within the narrative context. When narrativity and narrative voices are considerably reduced, as in historical paintings or photographs which record or reconstruct an isolated moment in history, the viewer will read the gesture shown in the visual medium as referential, attesting to a certain factuality of the images. Robert Capa’s famous photographs taken at Omaha Beach on D-Day – the surviving images are titled “The Magnificent Eleven” – provide a glimpse of the experience of the landing of the American GI’s as a historical event. The collective perspective that the viewer reads into these photographs is factual, even if he or she acknowledges their constructedness and underlying ideologies, as well as their situatedness in memory over time.
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5. Conclusion To summarize, modern historiography is often seen as a prototype for factual narration. It functions as a secondary narrative of reality. Hayden White and Paul Ricœur have demonstrated the frequent overlapping of fictional and historiographic narrative, which allows for the analysis of the poietic, world-making capacity of historiographic texts. While the pact of trustworthiness and disciplinary methods, such as source criticism, clearly distinguishes the factuality of historiography from the invention of fiction on the pragmatic level, the syntactic level of narrative offers only relative signposts of factuality, such as a lower level of experientiality, or fewer intrusions of narrative discourse in historical arguments. However, the analysis of the different forms and modes of historiographic narration – explanatory, descriptive, experiential, argumentative, etc. – demonstrates the many possibilities to establish, maintain, and frame factuality, as well as the wide variety of genres and media of historiography, from strictly language-based texts to multimedial forms, such as the museum.
References Brendecke, Arndt. “Tatsache.” Lexikon Geschichtswissenschaft: Hundert Grundbegriffe. Ed. Stefan Jordan. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002. 282–285. Brokken, Jan. Die Vergeltung: Rhoon 1944 – Ein Dorf unter deutscher Besatzung [2013]. Trans. Helga von Beuningen. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2015. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Dam, Beatrix van. Geschichte erza¨hlen: Repra¨sentation von Vergangenheit in deutschen und niederla¨ndischen Texten der Gegenwart. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016. Doležel, Lubomír. Possible Worlds of Fiction and History: The Postmodern Stage. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996. Fludernik, Monika. “Fiction vs. Non-Fiction: Narratological Differentiations.” Erzählen und Erzähltheorie im 20. Jahrhundert. Ed. Jörg Helbig. Heidelberg: Winter, 2001. 85–103. Fludernik, Monika. “Experience, Experientiality, and Historical Narrative: A View from Narratology.” Erfahrung und Geschichte: Historische Sinnbildung im Pränarrativen. Eds. Thiemo Breyer and Daniel Creutz. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010. 40–72. Fulda, Daniel. “‘Selective’ History: Why and How ‘History’ Depends on Readerly Narrativization, with the Wehrmacht Exhibition as an Example.” Narratology beyond Literary Criticism. Ed. Jan Christoph Meister. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005. 173–194. Fulda, Daniel. “Historiographic Narration.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. Ed. Peter Hühn et al. Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2014. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/ article/historiographic-narration. (2 May 2017). Fulda, Daniel, and Stefan Matuschek. “Literarische Formen in anderen Diskursformationen: Philosophie und Geschichtsschreibung.” Grenzen der Literatur: Zu Begriff und Phänomen des Literarischen. Eds. Simone Winko, Fotis Jannidis, and Gerhard Lauer. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. 188–227.
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Gabriel, Gottfried. “Fakten oder Fiktionen? Zum Erkenntniswert der Geschichte.” Historische Zeitschrift 297.1 (2013): 1–26. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse Revisited. [1983] Trans. Jane E. Levine. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Genette, Gérard. “Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative.” Poetics Today 11.4 (1990): 755– 774. Haas, Stefan. “Fiktionalität in den Geschichtswissenschaften.” Fiktionalität: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Eds. Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. 516– 532. Jaeger, Stephan. “Multiperspektivisches Erzählen in der Geschichtsschreibung des ausgehenden 20. Jahrhunderts: Wissenschaftliche Inszenierungen von Geschichte zwischen Roman und Wirklichkeit.” Multiperspektivisches Erzählen: Zur Theorie und Geschichte der Perspektivenstruktur im englischen Roman des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts. Eds. Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning. Trier: WVT, 2000. 323–346. Jaeger, Stephan. “Erzählen im historiographischen Diskurs.” Wirklichkeitserzählungen: Felder, Formen und Funktionen nicht-literarischen Erzählens. Eds. Christian Klein and Matías Martínez. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009. 110–135. Jaeger, Stephan. “Poietic Worlds and Experientiality in Historiographic Narrative.” Towards a Historiographic Narratology. Eds. Julia Nitz and Sandra Harbert Petrulionis. Special Issue of SPIEL (Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft) 30.1 (2011a): 29–50. Jaeger, Stephan. Performative Geschichtsschreibung: Forster, Herder, Schiller, Archenholz und die Brüder Schlegel. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011b. Jaeger, Stephan. “Unreliable Narration in Historical Studies.” Unreliable Narration and Trustworthiness: Intermedial and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Ed. Vera Nünning. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015a. 371–393. Jaeger, Stephan. “Popular Historical Writing from a Narratological Perspective.” Commercialised History: Popular History Magazines in Europe: Approaches to a Historico-Cultural Phenomenon as a Basis for History Teaching. Eds. Susanne Popp, Jutta Schumann, and Miriam Hannig. Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 2015b. 113–145. Lagoni, Frederike. Fiktionales versus faktuales Erza¨hlen fremden Bewusstseins. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2016. Leonhard, Jörn. Die Büchse der Pandora: Geschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs. Munich: Beck, 2014. Munslow, Alun. Narrative and History. Houndmills: palgrave, 2007. Nünning, Ansgar. “‘Verbal Fictions?’ Kritische Überlegungen und narratologische Alternativen zu Hayden Whites Einebnung des Gegensatzes zwischen Historiographie und Literatur.” Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch N.F. 40 (1999): 351–380. Patzig, Günther. “Das Problem der Objektivität und der Tatsachenbegriff.” Objektivität und Parteilichkeit. Eds. Reinhart Koselleck, Wolfgang J. Mommsen, and Jörn Rüsen. Munich: dtv, 1977. 319–336. Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Ricœur, Paul. Time and Narrative. [1983–1985] 3 vols. Trans. Kathleen Blamey, Kathleen McLaughlin, and David Pellauer. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984–1988. Rigney, Ann. Imperfect Histories: The Elusive Past and the Legacy of Romantic Historicism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Rüth, Axel. Erzählte Geschichte: Narrative Strukturen in der französischen Annales-Geschichtsschreibung. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2005. Rüth, Axel. “Narrativität in der wissenschaftlichen Geschichtsschreibung.” Narrativität als Begriff: Analysen und Anwendungsbeispiele zwischen philologischer und anthropologischer Orientierung. Ed. Matthias Aumüller. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012. 21–46.
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Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. “Fictional vs. Factual Narration.” Handbook of Narratology. 2nd ed. Eds. Peter Hühn, John Pier, and Jörg Wolf Schmid. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014 [2009]. 240–259. Sontheimer, Michael. “Hitlers Blitzkriege.” Der 2. Weltkrieg: Wendepunkt der deutschen Geschichte. Eds. Stephan Burgdorff, Klaus Wiegrefe, and Götz Aly. Munich: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt, 2005. 53–69. White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Zipfel, Frank. “Fiktionssignale.” Fiktionalität: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Eds. Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. 97–124.
ANDREAS MUSOLFF
Factual Narrative and Truth in Political Discourse 1. Introduction “It’s official: Truth is dead.” This was the sub-heading of The Washington Post ’s report on the Oxford English Dictionaries’ announcement to name “post-truth” as word of the year (16 November 2016). Like other newspapers that reported on the announcement (compare e.g. The New York Times and The Guardian, 15 November 2016), the Washington Post quoted the OED definition of the newly promoted compound adjective as “relating to […] circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief,” and it highlighted the fact that “the contentious ‘Brexit’ referendum and an equally divisive US presidential election caused usage of the adjective to skyrocket” (The Washington Post, 16 November 2016). The reference to topical events in Britain and the United States, i.e. the outcome of the ‘Brexit’ referendum in favor of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union in June 2016 and Donald Trump’s election as US President in November of that year, contextualizes, and to some extent relativizes, the apodictic obituary statement “Truth is dead.” Truth has survived 16 November 2016. Nonetheless, even if we take The Washington Post ’s statement as an example of journalistic hyperbole, the notion that ‘truth’ is under severe attack has become a commonplace that is continuously reinforced by coverage of the alleged proliferation of ‘fake news,’ ‘alternative facts,’ ‘truth markets,’ and competing publics, especially in internet-based media, including the so-called ‘social media,’ e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Reddit et al. (Freedland 2016; Harsin 2015; Rabin Havt and Media Matters for America 2016; Swaine 2017; Tallis 2016; The Economist 2016). Two often commented-on aspects are i) a lack of authoritative trutharbiters or moderators, resulting in non-expert audiences having to determine for themselves which news they wish to believe, and ii) the hidden influence of behavioral profiling via large-scale personal data collection on https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-023
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internet news services’ content selection (Beer 2009, boyd 2011; Bucher 2012). These aspects are important media-sociological factors in the spread of ‘post-truth’ discourse; however, our concern here is different: it is the presentation of political ‘news,’ i.e. factual information, in narratives. Specifically, this chapter discusses how political narration makes truth claims and which discursive signals of factuality are employed to assert such claims. As examples I will use aspects of US presidency- and Brexit-related rhetoric that have been explicitly criticized as involving ‘fake news,’ i.e. in which truth claims have been established, contested and defended. The methods for my analysis are drawn from narratology, discourse analysis, pragmatics and cognitive categorization theory.
2. Factual truth, trust and narrative in politics ‘Factuality’ and ‘truth’ are not neutral concepts in politics: declaring a politician’s utterance to be ‘true’ and/or ‘based on facts’ – or denying, questioning or rejecting such a validation – is a political move in its own right. The move is so significant that it is hedged by rules in specific contexts, for instance, if it happens in parliament – to call a Member of Parliament a “liar” is sanctioned in Britain’s Westminster House of Commons, as “unparliamentary language” and can lead to the accuser’s temporary suspension (BBC 2008). All political speakers of course claim ‘to say the truth,’ i.e. to speak in accordance with the ‘facts.’ Political communication thus comes with the presumption of fact-based truth (and truthfulness on the part of the speaker) in the sense of a regulative maxim, which is in turn underwritten by the general “cooperative principle” of human communication (Grice 1989, 26–27). This condition, which I will call ‘fact-based truth presumption’ (FBTP), involves trust on the part of the addressees that the respective speakers, if challenged, should in principle always be able to back up their factual claims by reference to commonly accepted experiential evidence. This condition singles out political narratives among narratives in general as the latter require “human experientiality” as their ultimate cognitive basis (Fludernik 1996, 50), but can include idiosyncratic and/or implausible experiences. The FBTP distinguishes political narratives from scientific representations, some of which may have narrative elements, e.g. in popular science, and defer to formalized knowledge systems that are not part of common knowledge. By contrast, the ‘facts’ of political discourse are thought to be comprehensible and accessible to all adult, competent members of the respective discourse communities.
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The fact-based truth presumption reflects the common-sense assumption that addressees and audiences who consider a speaker’s utterances to be incorrect or insincere by default will soon lose interest in paying attention to them or in checking their veracity, let alone aligning their own ideological and practical choices with those of the speaker. A publicly exposed prominent act of lying can destroy a political speaker’s credibility and standing, and is often also legally sanctioned (Brown 2015, 106–113). Even where no legal sanction is taken, political institutions can institute inquiries that have the power to revisit factual statements used in fateful political decisions, and the authors of the respective speech acts may suffer a loss of reputation and public ‘face.’ A case in point is the “Iraq inquiry,” relating to the Iraq war of 2003 and instituted by the British House of Commons, which was finally published in 2016 (Iraq Inquiry 2016). One of its key-elements was the re-investigation (following an earlier inquiry) of the claim made in parliament in 2002 by the then Prime Minister Tony Blair that Iraq was in possession of chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction (WMD) (Blair 2002). The backup for the statement had been a dossier of secret intelligence reports, which had also suggested that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was about to develop a nuclear WMD capability. The inquiry concluded that Blair’s statement had been factually wrong, as no WMD were ever found. Blair was not condemned for lying but was heavily criticized for combining cautiously formulated intelligence information with “interpretation and presentation of the evidence in order to make the case for policy action” (Iraq Inquiry 2016, § 836), which resulted in a “widespread perception” of an “overstatement of the Iraqi threat” (§ 838). Despite escaping legal censure, Blair’s credibility was massively damaged (Rampton and Stauber 2005; Strong 2017). Not only Blair but most political communicators have a reputation of being adept at avoiding such exposure, e.g. through using vague references and economizing on details, so as to maintain ‘deniability’ for any specific facts that might be falsifiable (Jamieson 1993). As a result, audiences who are familiar with their discourse are usually prepared to take politicians’ utterances ‘with a pinch of salt.’ At the same time, these audiences operate an informal system of monitoring speakers’ trustworthiness vis-à-vis other narratives in their respective ‘community of (political) practice’ as more or less reliable (Garfinkel 1963; Pelsmaekers, Jacobs and Rollo 2014; van Praet et al. 2014). For this reason, the internet’s provision of self-contained networks for news services and social media has become a central object of the above-mentioned concerns about a potential disintegration of the general public into isolated ‘sub-publics’ that construct and enact their socio-political identities in internet-niches, which provide tailor-made news,
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advertising, and social contacts on the basis of an algorithm-driven calculus. The FBTP is upheld within such networks and sub-publics and also on occasions where sub-discourses compete with each other in the mainstream public sphere. For example, both Trump followers and adversaries, Brexit supporters and detractors alike need to distinguish between incontestable facts, e.g. authoritatively determined election or referendum results on the one hand, and on the other hand a ‘timeline’ (such as the run-up and aftermath) that is open for conflicting interpretations concerning the causes and consequences of the election or the referendum. The resulting narratives may diverge substantially; however, regardless of whether they are told within or across sub-cultures, they have to obey the FBTP as regards their core elements. Their respective narrators’ ostensible aim must be to integrate the core elements into their surrounding timelines in such a way as to build a story that is plausible and convincing for the greater part of the mainstream public.1 The distinction of agreed core aspects of political narratives from their contestable narrative context can be linked to one of the classic tenets of narratology, i.e. identification of points of “complication” and “reversal” that are accorded a specific “evaluation” and “resolution” within a temporally ordered event structure (Abrams 1971, 130–131; Aristotle Poetics, 50b– 52b (1996, 13–19); Labov 2013; Labov and Waletzky 1997 [1967], 27–28). The “reversal” point is the crucial truth-relevant aspect of the narrative and the focus of interest for the audience. Temporally ordered representations of an election campaign, for instance, are not in and of themselves narratives just because they provide a sequential account of events. What turns them into stories are the respective turning points of voting outcomes that are evaluated as defeat for one side and victory for the other. It is this evaluation of the FBTP that provides an interpretable narrative perspective on the whole event structure. The following section explores two cases of establishing political narratives’ FBTPs: first, the post-election narrative told by US President Trump after his election ‘victory’ in 2016, then the interpretation of the United Kingdom’s ‘Brexit’ referendum in the same year.
1 For discourse participants who are perceived as not acknowledging the mainstream consensus about key facts, the stigmatizing term ‘conspiracy theorist’ has been coined to characterize their marginal status vis-à-vis the apparently ‘rational’ public discourse; cf. Fleming and Jane (2014).
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3. Framing political events as stories 3.1 “Master narrative” and factuality How do politicians turn an event sequence such as an election outcome into a master narrative? A good example is US President Donald Trump’s inauguration speech on 20 January 2017 (Trump 2017).2 In terms of overall narrative structure, Trump follows a classic model of story-telling, i.e. that of highlighting a perceived crisis that has only narrowly been averted by a decisive action (i.e. his election), which also promises a glorious future. After the ritual politeness formulae of greeting and thanking the presiding Chief Justice, his predecessor Presidents and the American people, Trump introduces straight away his overall narrative orientation: (1) We, the citizens of America, are now joined in a great national effort to rebuild our country and to restore its promise for all of our people. […] Today’s ceremony […] has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another – but we are transferring power from Washington, DC and giving it back to you, the American People. (Trump 2017)
Trump addresses the “citizens of America” as his “we”-group, i.e. as both the hero protagonist and as the main beneficiary of the promised transfer of power from a perceived Other, “Washington DC.” (which metonymically stands for the established political elite concentrated in the Nation’s capital). The distance between the hero and the Other is reinforced through a series of disjunctive statements that paint an unambiguous ‘black and white’ picture of a divided nation and provide the central narrative “complication” that needs to be resolved: (2) For too long, a small group in our nation’s Capital has reaped the rewards of government while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished – but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country. Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your tri-
2 For immediate media reactions which qualified his speech across national and ideological divides as “combative,” “unyielding,” “consistent” cf. The New York Times, 20 January 2017: “In Inaugural address, Trump continues to shun establishment”; The Washington Post, 20 January 2017: “Donald Trump’s inaugural address was a missile aimed directly at Washington”; The Wall Street Journal, 20 January 2017: “Donald Trump Strikes Nationalistic Tone in Inaugural Speech”; The Guardian, 20 January 2017: “The Guardian view on Donald Trump’s inauguration: A declaration of political war”; The Daily Telegraph, 23 January 2017: “Donald Trump delivered the most ‘American’ inauguration speech ever.”
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umphs; and while they celebrated in our nation’s Capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land. (Trump 2017)
The resolution for the narrative of the long-suffering people is then explicitly outlined, first in terms of the prospects that it holds for the American people, then in terms of the citizens’ alleged past experience, summarized in the key-formulation “American carnage”: (3) January 20th 2017 will be remembered as the day the people became the rulers of this nation again. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Everyone is listening to you now. (Trump 2017) (4) Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves. […] But for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists: Mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now. (Trump 2017)
The remaining (largest) part of the speech is taken up by variations on the promise about the nation going to “thrive and prosper again,” which in the peroration is turned into a succession of mantra-like slogan repetitions: (5) Together, We Will Make America Strong Again. We Will Make America Wealthy Again. We Will Make America Proud Again. We Will Make America Safe Again. And, Yes, Together, We Will Make America Great Again. (Trump 2017)
The ‘timeline’ or event-structure of Trump’s narration could not be outlined more clearly: a) a past reaching up to the present, which is discursively represented by declarative statements in the past and present perfect tenses (“Their victories have not been your victories”; “there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land”); b) a turnaround moment that is represented in the continuous present tense or the simple present (“we are transferring power […],” “[…] stops now”), c) a promised future (“we will […]”) and d) a retrospective viewpoint in the future (“[…] will be remembered”). In terms of evaluation and perspective, Trump tells a tale of the nation’s redemption. It is based on the enumeration of exemplary factual references to past ‘bad’ experiences that starts with “Mothers and children trapped in poverty […]” in passage (4). These examples hint at Trump’s supposed familiarity with ordinary citizens’ alleged experiences of socio-economic and moral “carnage.” Such “small” sub-narratives carry a crucial FBTP-load and are particularly attractive in political discourse because they are “seen as the province of the ordinary, the down-to-earth, the unpretentious and morally straightforward – the opposite of the abstract argument, theoretical posturing, and complex facts and figures of
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intellectuals” (Polletta 2008, 30).3 This quality makes the stories a perfect fit for Trump’s anti-‘elitist’ stance. He makes himself the mouthpiece for the experiences of mothers, workers, students, and crime victims whose stories he appropriates and pitches against a supposed self-rewarding culture of the political establishment of “Washington” sketched in passage (2). In doing so, he achieves several rhetorical purposes: –
– –
He establishes a strong ethos (Charteris-Black 2014, 8–10) for himself as being a ‘man of the people’ who does not share the egotistic attitude of the establishment and joins in the collective identity of American “us” vs. the selfish “them”; He highlights the urgency of moving from the “carnage” of the recent past to the near “great” future and thus “proximises” (Cap 2014, 192– 194) both the threat and the promise of deliverance; He presents a ‘master-narrative’ in both the senses of establishing a (maximally strong) self-identity and of aligning his story with “grand récits or metanarratives” of national deliverance/redemption/rebirth (Bamberg 2004, 359–360). In doing so, he transforms the FBTP into a ‘self-fulfilling promise’: the narrative constructs its ‘truth’ as being proven/fulfilled in the near future.
For a narrative to be politically effective, its (re-)solution needs to be at the same time a present state of affairs that has already been almost achieved and a commitment for the future. Without the former aspect, the story may appear as a utopian, unrealistic fantasy; without the latter, prospective, aspect, it risks being seen as a mere historical account. Instead, with the resolution being partially completed but also still partially open, the narrative can serve as a call for action that turns the master narrative into a political master-agenda. 3.2 The narrative devil in the detail It could be argued, conceivably, that political master narratives are so vague, i.e. include so little material referencing verifiable (or falsifiable) facts that their ‘factuality’ and ‘factual truth’ cannot properly be assessed.
3 Cf. also Polletta (2006) and Fetzer (2010); for the identity-creating role of small stories see Bamberg and Georgakopoulou (2008); Bamberg (2009); Georgakopoulou (2007). For the fundamental role of grounding narratives in experience see Fludernik (1996, 26–30).
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This does not mean that they are devoid of a FBTP but that this presupposition is effectively unprovable. Conversely, one might assume that narratives containing ‘checkable’ factual details could be decided for their truth value (and that they might therefore be preferable in the sense of a normative communicative ideal such as perspicuity and clarity). Surely, the respective FBTB could then be established independently, which would reduce the impact of narrative framing? The following case study presents us with a seemingly clear-cut example of a political utterance (or series of utterances) that includes the reference to the ‘hardest of facts,’ i.e. quantifiable information, which should – in theory – be amenable to full scrutiny for its FBTB(s). Could or should this ‘factual’ reference be considered independently of the narrative? On 15 September 2017, the British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, published an article under the title “My vision for a bold, thriving Britain enabled by Brexit” (Johnson 2017) in the strongly Conservative-leaning and ‘Eurosceptic’ newspaper The Daily Telegraph (for which he had worked as a ‘regular’ journalist before entering in earnest on his political career). One passage in particular attracted massive attention by other British politicians and media; it related to a claim first made during the campaign for the Brexit referendum in 2016: (6) Once we have settled our accounts, we will take back control of roughly £350 m per week. It would be a fine thing, as many of us have pointed out, if a lot of that money went on the NHS [British National Health Service], provided we use that cash injection to modernise and make the most of new technology. (Johnson 2017)
The Telegraph accompanied the Foreign Secretary’s “blueprint for Brexit” with a detailed commentary, with its headline highlighting precisely this promise: (7) Exclusive: Boris Johnson – Yes we WILL take back £350 m from EU for NHS (The Daily Telegraph, 15 September 2017).
and so did other newspapers, each with their own ‘spin’ on the news: (8) Boris Johnson: we will still claw back £350 m a week after Brexit [= headline]. Foreign secretary revives Vote Leave’s controversial campaign message, insisting cash should go to NHS (The Guardian, 15 September 2017) (9) Boris Johnson breaks with Theresa May and says UK should still send £350 m to NHS after Brexit [= headline]. Foreign Secretary’s 4,000-word article is likely to be interpreted as the start of a potential leadership challenge (The Independent, 16 September 2017) (10) Take back control: UK WILL use Brexit £350 m per week to fund NHS, Boris Johnson promises [= headline]. BORIS Johnson has restated the claim that Britain will be £350 million per week better off after it leaves the EU and that the money could be redirected to fund the NHS. (Daily Express, 16 September 2017)
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The sensational character of Johnson’s promise can already be gleaned from the fact that all four headlines, including that of his ‘home’ newspaper, the Telegraph, exaggerate its content, strictly speaking. The politician had clearly hedged the promise by presenting it as a possible, not certain “fine thing […] if a lot of that money [i.e. roughly £350m] went on the NHS” and he had added specific conditions, whereas all the headlines, irrespective of the newspapers’ political leanings (pro-Johnson for Telegraph and Express, critical of Johnson for Guardian and Independent) present it as a certainty (in terms of the promise) and cite the full amount, not just “a lot” of it. The background to this ‘sleight-of-hand’ reference can be found in the final phase of the 2016 Brexit referendum campaign, when the “£350m” figure became nationally known as the most prominent slogan of the ‘Leave’ campaign, which appeared on their ‘battlebus’ that accompanied the campaign leaders, i.e. Boris Johnson (who held no ministerial post at the time), his Tory party colleague Michael Gove and Gisela Stuart (Labour) up and down the country. The original slogan, printed in huge letters on the bus, was: (11) We send the EU £350 m a week let’s fund our NHS instead Vote Leave Let’s take back control (Daily Mail, 24 May 2016).
Johnson, Gove and Stuart as well as other pro-Brexit campaigners, including those of the separate campaign by the UK Independence Party, continuously reiterated, endorsed and defended the slogan, but it was also immediately and vigorously contested by the ‘Remain’ campaigners, led by the then Prime Minister David Cameron. Even before the referendum, which took place on 23 June, its defenders, such as Johnson were already criticized as “lying,” being “hypocritical,” “deliberately untruthful,” and “misrepresenting” the facts, given that Britain’s net contribution to the EU budget was in fact closer to £250m, and that even this figure did not take into account the EU’s ‘return’ contributions to the UK budget.4 The “liar” accusations and refutations even intensified following the referendum which delivered a narrow majority (51.9 %) pro-Brexit;5 however, they were in turn soon dismissed by the pro-Brexit camp as vindictive
4 Cf. e.g. Daily Mail, 24 May 2016; The Daily Telegraph, 3 June 2016; The Observer, 5 June 2016; The Guardian, 10 June 2016. 5 Cf. e.g. The Daily Telegraph, 24 June 2016; The Observer, 26 June 2016; The Independent, 27 June 2016.
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complaints by “Remoaners” who were unable to admit defeat and accept the “will of the people” as expressed in the referendum.6 Johnson’s September 2017 article in the Daily Telegraph thus only reignited the ‘Brexit-money for NHS’ debate that had been conducted on and off for fourteen months by then. Arguably, the newspapers’ ‘incorrect’ headlines quoting the £350 m amount were primarily intended to remind the later readers of the earlier scandal, rather than giving a verbatim quotation. Predictably, Johnson’s revival of the claim, albeit in a hedged formulation, led to similar accusations and refutations, with even Eurosceptic media such as the Daily Express and Daily Telegraph referring to it now as a “controversial” or “disputed claim” rather than a certainty.7 From a narratological viewpoint the controversy about the ‘£350 m for the NHS’ claim may seem irrelevant at first sight; after all, it has no overt narrative elements beyond that of a vague temporal perspective into the future. However, when regarded as the crucial ‘factual’ detail that underwrites a specific narrative ‘frame,’ the £350 m claim becomes significant as the pivot on which the whole story turns. What is that narrative? Broadly speaking, the ‘pro-Brexit story’ is not dissimilar to the master narrative of healing and redemption which Trump outlined for America at his inauguration: a dark past of being controlled by an oppressive force (here: the EU) that is ended by a decisive deliverance event, i.e. the Brexit referendum, which allegedly enables “the people” to “take back control” and determine their own destiny. However, where Trump only vaguely referred to supposedly ‘known’ facts as presuppositions, Johnson and his fellow ‘Brexiteers’ made the seemingly concrete claim that a specific sum of money was spent by the UK on supporting the EU and that this same sum (or, in the 2017 version, “a lot of it”) would be spent on a home concern, i.e. the revered (but chronically underfunded) British National Health Service. The factuality of the statement about Britain’s weekly EU payments is used to support the promised gain for the NHS and thus for the nation: only if the reported fact of such a payment (“We send the EU £350 m a week”) is accepted as true, the promise and the narrative of liberation/ redemption make sense. Conversely, if the claim were proven to be essentially untrue, the narrative would be implausible or just ‘void’ of real-life significance. The answer to the question above, i.e. if a crucial ‘factual’ reference could be considered independently of the narrative – on ‘its own
6 Cf. e.g. Daily Express, 25 November and 8 December 2016; Daily Mail, 3 October 2016. 7 Cf. e.g. Daily Express, 16 September 2017, The Daily Telegraph, 16 September 2017; The Observer, 17 September 2017; The Guardian, 18 September 2017.
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terms,’ must therefore be negative: its ‘decisive’ function for the narrative’s evaluation is what makes the reference meaningful in the first place. Without that evaluation function the factual reference would be nothing but an irrelevant detail. In terms of pragmatic political success, it seems that Johnson’s detractors did not succeed in decisively undermining the factuality assumption (FBTP) of his renewed £350 m claim, despite publishing counter-statistics and exposing its calculation as exaggerated.8 This is of course due to the adversarial nature of public political discourse that we already noted at the start: a prominent politician such as the Foreign Secretary of a national government is unlikely to ‘admit’ having lied or misrepresented any important facts, on account of the loss of public face (and power) that such an admission would trigger. His supporters can thus continue to claim more or less disingenuously that the narrative, which was based on the alleged facts, is still principally valid and arguable, if controversial (or ‘disputed’). This seems to leave us with an unsatisfactory conclusion, namely that the factuality of political narratives is undecidable in the realpolitik of political discourse (due to power-conditions that prevent a consensus about what counts as facts) and that, as a consequence, factual narratives are understood, believed or disbelieved solely or mainly on the basis of their receivers’ allegiances to the respective speakers. In the concluding section, I will outline an argument against such a skepticist perspective by focusing on the ‘scenario’ structure of narratives. 4. Political narratives as ‘scenarios’ The category of ‘scenario’ has been developed in Cognitive Semantics as a subtype of conceptual ‘frames’ that provide sets of participants and schematic event structures (e.g. SOURCE-PATH-GOAL ) that help the receiver of an utterance to integrate the new linguistic and/or other semiotic input into a context that makes it meaningful (Fillmore 1975, 1985; Musolff 2006, 2016, 30–37; Ziem 2014). Unlike the most basic frames, scenarios are based on stereotypical knowledge from exemplary experiential scenes and include sufficiently rich narrative structure to allow for evaluative,
8 In 2017, the row over the claim’s factuality was reignited when Sir David Norgrove, the head of the UK Statistics Authority, wrote an open letter to Johnson, in which he criticized the £350 m figure as a “clear misuse of official statistics,” which in turn motivated Johnson to ‘reject the rejection’ of his factual claims by attacking Norgrove (cf. The Observer, 17 September 2017; The Independent, 19 September 2017).
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argumentative and further pragmatic inferences and interpretive elaboration. In metaphor studies, scenario-analysis has been used to bridge the gap between Conceptual Metaphor Theory and Discourse Metaphor Analysis by capturing narrative aspects of metaphor and figurative language use (Deignan 2010, 360–362; Musolff 2004, 2006, 2016; Semino 2008, 219–222; Sinding 2015). Due to their stereotypical and presuppositional nature, scenarios provide (or at least seem to provide) the factual validation of political narratives that cannot be established by mere reference to pure facts (or to an expert description of the latter as in scientific discourse). Both Trump’s master narrative of national redemption/liberation for the American people and the pro-Brexit narrative of “taking back control” not only contain a canonical narration structure centered on reversal and evaluation but also function as melodramatic storylines that the general audience are familiar with, e.g. from mediatized versions of fairy tales with clearly delineated participants (i.e., heroes, villains and victims) and an outcome that sees the victims rescued from the villains by the heroes. In our cases, the ‘evidence’ of an election victory or of a specific sum of money that can be identified (however vaguely) as being available/disposable fits into the scenario structure as its positive outcome, i.e. ‘solution,’ for the supposed ‘problem,’ i.e. the alleged oppression of the American and British peoples. The precise details of the evidence – i.e., the size and nature of Trump’s election victory, or the exact sum of money made available through Brexit – is, despite its facticity, only of secondary importance: what matters is that these details have been established as factual reference points and as ‘reversal’ or ‘solution point’ in the storyline. Whilst these ‘factual’ references are presented and, if need be, defended by their narrators as evidence for the narrative’s truth, they in turn are validated as necessary information by their position and function in the narrative. Without their pivotal role in its solution, they would be accidental bits of information. Instead, as central scenario elements, they carry FBTPs that call not only for epistemic but also emotional appraisal: no recipient will remain ‘neutral’ vis-à-vis their truth claims. For those who believe them as being possible, the stories will make sense as interpretations of the respective events at hand (change of government, Brexit) and as invitations to understand larger issues (e.g., the reasons for “America’s carnage,” the UK’s role as a global power). For non-believers, the respective hero figure (Trump or Johnson) is turned into a villain but the narrative’s emphatic ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ construal remains equally powerful. Within such a stereotypical redemption scenario, the fact-based truth presupposition is still accepted but it has become a scenario slot to be filled by the receiver ‘in good fit’ rather than a testable proposition whose truth value
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can be decided here and now. The ‘fit’ of factual references into a narrative scenario structure cannot replace the empirical truth or veracity check, but in political discourse it is routinely used as a substitute. This routine is, however, not unassailable. If critics wish to question the narrative’s FBTP, their main target should not be the details of isolated facts; instead they have to engage with the whole narrative as a complex but coherent truth claim that must be critically unpacked in its overall orientation and bias.
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HELLA DIETZ
Narrative and Factuality in Sociology 1. Introduction: Different perspectives on factuality Sociology’s attitude towards narrative is ambivalent, and related debates remain at the margins of the discipline. This is in part due to the fact that sociology is ambivalent about the nature of its object, the social. In principle, sociologists accept Dilthey’s conviction (1883) that the social is distinct from almost all natural phenomena because its objects are also subjects which shape their reality: society is influenced by our doings (and narrations), gravity is not. As we teach our students, even ‘false’ conceptions, such as the mistaken belief in the arrival of Martians, shape the social because “[i]f men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (Thomas and Thomas 1928, 572). Yet sociologists differ greatly in their assessment of the consequences to be drawn from these insights.1 The majority emphasizes the social’s comparative stability, identifying relatively stable structures such as institutions, rules, resources, or codes.2 This majority had and has to be repeatedly reminded of the social’s inherent temporality and contingency (see Knöbl 2012; Schützeichel and Jordan 2015, 4). Therefore, contrary to historiography, where temporality is considered an indisputable fact and where the issue of narrativity is widely, albeit controversially, debated,3 and despite isolated calls for a narrative
1 These are not the only controversies – more common is the dichotomy of action versus structure, which focuses on the question of whether we look at collective phenomena as emergent social facts or as cumulative effects of (inter)actions. 2 They also differ with respect to the status they attribute to sociological knowledge: most sociologists assume that they have privileged access to the social (for a recent articulation of this view in the French tradition see Bourdieu (1993 [1980], 147–179), while representatives of the minority group claim that sociological and everyday knowledge, at least in principle, are to be placed on a continuum (for a classical pragmatist articulation see Peirce 1877). 3 See White (1991 [1973]); Rüsen (1990, 2004); Frei and Kansteiner (2013); compare also / III.4 Jaeger. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-024
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turn in sociology (Czarniawska 2004; Berger and Quinney 2004), rather few sociologists discuss the issue.4 In what follows, I will first introduce the philosophical-sociological contribution of John Dewey, whose thinking has influenced most of the subsequent debates on narrative, most notably the debate in historical sociology since the 1980s (section 2). I will use Dewey’s perspective to clarify how empirical studies use narratives with the purpose of establishing factuality (section 3). Instead of a summary, I will end with some comments on narrative in sociological theory, and on future prospects for sociology’s dealings with narrative (section 4). 2. The pragmatist take on narrative5 Like all pragmatists, John Dewey claims that social action normally proceeds arationally: we follow routines without reflecting on them. Only if those habits fail do we start to think, and search for a solution to the resulting problem. In order to do this, we need to transform “an antecedent existentially indeterminate or unsettled situation into a determinate one” (Dewey 1938, 220): from an endless stream, we have to select occurrences that are relevant and, as a consequence, end up neglecting others. First, we need to define a beginning and an end; and we have to construct a (more or less) coherent plot, clarifying how X leads to Y: in short, we have to “narrate” (Dewey 1929, 249). Most of us consciously experience such meaning-making in foreign countries, where we encounter unfamiliar routines and our own habits no longer sustain us. From a pragmatist perspective, such meaning-making or ‘narrating’6 of situations is thus not something we choose or decline to do; if we act in 4 But see the debate in historical sociology, for instance Abbott (2001). For macrosociology see Joas (2016) and Knöbl (2007, 2012); for the genesis of values see Joas (1999, 2015); for economic sociology see Beckert (2011, 2014); for organizational sociology see Czarniawska (1997, 1998); for protest movement research see Polletta (2006); Dietz (2015); for the study of emotions see Katz (1999). 5 Sociologists dealing with narrative mostly refer to four different strands of the debate: to the structuralist works of Vladimir J. Propp and Algirdas J. Greimas in literary theory; the debate in historiography initiated by Hayden White (1991 [1973]); to Paul Ricœur’s (1986, 1996) phenomenological oeuvre; and to the pragmatist thinking of Charles S. Peirce (1877) and John Dewey (1910, 1929, 1938). I will focus on pragmatism, and especially on John Dewey’s insights into the relationship between empirical inquiry, temporality and narration (see also Dietz 2013). 6 In cases where I do not refer to the prototypical concept of narration which implies an intentional act of communication, but to narratively structured processes of meaning-making (the usage of Dewey), I mark this by using single quotes.
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uncertain circumstances, we inevitably determine situations and thus ‘narrate.’ Therein also lies the essence of human freedom: because we are able to ‘narrate’ social situations differently, we shape our reality (Dewey 1929, 249; see similarly Scheler 1976 [1928], 32–33) – even if the ‘narration’ may be ‘wrong,’ as the above-mentioned Thomas theorem clarified. In reality, most situations – as the structuralists correctly emphasize – are pre-structured, and our freedom to ‘narrate’ situations differently is quite limited. But the strength of pragmatism and its original contribution to sociology lies in its ability to capture the fact that all action is to some extent characterized by a certain amount of indeterminacy (see for instance Dewey 1910, 9–11). For Dewey, ‘to narrate’ means to describe qualitative change. Thus even the simple proposition that something is red implies a ‘narration’ because it suggests that something has acquired a new quality (“it became red”) or that it has the potential to change the quality of something else “to redden something” (1938, 221). In later discussions, most proponents of a sociological narrative turn define ‘narratives’ more strictly as “sequences of events” with a beginning, a middle, and an end (see Maines 1993; Griffin 1992, 419–420).7 Such sequences of events may consist of actions, or structural changes, or even, as Jack Katz (1999) shows, of instances of emotional expression: if we are getting angry, obviously corporeal sensations are happening to us (‘being angry’), but more often than not we also actively shape the resulting emotional reaction (‘doing anger’). One of Katz’s examples are people getting angry while driving cars in Los Angeles. He shows that their anger can be described as a narratively structured performance; this performance is directed at an audience – in the case of single drivers a mostly imagined one – and at helping to repair the actors’ violated integrity (see 1999, 18–87). But it is not only the objects of sociological studies that engage in ‘narration’; sociologists themselves also ‘narrate.’ Dewey argued that scientific analysis is a practical undertaking, and is guided by the failure of habits just as is everyday action. Although scientists analyze (past) actions of others, they do so against the background of their own framework of (scientific) problem(s). Dewey uses the example of history: history is not written in stone; it has to be rewritten or revised in accordance with new questions, with reference to changing viewpoints and to the currently available scientific concepts and relevant categories (1938, 233 and 236). One might counter this argument by proposing that sociology would be different from
7 Paul Ricœur later also used the term for pieces of art, which were constructed as narrative by an artist, and re-constructed as narrative by recipients.
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history because it strives to identify time-invariant patterns of behavior and has to abstract from concrete historical events. Dewey would respond that abstract thinking also refers to the original problem that was responsible for initiating the inquiry (1910, 11). Furthermore, sociological studies as well as sociological theories also have to establish the legitimacy of their selection of relevant events for their present. Therefore, sociology can itself be regarded as a narrative genre. Dewey’s insights have influenced the sociological debate on narrative within historical sociology since the 1980s; they have also – albeit rather indirectly, via the Chicago School – had an important bearing on the methodological development of biographical or ‘narrative interviews.’ Dewey’s influence moreover extends to neopragmatists and their critique of modernization theory. These developments will be discussed in some detail below. 3. How narrative establishes factuality in sociology Since its early days, sociologists have debated what kind of science sociology would be. Following Popper’s methodological orthodoxy (1934), the aim of all empirical research is the articulation of potentially falsifiable theories (/ III.10 Walsh, / III.12 Milne). But even this seemingly wellestablished methodology is contested (see Joas and Knöbl 2004, 27–30). Falsification rests on the assumption that one can neatly distinguish between theoretical statements and empirical observations. But since the linguistic turn we have known that there is no pure observation, that we necessarily have to resort to language in order to articulate observation, but also to consciously observe something as something. Thus, there are no observations which are not already ‘infected’ by language and even by theory, as is the case for the sociological concepts of modernity or of workers. If empirical observations are thus imbued with theoretical assumptions, a theory that is to be tested might be incorrectly falsified because the apparently falsificatory evidence relates to the theoretical framework underlying the observational set-up and not to the theory itself. Popper actually conceded that much, but he did not consider this possibility a real problem because he felt that, if necessary, basic assumptions (“Basissätze”) could themselves be tested, and falsified. In the practice of the sciences, though, theories are not as easily falsified. In his famous historical-sociological study, Thomas Kuhn (1962) has demonstrated that theories are often ‘saved’ by using additional hypotheses in order to integrate the new observations which do not meet the requirements of the theory, thus saving the theoretical core. For instance, Marx
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and Engels predicted that revolutions would take place in the most industrialized countries, but in actual fact this did not turn out to be the case (Russia was not one of the most industrialized countries). Still, Marxist researchers did not consider the theory of Marxism to be falsified, explaining that revolutions took place in underdeveloped countries of the third world because capitalism had changed. Of course, there are good reasons not to throw away a theory as soon as one finds the first counter-example but instead to modify the theory to account for the problematic evidence. The problem with this procedure is that no clear-cut criterion exists which would determine when a theory has definitely to be regarded as having been falsified. Kuhn’s provocative conclusion was that theories in practice are never falsified at all – they ‘die out’ when their representatives do and when an entirely new theory initiates a paradigm shift that displaces the old theory. Thus, there is no methodology which would save sociology from the influence of language, theory, and therefore ultimately: ‘narrative.’ The same holds true for the different methods applied. Sociologists with an interest in (inter)action favor qualitative methods: ethnographic field studies, hermeneutic analyses of all the different kinds of sources, or (minimally standardized) interviews. Sociologists focusing on structures tend to resort to quantitative methods: statistical analyses of surveys, standardized interviews or process-generated data (including texts). In practice, however, it is quite common to mix methods (‘triangulation’), and both perspectives try to integrate aspects of the other. Qualitative researchers are also interested in structural features – the former, for instance, use Ulrich Oevermann’s “objective hermeneutics” (Oevermann et al. 1979) in order to identify objective structures of meaning. Structuralists, on the other hand, use hermeneutic methods to interpret historical sources, or deploy other qualitative methods for explorative pre-studies. At first sight it seems that qualitative methods should be more ‘narrative’ in character than quantitative ones, and more difficult to revise intersubjectively. In ethnographies, for instance, factuality is based on the representation of situations that more often than not exist only in the sociologist’s account (/ III.3 Dobler). Statistical analysis, on the other hand, can most easily be tested intersubjectively, but gives only minimal insight into subjective meaning – it reveals only correlations between fixed variables. But in practice, things turn out to be more complicated. Andrew Abbott, one of the most prominent neopragmatists in historical sociology since the 1980s, has demonstrated that quantitative research in fact also relies heavily on narrative in order to establish factuality. The starting point of Abbott’s critique is the logical positivists’ primary insight that causality
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is always a preliminary attribution on the part of the observer. In principle, this insight is not controversial – handbooks of quantitative research explicitly specify that the ‘explanation’ that one thing is caused by another is nothing more than an abbreviation for stating that (1) A happened before or at the same time as B, that (2) A and B are strongly correlated, and that (3) a causal relationship is assumed because a mechanism can be formulated which makes this relationship plausible (Abbott 2001, 186). In practice, though, sociological texts are full of “unreflected causalism” (2001, 98): by means of their rhetoric, quantitative researchers pretend that they prove causal attribution on the basis of statistical analysis, but this causation is in fact a narrative that has been imposed on the observed statistical correlations. Qualitative studies, on the other hand, cannot hide their conclusions behind statistics, but they often do not make them explicit enough, leaving it open whether elements of their analysis follow after or from one another (Abbott 2001, 151). One might assume that such unreflected causalism is only an argument for better quality standards. But Abbott argues that there are good practical reasons for neglecting those standards. First, such neglect spares the author the need to specify by which exact mechanism B follows from A (2001, 112, 186). This is especially problematic if such assumed causality is transferred to another context, e.g. from capitalist to state-socialist societies, with very different structural conditions for (inter)action (see Dietz 2015, 151–225). Second, the rhetoric serves to settle a controversy over methods and the concept of causality. For the early statisticians, ‘causality’ seemed of relatively little concern; they were interested in description or outcome analysis rather than in mechanisms. Likewise, for the logical positivists, causality appeared to be an anthropomorphic bugbear to be purged from ‘real’ science. (They were only prepared to accept the concept of ‘causality’ if it signified merely association between A and B.) But for other sociologists, and non-statisticians, causality was the essential core for the explanation in human affairs. After the Second World War, statisticians reacted to this critique by reviving the language of causality. In contrast to Durkheim and others, they did not analyze concrete actions but practiced an unreflected causalism which serves the need for explanation but can do so without having to analyze concrete actions, which statisticians did not want to deal with, and without having to admit that such explanation is narratively constructed (see Abbott 2001, 108–110).8 8 For a debate on possibilities of better reflecting narrative operations see Knöbl (2012); Abbott (2001); Steinmetz (2005); Abell (2001); Sewell (1996); Heise (1989); Griffin (1992).
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4. Excursus: The narrative interview The narrative interview, which had its origin in the Chicago School, was first established by Fritz Schütze and then further developed by Gabriele Rosenthal (1993, 2004) and others. In narrative interviews, all interviewees are asked to narrate their whole life story, even if the researcher is only interested in a specific topic, because the life story as the overall context provides specific meaning for the intended focus of the research. The method attributes particular importance to the observed structural disparity between what is experienced and what the subject narrates as his or her life story; it also focuses on the difference between the perspective of the narrator’s present and his or her past attitudes and viewpoints. Rosenthal tries to avoid some of the pitfalls of hermeneutic analysis by combining several methods: she uses objective hermeneutics for the sequential analysis of the biographical data, and then contrasts the results with the interviewee’s narrated life story in order to discover the latent and implicit ordering structures of the life story (2004, 49–50, 54–55, 62–63). In this manner she was, for instance, able to present interesting work on the influence of the Holocaust in the lives of three generations of survivors (1997). Criticism of this method refers mostly to its quite distinct assumptions regarding the nature of the narrating process; for instance, it has been noted that when the interviewer listens to the whole life story without interrupting the narrative, the interviewees will orient their narrative less and less towards the interlocutor. On the other hand, the personal experiences that are being narrated are argued to reflect more closely what concretely occurred and what the interviewee concretely felt in the past than would be the case in argumentation or description (Rosenthal 2004, 53).9 Both assumptions are debatable as they do not take the unreliability of narratives seriously enough: as Koschorke (2012, 16) clarifies, there is no structural difference between fictional and factual narrative elements. 5. Concluding remarks on how narratives shape our theories Following Dewey, ‘narrative’ is a configuration of a sequence of events describing qualitative change in order to solve an action problem in indeterminate and thus uncertain situations. ‘Narrative’ is not a supplement
9 Hans Joas shares the latter conviction at least for value-generating experiences (1999, 2011). In Joas (2015) he explicates the relationship between narrative and value-generating experiences in detail.
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added to a non-narrative analysis (a simple ‘presentational ornament’), but rather an integral part of selecting and analyzing ‘data.’ An event is not something encountered in reality, it is – in the meaning of the Latin word evenire – the result of a selection process (Dewey 1938, 264). Not even the articulation of theory is free from ‘narrative’ selection and configuration. In this sense, sociology, despite its deep reservations against the term, is to be considered a ‘narrative’ genre. There are several starting points for further reflection on ‘narrative’ elements of the social and on our ‘narratively’ structured explanations of social phenomena expanding on Dewey’s insights. Hans Joas recently warned against the “dangerous nouns of process: modernization, differentiation, secularization” (2016). He shows that sociology’s consensus has been to assume the existence of a fundamental discontinuity between modernity and all previous history – and this notion of modernity, which was based on the assumption of an inevitable retreat of religion, became sociology’s object of analysis (2016, 154–155). However, as the critical debate concerning modernization theory shows (Knöbl 2001, 2007), there are in fact many arguments against this assumption of a homogeneous modernity, of ongoing differentiation (instead of processes of differentiation and de-differentiation), and of the retreat of religion. Such debate could enhance sociology’s awareness of historical and social contingency and also intensify the discipline’s reflection on narrative (see Knöbl 2012). Starting from the above-mentioned methodological debate, historical sociology offers specific proposals, for instance on how to standardize reflection about narrative (Abell 2001, Griffin 1992), or how to improve path dependency arguments (see Dobry 1999, Steinmetz 2005, Knöbl 2012). Moreover, research in gender studies, practice theory and in the tradition of Foucauldian analyses of power (1976) contributes to the questioning of specific narratives. Even if such work does not explicitly engage with the term narrative, it still helps to sensitize sociologists to the influence of ‘narrative’ in our ‘doing theory.’ Sociology could make further use of the methods of narratology, for instance by identifying the plot structures of theories and explanations, or by analyzing microplots that are inherent in single concepts (Koschorke 2012, 264–267; for a first attempt, see Dietz 2014, 2017).
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Schützeichel, Rainer, and Stefan Jordan. “Prozesse – eine interdisziplinäre Bestandsaufnahme.” Prozesse: Formen, Dynamiken, Erklärungen. Eds. Rainer Schützeichel and Stefan Jordan. Wiesbaden: VS, 2015. 1–16. Sewell, William H. “Three Temporalities: Toward an Eventful Sociology.” The Historic Turn in the Human Sciences. Ed. T. McDonald. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. 245–280. Steinmetz, George. “The Epistemological Unconsciousness of U. S. Sociology and the Transition to PostFordism: The Case of Historical Sociology.” Remaking Modernity. Politics, History, and Sociology. Eds. Julia Adams et al. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2005. 109–157. Thomas, William I., and Dorothy S. Thomas. The Child in America: Behavior Problems and Programs. New York: Knopf, 1928. White, Hayden. Metahistory: Die historische Einbildungskraft im 19. Jahrhundert in Europa. [1973] Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1991.
BERNHARD KLEEBERG
Factual Narrative in Economics 1. A brief definition of the concept Economics conceives of itself as a science of reality. Of course, economists are aware of the constructive character of their models. Yet the role of imagination or aesthetic principles is constrained, since models, even though they might be understood as elegant reductions of complex reality, are still considered to be reductions of reality, supplying orientation for real decisions, or even offering true predictions. Whether predictive, descriptive or explanatory, economic statements about the world are frequently intermedial (or multimedial): they make use of narratives, numbers, formulas and diagrams for the visualization of reality. Quantitative representations like statistical charts and graphs are fundamental to economics, because the referential function of numbers makes it easier to extrapolate data about fields that cannot be directly observed, to relate and compare different empirical objects and fields of knowledge, and thus to reduce the complexity of economic reality. Narratives, on the other hand, serve the purpose of structuring the empirical world, processing economic knowledge didactically and anchoring quantitative economic representations, formulas and laws in the real world – for example in the annual reports of administrations or companies, textbooks on economics, economic forecasting or economic self-help literature. Although their forms and functions are no less heterogeneous than those of economic approaches themselves (e.g. of Marxism, neo-classicism, institutional economics, behavioral economics, etc.), economic narratives often share a normative dimension since they frequently appear in arguments that demand a modification of reality in accordance with economic rationality: these stories tell us about activities optimized, scarcity eradicated, benefits maximized, the economy boosted, and balance reestablished.
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2. Survey of the phenomenological field Narratives are constitutive of economic discourse, structuring and organizing it. By bridging the gap between terminologies, concepts of knowledge, or interpretations of factuality, narratives relate it to other discourses and reality fields. Narratives can serve to establish compatibility with other approaches and, in particular, to anchor theories or predictions in reality, since they produce a semantic surplus that helps to render them plausible. Converting logical-deductive sequences into a chronological series of actions and events, they provide meaning; converting the precision economic models achieve through quantification into semantic vagueness and narrative openness, they allow us to apply these models to reality. Narratives supplement formalized economic calculations in a complementary fashion, telling a story that follows the economic model plot (Morgan 2001; 2012). In this respect, they resemble mythical narratives and fairy tales (McCloskey 1991a). Narratives of success or failure, of crisis or balance, can, in this sense, be understood as ideal types or models which determine the elements, boundary conditions and developmental tendencies of the narrated world. In respect to factuality, they are, like most economic narratives, hybrid in the sense that they relate to reality as well as to the economic model. In this regard, it is important to note that economic narratives operate with different conceptions of reality. (1)
Model narratives introduce a fiction which is supposed to represent the actual functioning of the economy, that is, they enfold a scenario allegedly true to reality.
(2)
Case simulations refer to reality as well, but only as the starting point of a counterfactual ‘what if’-scenario that is assumed to say something true about future realities.
(3)
In comparison to these, only case histories can be termed factual narratives in a proper sense, as they refer to empirical developments and actually occurring events.
Model narratives are hybrid narratives that oscillate between the prescriptiveness of the model and reference to reality. They fulfill an explicative didactic function. Such feignedly factual narratives are scientific fictions whose reference lies in the (formal) model itself. In order to strengthen the model’s plausibility fictional scenarios are conceived that unify in themselves all the regularities and variables of a model and follow the structural properties of the story specified by the model. Model narratives often have the character of fables in which all the relevant character types are brought togeth-
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er, the world is ordered in a readily comprehensible fashion, and in which the behavior and actions of the agents can accordingly be calculated and predicted. Typically, therefore, model narratives are connected with stories about rational action. A classic example of a model narrative is the so-called Robinson Crusoe economy, based on Daniel Defoe’s novel from 1719. Applied in various fields, such as microeconomics, public finance, or growth economics, it serves to explain how an equilibrium can be reached between how the producer can maximize profit and how the consumer can maximize utility, taking into account the law of diminishing marginal benefits. On his desert island, Robinson (in a double role as producer and consumer) sometimes hangs out on the beach and sometimes collects coconuts to have something to eat. He knows that the more coconuts he collects, the more he has to eat, yet the less time he has to relax. As the latter makes him happiest, he tries to find the best possible balance between work and leisure time and thus starts to experiment from day to day. He soon discovers that the more hours he works, the fewer additional coconuts he collects and decides on a relation with as many coconuts and as much leisure time as possible, and with as little work as necessary. The model narrative thus introduces an economic minimal scenario with two commodities, a producer and a consumer, and tells a story about rational consumer behavior (see Varian 2010, 609–631). Equipped with abstract formulas and diagrams that represent production functions and indifference curves,1 the Robinson Crusoe narrative appears in several different variations. It explains economic theories and hypotheses like, for instance, Pareto efficiency,2 the theory of rational behavior, etc. Whether the variants of the narrative simply introduce a second producer/consumer – Friday – to the story, or altogether set the story in a current everyday scenario: all model narratives follow the prescriptiveness of the economic model and provide references to reality. Model narratives like these can be distinguished from case simulations that are projected into the future with an explorative-prognostic aim or have a verificational function. They serve to frame the predicted events and processes, whose (non-)occurrence also functions as a pragmatic test of the relevant economic models. Case simulations are hybrid narratives: they start with real events and proceed with counterfactuals. By changing indi-
1 I.e. graphs that show different combinations of (quantities of ) two goods (e.g. hanging out on the beach/eating coconuts), towards which the consumer has equal preferences. 2 Named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, ‘Pareto efficiency’ refers to a state in which it is impossible to improve one parameter without worsening another.
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vidual variables in a real initial scenario, different processes can be induced within the model and alternative outcomes deductively derived. Within the framework of such as-if-narratives, reality is simulated by supplementing the initial conditions, variables and inner logic of the model with variables that are not explained within the model itself (‘exogenous’ or ‘independent’ variables) and help to make the predictions more precise. In the process, options for action are unfolded against expectations for the future and so adapted for the calculation of risk; economically correct/rational action is distinguished from wrong/irrational action through the presentation of the consequences of actions. Often, counterfactual narratives thus only suggest one possible future scenario. When predictions are presented as genuine prolepses, which trace the inescapability of certain decisions back to the knowledge of economic experts, they follow narratives of inevitability: there is only one rational way to deal with the economic situation, the one suggested by the model. At the same time, such narratives open up the possibility of self-immunization: if certain predictions turn out to be inaccurate, external irritators can be set aside within the framework of the residual category of exogenous variables. As a result, the model need not be rejected; instead, inaccurate predictions are ascribed to a lack of information. The narrative reformulation of economic predictions facilitates such a procedure, as the boundaries between causally relevant (story) and narratively decorative (discourse) elements of the narration can be shifted. A good historical example for a case simulation is that of the Dutch econometrician Jan Tinbergen, who in the 1930s presented the first ever dynamic macroeconomic model, a mathematical model of the Dutch economy. Tinbergen defined exogenous variables (import prices, volume of world export, etc.) and endogenous ones (domestic economic activity, employment, etc.), made several distinctions (consumer goods/capital goods, consumption/saving, raw materials/final goods, etc.), and fed the model with empirical data. He then presented a number of case simulations that differed in respect to measures of economic policy (e.g. additional public investment, trade protection, reduction in prices, etc.) and calculated the effects of these policy alternatives on the development of the Dutch economy (Knoester and Wellink 1996; Maas 2014, 151–152). Case histories, in contrast, take up real developments with a present-day reference. They serve the formation of economic theories, or as examples in the history of economics and dogmatics. When case histories form a specific part of economic analyses – for example, within the framework of a deductive-nomological approach – they provide those empirical observations that are necessary besides the relevant economic law to arrive at an explanation of an issue. These case histories have the status of factual narratives with an explanatory function. Within the framework of a history of
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economic dogma or in textbooks, case histories have an explicative-didactic function when they relate stories of the success or failure of economic actions in order to elucidate possible strategies as defined by a model. Case histories are also used retrospectively with legitimatory intent. Here, stories are chosen in order to support positions in the sense of abductive post-hoc explanations – or, at least, they are narrated in this way, thus constituting a type of unverified explanations termed just-so-stories3 (Gould 1978). Case histories of this kind pretend to explain traits and developments with reference to facts while simply presenting a deliberate explanation that fits with the story. They follow the structural pattern of the model and present the outcome of developments as inevitable (Goldschmidt and Szmrecsanyi 2008). Additionally, they do not thematize the narrating author, which suggests a non-perspectival objectivity. Narratives in accordance with the just-so pattern are often found in contexts of justification, where they supplement the foundational mode of mathematical derivations, tables or diagrams. As clearly factual narratives, they claim to refer to real events. The borders between case histories and superordinate developmental histories are fluid. If narratives serve to legitimate or to criticize economic currents or paradigms they often deploy figures of anthropologization (e.g. speaking of a ‘typically human’ behavior) or naturalization (e.g. claiming that a mechanism has always been in force) in order to project stories of origins, progress or salvation. Such narratives integrate system boundaries and transition stages. For instance, the characteristics of neoclassical economics are transferred to premodernity via a story about the breakthrough of the true nature of man (e.g., of the rationally calculating homo oeconomicus) at the beginning of the modern age (Plumpe 2007, 319). Sometimes they unfold the normative meaning of economic narratives: for instance, in the light of the self-regulative powers of the market, they call for (neo)liberal attentism or, in the case of a financial crisis, for state intervention. Within the framework of the optimization narratives of self-help manuals, stories consider how to adjust reality; they frequently use the imperative tense and an authorial narrative situation. 3. An exemplary analysis Narratives designed to function as mediators between theoretical approaches and reality serve the didactic explication of economic theories and models. They can be found in research literature, textbooks, manage-
3 Named after Rudyard Kipling’s famous Just So Stories for Little Children (1902).
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ment magazines, or in the advice of economic consultants. The decisive question is not whether a case actually happened in a particular way; what is important, rather, is the possibility to identify with the story’s protagonists and the comprehensibility and adaptability of the narrative. After all, these narratives serve as a means of ensuring the credibility of the theoretical approach: the exemplary nature of the case underlines the validity of the theory. It is characteristic of textbooks to use invented stories in order to elucidate economic rationality. In accordance with its function of explaining the prototypical action of ideal entrepreneurs like the homo œconomicus, the narrated world unifies all those structural elements which, against the background of the neo-classical image of man, are decisive for rational behavior: observation and collection of information, innovation, striving for the maximization of benefit or profit, rational cost-benefit analysis and calculation of risks, purposeful use of resources, the cycle of supply and demand, which brings advantages for all through the market mechanism. This function calls for short scenarios that describe rational behavior on the basis of an ‘if … then’ model: if a company/administration X fails to apply knowledge y and to implement action zkl. R., it will not be able to maximize profit, and hence disappear from the market/go broke. Whereas companies ideally display a behavior aimed at profit maximization whose adequacy can be described in the form of an if-then story with a clear outcome, individual actors (households) reveal a behavior aimed at benefit maximization which is (also) measured by subjective preferences and hence cannot be easily observed. As a result, the corresponding models tend to be illustrated in a narrative mode, and the fictitious narrative is directly provided with a moral, that is, an economic explanation. In his widely read textbook on microeconomics, the Austrian economist Ferry Stocker (2013 [1995]) presents a model narration about a fictive protagonist named Claudio Gelatino, a student of economics, who works in an ice cream parlor at a lake. One day he goes to a beach café several miles away where he buys ice cream for an exorbitant price. On his return, he notices the greedy looks of the other bathers. But while he was away, Claudio’s girlfriend had run off with a surfer. He is stunned, but recovers his composure again and begins “to think about the thing with the ice cream” (all 53; my translation). He experiences an economic conversion which transforms him into an entrepreneur. “A business sense fills his mind and he begins to calculate […]”; he fetches ice cream from his ice cream parlor and sells it for three times the price: “With his pockets full of money Claudio goes home – after taking a particularly enjoyable swim in the cooling waters of the lake. He has done good business […] and has effortlessly earned far more than in the stressful hours selling ice every
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evening in his acquaintance’s ice cream parlor.” The semantic concepts of the story – needs, observation, resources, innovation etc. – are here transposed into a discourse in which narrative techniques are used in order to heighten the affective side of the story. This is achieved, among other things, through the narrative element of the lost love of the student protagonist and by regularly interrupting the colloquially and indirectly narrated presentation with direct speech in the dramatic mode. At the same time, the interpretational sovereignty of the heterodiegetic narrator is underpinned by his omniscience. The individualization of the protagonist, which is accompanied by a translation of the theoretical approach into a narrative of individual success, offers identification potential and not only suggests that ‘anyone can make it,’ but also that it would be irrational, that is to say uneconomic, to act differently. The narration then concludes – “What really happened …” (all 55) – with an economic interpretation which discloses the causal motivation of the meaning structure of the narrated world and the adherence of the protagonist to the figure model of the homo oeconomicus. As the story was constructed in accordance with the provisos of the theory, the author can then state: “No matter how simple the case presented here may seem, it contains almost all the decisive aspects that really matter for success as an entrepreneur.” It is precisely the simplicity of the narrative, the structure consisting of only a few events, which guarantees the high degree of adaptability – individual parameters may change, but the fundamental structure is basic enough to be recognized in every specific individual case. In the present case we first encounter Claudio as a household (consumption/ demand), later as an entrepreneur (production/supply). On account of his “attentive observation” he knows his customers’ “latent needs” and has an idea “how to make a profit.” He uses “his resources […] where they can best generate income,” produces something that “people […] also want to buy.” This is an “innovative act” where the “implementation of the production” takes place “in the enterprise itself,” which ultimately “increases the benefits of all participants in the market” (55–56). Finally, the axiom of the self-regulation of the market in the sense of Adam Smith’s metaphor of the invisible hand is presented as the economic moral of the story. 4. Research survey Questions of narrative and narratology have traditionally been the responsibility of literary scholars. It may therefore not be amiss to briefly place the analysis of factual narratives in economic discourses within a wider
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framework of recent interdisciplinary contacts between economics and literary studies. To begin with, literary criticism has analyzed the role of literature in economics: the literary motifs, figures and scenarios used in economic theory as well as the literary mirroring of economic contexts and theories. It has moreover discussed the didactic and paradigmatic role of literary examples (see, for example, Kish-Goodling 1998; Watts 2002). The scholarly discussion on the question of economics as literature, that is, its relation to fact and fiction, begins in the late 1970s. Shell (1978) deals with the poetics of monetary inscriptions (e.g. in coins), Gibbard and Varian (1978) identify narratives as an integral part of the economy and understand economic models as specific forms of narratives, since their variables must be interpreted in order to provide the model with a reference to reality. Since the middle of the 1980s, studies on the rhetoric of science, in particular, have placed emphasis on the functional character of economic texts and have analyzed their central metaphors and stylistic features. McCloskey’s The Rhetoric of Economics (1985) can be regarded as the locus classicus of the treatment of the rhetorical and narrative structures of economic theory. In an analysis of texts which had become paradigmatic – among others economic works by Paul Samuelson, Gary Becker, Robert Solow and Robert Fogel –, McCloskey attacks the methodical selfunderstanding of the economic sciences: contrary to their epistemic claims, they did not operate on the basis of the falsification of hypotheses, and rarely had an empirical-statistical basis, but instead legitimated their statements by means of (esoteric) mathematical virtuosity and irrelevant tests of significance. She also criticizes the fact that economics leans towards authorities, uses analogies and relies on introspection. McCloskey’s view is that economic theory is essentially rhetorical and fictional, which deconstructs the epistemic status of the economic sciences as reality sciences: the economic sciences are merely conviction sciences. McCloskey’s further research moreover focuses on metaphors and their relation to narratives; metaphors offer complementary answers to ‘Why’ questions and sometimes co-occur with narratives in the form of allegories (see McCloskey 1987, 1990, 1991a/b; McCloskey and Klamer 1989). Whereas economic narratives deal with factual economies at particular points in time and in particular places, metaphors are oriented towards hypothetical, future economies and are part of counterfactual argumentation. The vaguer the model, the more easily can the narrative be adapted to reality; for instance, a simple Robinson Crusoe model with two commodities, a producer and a consumer, can easily be applied to the real world. The more complex and exact the model, however, the more absurd it becomes as a factual narrative.
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Following on McCloskey, discourse analytical studies since the 1990s have discussed discursive regularities, implicit theories and normative presuppositions of economic concepts and symbols (Samuels 1990). Attention has also been paid to the influence of the leading sciences or more general patterns of thought (like modernism or conservativism) on the language conventions of economics (Nash 1990; Henderson et al. 1993) – often with critical intent, as in the New Economic Criticism (Woodmansee and Osteen 1999). Furthermore, important impulses concerning the reference of economics to reality come from the history of science (see the survey in Schabas 2002). Approaches that deal with economic models have been particularly fruitful. Arguing that economic storytelling does not depend on the statistic or dynamic structure of the model, but is generic for the application of models in economic practice, Morgan has pointed out that narratives are more than mere rhetorical or heuristic tools: in economic theory they are applied as cognitive instruments and are an integral element in the practical use of models. No matter whether they tell about a real or a hypothetical world, they explicate the basic structure of a model, which without them could not be set in relationship to the world. Models thus generate stories in a configurational mode (Morgan 2001). In order to learn from models, an external dynamics must be set in motion by asking them questions. The answers which are then provided by the deductive resources of a model typically take the form of narrations whose nature is generated by the question, by an ad hoc observation or by the modification of an assumption: an element of the model is changed, a sequence of further changes takes place, another story is told (Morgan 2007; 2012; Morgan and Morrison 1999). 5. Conclusion Narratives are constitutive of economic discourse. They structure and organize it. Hence, one can appreciate why the rhetoric and narrative techniques of the economic sphere have increasingly become the subject of critical studies, particularly since the financial crisis of 2008 (see Vogl 2010; 2015; Künzel and Hempel 2011; Priddat 2014; 2015). The more the complexity of (current) economic operations becomes apparent, the more the tie of economic narratives to factuality is being questioned. If economics is a science of reality, this is the case in a figurative sense: it reduces complex reality to economic models and generates narratives to allow economists or politicians to work with these models, to prescribe order and to shape future economic facts. As has been shown, economic narratives relate to reality as well as to the economic model, they bridge gaps between fields
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of knowledge, establish compatibility with other approaches, and anchor theories in reality. While many of these stories are true to reality, others are counterfactual. However, few seem to be factual narratives proper, referring to the empirical world. References Gibbard, Allan, and H. R. Varian. “Economic Models.” The Journal of Philosophy 75.11 (1978): 664–677. Goldschmidt, Nils, and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi. “The Cameelious Hump and ‘Just So Stories’ in Economic Literature – A Linguistic Analysis.” How Language is Used to Do Business: Essays on the Rhetoric of Economics. Ed. Edward Clift. New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. 167–186. Gould, Steven Jay. “Sociobiology: The Art of Storytelling.” New Scientist 80 (1978): 530– 533. Henderson, Willie, Tony Dudley-Evans, and Roger Backhouse. Eds. Economics and Language. London and New York: Routledge, 1993. Kipling, Rudyard. Just So Stories for Little Children. New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1902. Kish-Goodling, Donna M. “Using The Merchant of Venice in Teaching Monetary Economics.” The Journal of Economic Education 29.4 (1998): 330–339. Knoester, Anthonie, and Arnout H. E. M. Wellink. “Tinbergen and the Royal Netherlands Economic Association.” Tinbergen and Modern Economics: The Noble Economist Saint. Ed. K. Puttaswamaiah. New Dehli: Indus Publishing, 1996. 121–142. Künzel, Christine, and Dirk Hempel. Eds. Finanzen und Fiktionen. Grenzgänge zwischen Literatur und Wirtschaft. Frankfurt/Main et al.: Campus, 2011. Maas, Harro. Economic Methodology: A Historical Introduction. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014. McCloskey, Deirdre (originally published as Donald N. McCloskey). The Rhetoric of Economics. Brighton, Sussex: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. McCloskey, Deirdre (originally published as Donald N. McCloskey). The Writing of Economics. New York et al.: Macmillan, 1987. McCloskey, Deirdre (originally published as Donald N. McCloskey). If You’re So Smart. The Narrative of Economic Expertise. Chicago et al.: University of Chicago Press, 1990. McCloskey, Deirdre (originally published as Donald N. McCloskey). “Storytelling in Economics.” Economics and Hermeneutics. Ed. D. Lavoie. London: Routledge, 1991a. 61–75. McCloskey, Deirdre (originally published as Donald N. McCloskey). “History, Differential Equations, and the Problem of Narration.” History and Theory 30.1 (1991b): 21–36. McCloskey, Deirdre (originally published as Donald N. McCloskey), and Arjo Klamer. Eds. The Consequences of Economic Rhetoric. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Morgan, Mary S. “Models, Stories and the Economic World.” Journal of Economic Methodology 8.3 (2001): 361–384. Morgan Mary S. “The Curious Case of the Prisoner’s Dilemma: Model Situation? Exemplary Narrative?” Science without Laws. Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives. Eds. Angela N. H. Creager et al. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007. 157–185. Morgan, Mary S. The World in the Model. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
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Morgan, Mary S., and Margaret Morrison. Eds. Models as Mediators. Perspectives on Natural and Social Science. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Nash, Christopher. Ed. Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and Literature. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Plumpe, Werner. “Die Geburt des ‘Homo oeconomicus.’ Historische Überlegungen zur Entstehung und Bedeutung des Handlungsmodells der modernen Wirtschaft.” Menschen und Märkte. Studien zur historischen Wirtschaftsanthropologie. Eds. Wolfgang Reinhard and Justin Stagl. Vienna et al.: Böhlau, 2007. 319–352. Priddat, Birger P. “Ökonomie als Produktion von Literatur? Wissen und Nichtwissen im Literatur-Ökonomie-Spannungsfeld.” Literarische Ökonomik. Eds. Iuditha Balint and Sebastian Zilles. Paderborn: Fink, 2014. 159–178. Priddat, Birger P. Economics of Persuasion. Ökonomie zwischen Markt, Kommunikation und Überredung. Marburg: Metropolis, 2015. Samuels, Warren J. Ed. Economics as Discourse: An Analysis of the Language of Economists. Boston et al.: Springer Netherlands, 1990. Schabas, Margaret. “Coming Together: History of Economics as History of Science.” History of Political Economy 34.suppl. (2002): 208–225. Shell, Marc. The Economy of Literature. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Stocker, Ferry. Spaß mit Mikro. Einführung in die Mikroökonomik. [1995] 8th ed. Munich and Vienna: Oldenbourg, 2013. Varian, Hal R. Intermediate Microeconomics: A Modern Approach. New York et al.: Norton, 2010. Vogl, Joseph. Das Gespenst des Kapitals. Zurich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2010. Vogl, Joseph. Der Souveränitätseffekt. Zurich and Berlin: Diaphanes, 2015. Watts, Michael. “How Economists Use Literature and Drama.” The Journal of Economic Education 33.4 (2002): 377–386. Woodmansee, Martha, and Mark Osteen. Eds. The New Economic Criticism. Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.
SIMON STERN
Factuality, Evidence and Truth in Factual Narratives in the Law Factual narratives play a prominent role in two very different legal contexts: in legal advocacy, lawyers seek to frame the facts in a way that will help their client to prevail, while in judicial decisions, the factual narrative at the outset provides an introduction to the legal analysis that resolves the dispute. The legal setting that provides the focus in this chapter is the Anglo-American legal system (i.e., the common law); civil-law systems have a somewhat different orientation towards facts. Whereas in their role as advocates, lawyers may draw on a range of narrative techniques in attempting to control the witnesses and to anticipate potentially damaging evidence, the factual recitation in a judicial opinion is usually subdued, and its narrative mode generally eschews techniques that might bring the reader into closer proximity with one of the parties, or position the reader within their world. Although litigators may be able to learn how to make their factual claims more persuasive by studying the narrative techniques of imaginative writers, as many commentators have urged (e.g., Meyer 2014; J. Shapiro 2014), judges take the opposite view, striving for a kind of objectivity that avoids conspicuous use of these techniques (which would likely be read as a sign of partiality), and instead seek to enhance the factuality of their discourse by setting out the details in a sober fashion that perhaps owes something to the “plain style” promoted by the founders of the Royal Society (B. Shapiro 2003, 112–14). In legal discourse, the term most frequently invoked as the converse of ‘fact’ is ‘law’ rather than ’fiction,’ and this distinction helps to specify the fact’s narrative significance.1 Facts are simply those materials that form the grist for legal analysis, to yield a legal conclusion (e.g., a conclusion that someone is guilty, or liable). Facts are contrasted against law not
1 In legal discourse, the term 'fiction' is usually restricted to the context of legal fictions (fictio legis) (Stern 2015; Stern 2017). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-026
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because facts are unlawful, but because they must be established so that a doctrine or a statutory provision (for instance) can be applied to some definite target so as to produce that legal conclusion. That lawyers do not reflexively turn to ‘fiction’ (or ‘falsehood’) as the contrastive term suggests that fact and law belong to a carefully cultivated terrain where each of these terms informs the meaning of the other in a way that reflects their technical use. Facts become persuasive, and can be made narratively compelling, in a theater where they do not so much compete with law as conspire with it, gaining some of their impact from the deployment of the law, even as the two are kept conceptually distinct. At the same time, the status of facts in legal discourse is not so foreign to their status in other discourses of accuracy and authenticity as to make those contexts simply irrelevant. Consequently, the techniques that help to enhance the credibility of a factual assertion, in trials and legal decisions, depend partly on its relation to the legal result that prompts its production, and partly on its kinship with the sources of factual accuracy in other regimes of description. As John Baker and S. F. C. Milsom have pointed out, we cannot even begin to speak about the development of the common law until the distinction between fact and law emerged, with the two matters allocated respectively to jury and judge, after the abolition of the trial by ordeal in the thirteenth century (Milsom 1967, 2; Baker 2002, 71–76). This era also saw the emergence of lawyers who specialized in pleading cases, telling the litigant’s tale in the official language of the courts. Initially called conteurs or narrators, these specialists would eventually become known as barristers (Brand 2010, 94–101; Spearing 2015). Their expertise included both the facts and the law: just as they translated their clients’ factual allegations into Norman French and Latin for courtroom argument, they also sought to translate the alleged injuries into some form of legal relief. Thus, even from this early date, what counts as a legal fact has been subject to a complex process that transforms the parties’ statements into legally cognizable evidence. Not every trial is a proof contest over some version of the facts. In some instances, the parties agree about the facts, and the dispute centers on their legal significance. Or perhaps, although the facts may be in dispute, the defendant might not bother to contest them, arguing that even if one were to accept all the plaintiff’s allegations, they would not be sufficient to make out a legal claim. Again, the parties may agree provisionally to a stipulated version of the facts that does not aim for perfect accuracy but is good enough for the purpose of resolving one of the legal issues in the case. In these scenarios, the facts are generally set out by way of affidavit (a party’s evidence, transcribed in a sworn statement) and other
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documentary evidence, and the lawyers will have little opportunity to resort to any kind of narrative craft in offering them up.2 What, then, is the distinction between fact and law that accounts for these tactical decisions about how to proceed, and whether to contest the facts? The paradigmatic rendition of the trial, in popular culture, treats facts as evidence – acts, statements, documents – already existing outside the world of the courtroom, and brought in to establish the truth about the parties’ interactions. Facts, according to that view, exist independently of the court’s dealings with them, and law is the instrument we apply to them, to assess liability. The continuing appeal of these renderings of the trial suggests that they capture a widely shared sense about what counts as a fact and, by implication, how to establish their authenticity in a way that will satisfy a jury. At the same time, as this discussion has already begun to suggest, the distinction between law and fact is more artificial and more malleable than that view proposes. Indeed, a notable development in the history of the common law has involved the conversion of matters of fact into matters of law (and, occasionally, vice versa). Legal historians have shown that the nineteenth century, in particular, saw the transformation of many questions of fact into questions of law, as judges lost their power over some of the mechanisms of jury control, and sought to restore the balance by withdrawing certain issues from the jury’s purview. Grant Gilmore, for example, observed that, because of their distrust of juries, judges made contract doctrine increasingly formal in that era, increasingly driven by legal rules rather than flexible and more discretionary standards: “To the extent contract litigation can be phrased as questions of law for the court, the vagaries of juries can be controlled” (Gilmore 1974, 100). Writing more broadly about the transformation of the legal order during this period, Larry DiMatteo explains that “the sensitivity of juries to contextual matters, such as the characteristics of the parties, was avoided through the conversion of questions of fact to questions of law” (DiMatteo 2004, 417). To adopt this explanation (as numerous other legal historians have also done) is to recognize that one of the main purposes of the law/fact distinction is to perform the instrumental function of allocating tasks (Allen and Pardo 2002). If a factual issue could be recharacterized as a legal issue, on the one hand this may remind us of the potential commonalities among the techniques of persuasion that apply to both; on the other hand, the decision
2 Even an affidavit, of course, reflects certain narrative conventions that an experienced lawyer can turn to advantage (see, e.g., Meyer 2014, 179–180); but when the parties stipulate to the facts, the opportunities for skillful manipulation are limited.
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to remove a question from the province of the jury may also serve to eliminate certain forensic modes of persuasion that are more readily directed at juries than judges.3 DiMatteo’s comment about jurors’ sensitivity to the characteristics of the parties, for example, reflects the sense that questions such as whether the defendant took ‘reasonable care’ to avoid harming the plaintiff might turn on a wide range of evidence about the plaintiff if classified as a question of fact, but a much narrower range (with accordingly fewer forensic opportunities) if treated as a question of law. A slightly earlier example that may help to sharpen the point involves the British experience with seditious libel in the eighteenth century. Worried that politically motivated jurors would find reasons to acquit the defendants in these cases, judges sought to limit the jury’s task to determining the fact of publication, while reserving questions about the publication’s harmful effect, and the author’s intention to produce that effect, as matters of law. However, it is not hard to see how effect and intent could be regarded as questions of fact, and if so, how juries might impose a high evidentiary burden on the prosecution to establish those facts. These questions were, indeed, allocated to the jury by statute in 1792 (Howe 1939; Lobban 1990). Questions about a publication’s intent and effect offer excellent examples of issues that may appear factual, but are often treated as legal (in the areas of obscenity and libel, for instance), with the result that their evaluation turns on a significantly different style of argument. Of course, the allocation of a certain question to the jury hardly means that they are free to entertain any evidence they consider relevant. In legal advocacy and writing, the question of what counts as a fact depends crucially on the rules of evidence, which govern the admissibility of documents and testimony, and on the applicable standard of proof. The rules of evidence operate to screen out information that many people would consider useful and significant. A murder weapon acquired by means of a technically deficient search warrant, hearsay statements, and knowledge about someone’s general reputation are among the many kinds of evidence that the rules may exclude. These issues take on narrative significance not only because their presence or absence may play a vital role in filling out the details that will turn out to be ‘the facts of the case’ and that will define the contours of the story to be resolved, but also because the mode of exclusion can make their absence more or less prominent. Evidence excluded preliminarily, without a jury’s knowledge, does not call attention
3 This is not to suppose that judges are immune from techniques of persuasion that sway jurors, but only that lawyers tend to modify their tactics when arguing only to a judge.
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to itself in the same way as evidence that has been introduced and withdrawn (struck from the record). A line of testimony that proceeds by fits and starts, subject to constant objections from the opposing counsel, may be deprived of its narrative impact even if the witness manages to finish the story. Again, to see any line of testimony foreclosed before it can proceed further is to be reminded that the factual record, as established in the courtroom, does not purport to encompass everything leading up to the dispute, that the universe of legally cognizable facts does not stand in a relation of mimesis to the facts out there in the world. The use of proof standards, similarly, underscores the point that evidence is created in the courtroom, even though we say that the jury or judge ‘finds’ the evidence. The phrase ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ is sometimes invoked as if it were the universal standard for all factual matters, in both civil and criminal disputes, but that standard applies only in the criminal law, and more specifically, only when the prosecution prevails in a criminal case. That is, the defendant in a criminal case must be acquitted if the prosecution cannot establish the requisite facts beyond a reasonable doubt; the defendant does not need to prove anything beyond reasonable doubt, but need only expose the flaws in the prosecution’s case. Nevertheless, narrative has a significant role to play on both sides, because simply poking holes in the prosecution’s story is rarely as effective as offering another account that furnishes a coherent explanation of the prosecution’s evidence.4 Proof ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ is not the same as absolute certainty; therefore, even if the defendant is convicted, the facts are not taken as indisputably true but only as the truth that the legal contest produced. If the defendant is acquitted, there may be little for the judge to say by way of factual narrative. At the trial level, criminal prosecutions do not result in written decisions, as to the final verdict, unless the case is tried without a jury, and if the case ends with an acquittal, the factual narrative would sum up the allegations against the defendant, and would explain which ones could not be established to the requisite proof standard. The result is hardly likely to constitute a compelling narrative, and may not
4 The idea that jurors are reluctant to reject a fairly comprehensive and coherent account, unless offered another one that offers greater coherence (i.e., explains more of the evidence) has been most famously advanced in the “story model” theory of Pennington and Hastie (1991). Despite its name, however, and its frequent invocation by legal scholars as a validation of the vital role that narrative plays in legal persuasion, this model is concerned with coherence, not narrative. That is, it does not attend to narrators, plots, or characters, focusing instead on the lawyer’s ability to make the evidence meaningful by fitting it into an explanatory structure.
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even appear to be a complete one. In civil disputes, the standard of proof is considerably lower: the winning party is not required prove anything ‘beyond reasonable doubt,’ and can prevail by offering evidence whose veracity is seen as ‘more probable than not’ (that is, evidence with a greater than 50 % chance of being true). Thus, even though the judge may set out the details flatly and without qualification in the factual narrative, it is to be taken as true only in a probabilistic sense. In any dispute, civil or criminal, numerous factors besides the availability of documentary evidence might bear on the determination of the facts. Perhaps one of the parties spent more time and effort collecting witnesses, or took more care in conducting pretrial depositions. No matter how authoritative and definite its mode of delivery, the factual narrative in a judicial decision does not present the facts as if the judge’s version were indubitably correct, but only describes what has been established according to the protocols governing an adversarial dispute, with all the qualifications that accompany such a procedure. Nevertheless, despite these restrictions on the range of admissible evidence and the means of introducing it, the advocate who argues to a jury must strive to make the evidence appear realistic, evoked in a mimetic fashion. One might catalogue any number of narrative techniques relating to the management of perspective and temporal progression, but perhaps the most obviously effective technique involves the ability to create a sense of direct access to the events being described. To that end, lawyers often attempt to recreate a scene, in the courtroom, by positioning themselves as actors in the drama being rehearsed, asking the witness to confirm how far the actors were standing from each other, and what they were able to see from that location. The aim is not only to restage the scene as if it were being played out for real, but also to invite the jurors to position themselves within the events rather than contemplating the narrative as disembodied observers. By moving about on the floor, directing the jurors’ gaze in one direction or another, seeking to capture the tempo of the events, a lawyer may draw the jurors into the action, in a fashion akin to a novelistic narrator’s efforts to draw the reader into a scene. We may even encounter some of the same markers of proximity in both contexts: deictics such as here and now, along with comparative terms (closer, farther, next), often associated with the representation of consciousness in fiction, are familiar from numerous portrayals of courtroom scenes in film and television. Precisely because the invitation to participate in the action can be so compelling, the opposing counsel will be motivated to find reasons for interrupting the performance, to shatter the illusion of immediacy in a manner that novelists do not have to face when composing their texts. This kinetic approach to the management of the evidence is possible at trial, but not when an appeal is being argued, and is rarely attempted in
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cases without a jury, when the judge is tasked with deciding both the factual and legal issues. If the judge must find the facts, the final result will be a written judgment that begins by summarizing the facts, and then moves on to the law. In some ways, the judgment might be said to resemble a detective story. Detective fiction is notable for the way it cleaves sjuzhet and fabula, combining the narrative of a crime, which has occurred in the past, with the developing narrative of an investigation aimed at uncovering it (Todorov 1977; Porter 1981, 29). The reader’s attention is directed primarily at the task of piecing together those past events, and the plot unfolds in a way that obfuscates that narrative while also revealing it. Legal decisions also combine two stories: the narrative of a conflict that has blossomed into a lawsuit (which may, indeed, be a criminal prosecution) and the narrative of its legal resolution. Judicial writing, however, does not present these stories as two alternative versions of the same narrative. Legal decisions rarely display any uncertainty about the events preceding the professional investigators’ arrival. Even if some details of that story are hard to ascertain, the reader will not be invited to consider them as posing an intriguing problem that the text will eventually solve. Any such doubts typically occupy the same narrative register and are recounted in the same cadences as other details in the factual background, which all form part of a recitation that leaves as little ambiguity as possible. The analysts’ tools are directed not at discovering the true state of affairs leading up to the dispute, but at producing a satisfying legal assessment of the events. The pleasures of mystery fiction depend on the reader’s alignment with the detective in attempting to learn the facts; by contrast, if legal decisions foster any kind of readerly enjoyment or engagement, it depends on the reader’s appreciation of the judge’s acuity and finesse in wielding various legal concepts to reach a conclusion about how the law applies to those facts. Instead of creating suspense or curiosity as a way to enlist the reader’s participation, this narrative procedure aims to secure the reader’s assent (cf. Brewer and Lichtenstein 1981; Hoeken and van Vliet 2000). Moreover, while a judge’s recounting of the facts may include some affective language that strives to modulate the reader’s perception of the actors and events, that remains very much the exception. More typically, the facts emerge in the clipped and staccato tones of someone reciting a foreign language lesson. One of the leading handbooks on judicial writing explains that judges “may interpret the law liberally or strictly, [but] […] must not take this kind of liberty with the facts,” because the judge “is merely the recorder of them” and therefore “must adhere precisely” to them (George 1986, 47). To function as “merely the recorder” of the facts does not necessarily require a bland style, but this advice reflects an
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underlying belief in the importance of a neutral and objective stance, which readily translates into the kind of impassivity we typically find in the decision’s factual summation. Accordingly, there is also little conscious effort to align the reader’s perspective with that of any particular actor. In narrating the facts, a judge might happen to rely primarily on one party’s point of view, or might use spatial markers that bring the reader closer to the plaintiff or defendant, but these effects are usually subtle and inadvertent. Objectivity, in this context, usually means the avoidance of any effort to represent a party’s individual perspective, as we could apprehend it by knowing that person’s thoughts. Thus we will not, for example, see any use of free indirect discourse or psycho-narration in the factual account, even though these techniques may (controversially) appear in other kinds of factual narrative such as biography and journalism (Genette et al. 1990; Cohn 1989). Such conspicuously literary techniques would reflect a deliberate attempt, on the judge’s part, to offer up the perceptions of one party as an accurate view of the transaction; to manage the reader’s access to the events in this fashion would undermine the judge’s objectivity, casting doubt on the validity of the legal conclusion that follows. In addition, the claim to know what a party was thinking, and to treat that thought as simply reflecting the true state of affairs, would conflict with the proviso noted earlier, which always attaches to the factual narrative – namely, that the facts are taken as probabilities rather than certainties. No matter how authoritative and definite its mode of delivery, this narrative does not present the facts as if the judge’s version were indubitably correct. It is routine for judges to summarize the details confidently and without hesitation, knowing that a straightforward style is one of the conventions of legal writing that tacitly carries this proviso; however, that does not extend to the use of narrative techniques that purport to offer unmediated access to the actors’ minds. A judge who proceeded in this way would be seen as directly violating the proviso. Also largely excluded from the factual narrative is the use of dialogue, an essential means of conveying facts and advancing the plot in imaginative writing and in some forms of nonfiction. Unless the dispute turns on the parties’ exact words (for example, in cases involving hate speech, discrimination, or the rights of free expression), judges prefer to summarize rather than to quote. According to the same handbook cited earlier, “stating testimony verbatim […] is […] pointlessly burdensome” (George 1986, 47). We encounter quoted language (but not dialogue) far more often in the judgment’s analytical section, where the accurate rendering of a doctrine may be decisive in guiding the outcome, and may itself play a crucial role as the object of narrative attention if, for example, the judge concludes
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that the language needs to be modified, and the decision changes the law by inaugurating a new formula.5 The nearly universal absence of dialogue, and the prevalence of quotation for matters of law rather than for matters of fact, may remind us of the performative effects of judicial language. Dialogue, when it helps to fuel a plot, serves any number of constative and performative functions, telling the reader about events that have occurred and presenting interactions among the characters that constitute actions in the world of the story. If there is any constative function for the more limited kind of quotation that judges use when citing and applying legal standards, it is nearly inseparable from the performative work this language does. Legal doctrines, standards, and rules come into play as the instruments that resolve disputes (and that, occasionally, undergo change themselves in the process). They act by speaking, and the result is that quotation plays a very different role in legal judgments than in most other narrative forms where it figures. Appearing more in the service of law than fact, quotation takes on some of the features of a character. Instead of aiding in the task of narrative exposition, it appears precisely when it acts on the facts to yield some result. A trial offers limited opportunities for enhancing the factuality of the parties’ evidence, but these opportunities can, at least, be seen as having some commonalities with the techniques that strive to promote a reader’s immersion in a fictional world. Legal judgments, by contrast, enhance their factuality (if at all) by setting out the facts in a manner that makes the descriptions of fact and law seem very similar. Better understanding of what makes for factual realism in legal decisions, then, would require further attention to the techniques that make for objectivity in the treatment of both fact and law. References Allen, Ronald J., and Michael S. Pardo. “The Myth of the Law-Fact Distinction.” Northwestern University Law Review 97.4 (2002): 1769–1808. Baker, J. H. An Introduction to English Legal History. 4th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Brand, Paul. “The Language of the English Legal Profession: The Emergence of a Distinctive Legal Lexicon in Insular French.” The Anglo-Norman Language and Its Contexts. Ed. Richard Ingham. York: York Medieval Press, 2010. 94–101.
5 This kind of attention to judicial language is itself a historical development of the nineteenth century (Tiersma 2006). As Tiersma shows, judges had previously insisted on the importance of adhering closely to the language of statutes, but had not extended this view to judicial decisions.
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Brewer, W. F., and E. H. Lichtenstein. “Event Schemas, Story Schemas, and Story Grammars.” Attention and Performance IX. Eds. John B. Long and Alan D. Baddeley. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1981. 363–379. Cohn, Dorrit. “Fictional Versus Historical Lives: Borderlines and Borderline Cases.” Journal of Narrative Technique 19.1 (1989): 3–24. DiMatteo, Larry A. “Reason and Context: A Dual Track Theory of Interpretation.” Penn State Law Review 109.2 (2004): 397–486. Genette, Gérard, Nitsa Ben-Ari, and Brian McHale. “Fictional Narrative, Factual Narrative.” Poetics Today 11.4 (1990): 755–774. George, Joyce J. Judicial Opinion Writing Handbook. 2nd ed. Buffalo: William S. Hein & Co, 1986. Gilmore, Grant. The Death of Contract. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1974. Hoeken, Hans, and Mario van Vliet. “Suspense, Curiosity, and Surprise: How Discourse Structure Influences the Affective and Cognitive Processing of a Story.” Poetics 27.4 (2000): 277–286. Howe, Mark DeWolfe. “Juries as Judges of Criminal Law.” Harvard Law Review 52.4 (1939): 582–616. Lobban, Michael. “From Seditious Libel to Unlawful Assembly: Peterloo and the Changing Face of Political Crime c1770–1820.” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 10.3 (1990): 307– 352. Meyer, Philip N. Storytelling for Lawyers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Milsom, S.F.C. “Law and Fact in Legal Development.” University of Toronto Law Journal 17.1 (1967): 1–19. Pennington, Nancy, and Reid Hastie. “A Cognitive Theory of Juror Decision Making: The Story Model.” Cardozo Law Review 13.2–3 (1991): 519–558. Porter, Dennis. The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981. Shapiro, Barbara J. A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Shapiro, Jonathan. Lawyers, Liars, and the Art of Storytelling: Using Stories to Advocate, Influence, and Persuade. Chicago: ABA, 2014. Spearing, A.C. “What is a Narrator? Narrator Theory and Medieval Narratives.” Digital Philology 4.1 (2015): 59–105. Stern, Simon. “Legal Fictions and Exclusionary Rules.” Legal Fictions in Theory and Practice. Eds. Maksymilian Del Mar and William Twining. New York: Springer, 2015. 157–173. Stern, Simon. “Legal and Literary Fictions.” New Directions in Law and Literature. Eds. Elizabeth Anker and Bernadette Meyler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. 313–326. Tiersma, Peter M. “The Textualization of Precedent.” Notre Dame Law Review 82.3 (2006): 1187–1278. Todorov, Tzvetan. “The Typology of Detective Fiction.” The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. 42–52.
ANDREAS MAUZ
Truth in (Christian) Religion and in Genres of Religious Narrative 1. Introduction ‘Truth’ and ‘religion’ are notions closely related. As a highly normative concept truth is a key feature of religions – both from an internal perspective, in religion’s self-description, as in potentially critical external perspectives. This centrality needs to be emphasized not despite but because of the variety of ways in which ‘truth’ is relevant in the discourses and practices subsumed under the controversial singular ‘religion.’ Both meet most closely in the idea of a specific ‘religious truth,’ but that fusion is just one of many ways in which truth and religion may relate one with the other. Seen structurally, one can observe a number of different positions; these range from the conviction that religion provides the one and only ‘real’ or ‘eternal’ truth to the more moderate idea of different kinds of truths (religious truth being one of them) to the again exclusivist position that religion has no relation with truth whatsoever (i.e. its phenomena simply cannot have the property ‘true’). If the issue of the connection between truth and religion is controversial, such controversy comes up not only in disputes between different religions but also in different traditions within religions. In fact, the problem of understanding specific truths and how to live in accordance with them is a central reason for the existence of such subentities (‘confessions,’ ‘denominations’). This central and controversial relation between religion and truth also applies to the specific topic discussed here: the variety of religious narrative genres. In all standard perspectives on these narratives – the relation between the author(s) and the text, the text as such, and the text and its readers – issues of truth will be present either explicitly or implicitly. The following considerations on the topic focus predominantly (but not exclusively) on Christianity. (On Buddhism see / V.6 Hu von Hinüber and Soni.) This is a necessary practical limitation: it makes it possible to discuss some classic issues within one of the major religious traditions. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-027
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However, this also implies that the material discussed can count as ‘exemplary’ only to a limited extent. Especially if understood in functionalist terms (e.g. religion as what Lübbe calls “coping with contingency” (Lübbe 1998) and not in traditional substantialist terms (e.g. religion as a reaction to manifestations of ‘the sacred’), there are always more phenomena and types of narrative worth mentioning (Sterk and Caputo 2014; Brahier and Johannsen 2013). Religion is a concrete practice, a ‘normal’ dimension of everyday life, not something restricted to the intellectual realm of knowledge, reflection, dogma, and theology. Such an emphasis on religion as practice offers an essentially negative answer to the major question of a contextually appropriate understanding of truth. When it comes to truth in religion, the classic objectivist concept of truth is plausible only in a limited way. Truth is here not exclusively a matter of ‘historical facts’ and ‘empirical perception’; religion is not a realm in which utterances are clearly correct or false within a basic correspondence model of truth (/ II.1 Klauk, / II.2 Bartmann). In contrast, one basic understanding of truth that religious discourse offers is pragmatic or, more precisely, existential. While the classic concept of truth insists on intersubjectivity and verifiability (/ III.10 Walsh, / II.12 Milne), religious truth focuses on the person for whom something is true/ the truth. Within this framework truth refers to a kind of knowledge that ‘ultimately’ provides orientation in life – that is, a truth to live by, which can thus also be called ‘certainty’ or ‘trust.’ Crucially, such a truth based in a “will to believe” (James 1896) can also be communicated, even if it cannot be tested by the strong procedures ideally used to test objective truth(s). When we turn to narrative as a central medium of religious communication, these issues can be illustrated in detail. 2. Narrative in Christian tradition A few key features of (factual) narrative in (Christian) religion can be identified in terms of theology’s disciplinary canon of Biblical Studies, Dogmatics, and Practical Theology. These categories make it possible to discuss forms, functions, and contexts of narrative practice in relation to scholarly perspectives on them. While they do overlap, their specific perspectives on narrative are distinct: Biblical Studies emphasize formal and historical features of narrative, Dogmatics deals with its normative side, and Practical Theology focuses on empirical problems, on the practice of (oral) narration. In short, theological discourse, with its sub-disciplines, may in many ways be centrifugal, but the issue of narration offers a way to integrate these areas (Finnern 2014).
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3. Disciplinary perspectives 3.1 Biblical studies Discussions of narrative in Christianity must begin with the bible. The double canon of the Old and New Testament (OT/NT) – understood as Sacred Scripture – is a core element of Christian religious identity. As an actual library (Gr. biblia, ‘books’), the bible may be made up of quite heterogeneous genres (such as laws, proverbs, poetry, and letters), but it is essentially a book of stories: “Typically, the bible does not say ‘This is what you must believe’ but ‘This is what happened’” (Barton and Halliburton 1981, 79; Sternberg 1985; Nolan Fewell 2016). And as the OT begins with not one but two accounts of creation and the NT ends with a vision of the end of times, the programmatic narrative structure of the bible as a whole is an arc between the very beginning and the very end of salvation history – the one story of God and mankind. 3.1.1 Old Testament About half of the 39 books of the OT (around three quarters of the biblical canon) include narrative material. Its central topic is the conflictual relation between God and his creation and especially his people Israel, among them first of all glorious or not so glorious individuals like the ‘fathers’ (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob), the prophets communicating God’s will to the people, and several strong female characters (Esther, Ruth). The specific religious contour of this heterogeneous material has three interrelated dimensions (Fee and Stuart 1993, 79): the universal dimension (“top level”) of the creation, the fall, the need for redemption, and ultimate redemption; the ethnic-political dimension (“middle level”) of Israel’s destiny (from Abraham via Exodus to the conquest of the Holy Land, subsequent exile, and the return of the people to Israel); and the individual dimension (“bottom level”) of the many narratives constituting the upper levels. Theological use of this schema is characterized by a clearly normative perspective: “Old Testament narratives are not just stories about people who lived in Old Testament times. They are first and foremost stories about what God did to and through those people. […] God is the supreme ‘protagonist’ or decisive character in all narratives” (1993, 81; emphasis original). The premises of this kind of theological hermeneutics allow God’s work to be seen even where he is absent as an intratextual character. But large parts of contemporary scholarship work without such an integrative perspective and discuss individual narratives as such. And this goes
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especially for (non-theological interpretations) of narratives supposed to possess ‘archetypal’ or ‘mythical’ ‘true’ qualities (such as Cain and Abel, the Tower of Babylon, or Jacob wrestling with the Angel). While legal texts framed by narratives – most famously the Tablets of the Law from Mount Sinai (Ex 19–34) – present at least formally straightforward declarations of divine and true commandments, the existential implications of OT narrative practice can be exemplified by Dt 26:5–10, the so-called “small historical Credo” (von Rad 1938, 12). The highly formalized passage, which is the object of considerable discussion regarding its historical use, refers to decisive episodes in Israel’s history: “And thou shalt speak and say before the LORD thy God, A Syrian ready to perish was my father, and he went down into Egypt […] / And the Egyptians evil entreated us […] / And when we cried unto the LORD […]. And the LORD brought us forth out of Egypt with a mighty hand” (Dt 26:5–8).1 The point of this narrative confession lies in its involving discourse: events long past are being actualized as one’s own (collective) experience (cf. the reading practice in the Jewish Pessach-Haggada).
3.1.2 New Testament Within the NT, the last third of the small biblical library, narrative discourse is even more dominant (Luther et al. 2015). If the term is understood broadly, all the books except for the letters are narratives. This dominance is related to the clear focus of the material: these 26 books are all directly connected to the (historical) figure of Jesus of Nazareth. And this name, if combined with the title ‘Christ,’ is the shorthand formula for both the bible’s and Christianity’s truth (Landmesser 1999). Jesus Christ is “the name above all other names” (Phil 2:9). The title Christ refers to Israel’s expectation of the messiah (Gr. Christós; cf. 1 Sam 26:9; Jes 7:14), a savior figure who, in Christian terms, has arrived in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. The promise of the OT is fulfilled in the NT and the link between the Hebrew bible and the NT books is amply evident in the ‘fulfilment quotes’ (especially in the Gospel of Matthew). Thus, in addition to the historical development of the Jewish and Christian religions, these intertextual references show clearly that the NT is derived from and builds on the OT, which is superseded by the arrival of Christ as witnessed in the
1 All quotations from the bible are taken from the King James Translation (Standard Version).
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NT. As a result, the articulation of Christian truth is particularly difficult in relation to the Jewish religion. Within the NT’s literary genres – biography, historiography, letters, apocalypse – the theologically crucial biography presented in the gospels stands at the very beginning. Here, the Christian hero is the central figure. The opening line of the Gospel of Mark inaugurates the genre: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (Mk 1:1). The term εὺαγγέλιον / eu angélion (Gr. ‘good news’) thus characterizes both the genre – a specific Christian type of “kerygmatic-historiographic biography” (Dormeyer 1989, 173) – and its content: the good news of God becoming human and thus opening the way to salvation. The gospel narratives have few events: Jesus’s birth and first exploits, his teachings and deeds (among them the ‘miracles’), his passion and death, and his resurrection. These are generally presented in chronological order (with the decisive exception of proleptical announcements of his sufferings, as in Mk 8:31). But both the details of the story and their discursive arrangements differ in the individual gospels: for example, only Luke offers a detailed account of Jesus’s birth; Mark emphasizes the future passion of the hero; and only John mentions several visits to Jerusalem. Even the specifics of central incidents vary, such as Jesus’s place of birth (Bethlehem vs. Nazareth), his last words on the cross, or the presentation of the resurrection. The last of these involves a striking gap in the narrative: while there are indirect hints about the ‘event’ – most prominently the empty grave – it is itself left out. During the process of canon building, these many ‘contradictions’ were obviously not perceived as a problem. The narrative plurality of the four gospels did not seem to endanger the theological unity of the one Gospel (if not more than that: the plurality as a necessary means to express the Gospel adequately). In any case, the church’s refusal to stick to just one ‘clean’ gospel (as repeatedly proposed during church history), or to at least ‘correct’ the most obvious inconsistencies, offered much material for Enlightenment critique. Even beyond such central passages, each gospel presents a specific profile of the hero. If the gospels are kerygmatic biographies, accounts written by believers for believers, this does not mean they should not be treated as biographies (in the sense of presenting accurate historical data). Since there exist very few non-Christian sources on the historical Jesus (which are thus extremely valuable), the NT and especially the gospels are the major historical source for the life of Jesus.
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3.1.3 The gospels of Luke and John As with the vast majority of the biblical books, the authorship of the Gospel of Luke is highly uncertain. ‘Luke’ (Lk) is not the name of a historically traceable member of early Christianity but a pragmatic shorthand for a complex process of writing and redaction guided by a ‘community theology’ that ended around 90–100 AD with the text of the gospel passed on under that name. ‘Luke’ (from now on Luke) is famous for being a talented narrator, a perception based in part on the gospel’s prologue. He is the only evangelist to use a first-person narrator: Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us […]; / It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, / That thou mightest know the certainty of those things […]. (1:1–4)
The narrator here follows ancient historiography: he begins with explicit metatextual reflections on his predecessors, on his methods, and on his intentions – and he directly addresses his work to a specific recipient (with, as one can see, a meaningful name: ‘the lover of God’). This representative of listeners or readers learns with them about “those things […] most surely believed among us.” Still, this first-person discourse only appears in the prologue. From 1:5 to the end of the book, as in the other Gospels, an impersonal heterodiegetic narrator takes over: “There was in the days of Herod, the king of Judaea, […].” The representation of the risen Christ’s ascension at the end of the Gospel of Luke does not connect back to the prologue – but such a recourse can be found in the prologue to Luke’s Acts of the Apostles (Luke is the only evangelist to write a second canonical work, which portrays the beginning of the Christian church in historical time). Luke’s ‘historiographic’ approach leads him to write a biographical account that includes both the birth and youth of Jesus (while Mark starts with Christ’s first public appearance). He is the only one to provide a precise year for the appearance of John the Baptist, and thus also for that of Jesus, and he also supplies links to other historical events (2:1; 3:1). Here, too, the interest in history is intertwined with theology: the annunciation of John’s birth as a miracle is not only carefully connected to the birth of Jesus but superseded and outdone by this event (1:5–2:52). But it is the Gospel of John (Joh) that can be called the ‘gospel of truth.’ As in the associated Johannine epistles, ‘truth’ and its derivates run through the narrative. Christ himself, in one of several mighty sayings beginning with “I am,” even explicitly calls himself “the truth” (14:6) – and, in fact,
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declares himself to be the only truth giving access to God, an exclusive status illustrated by several strong metaphors (cf. 1:9 etc.). But it is the beginning of this gospel that establishes the unique profile of John in comparison to all the other so-called synoptic gospels (Mt, Mk, Joh). In stark contrast to Luke’s historiographic orientation, John begins in medias res with a poetic hymn to the lógos that refers back to Gen 1:1 and thus articulates its own kind of truth claim (Joh 1:1–16): “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. […] And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth” (Joh 1:1–14). Christ is the truth in person who also proclaims truths. This is also corroborated when his self-declaration as the only truth is confirmed by others (cf. 4:17 etc.). As the disciple “whom Jesus loved” (13:23 etc.) puts it, as an eye-witness to the crucifixion: “And he that saw it bare record, and his record is true: and he knoweth that he saith true, that ye might believe” (19:35). In a phrasing that evokes the logic of the fulfillment of the OT predictions, this verse also secures the gospel’s authority (cf. 21:24!). 3.2 Dogmatics For Christians, the bible as Sacred Scripture is ‘true’ as it becomes apparent pragmatically in its constant ecclesiastical and individual use as well as in the book’s materiality and aesthetic presentation. These practices also involve the more concrete idea of a true narrative: the gospels’ narrative provides a foundation for central Christian beliefs and ritual practices such as the sacraments of baptism and communion, and turns them into a kind of re-enactment. Consideration of why and in what sense the bible and its narratives are true is part of the task of dogmatic theology and of its systematic elaboration of Christian belief both addressed to members of the Church as to Non-Christians. 3.2.1 Scripture’s authority and truth So why is the bible seen as a source of theological authority? Answers to this question have clear consequences, for theological claims about Christian practice are generally required ‘to comply’ with Sacred Scripture. These answers are also directly connected to decisive moments in the history of Christianity, especially to the Reformation (Lauster 2004). The criticisms of the Roman Church made by Luther and his fellow protestants were based on Scripture. The ‘reformation’ the protestants had in mind was
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thus generally a return to origins, a curtailment of traditions established over the centuries. In response to the programmatic call Sola Scriptura (‘by Scripture alone’), Roman Catholicism dogmatically asserted the double authority of Scripture and Tradition, with Tradition represented by the Church. During the subsequent theological and military controversies, Protestant theology enforced the ‘Scriptural Principle’ in a strict formal manner: the understanding of the bible as the infallible written ‘Word of God’ – infallible thanks to divine inspiration of the biblical authors – became the basis of all theological claims. The idea of ‘verbal inspiration’ made it possible to ground a particular kind of truth in ‘Scriptural evidence.’ This enforcement of formal Church authority (by means of ‘verbal inspiration’), rejecting as it did Luther’s emphasis on the core material issue of atonement, solved one problem, but eventually, with the rise of the Enlightenment and modern Biblical Criticism, opened new avenues for further controversies. Both the idea of Scripture as the exclusive source of all theological knowledge and the claim to infallibility came under pressure from outside as well as inside the Christian tradition. The old need to deal with seemingly inconsistent, contradictory, incomprehensible, or even immoral passages returned with a vengeance. A decisive turn in reflecting on the growing crisis of Scriptural principle was made by Schleiermacher in his Dogmatics (1980 [1822], 221–224). He no longer regards faith as the consequence of the believer’s encounter with Scripture but, inversely, sees it as gaining its special status from faith. While some theologians maintained strong theories of Scripture’s authority, many – including the majority of academic Protestant theologians – moved on to other, less absolute theories. If the classical pre-modern argument for Scripture as the written ‘Word of God’ is a genetic theory based on a particular idea about the genesis of the biblical text, one successful modern mode of understanding biblical authority is that of effect theories. These still call Scripture the ‘Word of God,’ but only in relation to individual readers experiencing their encounter with Scripture as a call from God at a given moment (though not necessarily at all times). 3.2.2 The resurrection as narrative and central dogma While the critique of the authority of Scripture always remains pertinent on a general level of the discussion of any specific biblical book or text, miraculous events attract particular attention – especially Jesus’s Resurrection. Any analysis of this event always involves a more general questioning of Christianity’s authoritative claim to verifiable truth; after all, Christiani-
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ty’s first theologian, Paul, declared: “if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain” (1 Cor 15:14). The Resurrection, thus, is not merely an episode among others; it is the very basis of Christian faith’s truth. One of the fundamental issues at stake was, and still is, the status of the Resurrection, in simple terms: is it a ‘historical’ event or, if not, what is it (Novakovic 2016)? If both historicity and this ‘something else’ have many different interpretations, one can still raise the key question: if it were possible to prove that Jesus’s body rotted in his tomb, would this affect Christian belief – and if so, how? Though such a proof cannot be supplied, two straightforward alternatives are worth noting. From the perspective of history and the continuity of the Jesus narrative, a ‘full’ tomb would necessarily lead to an empty faith, stripped of its foundation. But from the perspective of theology and the discontinuity of the narrative, faith could be absolutely independent from this essentially unhistorical but eschatological event. Protestant existentialist theologian Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) adopted this latter position, arguing that the resurrection of Christ (and not of Jesus) is a resurrection into “kerygma” – that is, into the post-Easter community’s faithful proclamation of belief in Christ’s transformative power and, thereby, in a new self-understanding (Bultmann 1965, passim). Modern critique has in fact been focused less on potential theological problems than on filling in gaps in the gospel narratives. One classic critical explanation of the empty grave (Mt 28:1–6 and parallels) – in the sense of unmasking this ‘proof’ of the resurrection – was the speculation that the disciples stole Jesus’s body (an idea already represented in the gospel itself; Mt 28:12–14). According to this thesis, they faked the resurrection to fulfill his predictions and to cover up his and their own failures. A more psychological explanation of the narratives of the risen Christ’s appearances argues that the disciples only experienced his presence thanks to ‘visions’ provoked by their bad conscience for having abandoned him during his imprisonment (cf. the so-called “Fragmentenstreit” around Reimarus and Lessing; Fick 2016, 372–402). 3.3 Between and beyond biblical studies and dogmatics: Revelation narratives The issue of the revelation narrative opens up the scope of this discussion and, at least systematically, reaches beyond the Judeo-Christian tradition. This genre’s relationship to the problem of truth is not sufficiently appreciated in narrative research in religious studies and theology.
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When Lutheran theologians belonging to ‘Protestant Orthodoxy’ talked about Scripture’s infallibility, this was an external dogmatic description. But in order to develop this theory they also made use of internal self-descriptions in the many scriptures forming the Scripture. They turned to passages that seemed to articulate or at least support a strong understanding of biblical authority, especially 2 Tim 3:16 and 2 Peter 1:19, with their explicit use of theopnéustos (‘God-breathed’) referring to Scripture (in the sense of Thora/OT!). If such a claim is argumentative, another type of internal genetic self-description is narrative. Passages such as the account of Moses’s ascent of Mount Sinai or that of John receiving eschatological visions on Patmos Island (Rev 1) provide information on how these texts came to be written (John’s Apocalypse being a special case, as it is the only biblical book that claims to be entirely revealed). Although these passages had a specific reference to a certain part of (a) Scripture, they could still serve as a model to illustrate – or even prove – the entire text’s extraordinary status. The argumentative strategy of scriptural evidence was thus also applied to ground formally the many material proofs (such as the properties of God or certain ethical claims). Such narrative framing is of course not only found in the Christian bible. Texts that claim to be the result of a collaboration bridging the transcendent and the immanent, between the divinity and the human scribe, form a distinct genre that runs through the history of religion; it can be encountered in medieval mysticism, in the many ‘new revelations’ of a vast number of religious groups of quite different types, including extremely successful movements such as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with The Book of Mormon, or contemporary esoteric communities with their ‘channeled’ texts (Hammer 2001). A descriptive poetological modification of the notion of the “sacred text” can clarify the characteristic interplay between framing narratives and the revealed texts they frame (Mauz 2016). Within a poetological horizon ‘sacredness’ is a phenomenon on the textual surface. Here, ‘sacred’ is not a referential or factual attribute based on the assumed incidents of revelation; it is based solely on the text’s self-description as revealed. A ‘sacred text’ is then one that explicitly claims to be the product of a supernatural intervention. A focus on the modes of a text’s self-representation as ‘sacred’ does not consider the entire text but primarily the passages that perform its ‘sanctification.’ Thus, there are two text types that establish a ‘sacred text’: the sanctifying and the sanctified text. The narrative in Rev 1, John’s experiences on Patmos, is the sanctifying text of the Apocalypse, Chapters 2 to 22 are thus sanctified. If classifying a narrative as a sanctifying text means ascribing a functional identity to it, its medial characteristic is best captured by the term revelation narrative.
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The specificity of any given revelation narrative lies in how it represents the act of writing. Sanctifying texts regularly include descriptions of rather peculiar acts of composition; the special dignity of the product derives from the extravagances of its production and the modalities of how its signs find their way onto some writable medium (be it a stone, parchment, paper, or a digital writing device). In addition, we may differentiate ‘sacred texts’ poetologically in terms of the extent to which human action is involved in the reception of the divine message. Is the receiver’s task just that of transmitting the already written words to the people (like famously the case with the first tablets of the Law from Mount Sinai, written by “the Finger of God,” Ex 31:18)? Or is it the more complex – and thus fallible – process of taking down the words from different forms of dictation (as is the case of the second tablets written by Moses, Ex 34:28)? Or has the writer to indite the text independently, trying to find an adequate wording as for instance in the case of visionary experiences? 3.4 Practical theology If narration in a dogmatic context is primarily normative, Practical Theology focuses on its contemporary manifestations and benefits. In ecclesiastical practice, three contexts have an especially close relation to oral and intermedial practices of narration: preaching, religious education, and pastoral counseling. Especially in the Protestant tradition, the sermon is the center of religious services and these services also include other genres that are themselves at least partly narrative, such as readings, songs, prayers, or confessions. The sermon’s task is essentially that of interpreting the biblical texts as the true Gospel; the preacher refers back to the text and seeks to adapt its truth to the community’s present reality. This practice can again be evaluated in weaker or stronger forms: what is the status of the preacher’s words? Are they scholarly informed comments or are they to be seen as a form of the “Word of God,” as Karl Barth famously posited in his theory of the threefold word (the word “that became flesh,” the bible’s written word, and the word preached; Barth 2009, 88–124)? Independent of this crucial question, in religious services just as in religious education, the key question will be how much selection and interpretation of the biblical text occurs and to what extent these narratives function just like other contemporary fictional and factual narratives. Which stories are told in what way for what ‘didactic’ purposes? In reflections on pastoral counseling, one can most clearly identify a basic conviction that is also present elsewhere: narrative discourse is not merely seen as a contingent communicative medium; instead, in accordance with psychology and/or philosophy,
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narrative emerges as anthropologically connected with models of ‘narrative identity.’ Emphasis lies on the narrative articulation of biographical experiences and their integration into an overarching life story – not least negative ones especially relevant in counseling. This sometimes leads to models of ‘Narrative Theologies.’ Though there are considerable differences between the continental debate and the English language one, they all share a clear opposition towards argumentative discourse perceived as a philosophical feature estranging theology from its ‘natural’ inclination towards narrative (Hauerwas and Jones 1997; Mauz 2009). 3.5 Conversion narratives If in these cases we can easily track supra-individual narrative patterns, this is especially true of accounts of incidents leading to a religious perception of oneself and of the world. The (auto-)biographical genre of conversion narrative is paradigmatic for it goes to the very core of somebody’s identity: it displays how someone became ‘a new man,’ how she or he adopted – in most cases irreversibly – a new mode of being, a life in ‘truth’ that reorganizes existence both retrospectively and prospectively. The following are two classic examples: thanks to a ‘revelation by Jesus Christ,’ Saul turns into Paul, from an enemy of a new sect into its first theologian (Gal 1:11– 24; cf. Act 9). Augustine famously hears a playing child saying “tolle lege” (‘take and read’), perceives this as a divine order, and opens up the bible at random (Rom 13:13–14). As a consequence puts an end to his somewhat bohemian lifestyle (Conf VIII, 12:29). Especially since the linguistic turn, the study of conversion narratives has turned into detailed analyses of the properties of such stories as a reconstructive genre (Hindmarsh 2014). Following Ulmer’s seminal study (1988), conversion narratives usually have a tripartite narrative structure, in which events fall into three phases: the pre-conversional, the actual conversion and the post-conversional. The turning point of the conversion generally dominates the narrative discourse: it is displayed in rather detailed fashion, while pre- and post-conversional events are narrated in broad strokes. Another prominent feature of the genre’s discourse is its discontinuity, its confrontation with the limits of language, as can be seen in fragmentary sentences and the search for an adequate manner of articulating the conversion experience. This articulatory disorder has a significant communicative impact: it performatively underlines the extraordinary status of the conversion event. With the conversion serving as the narrative’s core, pre-conversional and post-conversional phases correspond directly in their functions. On the one hand, the pre-conversional phase must prepare the field (i.e. supplying an account
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involving a negative evaluation of the situation that posits a need for fundamental change, usually a crisis). On the other, the post-conversional highlights the positive effects of the conversion; it serves as a means of ‘verification’ – either by portraying a life free from any of the old problems or by stronger ‘evidence’ like a healing experience or the unexpected acquisition of material wealth. While older research focused on the question of whether or to what extent such narratives allow for a factual confirmation of the ‘actual’ events, the communicative paradigm eschews the way of reference and factuality by emphasizing that the narrative itself is an essential part of the conversion experience. Conversion’s ‘zero hour’ is thrown into relief in the act of its communication by means of established narrative patterns. 4. Conclusions The few fields and genres mentioned by no means cover the full range of the truth/narrative-complex in Christianity and beyond. But they do give an idea of the centrality and diversity of that complex. Reformulated with respect to the above mentioned threefold perspective: the religious text’s truth and authority may generally reside in its ‘higher origin’ (be it intra- or extratextually attributed). Secondly, along with formal features like canonization and aesthetic presentation, it may become apparent in the text’s own content (be it the life of a founding religious figure or accounts of the world’s creation or downfall). Finally, the text’s authoritative status emerges in its pragmatic use as a resource for guidance in life and in doctrinal reflection. And these levels of analysis are not limited to classic sacred texts; they equally apply to the extended archive of various genres of religious narrative. If the fictional-factual difference did not explicitly play a role in this tour d’horizon, this reflects the bulk of theological scholarship that uses a terminology that stems mainly from discourses other than classical narratology. Using the systematic resources available in narratology could thus be a central task for future scholarship. Another eminent future horizon might include a critique of narrative, generally or in reference to specific (types of ) narratives. Both in religious studies and in theology, a highly affirmative attitude towards narrative is prevalent; narrative is generally seen as ‘good’ because it is ‘holistic,’ ‘pluralistic,’ ‘didactically useful,’ and so on. However, when it comes to issues of truth, a critical perspective on narrative and its uses is imperative.
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References Barth, Karl. Church Dogmatics. Vol. I.1: The Doctrine of the Word of God. London: Bloomsbury, 2009. Barton, John, and John Halliburton. “Story and Narrative.” Believing in the Church: The Corporate Nature of Faith. A Report by the Doctrine Commission of the Church of England. Ed. Commission of the Church of England. London: SPCK, 1981. Brahier, Gabriela, and Dirk Johannsen. Eds. Konstruktionsgeschichten: Narrationsbezogene Ansätze in der Religionsforschung. Würzburg: Ergon, 2013. Bultmann, Rudolf. “Zum Problem der Entmythologisierung.” Glauben und Verstehen. Gesammelte Aufsätze. Vol. IV. Tübingen: Mohr, 1965. 128–137. Dormeyer, Detlev. Evangelium als literarische und theologische Gattung. Darmstadt: WBG, 1989. Fee, Gordon D., and Douglas Stuart. How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1993. Fick, Monika. Lessing-Handbuch. 4th ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2016. Finnern, Sönke. “Narration in Religious Discourse: The Example of Christianity.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narration-religiousdiscourse-example-christianity. Eds. Peter Hühn et al. Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2014 (28 April 2018). Hammer, Olav. Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Hauerwas, Stanley, and L. Gregory Jones. Eds. Why Narrative? Readings in Narrative Theology. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1997. Hindmarsh, Bruce. “Religious Conversions as Narrative and Autobiography.” The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion. Eds. Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 343–368. James, William. “The Will to Believe.” The New World 5 (1896): 327–347. King James Bible. Standard Version. https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org (28 April 2018). Landmesser, Christof. Wahrheit als Grundbegriff neutestamentlicher Wissenschaft. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999. Lauster, Jörg. Prinzip und Methode. Die Transformation des protestantischen Schriftprinzips durch die historische Kritik von Schleiermacher bis zur Gegenwart. Tu¨bingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004. Luther, Susanne, et al. Ed. Wie Geschichten Geschichte schreiben. Frühchristliche Literatur zwischen Faktualität und Fiktionalität. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015. Lübbe, Hermann. “Kontingenzerfahrung und Kontingenzbewältigung.” Kontingenz. Eds. Gerhart von Graevenitz and Odo Marquard. Munich: Fink, 1998. 35–47. Mauz, Andreas. “Theology and Narration. Reflections on the ‘Narrative Theology’-Debate and Beyond.” Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research. Eds. Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. 261–285. Mauz, Andreas. Machtworte. Studien zur Poetik des ‘heiligen Textes.’ Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016. Nolan Fewell, Danna. Ed. The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. Novakovic, Lidija. Resurrection: A Guide for the Perplexed. London: Bloomsbury, 2016. Rad, Gerhard von. Das formgeschichtliche Problem des Hexateuchs. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1938. Schleiermacher, Friedrich D. E. Der christliche Glaube […]. Vol. 2. [1822] Kritische Gesamtausgabe I.7.1/2. Ed. Hermann Peiter. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1980. Sterk, Andrea, and Nina Caputo. Eds. Faithful Narratives: Historians, Religion, and the Challenge of Objectivity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014.
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Sternberg, Meir. The Poetics of Biblical Narrative. Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Ulmer, Bernd. “Konversionserzählungen als rekonstruktive Gattung. Erzählerische Mittel und Strategien bei der Rekonstruktion eines Bekehrungserlebnisses.” Zeitschrift für Soziologie 17.1 (1988): 19–33.
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The Narration of Scientific Facts If there is a meaningful concept of scientific fact, it is one that cuts across the more careful standard distinction between scientific observation and scientific theory. That is, there are both empirical scientific facts (water at a pressure of one atmosphere boils at 100 degrees centigrade) and principled general scientific facts (cell theory describes the fundamental structure of living organisms). Both observations and theories may come to be regarded as factual within a scientific community; the sense of ‘fact’ that applies, though, is not only more rigorous but also more skeptical than factuality as ordinarily understood. To call a fact ‘scientific’ is not exactly to say that it is a more absolute fact (as common usage implies), but rather that it is a more accountable fact. The rigorous aspect of this accountability is secured by the methodical standards of science: theories must be testable, and be extensively tested; particular observations must meet the criteria of established practice in the relevant field and hence be, at least in principle, reproducible. The skepticism that attaches to the notion of fact in science is just the flip side of the accountability. Scientific theories have to be falsifiable to be testable, and their legitimacy is not a matter of confirmation, strictly speaking, but of demonstrated robustness in the face of efforts at falsification. As the Popperian doctrine of falsificationism has it, scientific facts are not ultimately confirmed, so much as tested beyond reasonable doubt (2002 [1959]). There are pragmatic dimensions to such factuality: theories are accountable within the scope of their applicability, within certain degrees of approximation, and within the limits of the questions they answer, and these considerations are contingent upon the current agenda of research in the relevant fields. A robust theory is one that is too well tested to be worth further testing, but that criterion is relative to a given state of the science. Scientific facts, then, are part of the discourse of knowledge, and there is an irreducible conceptual gap between facts in that sense and the states of affairs with which they are concerned. This point is similarly applicable at the level of scientific observations. They are factual to the extent that they are independent of the circumstanhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-028
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tial variables of a particular act of observation, a criterion of objectivity secured by the accountability of observation to standards of in-principle reproducibility. Yet ‘objectivity’ here clearly cannot mean independence from the human perspective as such. Observations do not present the reality or state of affairs itself, but the phenomenon as registered by our senses or their technological extensions, our instruments; this is inherent in the status of observations as knowledge. Empiricism is founded upon the evidential basis of knowledge, but its practice is also framed by the contingencies of currently prevailing systems of knowledge. Theories must hang together; observations, and methods of observation, must be consistent. Science is above all systematic, which means (counterintuitively) that precisely to the extent that it is cumulative, it privileges a coherence theory rather than correspondence theory of truth (see / II.2 Bartmann, / II.1 Klauk).1 Note that to say so is not to opt for philosophical idealism rather than realism; unlike the former, both coherence and correspondence theories of truth are (in their scientific manifestations) finally accountable to empirical data. Both concern the relation of knowledge to reality, but whereas correspondence theories conceive this relation atomistically, point by point, coherence theories conceive of it holistically, as the adequacy of a domain of knowledge to its object. This premium upon coherence is confirmed, not refuted, by the fact that scientific paradigms are occasionally superseded by more inclusive or more finely granular explanatory frameworks. Factuality, as a property of discourses, does not apply simply to what is, but rather to what can be truly said about what is. Truth, being necessarily couched within terms of some conceptual framework, is implicated in considerations of form; and narrative form is a case in point, one that is both ubiquitously invoked and deeply problematic. Scientific facts come into relation with narrative for two kinds of reason, one having to do with explanation, the other with communication. The former is the privileged use of narrative in science education, while the latter is dominant in science communication, though of course both modes are invoked in both contexts. My distinction here, despite the apparent compatibility of explanation and communication, is actually an antithetical one. The choice between these two uses of narrative involves two alternative premises about its function: narrative explanation assumes that the form and logic of narrative are adequate to the scientific facts under consideration; whereas narrative communication assumes that narrative form and logic are intelli-
1 For a philosophical overview of the history of scientific method, see Gower (1997); on the systematic nature of science, see Hoyningen-Huene (2013).
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gible to the intended audience, graspable in a way not afforded by the facts themselves (that is, non-narrative articulations of factuality: laws, statistics, systemic distributions of data, formulae, etc.). The value of narrative explanation, then, depends upon the congruence between narrative form and the facts; the value of narrative communication depends upon the difference between them. In broad theoretical terms, the incompatibility between narrative and scientific knowledge is a familiar idea. It is the premise of Jean-François Lyotard’s argument in The Postmodern Condition, which characterizes the postmodern crisis of delegitimation as a result of the way science has defined its own authority and integrity in opposition to narrative knowledge, only to find that the project of science itself rests upon metanarratives that must themselves fall within the scope of its skepticism, or its “incredulity” towards narrative (1984 [1979], xxiv; also see / III.11 Borrelli). The impossibility of an objective narrative of facts has also been played out in Hayden White’s critique of historiography (1987), which argues that narrative history can never be just the exposition of historical fact because narrative is intrinsically evaluative discourse, and the sources of its value system are not the empirical world of historical events but the discursive forms (the genres, tropes, and archetypes) of cultural narratives (see / III.4 Jaeger). Despite the occasional rhetorical excesses of these theorists, however, such considerations do not conflate narrative in general with fiction. These are issues native to the discourses of narrative factuality. While the qualities of narrative as cultural discourse do have some purchase upon the pursuit of scientific knowledge, narrative is more relevant (though no less problematic) when taken as fundamentally a mode of cognition.2 The convergence between narratology and cognitive science has increasingly located the roots of narrative sense-making in embodied cognitive behavior, a full account of which would need to encompass evolutionary and developmental parameters as well as cultural contexts. Narrative cognition is the form in which we grasp process, and so conceive of temporality; it has an irreducible relation to what it means to make sense of these things. Nonetheless, it does not require much reflection to see that it is not the only way of conceptualizing time and process, since other conceptual frameworks have currency within certain fields of inquiry, and indeed in general cultural discourse. There are systems models and probabilistic models of process; tensed models of time that situate the past
2 A succinct definition of narrative cognition, avoiding presupposition of everything that is consequent upon thinking narratively, would be “the semiotic articulation of linear temporal sequence” (Walsh 2018, 12).
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and future relative to a changing ‘now’ (or ‘A-series’ time, in philosophical parlance, in contrast with the spatialized timeline of ‘B-series’ or calendric time); as well as four-dimensional conceptions of time, among others.3 Such ideas can be intuitive as well as intellectual, but their intelligibility nonetheless remains, more or less overtly, in dialogue with a narrative mode of understanding. Narrative is the elemental form on which we draw whenever something happens, to the extent that to make sense of events, in basic cognitive terms, is just to grasp them together as a narrative. Yet narrative form is not neutral or transparent to phenomena: it establishes hierarchies of salience and axes of relation, as any sense-making activity must, and these have tendentious features at a far more fundamental level than the narrative qualities that were of concern to Lyotard and White. It is not just that our narrative understanding is conditioned by the familiar devices and templates we have assimilated from dominant cultural forms of narrative; the bare possibility of narrative form itself entails significant and prejudicial epistemological commitments. Narrativity, in this cognitive context, is best regarded as the name for those effects intrinsic to thinking narratively, rather than as a measure of the extent to which a given discourse possesses the qualities of a narrative. So, perhaps the most elemental feature of narrative cognition is its anthropocentrism, which is manifest in the human scale of its reference frame and its projection of literal or figurative experientiality upon any subject matter whatever, in forms ranging from the implicit attribution of agency to full-blown anthropomorphism. Anthropocentrism of some kind is inherent to the meaningfulness of any human cognitive construct, but it is also bound up with the contingencies of our evolutionary past in intellectually constraining ways. But the distinctive logic of narrative is not only a product of the circumstantial criteria of competitive advantage in a state of nature, it is also reflexively self-confirming: every individual narrative is intelligible as an instance of a narrative pattern that is itself an abstraction from narrative instances. This reciprocity between the particular and the general is intrinsic to narrative meaning, but the consequent hermeneutic circle necessarily constrains the empiricism of narrative cognition. For example, narrative’s privileging of sequential relations as a sense-making principle not only obscures other kinds of process, but also relies upon irreducibly implicit
3 On the incompatibility between systemic and narrative models of process, see Stepney and Walsh (2018). On the variety of possible conceptions of time (not all of which are decisively aligned with, or incompatible with, narrative understanding), see Markosian (2016). For a helpful discussion of time in philosophy, see the first chapter of Currie (2007).
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connective principles, most obviously our innate model of causal inference. These effects arise from the conceptual primacy of form in narrative cognition, and while the successful imposition of such form is the condition for narrative understanding, it is not just limiting but actually debilitating when attempting to understand processes that are remote from the ordinary experience of an intelligent social animal. Yet challenges of this sort are necessarily presented by, for example, the sciences of the very large or small, the very fast or slow, or just the systemically complex.4 Narrative’s affordances and limitations impinge upon the narration of scientific facts at the level of theory and at that of observation, and both cases foreground the tension between narrative’s explanatory and communicative functions. So, the task when articulating scientific theories is typically both to exemplify, and to do so in terms that are assimilable to a human experiential frame of reference. Two classic examples of such narratives are the ‘twin paradox,’ as an illustration of the principle of time dilation consequent upon the special theory of relativity; and ‘Schrödinger’s cat,’ as a thought experiment concerned with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. A partial version of the problem that became known as the twin paradox was set out by Einstein, using clocks, in his 1905 paper introducing special relativity, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies” (1989 [1905]); the twins themselves were introduced by Paul Langevin in 1911, although Einstein had already implicitly done so by referring to identically constituted living organisms in a 1911 lecture elaborating upon his earlier account.5 Briefly told, the story of the twins is this: one twin goes on a long journey through space at near light speed, while the other remains on earth; the traveling twin returns to find the earth-bound twin is now significantly older.6 The age difference is due to time dilation, a theoretical (and empirically testable) consequence of special relativity; a clock traveling at speed relative to another clock runs more slowly, and the greater the relative speed, the more pronounced the effect. The apparent paradox is that, if motion is relative, both twins are traveling at speed relative to each
4 For a more thorough discussion of the range of implications to be drawn from a definition of narrative in cognitive terms, see Walsh (2018). 5 A succinct and accessible exposition and resolution of the twin paradox is Lasky (2006); a thorough discussion of the pedagogical challenges of explaining the paradox is given in Shuler (2014); the history of Einstein’s own engagements with the problem is given by Pesic (2003). 6 Note that here and subsequently my concern is with the bare narrative form of my examples, not the extent to which they exhibit the qualities we associate with novelistic fiction.
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other, and so time should pass more slowly for each relative to the other. Why do the two effects not cancel each other out? My purpose is not to be detained by the charm of the twin paradox, much less by the physics that explains it, but to note the ways in which narrative interacts with scientific theory here. Einstein’s resort to a narrative example in the first place had expository motives; it made the abstruse mathematics of special relativity concrete and specific, and so made some of its consequences tangible and particular. The example’s mutation from clocks to twins is a predictable anthropocentric consolidation of its narrativity, serving both to express time dilation as an experiential reality rather than a mathematical abstraction, and to make it significant on a human scale. At the same time, it is precisely this narrative move that foregrounds the more disconcerting and fantastical aspects of the idea. The story of the twins is in one sense a literal extrapolation of the implications of time dilation, but it is the human scale of this presentation that requires the appeal to near light-speed space travel (to produce time dilation effects of a perceptible magnitude), and so introduces an element of science fiction. By accommodating human scale in one respect, the example exceeds it in another, and shades from narrative explanation into a form of narrative communication that emphasizes the exoticism of the theory. Einstein himself drew attention to this rhetorical shift in his own 1911 elaboration upon the story, describing it as presenting “the thing at its funniest” (Pesic 2003, 586). The story is no longer offering direct access to the theory, so much as providing the vehicle for an imaginative leap. In this guise, the narration of scientific facts works less as an instance of direct factuality than as a form with some of the qualities of parable, the figurative projection of one story onto another (Turner 1996). A parable is cast in terms accessible to understanding in ways that the target domain is not; all narrative presentation of theory has this character in a sense, being a projection of the concrete or particular onto the abstract or general. Since its explanatory power depends upon difference, however, it also greatly increases the potential for inappropriate inferences, and misinterpretation. The ‘paradoxical’ quality of the twin paradox is itself an instance of such mistaken inference, the root of which is not the issue of scale, but the bare fact of narrative’s anthropocentric perspectivalism. Attempts to disentangle the example from paradox have taken a surprising variety of directions, all of them struggling to reconcile the mathematical theoretical framework with narrative form, which both makes it accessible and resists it. In essence the apparent asymmetry between the experiences of the two twins is explained by the fact that the space traveling twin’s out-and-back journey necessarily involves a change of inertial frame of reference that does not apply to the earth-bound twin. The irreducible relativity of inertial
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frames of reference is at the heart of special relativity; there is no absolute temporality, no absolute present, and so the axis of simultaneity between the two twins need not correspond to equivalent elapsed time. Yet the story of the twins, as a story, inherently posits the third-person frame of reference of the narration itself, and so continues to insinuate an absolute space-time in defiance of the main point of the narrative. In a more abstract sense, the function of parable itself, which is to conceptually synthesize discrete frames of reference, is what dooms the narrative to misrepresentation. Erwin Schrödinger (1980 [1935]) had different motives for his recourse to narrative in the case of Schrödinger’s cat, and the contrast offers an illuminating comparison with the twin paradox. Briefly, this thought experiment involves placing a cat in a sealed box, along with a Geiger counter rigged to release poisonous gas when it detects the decay of a single atom of radioactive material – an event which has an equal probability of occurring or not occurring in the course of an hour. After one hour the box is opened, to reveal either a live or dead cat, but until that point its fate is indeterminate. In accordance with the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, one would say that until it is observed it is both alive and dead. Narrative has a mixed role in Schrödinger’s thought experiment, just as it does in the twin paradox. On the one hand, it offers a literal extension of the idea of quantum superposition to macro-scale events; on the other hand, it serves as a reductio ad absurdum of the Copenhagen interpretation, in the form of a parable about the role it attributes to observation in the collapse of the wave function. In Einstein’s case, then, the narrative was intended to be expository for a general audience, and the appearance of paradox was an unfortunate effect of presenting the theory in narrative form. Schrödinger’s technical scientific paper did not require narrative exposition; in this case the narrative was introduced as a refutation of the theory (or rather, of certain interpretations of the theory), and its paradoxical quality is very much the point. Although Schrödinger offered no definite alternative reading of his own wave function equation, he (like Einstein) was a scientific realist; his refusal to countenance the idea of a cat that is simultaneously dead and alive is a refusal to accept that reality has no definite form independent of observation. Yet his appeal to the macro-scale coherence of narrative itself takes the limits of human cognition to define what is to count as definite form. Schrödinger’s story has had an extensive afterlife not only in scientific debate but also in general culture, including many readings that run entirely counter to his own point, and the range of these responses has been explored in detail by Marie-Laure Ryan (2011). They can be broadly charac-
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terized, though, in terms of the different ways they seize upon aspects of the narrative presentation. Responses that focus upon the story’s extension of quantum effects to the macro-scale have tended to look for principled limits to the scope of superposition, or to pursue issues that remain implicit in Schrödinger’s version, such as what counts as observation. They take the anthropocentric scale of narrative as too coarse-grained to capture quantum reality, or they take the narrative to be problematic just because it is incomplete. Responses that treat the story primarily as a parable, on the other hand, have much more freely affirmed its paradoxical qualities, as figurative expressions of concepts beyond the remit of narrative, whether because it says too much (with respect to the radically discontinuous logic of quantum physics), or too little (with respect to the supra-narrative excess of many-worlds ontologies). The case of Schrödinger’s cat also broaches the question of the relation between observation and theory; between the two distinct frames within which scientific factuality can apply. Theories are built upon observations, and the regularities revealed by observations, but observation is never innocent of theory; without some theoretical frame of reference, observations are meaningless. This reciprocity between observation and theory is echoed in the way narrative meaning depends upon a reciprocal relation between the particulars of a given narrative and the abstract model of narrative form – that is, its logic of sequentiality and the manifold corollaries of that logic. Narrative is itself a theory-laden form of explanation, though it is theory-like in a largely unexamined way. I can now turn to an example of the narrative representation of observations as scientific facts, keeping in mind not only the principled reciprocity between scientific theory and observation, but also the analogous reciprocity between narrative particulars and narrative form. My example accentuates the reversal from top-down to bottom-up conception implied in the move from theory to observation, and declines a long way from the heady intellectual realms of special relativity and quantum mechanics. It is a recent piece of research published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, and picked up by the BBC and other media channels, titled “The Roles of Impact and Inertia in the Failure of a Shoelace Knot.” The paper’s account of knot failure, as presented in the published abstract, is as follows: First, the repeated impact of the shoe on the floor during walking serves to loosen the knot. Then, the whipping motions of the free ends of the laces caused by the leg swing produce slipping of the laces. This leads to eventual runaway untangling of the knot. (Daily-Diamond et al. 2017, 1) This rather bland summary in narrative form presents the results of experimental observations, taken with a high-speed camera, of the laced
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shoes of subjects on treadmills – as well as a number of control experiments. There are both communicative and explanatory considerations in play in this example. The research is engaged with applied knot theory and has possible implications in other contexts, including surgical sutures, but its choice of subject clearly has an appeal to the general public in mind. It did indeed secure take up in the news media, but not as an effective exercise in science communication; instead, it slotted into a well-established stereotype of the wasteful irrelevance of science. A comment in response to the BBC online coverage is representative: “I find it unbelievable that (presumably) highly educated scientists are spending their time on these petty questions. Any fool can tell you that if you walk about, the movement of your feet will loosen laces” (BBC News 2017). This is a typical science communication dilemma: the narrative presentation of research is intended to maximize its accessibility, but mutates into banality. The problem is aggravated in this case by the fact that sequential narrative form tends to obscure the main finding of the research, which is the combination of two distinct mechanisms in a cyclical positive feedback loop. The researchers do gesture towards this feature in the narrative presentation of their findings to the media (“avalanche effect”; “catastrophic failure”); but like the word “runaway” in the quote above, these efforts inevitably generate comic overtones in relation to the subject of shoelaces.7 Even as explanation, then, the function of narrative here is problematic. Despite the simplicity of the object of inquiry, an all-too-readily narratable event, and the apparent compatibility between the bottom-up empiricism of observation and a narrative presentation of facts, the scientific interest eludes narrative articulation. The reason is not circumstantial but intrinsic to the findings, which indicate that a systemic rather than sequential modeling of the process is required, in order to express the reciprocal interaction of mechanisms involved in the emergent effect of unraveling; that is to say, the facts are recalcitrant to the logic of narrative representation. But the problem goes beyond the circumstances of these particular observations, and raises the question of what it is to be explanatory. On the one hand, if narrative form is a feature of the explanans rather than of the explanandum, of the mode of cognition rather than the cognized reality, it is hard to see how it can be explanatory by virtue of being narrative (Klauk 2016). On the other hand, causal inference (and therefore causal
7 Nicholson Baker’s extended meditations on shoelace wear and shoelace knots in The Mezzanine conclude with a long footnote comically surveying extant research on the subject (1988, 129–131). Thanks to Marie-Laure Ryan for this reference.
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explanation, surely the most paradigmatic form of explanation) is hard to disentangle from narrative cognition. Causal inference is another name for the conceptual leap necessary to the formal grasping together of every act of narrative cognition; it is the archetypal implicit relation constituting narrative wholes. Causal explanation, then, cannot be reduced to the invocation of covering laws, as in the deductive-nomological model of explanation; it is bound up with narrative cognition. This is not to say that causality is a projection of human subjectivity, but only that our conceptual relationship to it is mediated, and constrained, by our dependence upon narrative. Narrative factuality is the application of an innate theoretical paradigm, and is explanatory, not by virtue of reference to states of affairs, but just to the extent that it is itself pragmatically grounded and so continuous with empiricism, if a restricted mode of it.8 The narrative explanation of scientific facts, from the most abstruse theories to the most elementary observations, is a necessary but compromising effort to make the specific affordances of a basic cognitive resource adequate to the full scope of scientific inquiry. Such compromise leaves unresolved a range of problems concerning narrative explanation and communication, according to context; the former is at a premium in education, for example, while the latter dominates science communication in the public sphere. In an educational context there is some plausibility to the hypothesis that narrative modes of representation not only enhance interest and understanding by virtue of their accessibility, but also more effectively take root in memory. But narrative explanation also tends, by privileging relatability, to minimize the intellectual exposure to the unfamiliar (in the subject matter and in the mode of explanation) that we might reasonably consider essential to education itself (Norris et al. 2005). In a science communication context, especially in mass media, these considerations are to a large extent superseded by the way the rhetoric of narrative factuality becomes entangled with the tendentiousness of news values and the ethics of persuasion, both of which are fundamental motives behind the nearubiquitous recourse to narrative presentation of science for non-specialist audiences (Dahlstrom 2014). It is not just that the cognitive accessibility of narrative’s human scale becomes increasingly problematic for phenomena that diverge from that scale; but also that the affective power of narrative form itself becomes a problem. David Velleman has argued that the force of narrative “explanation” has to do with the emotional nature of the grasping together of narrative wholes, and the sense of resolution they
8 For a ‘manipulationist’ view of causal explanation grounded in pragmatics and counterfactual intervention, see Woodward (2004).
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offer: “Having sorted out its feelings toward events, the audience mistakenly feels that it has sorted out the events themselves: it mistakes emotional closure for intellectual closure” (2003, 20). It is true that critical selfconsciousness about narrative can help guard against such tendencies, but repudiating narrative form is not always a constructive move; it can all too easily serve to reject explanation itself, and devalue the project of science. Even as we recognize the need to regard narrative with suspicion, we continue to depend upon it.
References Baker, Nicholson. The Mezzanine. New York: Grove Press, 1988. BBC News. “Mystery of Why Shoelaces Come Undone Unravelled by Science.” 12 April 2017. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-39573642 (15 May 2017). Currie, Mark. About Time: Narrative, Fiction and the Philosophy of Time. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. Dahlstrom, Michael F. “Using Narratives and Storytelling to Communicate Science with Nonexpert Audiences.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111.suppl. 4 (2014): 13614–13620. Daily-Diamond, Christopher A., Christine E. Gregg and Oliver M. O’Reilly. “The Roles of Impact and Inertia in the Failure of a Shoelace Knot.” Proceedings of the Royal Society A 473 (2017): 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2016.0770. (5 July 2018). Einstein, Albert. “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.” [1905] The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, Vol. 2. Ed. John Stachel. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. 304–395. Gower, Barry. Scientific Method: A Historical and Philosophical Introduction. London: Routledge, 1997. Hoyningen-Huene, Paul. Systematicity: The Nature of Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Klauk, Tobias. “Is There Such a Thing as Narrative Explanation?” Journal of Literary Theory 10.1 (2016): 110–138. Lasky, Ronald C. “Time and the Twin Paradox.” Scientific American Special Edition 16.1 (2006): 20–23. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. [1979] Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Markosian, Ned. “Time.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/fall2016/entries/time/. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Stanford: Stanford University, 2016 (15 May 2017). Norris, Stephen P., Sandra M. Guilbert, Martha L. Smith, Shahram Hakimelahi and Linda M. Phillips. “A Theoretical Framework for Narrative Explanation in Science.” Science Education 89 (2005): 535–563. Pesic, Peter. “Einstein and the Twin Paradox.” European Journal of Physics 24.6 (2003): 585– 590. Popper, Karl R. The Logic of Scientific Discovery. [1959] London: Routledge, 2002. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Narrative/Science Entanglements: On the Thousand and One Literary Lives of Schrödinger’s Cat.” Narrative 19.2 (2011): 171–186.
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Schrödinger, Erwin. “The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics.” [1935] Trans. John D. Trimmer. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 124.5 (1980): 323–338. Shuler, Robert L. Jr. “The Twins Clock Paradox: History and Perspectives.” Journal of Modern Physics 5 (2014): 1062–1078. Stepney, Susan and Richard Walsh. Eds. Narrating Complexity. London: Springer, 2018. Turner, Mark. The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Velleman, J. David. “Narrative Explanation.” The Philosophical Review 112.1 (2003): 1–25. Walsh, Richard. “Narrative Theory for Complexity Scientists.” Narrating Complexity. Eds. Susan Stepney and Richard Walsh. London: Springer, 2018. 11–25. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Woodward, James. Making Things Happen: A Theory of Causal Explanation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
ARIANNA BORRELLI
Narrative in Early Modern and Modern Science 1. Introduction Since the 1980s a growing body of research has been devoted to the role of narratives in the construction and validation of knowledge in early modern and modern science, and the last two decades have been particularly productive. However, no systematic line of research has emerged so far, and in the following pages a few representative results are presented, arranged around a three-fold classification of the roles attributed to narratives in science: (1) narratives as (primarily textual) strategies for the presentation and validation of knowledge within the scientific community; (2) small and ‘grand’ narratives as means to validate scientific knowledge elements, scientific disciplines and the scientific enterprise within and beyond the scientific community; and (3) textual and non-textual narratives as constitutive elements of scientific understanding. These categories are not exclusive and must be understood as a mere heuristic attempt to provide orientation. Labeling an utterance as ‘scientific’ today constitutes a very high – possibly the highest – claim to its validity as a statement about the real world. In public discourse ‘scientific facts’ are assumed to have been carefully vetted by the relevant expert community on the basis of thoroughly informed empirical and theoretical considerations (/ Walsh). Behind most ‘scientific facts’ mentioned in public discourse there is indeed usually a large, if not always unanimous, consensus among scientists. However, the dynamics through which such consensus is reached and the relationship between scientific knowledge and a somehow defined ‘reality’ are among the most debated questions in science studies. Analytical philosophers of science are still engaged in discussing the possible nature of the scientific method and the realism/antirealism question (Andersen and Hepburn 2016, Chakravartty 2017), while historians, rhetoricians and sociologists of science have provided numerous examples of how, since the early modern period, scientific facts have been variously https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-029
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constructed according to the relevant historical-cultural and disciplinary context (Chemla and Keller 2017, Daston and Galison 2007, Fleck 1935, Shapin 1984). Thus, when studying modern and early modern investigations of nature, trying to pinpoint general criteria of validity, or to draw a line between the factual and the fictional, leads directly to the highly controversial topics of realism and constructivism. Disputes around constructivism in turn affect the way in which scholars from different backgrounds approach the question of the possible roles of narratives in past and present science. Narratives are traditionally associated with fiction as opposed to fact, and with imagination as opposed to reason, and so it may appear – with or without good reason – that allowing them to play too central a role in science could lead to claims that scientific facts are mere inventions. Such negative reactions have come particularly often from philosophers of science and scientists working in fields like fundamental physics, where the ‘facts’ being presented for the most part lack plausible referents in immediate experience (Ross 1996, Yocaris 2010). The present contribution takes the standpoint that narratological criteria defining the factual, fictional or fictive cannot be generally applied to scientific facts and their validation. At the same time, the validity of scientific utterances is considered as established according to historically and culturally situated criteria which, as we shall see, narrative strategies may help establish. This situation should however not be perceived as an obstacle, but rather as a challenge to developing narratological approaches to past and present science. For the reasons sketched above, the research landscape is divided. Philosophers of science tend to be quite suspicious of the suggestion that narratives may play a role in the construction of scientific knowledge, and usually acknowledge only the function of narratives in science teaching, popularization and communication. Historians, rhetoricians and sociologists of science are instead more open regarding narratives’ possible epistemic functions in scientific practices. Working scientists, when discussing their own personal experiences in scientific research, usually present a complex epistemic picture in which narratives may play a central role. Since the role of narration in science teaching and communications is dealt with in other contributions in this handbook (/ Milne, / Walsh), in the following pages I will primarily focus on research results which assume that narratives may in some (though not necessarily in all) instances represent essential factors in the construction of scientific knowledge. The presentation will be limited to the natural sciences, although most recent research on narratives in that field was produced within projects that also looked at economic, historical and social sciences and underscored the characteristics shared by the different disciplines.
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If not otherwise stated, all authors of the research summarized in this essay make explicit use of the term narrative. However, given the broad range of material to be discussed and the fact that practically none of the authors quoted employ a narratological vocabulary, in choosing the material I have adopted a very inclusive definition of narrative: any (not necessarily textual) construction which comprises a succession of at least two events (/ Fludernik). In discussing ‘grand narratives,’ ‘master narratives’ or ‘meta-narratives,’ I have taken care that only constructs with minimal narrative structures are dealt with.
2. Historiographic overview Questions about the role of narratives in scientific practices have been asked increasingly often in the wake of (the reception of ) Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), whose ideas on the relevance of social and cultural factors for the production of scientific knowledge were deeply influenced by Ludwik Fleck’s Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache. Einführung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv (The Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Introduction to the Theory of Thought Style and Thought Collective, 1935, my translation). Today, Fleck’s notion of “thought collective” (“Denkkollektiv”) as the social and epistemic locus of knowledge production is often employed in discussions of science, narrative and validation (Azzouni and Böschen 2015, 20–21), together with Jean-François Lyotard’s (1979) concept of a “grand narrative” (“grand récit,” Lyotard 1979, 63) of linear progress in knowledge about nature. In the present postmodern era, according to Lyotard, this narrative has become devalued, leading to a crisis of the ‘pure’ scientific enterprise and to increasing demands for useful or ‘practical’ research. Sociological and ethnological researches are also often referred to in accounts of narrative in science: see Karin Knorr-Cetina’s work on epistemic cultures (1999) and Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s (1979) study of laboratory science. Early contributions to the topic also came from literary studies, thanks to the development of the field of rhetoric of science (Gross 1990). There was a growing interest on the part of historians of literature in exploring the literary techniques employed in science writing and comparing them to those of other contemporary authors (Beer 1983, Dear 1991). These works prompted historians of science to regard narration as a fundamental instrument of world-making even beyond the textual form (Rheinberger 1994, Vogl 2010). Christina Brandt (2009) offers a highly informative overview of relevant research, and one can also note three more recent special
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issues of research journals1 and four edited volumes2 on the topic. Furthermore, Azzouni and Böschen suggest a distinction between “small” and “large” narratives which I have taken up in the classification employed in the present essay (2015, 16‒17; my translation). 3. The roles of narrative in scientific practice 3.1 The development of narrative technologies in science writing Ever since antiquity an essential part of the scholarly investigation of nature has been transmitted in writing and by means of literary techniques, among them narrative ones. These have often been deployed as means not simply of expressing, but also of validating, knowledge about nature. Both past and present techniques conform to the matter being presented and to their historical context and have been the subject of many investigations. Philosophers have focused on the role ‘stories’ play in helping establish the validity of theoretical constructs, with Stephan Hartmann (1999) arguing that a story loosely relating an approximate physical model to a fundamental theory by means of narrative references to everyday experience may lead to the acceptance of the model despite the lack of a rigorous derivation from the theory. Tim Lewens (2008) has interpreted the simplified, idealized narratives of the evolution process (“imaginary illustrations,” Lewenes 2008, 318) which Charles Darwin employed in his Origin of Species as epistemically relevant thought experiments. Christian Schepsmeier (2015) went further, arguing that Darwin’s imaginary illustrations should be regarded as narrative “thought models” (“Gedankenmodelle,” Schepsmeier 2015, 88; my translation) which were essential both for the validation and for the expression of the theory of evolution. According to Schepsmeier, in the Origin of Species Darwin wished to bring forward an empirical argument for which he did not – and could not – provide direct plausible evidence. As a substitute he offered the illustrations, which showed in a simple, vivid manner the way variation and selection could operate in concrete, if naïvely simplified cases. Schepsmeier explicitly refers to the narratological distinction between “factual” and “fictional,” stating that Darwin’s imaginary il-
1 Science et Récits (Orange-Ravachol and Triqued 2007), Littérature et Sciences (Acquier and Comoy Fusaro 2010), Narrative in Science (Morgan and Wise 2017). 2 Doxiadēs and Mazur (2012), Blume et al. (2015), Heydenreich and Mecke (2015), and Azzouni et al. (2015).
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lustrations challenge this clear-cut opposition (Schepsmeier 2015, 102). The constitutive function of the narrative form for the emergence of Darwin’s theory of evolution and its broader cultural influence are at the center of Gillian Beer’s (1983) classic contextualized analysis of Darwin’s writing, as discussed below in section 3.2. Much attention has been devoted to the narrative technologies in reporting experiences. Studies on the development of the practice of ‘experiment’ between the late Renaissance and the modern period have underscored the significance of the (primarily) textual expositions of experience in creating the notion of an empirical “matter of fact” which is today often taken for granted (Shapin 1984, 482‒483). At the beginning of the early modern period detailed, realistic reports of experiments were not seen as providing evidence in natural philosophical discourse. In fact, analyzing the way in which Galileo wrote about his experiences with falling bodies, Peter Dear (1991) has shown how the Italian scholar was not attempting to provide a factual narration of his own activities as situated in time and space, but was rather trying to present them in the simplified, absolute terms used to relate those everyday experiences that the Aristotelian tradition accepted as valid arguments, such as that water freezes at low temperature or that heavy bodies fall to the ground. It was only later on, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that complex, mostly instrumentaided experiences came to be accepted as valid contributions to the investigation of nature. As Steven Shapin (1984) showed, a main component of this transformation was the development of new literary technologies by Robert Boyle and other members of the Royal Society (/ Milne). Beside fostering the emergence of a network of “reliable witnesses” (Shapin 1984, 489) validating experiments and the circulation of instruments and detailed images allowing them to be replicated, Boyle developed a literary technology of exposition in which he claimed to narrate his experiments with all possible “circumstantial” detail (Shapin 1984, 492), so as to make the readers what Shapin called “virtual witnesses” of the performance (490‒494). Boyle’s long and detailed descriptions, which also occasionally reported on errors, were a fundamental element for the validation of the results of the experiment as a “matter of fact” (Shapin 1984, 482‒ 483). In Boyle’s discourse that term characterized statements allegedly free from theoretical interpretation. Following Shapin’s lead, Frederic Holmes (1991) studied the development of experimental reports in specific disciplines in the French Academy of Science during the eighteenth century, showing how they displayed a mixture of narrative and logical argumentation, with the earlier papers tending towards narratives, the later ones towards logical arguments. Holmes linked this change to the creation within the Academy of specialized disciplinary communities acting as “thought
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collectives” in Fleck’s sense (Fleck 1935). Within these groups, validation strategies could rely on shared assumptions and standard schemes. Christian Licoppe (1996), who investigated the development of experimental practices of “proof ” (Licoppe 1996, 245) at the Academy of France in the same period, noted how, around the end of the eighteenth century, authority was delegated from virtual witnessing to individually special, “exact” (282) instruments such as Lavoisier‘s thermometers by a narrative staging of the instruments’ precision and of the reproducibility of its measurements in space and in time (277–285). It was only in the nineteenth century that standardization of measuring scales and instruments led to the replacement of individual devices with abstract, standardized ones, while at the same time scientific reports progressively lost their narrative character and relied for their validation on a logical argumentative, impersonal style. Christina Brandt has argued that validation of experimental results today rests on a literary strategy of “denarrativation” (“Denarrativierung,” Brandt 2009, 96; my translation) in which authority is enhanced by effacing authorship and letting experimental reports appear like “timeless” statements (“zeitlos,” Brandt 2009, 99; my translation). 3.2 Grand narratives and knowledge validation The previous section has focused on the narrative strategies employed (or not) by scientists when writing about their research. These narratives may be local, stand-alone creations, or may represent instances of broader narratives shared with other parts of the scientific community or with the general public (Azzouni and Böschen 2015). As such, these broader narratives may contribute to validate not only the contents of the paper, but also the whole research enterprise, and they may do so independently of whether they feature in the text. The best-known example of this kind is Lyotard’s grand narrative of scientific progress, which has provided the starting point for various later authors. According to Arkady Plotnisky (2005, 2012), Lyotard’s assessment of the postmodern condition as a loss of faith in grand narratives can be linked to the transformations which took place in mathematics and physics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In physics, the establishment of quantum mechanics meant that the dynamics of micro-physical entities like electrons could no longer be conceived according to familiar macroscopic patterns, which Plotnisky sees as corresponding to classical narratives, in contrast to postmodern ones. In a similar way, the emergence of non-Euclidean geometry was interpreted as the passage from a modern to a postmodern kind of ‘mathematical narrative.’
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Stefan Böschen and Willy Viehöver (2015) combined Lyotard’s ideas with discourse analysis to study a debate about gene manipulation between molecular biologists and ecologists. According to Böschen and Viehöver, each group deployed a “theory narrative” framing the situation in terms of specific epistemic elements, and a “public narrative” which explained what the conflict was about (“Theorieerzählung,” “Öffentlichkeitserzählung,” Böschen and Viehöver 2015, 304; my translation). Molecular biologists had the laboratory as their reference space and presented their work as a story of the search for and elimination of uncontrollable factors (theory narrative), claiming that the conflict with the ecologists resulted from their exploitation of the ignorance of the general public (public narrative). The ecologists, on the other hand, had the ecosystem as their reference space, representing it as a complex system of decentered agencies with which it was necessary to constantly engage anew (theory narrative). In their opinion the conflict with the biologists consisted primarily in public relations rather than in the issue itself (public narrative). Alluding to Hayden White, Böschen and Viehöver also characterized the various narratives in terms of literary genres (romance, satire, tragedy), while at the same time deploying the tools of communication analysis. From a more abstract philosophical perspective, Joseph Rouse regarded scientific activities as defining and validating themselves as part of an openended narrative “in construction” in which each study is expected not only to answer pre-existing questions, but also to open up new ones to be answered in the future (Rouse 1990, 181). Studies not conforming to this narrative pattern, Rouse argues, are dismissed as non-scientific. The specific realization of this narrative scheme is different in each discipline, and possibly even in each research project, and can be implemented with more or less detail in each article or series of studies. Mathematician Barry Mazur (2012) presents a view of mathematics which echoes Rouse’s theory, although it is fully independent from it. According to Mazur, mathematicians, or at least the “great” ones, have what he refers to as “a vision” or “a dream” (Mazur 2012, 184, 189, 206), i.e. an overarching narrative guiding and unifying the past, present and future of their research. Instead, historian of mathematics Amir Alexander (2012) argues that the vision which mathematicians have of their past, identity and research program displays a narrative structure shaped by the culture of the time, and in turn shaping the mathematical enterprise. According to Alexander, during the Renaissance mathematicians conceived their work as a voyage of exploration like those of Magellan or Columbus, while the nineteenth century saw the emergence of the figure of the mathematician as a romantic martyr and of mathematics as a spiritual, ‘pure’ enterprise. An insightful sociological perspective on narratives in science is found in Jochen Gläser’s
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(2015) study of their roles in knowledge production and community building. Gläser regards narratives in science as field-specific and attributes to them a “twin function” (Gläser 2015, 18) in knowledge production and identity building. He classifies them into three categories: publications as core narratives, “shop-floor stories” as vehicles for local knowledge production, and the narratives keeping together the community and validating their research tasks through “stories of past work leading up to the present state of knowledge, which in turn defines future work” (Gläser 2015, 18). Gläser’s ideas resonate with Rouse’s claim of the narrative nature of the scientific enterprise, to which Gläser explicitly refers. As these examples will have shown, no clear-cut distinction is possible between small and grand, internal and external narratives of science. Various authors have studied how narratives, and more generally concepts and metaphors, move between science and the wider cultural sphere, especially as far as the life sciences are concerned (Höcker et al. 2006). A classical and very instructive case study is Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983), in which the narrative techniques developed by Darwin in his writings on the theory of evolution are analyzed in the context of contemporary Victorian literature. Beer underscores how innovative Darwin’s idea were at the time, no matter how familiar they may be for us today, and showed how Darwin consciously combined literary techniques, myths and public narratives of his time to be able to express his thoughts. On the other hand, Darwin’s narrative structures and with them his ideas were eventually appropriated by writers of his time and became the basis for transformations of both literature and myths. In her work Beer underscores how, for Darwin, writing and conceiving the theory of evolution were inseparable tasks. This takes us to the next section of this essay which discusses narrative knowing. 3.3 Narrative knowing in the natural sciences According to Beer, Darwin had no choice but to construct a new narrative to be able to express his theory of evolution. The thesis that narrative structures are at least in some instances necessary not only for the validation, but also for the production, of scientific knowledge has been stated by various authors (Hallyn 1987, Lévy-Leblond 2010, Moser 2006). The term ‘narrative knowing’ has recently been employed in discussions on whether a minimal narrative structure may at least in some cases be necessary in the natural sciences to allow scientists to apprehend their research objects. The notion that historians construct knowledge by means of a narration which is not fully factual has long been a current concept in the
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philosophy of history, often also subsumed under the term of narrative knowing (Jaeger 2009, 115‒121, Polkinghorne 1988, 37‒69). In that context it used to be assumed that it is possible to draw a line between a narrative way of knowing characteristic of the humanities and a logical-analytical one ruling in the natural sciences. This distinction has recently been called into question, with scholars from science, technology and literary studies claiming that both narrative and narrative knowing can be fundamental components of natural scientific practices (/ Walsh, Azzouni and Böschen 2015, Morgan and Wise 2017, Wise 2017). These arguments have been proposed from a variety of different perspectives and methodologies, some shaped by literary and cultural studies, others reflecting results of cognitive research. In general, scholars from literary and cultural studies have paid more attention to the role of narrative in medicine, psychology, anthropology as well as the earth and life sciences, while the exact sciences have been mainly targeted from the perspective of cognitive studies. Although most debates on narrative knowing in the sciences do not explicitly address issues of validity or evidence, they are nonetheless very relevant for these topics as they concern the key question of how scientific understanding comes to be, as opposed to other, ‘unscientific’ ways of knowledge production. In his analysis of knowledge about the North Pole in the nineteenth century, Christian Holtorf (2015) has demonstrated how, on the basis of often sketchy or inaccurate reports, the notion of the North Pole was constructed as an imaginary, at times contradictory conglomerate of narratives, which nonetheless constituted a fundamental part of science of the time. Narratives can also be essential for making sense of experimental practices at the very moment of research, as claimed by Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (1994). Rheinberger employed Jacques Derrida’s term “historiality” to describe the intrinsic nature of knowledge production in experimental systems, which according to him have their own “internal time” which “characterizes a sequence of states of the system insofar as they can be considered to undergo a continuing cycle of nonidentical reproduction” (Rheinberger 1994, 68). The “historial” character of experimental research implies that its objects are never simply apprehended, but are always reconstructed from their traces, and the researcher chooses to write one history among many (Rheinberger 1994, 77). While it is probably easier – and less controversial – to describe the narrative aspects of earth and life sciences, a number of recent research contributions have plausibly argued that narrative understanding is also an important element of practice in exact sciences like chemistry, physics and mathematics. Mathematician Michael Harris (2012) has claimed that mathematics is narrative, describing proofs as a kind of emplotment of
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logical inferences. Another mathematician, Bernard Teissier (2012), likens mathematical proofs to narratives which readers can only understand and validate by interpreting them in terms of “low-level thoughts” (235) linked to embodied cognition. In physics, too, narrative knowing may play a role. We saw in the previous section how Plotnisky (2005) regarded the rise of quantum theory as a shift from modern to postmodern narration of phenomena, while Ilias Yocaris (2010) has instead argued that a main outcome of Niels Bohr’s quantum theory of the atom was that atomic systems could now not be fully described anymore by means of computations, but instead had to be narrated with the help of images and language. A similar thesis has been proposed by Arianna Borrelli (2015a, 2015b) for high energy physics where, from the 1960s onward, theoretical constructs have increasingly displayed a hybrid character, combining individual mathematical components connected by verbal statements, diagrams and other representational strategies. According to Borrelli, the whole structure has an overall narrative character. On a different note, physicist Klaus Mecke (2015) has suggested that measurement processes in modern physics could be regarded as narratives which contribute to the construction of scientific concepts. Finally, narratives have also been associated with the computational practices which are today becoming increasingly central in science. Norton Wise has proposed interpreting knowledge produced in molecular dynamics with the help of model-based computer simulations as a form of narrative knowing; it derives from a performative, time-based procedure of computing the development of physical systems, which is presented in the form of short movies (Wise 2017). Following Mary Morgan’s discussion of narrative in economy (/ Kleeberg, Morgan 2001), Wise argues for an analogy between the time-based experience involved in model-based simulations and those linked to narrative knowing in historical research.
4. Conclusion At the latest since the 1980s, historians, sociologists and philosophers of science, as well as scholars from literary and cultural studies, have recognized that narratives play a number of different, often prominent roles in the construction and validation of scientific facts and scientific evidence. Works addressing the possible relationship of science and narrative are extremely varied in methodology, premises and goals. Authors tend to employ a minimalist notion of narrative as the time sequence of at least two events, and avoid applying the narratological categories of fictional
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and factual in this context, at times explicitly regarding them as problematic (Brandt 2009, 103‒105, Schepsmeier 2015, 102). Topics which have attracted particular attention so far are the development of narrative strategies for presenting scientific, and especially experimental results (section 3.1.), and the ‘grand narratives’ shaping and validating the scientific enterprise (section 3.2.). A rather controversial, yet nonetheless increasingly popular research line consists in attempts to show how, when looking at processes of knowledge construction, no clear-cut distinction can be drawn between narrative knowing characteristic of the humanities and non-narrative, logical-mathematical knowing typical of the natural sciences (section 3.3.). Despite, or perhaps thanks to, the great variety of approaches to it, the issue of narrative in science has been the subject of an increasing number of studies. In recent years, efforts have been made to mutually connect originally unrelated research lines, with narratologists often involved in the effort of exploring the issue of narrative in science.
References Acquier, Marie-Laure, and Edwige Comoy Fusaro. Eds. Littérature et Sciences. Special Issue of Cahiers de Narratologie 18 (2010). http://narratologie.revues.org/5960 (28 March 2018). Alexander, Amir. “From Voyagers to Martyrs: Toward a Storied History of Mathematics.” Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative. Eds. Apostolos K. Doxiadēs and Barry Mazur. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. 1–51. Andersen, Hanne, and Brian Hepburn. “Scientific Method.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/scientific-method/. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Stanford: Stanford University, 2016 (16 May 2018). Azzouni, Safia, Stefan Böschen, and Carsten Reinhard. Eds. Erzählung und Geltung: Wissenschaft zwischen Autorschaft und Autorität. Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2015. Azzouni, Safia, and Stefan Böschen. “Erzählung und Geltung. Ein problemorientierter Ausgangspunkt.” Erzählung und Geltung: Wissenschaft zwischen Autorschaft und Autorität. Eds. Safia Azzouni, Stefan Böschen, and Carsten Reinhardt. Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2015. 1–31. Beer, Gillian. Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and NineteenthCentury Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Blume, Hermann, Christoph Leitgeb, and Michael Rössner. Eds. Narrated Communities – Narrated Realities: Narration as Cognitive Processing and Cultural Practice. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Borrelli, Arianna. “Die Genesis des Gottesteilchens. Erzählung als konstitutives Element der theoretischen Teilchenphysik.” Erzählung und Geltung: Wissenschaft zwischen Autorschaft und Autorität. Eds. Safia Azzouni, Stefan Böschen, and Carsten Reinhardt. Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2015a. 63–86. Borrelli, Arianna. “Between Logos and Mythos: Narratives of “Naturalness” in Today’s Particle Physics Community.” Narrated Communities – Narrated Realities: Narration as Cognitive Processing and Cultural Practice. Eds. Hermann Blume, Christoph Leitgeb, and Michael Rössner. Leiden: Brill, 2015b. 69–83.
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Böschen, Stefan, and Willy Viehöver. “Narrative Autorität und Wissensproduktion.” Erzählung und Geltung: Wissenschaft zwischen Autorschaft und Autorität. Ed. Safia Azzouni, Stefan Böschen, and Carsten Reinhardt. Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2015. 303–336. Brandt, Christina. “Wissenschaftserzählungen. Narrative Strukturen im naturwissenschaftlichen Diskurs.” Wirklichkeitserzählungen: Felder, Formen und Funktionen nicht-literarischen Erzählens. Eds. Christian Klein and Matías Martínez. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009. 81–109. Chakravartty, Anjan. “Scientific Realism.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/scientific-realism/. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Stanford: Stanford University, 2017 (28 March 2018). Chemla, Karine, and Evelyn Fox Keller. Eds. Cultures Without Culturalism: The Making of Scientific Knowledge. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2007. Dear, Peter. “Narratives, Anecdotes and Experiments: Turning Experience into Science in the Seventeenth Century.” The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument: Historical Studies. Ed. Peter Dear. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. 135–163. Doxiadēs, Apostolos K., and Barry Mazur. Eds. Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. Fleck, Ludwik. Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache. Einführung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1935. Gläser, Jochen. “Stones, Mortar, Building: Knowledge Production and Community Building in Narratives in Science.” Narrated Communities – Narrated Realities: Narration as Cognitive Processing and Cultural Practice. Eds. Hermann Blume, Christoph Leitgeb, and Michael Rössner. Leiden: Brill, 2015. 15–28. Gross, Alan G. The Rhetoric of Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Hallyn, Fernand. La Structure Poétique du Monde: Copernic, Kepler. Paris: SEUIL, 1987. Hartmann, Stephan. “Models and Stories in Hadron Physics.” Models as Mediators. Eds. Mary Morgan and Margaret Morrison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 326–346. Harris, Michael. “Do Androids Prove Theorems in Their Sleep?” Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative. Eds. Apostolos K. Doxiadēs and Barry Mazur. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. 130–182. Heydenreich, Aura Maria, and Klaus R. Mecke. Eds. Quarks and Letters: Naturwissenschaften in der Literatur und Kultur der Gegenwart. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. Höcker, Arne, Jeannie Moser, and Philippe Weber. Eds. Wissen. Erzählen. Narrative der Humanwissenschaften. Berlin: transcript, 2006. Holmes, Frederic L. “Argument and Narrative in Scientific Writing.” The Literary Structure of Scientific Argument: Historical Studies. Ed. Peter Dear. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. 164–181. Holtorf, Christian. “Der Nordpol. Eine Erzählung.” Erzählung und Geltung: Wissenschaft zwischen Autorschaft und Autorität. Eds. Safia Azzouni, Stefan Böschen, and Carsten Reinhardt. Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2015. 133–155. Knorr-Cetina, Karin. Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1962. Jaeger, Stephan. “Erzählen im historiographischen Diskurs.” Wirklichkeitserzählungen: Felder, Formen und Funktionen nicht-literarischen Erzählens. Eds. Christian Klein and Matías Martínez. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2009. 110–135. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979.
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Lévy-Leblond, Jean-Marc. “Le Miroir, la Cornue et la Pierre de Touche, ou : Que Peut la Littérature pour la Science ?” https://doi.org/10.4000/narratologie.6002 Cahiers de Narratologie 18 (2010) (16 May 2018). Lewens, Tim. “The Origin and Philosophy.” The Cambridge Companion to the Origin of Species. Eds. Robert Richards and Michael Ruse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 314–332. Licoppe, Christian. La Formation de la Pratique Scientifique: Le Discours de l’Expérience en France et en Angleterre, 1630–1820. Paris: La Découverte, 1996. Lyotard, Jean-François. La Condition Postmoderne: Rapport sur le Savoir. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1979. Mazur, Barry. “Visions, Dreams, and Mathematics.” Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative. Eds. Apostolos K. Doxiadēs and Barry Mazur. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. 186–212. Mecke, Klaus. “Narratives in Physics: Quantitative Metaphors and Formula 2 Tropes?” Narrated Communities – Narrated Realities: Narration as Cognitive Processing and Cultural Practice. Eds. Hermann Blume, Christoph Leitgeb, and Michael Rössner. Leiden: Brill, 2015. 29–49. Morgan, Mary S. “Models, Stories and the Economic World.” Journal of Economic Methodology 8 (2001): 361–384. Morgan, Mary S., and M. Norton Wise. Eds. Narrative in Science. Special Issue of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 62 (2017). Moser, Jeannie. “Poetologien / Rhetoriken des Wissens. Einleitung.” Wissen. Erzählen. Narrative der Humanwissenschaften. Eds. Arne Höcker, Jeannie Moser, and Philippe Weber. Berlin: transcript, 2006. 11–16. Orange-Ravachol, Denise, and Eric Triqued. Eds. Sciences et Récits. Special Issue of Aster 44 (2007). Plotnisky, Arkady. “Science and Narrative.” Routledge Encyclopaedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Hermann, Manfred Jahn and Marie-Laurie Ryan. London: Routledge, 2005. 514– 518. Plotnisky, Arkady. “Adventures of the Diagonal: Non-Euclidean Mathematics and Narrative.” Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative. Eds. Apostolos K. Doxiadēs and Barry Mazur. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. 407–446. Polkinghorne, Donald. Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988. Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. “Experimental Systems: Historiality, Narration, and Deconstruction.” https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889700001599. Science in Context 7 (1994): 65–81 (28 March 2018). Ross, Andrew. Science Wars. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Rouse, Joseph. “The Narrative Reconstruction of Science.” Inquiry 33.2 (1990): 179–196. Schepsmeier, Christian. “‘Let us suppose.’ Narrativ präsentierte Gedankenmodelle in Darwins Origin of Species.” Erzählung und Geltung: Wissenschaft zwischen Autorschaft und Autorität. Eds. Safia Azzouni, Stefan Böschen, and Carsten Reinhardt. Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2015. 87–106. Shapin, Steven. “Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology.” Social Studies of Science 14 (1984): 481–520. Teissier, Bernard. “Mathematics and Narrative: Why Are Stories and Proofs Interesting?” Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative. Eds. Apostolos K. Doxiadēs and Barry Mazur. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. 232–243. Vogl, Joseph. Poetologien des Wissens um 1800. Munich: Fink, 2010. Wise, M. Norton. “On the Narrative Form of Simulations.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 62 (2017): 74–85.
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CATHERINE MILNE
Empiricism and the Factual Empiricism is an epistemological stance that puts observations as the basis for knowledge generation both in terms of sensory experience being the source of ideas (versus ideas being innate) and as the primary justification for knowledge claims. Empiricism is accepted as one of the major stances for creating new knowledge in science. An observer uses their senses, such as hearing, seeing, tasting, touching and smelling, to make knowledge claims. For example, you walk outside and, applying your sense of sight, hearing and touch, you see water falling from the sky, you hear drops falling and you feel water drops hitting your body. You can claim to know that it is raining. An empiricist would accept your observation as truthful. This form of empiricism separates the knower, the person who is making these observations, from the known, that it is raining, by differentiating between human observers and the natural world. So observing is something done by a person to the world looking at the world around him or her. This experience also highlights one of the challenges empiricism faces, because a person making a judgment about the truthfulness of my observation about raining would already need to have an understanding of rain either through prior experience or from a conceptual understanding of rain. Additionally, very often empiricism is presented as a contrast to rationalism, an epistemological position that places reason rather than sense experiences at the center of knowledge justification. However, it is empiricism that is often associated with the generation of matters of fact and it is this association that is the focus of this chapter.
1. A short history As a word and associated meaning, empirical, comes from the Latin empiricus and Greek empeirikos meaning experienced or skilled in trial or experiment. Empiricism is a term associated with an ancient school of physicians in Greek medicine called empiricists and became a dominant medical ideolohttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-030
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gy in the School of Alexandria established by Alexander the Great at the mouth of the Nile River in Egypt in 331 BCE (Lindberg 2007). Greek medical empiricists argued that, if the causes of diseases were the same in all places, the same remedies ought to be used everywhere. This approach to medicine suggests that, regardless of context, there has always been a universal element to empiricism even when the word first came into use. These empiricists dismissed inquiry because they viewed Nature as incomprehensible arguing instead that experience was the most productive way of understanding how it was possible to find relief from sickness. Accepting that actions or practices, not opinions, were most important for developing knowledge, this form of empiricism shares some similarity with contemporary sense-based empiricism. Evidence of the reach of empiricism as a stance can be found in other ancient sources, such as the Vaiśesøika Sūtra, a Sanskrit text authored by Kanada, a Hindu philosopher who is thought to have lived at some time between 600 and 200 BCE (Wells 2009). We do not know much about Kanada and even the provenance of the text itself was at one stage an open question. In the Vaiśesøika Sūtra, Kanada argued that sense from the body expanded out into the environment to measure and define physical elements. A competing rationalist philosophy, often associated with the Greek philosopher Plato (~427–~348 BCE), argued for reason, independent of our senses, as the basis for the generation of knowledge. But Aristotle (384–322 BCE), a student of Plato, was an early sense-based empiricist placing value on the use of observation to make new knowledge. In his book, On the Generation of Animals, he (or his followers) noted: Such appears to be the truth about the generation of bees, judging from theory and from what are believed to be the facts about them; the facts, however, have not yet been sufficiently grasped; if ever they are, then credit must be given rather to observation [also translated as “the evidence of the senses”] than to theories, and to theories only if what they affirm agrees with the observed facts. (1912, 760)
In this text, Aristotle seems to be making the argument that evidence from the senses provides facts necessary for the development and endorsement of robust theory and, where the facts contradict the theory, the facts should have priority. Throughout time there seems to have been recognition that there is value in applying the senses to observations of nature, whether that observation was to find hidden order in nature or to order nature in specific ways. 2. Empiricism, inductivism and matters of fact While accepting the long history of an empiricist stance to knowledge generation, the form of empiricism associated with the generation of mat-
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ters of fact comes to us from the writings of Francis Bacon (1561–1625), an English thinker, lawyer, author, and statesman, who argued that natural philosophers and tinkerers should put their faith in observations since it was through making observations that true reality would be revealed. Since previous philosophers, like Aristotle, had made arguments for using the senses for constructing knowledge it is possible that Bacon was influenced by materials he read as more and more ancient and Arabic texts were translated into Latin and became available in Latinized Europe. But the time was also right in England for his arguments to be taken up by other natural philosophers seeking a rationale for their methods of investigation. Implicit with Bacon’s philosophy was the idea that there existed a direct pathway from the reality of Nature (God’s creation) to observation that was not influenced by the observer’s beliefs. Simply expressed, Bacon argued for theory-free observations that generated matters of fact about the natural world. According to historian Barbara Shapiro (2000), the English legal system of the time had already prepared people to accept observation as a basis for authentic testimony in legal matters of fact (Bacon had studied law). So, within the community, there was a general acceptance of the idea of matters of fact. Also, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (1989), early English usage of the term fact was as an act, something done rather than something said. Both of these cultural developments provided English philosophers with an environment that was accepting of using matters of fact as active constructions from observations and as the basis for a new way of making knowledge. Bacon argued that theories, being dependent on human reason and opinion, lacked the ‘truth’ of scientific facts because matters of fact were obtained by holding a mirror to reality. Also, because facts came from nature, which was God’s creation, they had moral as well as cognitive power making them difficult to argue against. At the time Bacon was writing, medieval scholasticism, also called Aristotelianism, was the dominant philosophy. It was based on axioms or a priori statements about how the world worked, but by the end of the sixteenth century knowledge was in pieces in Latinized Europe (Grant 1978) because over hundreds of years the axioms, which had been the focus of so much scholarship, had come to focus more and more narrowly on specific contexts. Francis Bacon was a trenchant critic of medieval scholasticism and he outlined his empirical approach to the conduct of developing new knowledge in his book, Novum Organum (1620). He claimed that the work of understanding was clouded by minds “occupied with unsound doctrines” (which he called “idols”) and that the only way to rectify this situation was to start afresh with thoughts purged of such doctrine (Bacon 1968 [1620], 40). Bacon maintained that, while he valued
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the writings of the ancients, the approach that he proposed for generating knowledge would lead practitioners to truth and understanding. Bacon’s criticism of deductive reasoning, which was based on logic and rational thought, supported his proposal that the search for human understanding should be based not on theories that had emerged from the studies of the ancients but on direct observations. In Parasceve / Novum Organum, Bacon argued that interpretation of nature required two steps, inferring and forming “axioms” from experience, and deducing and deriving new experiments from these axioms. According to Bacon these steps required the senses, the mind, and reason. The generation of matters of fact also required the existence of an appropriate physical environment for natural philosophers to perform their experiments in front of well-known and trusted witnesses who could confirm the presentation of matters of fact. In his History of the Royal Society, the organization established in England in support of empirical approaches to the understanding of the natural world, Thomas Sprat associated the use of the laboratory with the establishment of a matter of fact, as he described the value of the types of papers submitted to Philosophical Transactions, the journal of the Royal Society: Those to whom the conduct of the Experiment is committed [...] carry the eyes and the imaginations of the whole company into the Laboratory with them. And after they have perform’d the Trial they bring all the History of its process back again to the test. Then comes in the second great work of the Assembly, which is to judg[e] and resolve upon the matter of Fact. (1959 [1667], 169)
Thus, the laboratory was born as a public area where experimental philosophers could work and where matters of fact could be demonstrated. As a space, the laboratory contrasted with existing practical working areas maintained by alchemists that had been secretive and closed to the public. 3. Empiricism and seeing further The influence of this new philosophy can be noted in publications of natural philosophers, like Robert Hooke who in his book Micrographia wrote: Toward the prosecution of this method in Physical Inquiries, I have here and there gleaned up an handful of Observations, in the collection of most of which I made use of Microscopes, […] that improve the sense; which way I have hereintaken […] only to promote the use of Mechanical helps for the Senses, both in the surveying of the already visible world, and for the discovery of many others hitherto unknown […] so many others to be discovered, every considerable improvements of Telescopes or Microscopes producing new worlds and Terra Incognitions to our view. (2003 [1665], xxi)
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Note how Hooke presents his technoscientific observations as supporting truthful observations of worlds that were not amenable to being observed through the use of plain senses. Instruments, like the microscope and the telescope, could be considered dumb tools that served to extend human senses in ways that in no way altered what was observed. In Micrographia, Hooke also used very detailed diagrams to reinforce his account and to help the reader to visualize his observations under the microscope. For Hooke, diagrams were naturalistic representations of apparatus and observations of natural phenomena, another way to establish matters of fact. However, development of technologies that take us into a world we can experience but not touch, smell or taste, also raises the question of how we construct reality. As Galileo Galilei (1610) reports in his monograph, The Starry Messenger [Sederis Nunicus], he looked up with his spyglass (these instruments were not called telescopes until after Galileo had published this book) and saw Jupiter’s moons, which he called Medicean stars after his sponsor, Cosimo II de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. Galileo also observed through his telescope that the surface of the moon was similar to that of the Earth and that the Milky Way was actually a vast collection of stars. Galileo speculated that instruments might help humans observe even more: All these facts were discovered and observed by me not many days ago with the aid of a spyglass which I devised, after first being illuminated by divine grace. Perhaps other things, still more remarkable, will in time be discovered by me or by other observers with the aid of such an instrument, the form and construction of which I shall first briefly explain, as well as the occasion of its having been devised. (2004 [1610], 2)
Galileo’s observations with his spyglass suggested that the Universe was composed of similar material to that found on the Earth. This was at odds with accepted theory that saw the Universe as composed of an element, aether, which was pure and sacred, very different from the four elements that composed the Earth. Galileo’s observations also supported the heliocentric theory of the solar system, which put the Sun rather than the Earth at its center. Contemporary mapping of Galileo’s observations against modern measurements (Koberlein 2016) show that his observations were, in fact, very accurate. However, such empiricism from Galileo offered the possibility of subverting not only theories about the natural world but also belief systems that underpinned Roman Christianity under the leadership of the Popes. Galileo was found guilty of heresy by the Inquisition for his support of the heliocentric theory, which he was forced to retract, and which led him to be placed under house arrest.
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4. Challenges to empiricism and to the factual Although empiricism associated with inductivism provided pathways for the construction of new knowledge, there were issues associated with its practice that continue to this day. These issues are: (1) how does one define facts/concepts empirically; and (2) how does one make the insightful leaps from a collection of specific facts generated by empirical practice to a generalization, as required by inductive reasoning, and produce a compelling coherent account? 4.1 Defining facts empirically There are two ways to define facts, empirically and rationally, also known as conceptually. We are often more familiar with conceptual definitions because they tend to be the focus of most of finished science (Longino 1983). However, such definitions are not useful empirically. For example, Hasok Chang (2004) notes that as scholars in the eighteenth century began to use the boiling and freezing points of water as fixed points for the development of thermometers, they also began to realize the limitations of empirical constructions of the concept of boiling point. One of the leading scholars in the exploration of boiling point was Jean-André De Luc (1727–1817). As Chang recounts, De Luc discovered that the question, “What is boiling point?” was a difficult one to answer empirically. How do we know we are observing boiling? Is it when tiny bubbles of gas appear in a liquid, or when large bubbles appear at the bottom of the container, or when bubbles emerge from the bottom of the container and drift to the surface of the liquid? So vexing was this issue that in 1777 the Royal Society appointed a seven-member committee, chaired by Henry Cavendish and including De Luc, to determine what constituted the boiling point of water, so that the Royal Society could make recommendations about the fixed points of thermometers (Cavendish et al. 1777). In its report, the committee made a number of recommendations including: that the fixed points should be the boiling and freezing points of water recognizing that even with the best thermometers the boiling point of water varied by 2–3°F, acknowledging the role of atmospheric pressure on boiling point, and recommending a standard pressure for measuring boiling point of 29.8 English inches (about 1 atmosphere or 101 kiloPascals). However, the committee found that even after they had made these adjustments and used only distilled water, if they ran trials on different days, they still got differences in boiling point (Chang 2004).
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The experience of this committee highlights an issue that has become an integral element of scientific practice, the development of operational definitions based on empiricism that are experimentally useful. These definitions can be compared with rational conceptual definitions that are often the mainstay of traditional educational requirements where the focus is on conceptual understanding. As Galili, Bar, and Brosh note in their exploration of weight, it is possible to define the weight of a body rationally as “the total gravitational force exerted on the body by all other bodies in the universe” (2016, 987). However, such a construct cannot be observed or measured. An empirically-based definition, also called an operational definition, for this construct could instead be “the reading of a calibrated spring scale of an object that is stationary” (Knight 2013, quoted in Galili et al. 2016, 987). Such empirically-based definitions are also epistemologically and educationally useful, providing the basis for physical laws. Of course, there is always the understanding that such laws must be embedded within, and completed by, theoretical and rational explanatory frameworks. 4.2 Constructing coherence: From facts to narrative Recognizing patterns in facts and proposing a generalization is often presented as an early step for both connecting discoveries in Nature in ways that indicate the coherence of Nature and in the attribution of scientific discovery. One of the challenges for empiricism and induction is how the scientist, or anyone for that matter, communicates these processes in ways that will be compelling and convincing. Exploring early issues of the journal Philosophical Transactions reveal that many forms of written communication, from letters to reports, were used by experimental philosophers who sought to faithfully follow Francis Bacon’s directions about how one should report experiments (Bacon 1620), and the most compelling of these, such as those presented by Robert Boyle on respiration (1670), used narrative to communicate the investigations. As Nobel Laurate Roald Hoffmann notes, “observations, objective facts and reproducible data […] cannot exist without narrative” (2006, 407). He goes further arguing that the scientists who write for a variety of audiences are sensitized to the importance of telling stories and realize that data, including observations, equations, structural formulas and spectra, “are useless without the narrative, theoretical framework to make a story out of them” (407). All empiricists following Bacon’s recommendations to find patterns in the facts that can be made into generalizations, use narratives “to give account of phenomena in any specific scientific site and context” (Morgan and Wise 2017, 87). Philosophers Mary Morgan and M. Norton Wise argue
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that the point of narrative is not just to order materials but, by the ordering, answer how and why questions, which suggest a role for narrative in scientific explanation, are used to explain through the use of scientific theories the behavior of phenomena accepted as factual or true. In her analysis of the difference between fictional narratives and factual historical narratives, Monika Fludernik (2009) argues that historical narratives are constrained by the statements of observers and other historical sources. The same could be said for science which is constrained through empiricism by facts generated about the natural world. In outlining the qualities of a narrative she argues, “[o]ne criterion of what makes a narrative a narrative is the requirement of having a human or human-like (anthropomorphic) protagonist at the centre” (2009, 6). With this quote Fludernik captures exactly how narratives are used in science, either with a human scientist or material protagonist that has human-like characteristics at the center of the narrative. In writing about narrative science, Morgan and Wise endorse the requirement for a protagonist as argued by Fludernik when they note that, [n]arratives of the vicious behaviour of antlions in capturing innocent lesser insects, inflicting violent death against the valiant struggles of the prey are horror stories indeed […]. But these horrors are almost matched by the violent terms used by scientists to describe their own experimental procedures and interventions. (2017, 4)
To explore the evidence for both types of narratives in science consider the following. In his 1982 publication, Stanley Prusiner places the human scientist at the center of the narrative of the discovery of a causative agent for scrapie, a fatal degenerative disease of the central nervous system of sheep and goats. He notes, “[i]n 1961, transmission of the scrapie agent to mice transformed research […] but the murine end-point titration assay was still heroic” (1982, 136). Prusiner’s narrative communicates the heroic nature of human endeavor in this case. However, in other narratives from Prusiner and his colleagues it is the scrapie agent itself that is the central character as is captured here: If it can be established that the scrapie agent does contain hydrophobic domains on its surface and the agent is capable of extensive hydrophobic interactions, then several of the mysterious properties currently attributed to it might be explained. (Prusiner et al. 1978, 4998)
Note that in this narrative, the scrapie agent possesses numerous properties that possibly can be identified from the ways the scrapie agent, which was a mystery in 1978, interacts in a water-hating way with other agents. In chemical narratives, compounds are often presented as anthropomorphic protagonists. A particularly engaging example comes from Hoffmann writing with two colleagues exploring the formation of benzene dimers in Jail-
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breaking Benzene Dimers (Rogachev, Wen and Hoffmann 2012). Rogachev, Wen and Hoffmann tell what happened when they forced benzene molecules closer: “the molecules reacted to this torture by moving apart or forming dimers” (8062). The jailbreaking comes to the fore when dimers decide whether or not they will stay together based on energetically available ‘escape routes.’ Hoffmann argues, “[s]cience has stories in it” (2014, 253), and I agree as I read the latest issue of Science which describes scientists probing how “storms weaponize pollen” (Kornei 2018, 380). However, any acceptance of narrative creates a challenge for classical empiricism which is premised on the separation of the observer and the observed, the scientist and the material on which she is experimenting, but narrative provides a structure for bringing facts together by forcing us to acknowledge the agency of matter and the role of interactions between human and matter in telling the story of the facts. Empiricism made curiosity acceptable and gave importance to facts that are generated from empirical activities. But perhaps we need to ask whether the human uses her senses to impose observations on living and non-living matter or if both the material and the human have agency and therefore have a role in the facts developed from practices such as observing and then presented in a coherent narrative. References Aristotle. De generatione animalium On the Generation of Animals. Trans. A. Platt. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1912. https://books.google.com/books?id=NmImAQAAMAAJ& pg. (21 June 2017). Bacon, Francis. “Paraceve/Novum Organum.” [1620] The Works of Francis Bacon. Eds. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath. New York: Garrett Press, 1968. Boyle, Robert. “New Pneumatical Experiments About Respiration.” Philosophical Transactions 62 (1670): 2012–2031. Cavendish, Henry, et al. “The Report of the Committee Appointed by the Royal Society to Consider of the Best Method of Adjusting the Fixed Points of Thermometers; and of the Precautions Necessary to be Used in Making Experiments with Those Instruments.” Philosophical Transactions 67 (1777): 816–857. Chang, Hasok. Inventing Temperature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Fludernik, Monika. An Introduction to Narratology. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Galileo Galilei. Sidereus nuncius (Starry Messenger). [1610] Trans. Peter Barker. Oklahoma City, OK: Byzantium Press, 2004. Galili, Igal, Varda Bar, and Yaffa Brosh. “Teaching Weight-Gravity and Gravitation in Middle School: Testing a New Instructional Approach.” Science & Education 25 (2016): 977–1010. Grant, Edward. “Aristotelianism and the Longevity of the Medieval Worldview.” History of Science 16 (1978): 93–106. Hoffmann, Roald. “Metaphor Unchanged. Scientists Improve Their Craft by Writing About It.” American Scientist 94 (2006): 406–407.
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Hoffmann, Roald. “The Tensions of Scientific Storytelling: Science Depends on Compelling Narratives.” American Scientist 102 (2014): 250–253. Hooke, Robert. Micrographia. [1665] Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003. Koberlein, Brian. “Galileo’s Discovery of Jupiter’s Moons, and How It Changed the World.” Forbes (7 January 2016). https://www.forbes.com/sites/briankoberlein/2016/ 01/07/galileos-discovery-of-jupiters-moons-and-how-it-changed-the-world/#41e9c 74546f0. (21 June 2017). Kornei, Katherine. “Australian State Forecasts Deadly Thunderstorm Asthma.” Science 359.6374 (2018): 380. Lindberg, David. The Beginnings of Western Science. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Longino, Helen E. “Scientific Objectivity and the Logics of Science.” Inquiry 26.1 (1983): 85–106. Morgan, Mary S., and M. Norton Wise. “Narrative Ordering and Explanation.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 62 (2017): 86–97. Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Prusiner, Stanley B. “Novel Proteinaceous Infectious Particles Cause Scrapie.” Science 216.4542 (1982): 136–144. Prusiner, Stanley B., William J. Hadlow, David E. Garfin, S. Patricia Cochran, J. Richard Baringer, Richard E. Race, and Carl M. Eklund. “Partial Purification and Evidence for Multiple Molecular Forms of the Scrapie Agent.” Biochemistry 17.23 (1978): 4993–4999. Rogachev, Andrey Y., Xiao-Deng Wen, and Roald Hoffmann. “Jailbreaking Benzene Dimers.” Journal of the American Chemical Society 134 (2012): 8062–8065. Shapiro, Barbara J. A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1700. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Sprat, Thomas. History of the Royal Society. [1667] St. Louis, MO: Washington University Studies, 1959. Wells, John. The Vaisheshika Darshana. Trans. John Wells. Darshana Press, 2009. http:// darshanapress.com/The%20Vaisheshika%20Darshana.pdf. (30 June 2017).
FLORIAN MUNDHENKE
The Role of Factuality in Film 1. Introduction Depending on one’s perspective, it can either appear as if the invisible dividing line between fact and fiction has always been distinct or as if it has always been permeable and, in accordance with producers’ or audiences’ intentions and basic assumptions, negotiable for every individual film. These two strands concerning the boundary between fact and fiction already come into view in early film history. For example, people tend to read the films of the brothers Lumière mostly under the rubric of the documentary, while they intuitively identify the works of Georges Méliès as purely fictional, focusing on his fantastic subjects, hilarious characters and film tricks. Only after further discussion does it become clear that the Lumière films not only deal with carefully selected episodes from reality, but are actually very consciously constructed in respect of mise-en-scène, camera angles as well as spatial arrangement. Moreover, as films like L’arroseur arosée (1896) prove, the Lumières also produced fictional films, utilizing actors and telling a brief story, in this case showing a gardener irritated with a boy stepping on his water pipe, which results in a spanking for the troublemaker. It can be said that the distinction between fictional and nonfictional types of film (documentary, advertising and promotional films, educational and instructional films, experimental and art films, amateur films and home movies) has a strong tradition in film theory. In David Bordwell’s and Kristin Thompson’s Film History (first published in 1979) each chapter deals with a certain era and discusses fictional films before turning to developments in documentary and art cinema at the end. From a pragmatic viewpoint, it seems easy to make the distinction since the viewer needs a different mindset and initial starting point to deal with either a fictional or a documentary film.1 On the other hand, film practices can be practically 1 Roger Odin has published widely on what happens in the mind of the spectator while watching a fictional film in comparison to how that differs from viewing a nonfictional https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-031
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identical in terms of the referencing of reality and regarding how authenticity is being built and developed, down to specific camera or sound techniques, even if one can clearly classify the examples as either fictional or nonfictional. Hence, while the differentiation might be useful for a quick overview on a wide range of films, it becomes less useful and is not sufficiently precise when one wishes to analyze individual examples or when discussing the very diverse historical development of film. This essay thus accepts the existence of the differentiation between fact and fiction but also wants to demonstrate how permeable the distinction is when critical attention is paid to the various techniques, practices and specific directorial decisions.2 Whether one is dealing with a fictional or a factual film example, and how this distinction can be made while watching the film, largely depends on the film’s structure and editing. It can be said that this operation is not always easy, since just looking at the film’s stylistic features and the descriptions to be found in the paratext (trailers, posters, reviews) is not always sufficient. Furthermore, these categories are continually being blurred or played with, and the seemingly unambiguous inscriptions of fictionality or factuality into the text are sometimes deliberately manipulated. For instance, a shaky hand-held camera may be an indication of the authentic circumstances of the recording situation. But since the advent of fictional genre films that use this aesthetic device (in the wake of the iconic example The Blair Witch Project, 1999, Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez), this formal category no longer serves as a clear indication of authenticity in a factual film. Thus, it can already be said here that all the features that can be employed are possible but not sufficient criteria for classifying any given example as either fictional or factual. In what follows, three areas will be outlined which help deal with the relation of film to the ‘real’ and with the structure imposed to mediate between the two. Under the term structure, I wish to address all alternative ways of constructing and arranging the filmic image. These options include adding music and a narrator figure and producing an overall specific style (the structure can be narrative, but also argumentative, associative or abstract).3 film. He calls this the ‘fictionalizing’ and the ‘documentarizing’ reading (lecture fictivisante, lecture documentarisante). See Odin (2000). 2 For further information on the historical and theoretical debate on the development of fictional and nonfictional film forms, see Mundhenke (2017). 3 This differentiation follows Bordwell and Thompson (1990, 89–126). Both argue that film (no matter if fictional or factual) can be arranged through narration or four principles on nonnarrative formal systems: categorical (sorting the material into certain categories), rhetorical (presenting an argument), abstract (as in experimental film) or associative (through a juxtaposition of images and sound, as in a music video).
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In section 2.1., I will investigate the problem of the assumed referentiality of cinematic recordings. The question is how does the filmed material relate to reality? Next, I will turn to the stylistic devices and discuss their relative ambiguity (section 2.2.). Both formal elements and a film’s structure can be read either as fictional or factual. Finally, the context of production, the handling of material and the audience’s perception of film are considered (section 2.3.). It shall be proposed that it is the frame of the communicative situation that crucially determines whether we perceive a film as fictional or factual. 2. Three problems of dealing with the connection between film and the real 2.1 The problem of referentiality Narrative texts, including films, can be seen to initiate communicative investigations about events in reality. Thus, it can be argued that even genre films from science fiction or fantasy are fundamentally related to the framework of the real world (for example with regard to moral obligations or human needs). Marie-Laure Ryan (2010, 15) speaks of a “re-centering”: the recipient enters into a communicative situation which probably differs from his or her surrounding environment, but he or she in the individual reception always transports their own knowledge about life and everyday reality into the fictional realm. However, the differentiation between ‘As if’ (pretense) and ‘It is’ (direct relation with the real) suggests that nonfictional films are seemingly closer to reality and form a direct reflection on real-life events and existing people. Frank Kessler points out that this understanding of the documentary refers back to the theory of photography, which, in contrast to written texts, presents an indexical relation between photograph and subject matter through the apparatus structure: “It is to some extent even possible to argue,” suggests Kessler, “that the indexical quality of the photographic image is above all the basis of the documentary quality of film” (1998, 68).4 Thus, a direct, indexical relationship between object and image is being implied. If one looks at realist film theories, one notes that authors like Kracauer and Bazin have also attributed a proximity to the real to the institution of film in general (Kracauer 1960; Bazin 1967). Vinzenz Hediger speaks of the “necessary nonfictionality of film” and says that Bazin was even talking 4 Here and in all further quotations from German criticism, the translation is mine.
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about the “self-inscription of the depicted – or more wide-ranging: of nature – into the picture,” which ultimately results in a “quasi-physical referentiality” (2009, 176–177). The problem of cinematic referentiality is, therefore, primarily one of the recurring underdetermination of cinematic images and their adaptation into the film structure. If a viewer sees a historical film, he or she can tell from looking at the images that it is supposed to play in Rome. Whether the city is a temporary reconstruction in the form of constructed scenery, or if they see the real buildings, which still exist today, cannot be determined (nor should it be) from looking at the cinematic images alone. Borrowing from Étienne Souriau (1953), Frank Kessler tries to counter this dilemma of the “paradoxical combination of indicative and irrealis” by adopting a distinction between the afilmic, the profilmic and the filmic/ cinematic image (cf. Kessler 1998, 73–76). According to him, the cinematic refers to the images captured in the footage; the profilmic designates the situation of the filmmaker and the camera on the spot; and the afilmic describes the horizon of the real to which the film implicitly refers. These levels are manifested differently in each film, and their internal balance is constantly changed and reconciled. It can be said that reality is altered through the steps of film production: the afilmic is limited by the selection of events in the pre-production, it is further processed in the profilmic situation on location and then finally transformed into cinematic images of the film by applying the means of postproduction (montage, music, commentary, etc.). The reference to the real in film is thus always only an indirect one due to these artistic choices, which lead to an unavoidable reduction, adjustment and modulation of reality. There is no direct reflection of the real but only a mediated version. A historical film can assert that ‘these scenes are playing in Rome in the year 100 AD,’ and the viewer may share this assumption when he or she engages with the fiction. In the same way, a documentary may insist that the images are taken from the real-life events of a workers’ strike, but the images are only a part of the cinematic representation and their adaptation to the film structure. The images seem to invoke the indexicality of the cinematic (e.g. by depicting scenes from the strike), but they cannot deliver unrestricted factuality; the film only shows excerpts (e.g. the final moments of the strike) and selected personal perspectives (mostly the director’s viewpoint or that of the eye witnesses who were involved). Frank Kessler speaks of the fact that filmic images can indeed claim “that these events have happened,” but they cannot say “it has been like this” (1998, 75); the impression of what events were like will be different for each and every film version. The clarity of a film’s interpretation does not arise solely from the pure indexicality of the cinematic image but also from the
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context of the cinematic structure, which constantly re-modulates its relation to the afilmic world. Bill Nichols has written extensively about the Rodney King case which involved filmed material of a crime suspect being beaten by several policemen in Los Angeles in 1991 (see Nichols 1994, 17–42). There were several recordings by bystanders, but no one recorded the whole sequence of events. Depending on which images were used and shown and whether the recording was more or less abridged (e.g. in TV news or during the court trials that followed), one could identify either King or the policemen as the principal aggressors. This example illustrates that the principal indexical quality of the images can always be questioned and re-interpreted by subjective explanations of what the images might reveal. This is pre-eminently the case when various sources exist and films are incomplete, blurred or only show a limited angle on the events. Thus, the problem of cinematic reference is not only produced by the cinematic images themselves in their ontological presence but also emerges through the changeability of the film’s structure and the reflexive power of its mutability. For instance, the inclusion of seemingly indexical recordings of reality in films intensifies the authenticity and the filmic impact. It exploits the cinematic image as proof of the real (in documentary) or as a claim to the real (in fictional film), when in fact it is merely one aspect within a larger framework of artistic decisions. These kinds of negotiations not only take place on the level of theoretical analysis but also on the level of communication. In analogy with the omniscient narrator mode in the Victorian novel, the spectator has to trust the film. He or she must always believe the director. In a documentary film, the spectator therefore believes both the ‘It is’ or ‘It has been’ in the form of an evidence structure; in a fictional film, he or she acknowledges the ‘It is as if’ in the sense of a prior assumption about the represented world. 2.2 The problem of the ambiguity of cinematic aesthetics In addition to the (unprovable) reference to reality, a second problem for the factual in film relates to film style itself, to the aesthetics and the structuring of the film as an index of factuality. The presence or absence of a specific aesthetic feature cannot be a criterion for the classification under one of the two modes. In addition, certain practices may involve very different functions, some of which are even contradictory. Moreover, the meaning of individual features can change historically over time. The hand-held camera (or living camera) is an example of these shifts and developments. Since the establishment of direct cinema in the 1960s, this device
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was understood in documentary film as a proof of the presence of the film team in the vicinity of the events. The same device used in a horror film today stands for the involvement of a figure and signifies an uncertainty regarding the facts due to the lack of an objective vantage point (subjective perspective). The significance of the hand-held camera has thus changed generically and moved beyond its earlier conventionalization. This is true not only concerning the formal aesthetic conventions associated with the technique of montage, the function of the camera and the use of film music, but also of the structuring components of narration and argumentation. (See also Saunders 2007.) In light of this, one can conclude that the formal characteristics of a film are, in a certain sense, always open (i.e. inconsistent) signs, while their meaning has to be interpreted individually for every example. Particularly in the historical development of film, one can observe that the techniques of documentary film practice (that work at creating an unmediated authenticity) have penetrated more and more into fictional representations. It is therefore of fundamental importance that formal tools and devices (camera, montage, music, but also structuring) are always perceived against the background of historically changeable production practices. Regarding the fictional film, David Bordwell’s idea of the classical style established by Hollywood in the 1930s, can be used to identify how formal characteristics are temporarily stable in the context of a particular cinematic practice (Bordwell 1985, 156–204). According to him, the stylistic design used in classical Hollywood works to support a coherent narrative and wants to make possible a reliable film reception. Consequently, the technical means (camera handling, lighting, acting, montage, use of music) are calculated to establish the greatest possible transparency. In this historical period, the principle of continuity editing prevails: connections between scenes are made clear and must be comprehensible. This works in such a way that the narration of the film becomes obscured. In establishing the basic narrative conflict, the editing fades into the background, that is, it is supposed to remain as invisible as possible. In other forms of narration, according to Bordwell, including the art house narration of the 1960s, New Hollywood’s style and post-classical narration, the mode of narration changes. In a postclassical Hollywood film, the hand-held camera is now used more as a means of expressing subjectivity and uncertainty than as a tool suggesting authenticity as it once was. (See Bordwell 2006.) For the aesthetics of the documentary film, Christian Hissnauer (2011), following Manfred Hattendorf (1999), has provided an overview of the aesthetic and stylistic features of the genre (see Hissnauer 2011, 129–137). He distinguishes between the use of existing material (archival films, documents, private recordings) and original material (interviews, research re-
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cordings), camera strategies (e.g. observing camera or the hand-held camera), the types of persons appearing (witnesses, hosts, experts), sound (original sound or post-sync), commentary (auctorial off-narrator or the absence of a spoken comment) and other features such as locations, titles, the quality of the material, etc. He primarily evaluates these elements in relation to the background of an ongoing authentication. Hissnauer concludes that on all of these levels “there is always a staging or indexing decision” that “has an influence on the content and aesthetic possibilities within the creation and reception of a documentary production” (132). These signals are historically mutable and depend on the context of reception (e.g. cinema or television). What ultimately unites them is that they all imply a “rhetoric of attestation” (132). Hissnauer also speaks of “intended effects of authentication,” whereby these effects “usually” (132, 136) support and stabilize the film’s intention. The structure of a documentary thus suggests a meaningful connection between these elements, with a title chosen by the author and an introductory speaker commentary, followed by interviews with experts. Accordingly, the viewer can assume that the chosen techniques, experts, original recordings and commentary match and are related to the topic of the film – and are not faked or unsuitable to the genre (for example, featuring an expert embodied by an actor or using fake archival material). As with the fictional film, in documentary film, historical mutability can alter the use of certain devices. Bill Nichols differentiated between six modes of documentary film (implying six historical phases) (2001, 130–149). With this in mind, the expository mode (mostly to be found in films made between 1930 to 1960) often used an authoritarian voice-off narrator impersonating an objective stance and representing an ideal perspective on the events filmed. With the establishment of the handheld camera in 1955, the observational mode (mostly used in the 1960s to 1980s) focused on establishing an involvement of the viewer with the events in progress. The filmmaker accompanied certain people and events on the spot with his team (which can be visible in the frame) and mostly renounced off-narration, limiting the focus to a specific perspective.5 Another filmic device that has migrated not from documentary to fictional film but in the opposite direction is the use of non-diegetic film music. After the implementation of the observational phase of filmmaking in the 1960s, documentary entered a new phase – called reflexive or performative mode by Nichols (2001, 140–144). Films like The Thin Blue Line (1985,
5 Similar observations are made by other documentary theoreticians. Erik Barnouw talks about the shift from expository to observational documentary in describing the handling of the film camera either as “catalyst” or “observer” (1993, 229–260).
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Errol Morris) with an original score by Philip Glass, or epic British nature films like Deep Blue (2003, Alastair Fothergill, Andy Byatt) and Earth (2007, Alastair Fothergill, Mark Linfield) with compositions by George Fenton, relied heavily on the emotional and elucidating function of orchestral film music. This technique was not unknown in 1960s and 1970s documentary film production, but it was rather rare and unusual, since it seemed to interfere with the aim of creating authenticity. But with a topical shift of documentary to nature and environmental films, but also to the political and socio-critical films by Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock and others, film music was established as both an enhancing and a distancing device more useful for these new thematics. In summary, it can be said that individual cinematic devices provide only a small amount of information about the degree of factuality of a film. It is only in connection with production practices that they become relevant. Usually all techniques play a specific role within the given framework of conventions. The problem of the ambiguity of aesthetic devices can thus be encountered by the fact that formal means operate within a given time-specific system. They should be interpreted within a precise temporal horizon of production techniques. 2.3 The problem of the dependency of communication on production and reception Like most mediated treatments about reality, the differentiation of fictionality from factuality is one which is primarily negotiated between the producer of the film and its recipient. In addition, this negotiation has to be made over and again: “In fact, the ontological distinction between fiction and non-fiction, which renders all genre-differences secondary and subordinates the field of cinematic discourse […] into the two categories of fictional and non-fictional film, had to be introduced into this field,” suggests Vinzenz Hediger (2009, 168). This differentiation between the factual film and the mere ‘entertainment experience’ of the fictional film, as described initially by John Grierson (1926, 26) in reference to the “documentary value” of film, was used to ennoble the documentary as a means of world reflection, social criticism, education and knowledge. According to this perspective, such film addresses the issue that these labels are primarily communicative instruments. The German philologist Frank Zipfel therefore notes that the differentiation between fictional and factual examples requires the analysis of “cultural […] practices,” whereby “author and reader enter into a pact or conclude a contract for the production and reception of a […] text” (2001, 283). There is a repertoire of
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rules that applies to every reception process, and these rules are not explicit or always the same, but implicit and changeable. Against the background of these open sets of devices, which are processed through socialization, the distinction between fact and fiction becomes effective. Through the designation of a work as fiction, its status is marked, and the text is mapped within the system. It thus can be “published within the framework of the social practice of fiction” (282). The above-mentioned signposts of referentiality can indicate a tendency within the spectrum of fictional or factual films. This observation is of importance, as Zipfel also points out: “the fact that a story is about a nonfictional event […] is not a sufficient condition” (283) for defining it as factual within a given communicative situation. Only through the interpretation of such signposts and the application of rules is the process of determining the status or mode of a text initiated. Ideally, one could assume that media communication results in speaking about a shared reality. This process is initiated by the director who opens the debate. This establishes a triad between filmmaker, recipient and world as a shared reference. The world and the references provided establish a common basis of understanding against which the audience’s knowledge and ways of thinking can be negotiated. In a fictional example, the focus is on an aspect of entering into a game. It is about a ‘make-believe’ set up by the speaker and the agreement to create a fictional world on the part of the recipient. The particularity of the fictional world-making lies in its imaginary abstraction and construction (as opposed to the concrete spatial, temporal or sociopolitical framework of the factual). This moment of generalization allows the recipient to play this game for some time, but he or she is not completely immersed in it. Zipfel speaks of a “double perspective” (258): “In the make-believe game – as with every game – the reader not only plays the game; he is aware that he is playing a game, and is able to observe himself in the game” (258, my emphasis). According to Georg Weidacher, if the speaker has initiated a communicative situation through a film and the recipient accepts it, a successful “communicative equilibration” is established (2007, 141). In this case, the audience both consents to the fictional game of imagination and agrees to enter a conversation about, and perspectivation of, reality. The result is a successful pragmatic negotiation process between factual and fictional communication. The problem of context dependency must therefore be handled by, first, finding a necessary frame for the act of communication which satisfies the individual example and the communication parties involved and, secondly, by considering its historical and temporal situation and the interaction of semantic, symbolic and pragmatic operations at work intra- and extratextually.
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3. Conclusion It can be said that there are many possible indicators for deciding about the fictionality or factuality of a film, but none of them are sufficient in and of themselves for a definite determination. Rather, it must be assumed that all factors taken together stabilize the reading of a text. Three problems concerning the differentiation of fictional and factual examples were identified: First, the problem of film reference and its relatively open, unprovable relation to the real. Because of the underdetermination of the filmic image, which is only established by the film’s structure, the referentiality of images is often an unreliable indicator of authenticity. As a solution to this problem, it has been proposed that all films must be viewed as manufactured structures because they alter reality in the implementation of a cinematic world. Furthermore, there is the problem of the ambiguity of aesthetic devices, which, viewed individually, scarcely permit any consistent signification. Stylistic techniques such as the hand-held camera or nondiegetic film music must be considered against the background of formal conventions and production practices. The style of a film must be historically positioned and is part of the interpretation of the individual work. Thirdly, the communication situation between the text producer and the text recipient is an outstanding factor in establishing and evaluating the individual aspects mentioned above. Thus, a film originates historically and culturally in a certain climate, which must be included in the interpretation. Through the evaluation of the communication space, the observation of elements of the aesthetic system as well as the reflection about how the film is labeled; the recipient can make a relatively secure decision about the fictionality or factuality involved. Due to the complexity of the factors and the density of the processes, there is always the possibility that communication can fail – either consciously and intentionally (as a deception intended by the producer, as in a mockumentary film) or unconsciously (as misperception). References Barnouw, Erik. Documentary. A History of the Non-Fiction Film. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Bazin, André. What is Cinema? Ed. and trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1967. Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. London: Methuen, 1985. Bordwell, David. The Way Hollywood Tells It. Story and Style in Modern Movies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art. An Introduction. 3rd ed. New York, St. Louis, San Francisco: McGraw-Hill, 1990.
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Grierson, John (as The Moviegoer). “Flaherty’s Poetic Moana.” The New York Sun (8 February 1926). Reprinted in The Documentary Tradition. Ed. Lewis Jacobs. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979. 25–26. Hattendorf, Manfred. Dokumentarfilm und Authentizität. Ästhetik und Pragmatik einer Gattung. Konstanz: UVK, 1999. Hediger, Vinzenz. “Vom Überhandnehmen der Fiktion. Über die ontologische Unterbestimmtheit filmischer Darstellung.” “Es ist, als ob.” Fiktionalität in Philosophie, Film- und Medienwissenschaft. Ed. Gertrud Koch. Munich: Fink, 2009. 163–184. Hissnauer, Christian. Fernsehdokumentarismus. Theoretische Näherungen, pragmatische Abgrenzungen, begriffliche Klärungen. Konstanz: UVK, 2011. Kessler, Frank. “Fakt oder Fiktion? Zum pragmatischen Status dokumentarischer Bilder.” Montage AV 7.2 (1998): 63–78. Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Mundhenke, Florian. Zwischen Dokumentar- und Spielfilm. Zur Repräsentation und Rezeption von Hybridformen. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2017. Nichols, Bill. Blurred Boundaries. Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. Odin, Roger. De La Fiction. Bruxelles: De Boeck, 2000. Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Fiction, Cognition, and Non-Verbal Media.” Fact, Fiction and Faction. Eds. Jørgen Johansen, Dines Johansen, Leif Søndergaard. Odense, Portland: University Press of Southern Denmark, 2010. 9–28. Saunders, Dave. Direct Cinema. Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. Souriau, Étienne. L’univers filmique. Paris: Flammarion, 1953. Weidacher, Georg. Fiktionale Texte, fiktive Welten. Fiktionalität aus textlinguistischer Sicht. Tübingen: Narr, 2007. Zipfel, Frank. Fiktion, Fiktivität, Fiktionalität. Analysen zur Fiktion in der Literatur und zum Fiktionsbegriff in der Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2001.
KARL NIKOLAUS RENNER
Facts and Factual Narration in Journalism 1. Journalism and factuality 1.1 Journalism as a genre of communication Journalism and literature – like advertising and other communication genres – can be understood as “institutionalized macro-forms of communication” (Schmidt and Zurstiege 2000, 177). The institutionalization of these forms through habituation, typification, and mutual expectations (Berger and Luckmann 2003, 58) have fixed their modalities of communication to such an extent that they crucially affect the communicative actions of all participants. What is unique about journalism as a genre of communication is that it promises current, factual, and impartial information which can be continuously updated (Schmidt and Zurstiege 2000, 177–182). Journalism acquired this role when the emergence of the newspaper as a mass medium possessing its own organizational and economic structures made it into a subsystem of society.1 In the history of media and communication, journalism has not only become more distinct as a genre; it has also expanded to include communication services such as radio, television, and the Internet. The factuality of journalism is founded on its obligation to report the truth – a claim it has made from the very beginning. The German-language Flugschriften (pamphlets) of the sixteenth century, from which today’s newspapers developed, already used “Neue wahrhaftige Zeitung” (New Truthful Paper) regularly as a subtitle (Wilke 2016, 25–33). While the obligation
1 The development of newspapers began in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (/ V.3 Detering and Meierhofer) with handwritten company newsletters put out by merchant houses trading on a global scale, as well as single-page prints with information on current events called “new papers.” The first newspapers to be published periodically were the Relation (Strasbourg 1605) and the Aviso (Wolfenbüttel 1609) (Wilke 2000, 18–25, 41–45). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-032
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to truth expressed in this paratextual phrase is also shared by historiography, what makes journalism different both then and now is that it always stays abreast of current events. This truth claim means primarily that it conveys information that is neither knowingly nor unknowingly false – meaning that those responsible for communication services do not lie and that they do everything in their power to avoid error. While the degree to which journalism was already distancing itself from literature in the sixteenth century through its allegiance to the truth has not been researched to date, it is an established fact that being obliged to report the truth had become a distinctive quality of journalism by the eighteenth century at the latest. It was at this time that literary discourses increasingly specialized in fictionality (Schmidt and Zurstiege 2000, 178) (/ IV.9 Paige, / IV.1 McKeon). Fictional literature was thus not only able to deal with imaginary situations; it took full advantage of this ability. This fictional license is, and continues to be, in clear opposition to journalism’s obligation to the truth – for, according to a saying that is widely used in journalistic circles, journalists do not tell (made-up) stories, they report the facts. Another way journalism set itself apart from other forms of discourse was by gradually gaining independence and autonomy, which enabled it to communicate not just the truth, but the whole truth. The first important step in this direction was the abolition of state censorship, resulting in freedom of the press. To this day, freedom of the press has remained a cornerstone of all liberal democratic governments and movements since the eighteenth century and has been implemented in contemporary democracies one after the other (Wilke 2009, 77–125). However, more than fifty countries today still suppress the freedom of the press (Reporters Without Borders 2017). The next development that was to shape the autonomy of journalism as we know it today was its emancipation from partisan journalism, which had been widespread even in the democratic systems of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, a time when newspapers were regarded as mouthpieces for political parties. This resulted in a kind of advocacy journalism in which facts were mixed with opinions, while uncomfortable issues were ignored (Meier 2007, 184). This form of journalism became obsolete at the end of the nineteenth century when newspaper-publishing companies developed new business models (penny press, street sales, paid advertisement) that freed them from exclusively catering to the supporters of one party. In 1880, in the statement of policies of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Joseph Pulitzer declared that this new form of journalism “will serve no party but the people; be no organ of Republicanism, but the organ of truth” (quoted in Emery and Emery 1992, 171). At this time, so-called objective journalism emerged, which concentrated on
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the presentation of facts. This conception of journalism continues today to define the self-image of journalists. Its main characteristic is the clear discursive separation of information and opinion (Meier 2007, 184). This means that when journalists write news reports, they must focus on informing audiences about the facts. On the other hand, when their goal is to comment upon these facts so as to allow the public to form an opinion, they must do this in the form of an editorial, op-ed, or satirical commentary, which must be clearly marked as opinion through paratextual indicators. As C. P. Scott, the editor of the Manchester Guardian from 1872 to 1929, once famously said: “Comment is free, but facts are sacred” (Scott 2002 [1921]). Modern journalism thus distinguishes not only between factual and fictional forms of communication, but between factual information and its subjective evaluation. There is also a close connection in journalism between factual news reporting and serving the common good of all citizens. The US Committee of Concerned Journalists expresses this clearly in its journalistic maxims from 2001, which were produced in order to safeguard journalism’s future in the world of digital and commercialized media: “The first [elementary principle of journalism] states that the purpose of journalism is to provide people with the information they need to be free and self-governing. To fulfill this task: 1. Journalism’s first obligation is to the truth. 2. Its first loyalty is to citizens” (Kovach and Rosenstiel 2001, 12, emphasis removed). 1.2 Journalism and the public The specific journalistic understanding of factuality is connected to the function that journalism fulfills in modern, diverse societies. In order to maintain cohesion, modern societies need a mediating institution that connects the different areas of society. According to systems theory, this function is fulfilled by the public sphere (Gerhards and Neidhardt 1991, 41). Journalism, as an independent subsystem of society, contributes to the development of public discourse by informing society about events “that could become important beyond the context in which they happened” (Kohring, 2001, 79, emphasis removed).2 Based on this socio-theoretical point of view, journalism could be defined as follows: Journalism researches, selects, and presents issues that are new, factual, and relevant. It creates public discourse by observing society and by offering these observations to
2 Unless otherwise indicated, translations are by Michelle Miles.
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a mass audience through periodic media, thus constructing a shared reality. This constructed reality helps [society] to navigate a complex world. (Meier 2007, 13)
In order for journalism to fulfill this function, the facts reported to the public must be true, which is why a factual mode of communication is necessary. It is also imperative in journalism that the selection of information not be based on strategic or biased points of view, but on relevance for society. This condition constitutes a fundamental difference between journalism and the public relations work of political parties, organizations, and companies, all of which want to influence the public for their own special interests (Meier 2007, 198–202). The distinction between information and opinion is thus meant to ensure that any information that is relevant to the whole of society is accessible to every interested citizen, regardless of their social position or political orientation. The importance of journalism’s service to society is demonstrated by the fact that its functions are regulated not only by the ethic codes of journalist’s associations and media companies but also by law. The law also distinguishes in this case between information and opinion. In Germany, for instance, the free expression of opinions is protected by the constitution, because it is a human right. Factual claims, however, are only permitted if they are true. When reporting facts, journalists are therefore committed by German media law to a thorough checking of the accuracy of the content (Dörr and Schwartmann 2014, 26). If a journalistic article makes an incorrect claim, the concerned individuals have the right to reply, an action which can ultimately result in prosecution for defamation or for causing economic harm according to criminal or civil law (Dörr and Schwartmann 2014, 38–39, 111–112). The societal significance of journalism is based on its ability to provide a basis for the formation of public opinion on current issues (Schmidt and Zurstiege 2000, 101–103; Meier 2007, 115). The public sphere is a system of communication through which the public absorbs information and opinions from journalistic and artistic publications, from rumors, and from public relations campaigns and weaves them together to form a collective opinion (Gerhards and Neidhardt 1991, 42). Insofar as this majority opinion legitimizes or delegitimizes political and social actions (Noelle-Neumann 2009, 433), it is essential to the formation of modern democratic societies. For this process of public opinion formation to be successful, it is imperative that all the information that matters for the community be made public, and also that the diversity of opinions be represented in the media. It is also essential that the public have sufficient trust in journalism’s ability to inform the society. Modern societies are based on the division of labor, hence trusting that others will perform their duties responsi-
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bly is a key factor “for being able to describe and explain the functioning of modern societies” (Kohring 2001, 53). The efficient interaction of all the factors that contribute to a democratic formation of opinion in modern societies depends on the journalistic quality of the available newspapers and news shows. Nowadays, however, the confidence of the public in the trustworthiness of journalism is becoming increasingly threatened by the aggressive distribution of fake news (/ I.4 Packard, / IV.8 Lavocat, / III.13 Mundhenke). In contrast to unintentionally misleading information, fake news are not the result of careless journalistic practice; they are phony news deliberately meant to deceive (Wardle 2017). Such phony information has been used for centuries to discredit rivals or to destabilize communities, but in the so-called attention economy of digital media fake news are becoming a particularly acute problem, because they spread very fast and generate clicks, which bring advertising revenue. The increasing replacement of the selective mechanisms of journalism by the selective mechanisms of social media creates echo chambers and filter bubbles in which people only receive the kind of information that corresponds to their preconceived opinions. These people reject all other information as fake news, in order to immunize themselves against differing views (Russ-Mohl 2017). 2. Journalism and narration 2.1 Reporting and narrating Different types of journalism take different approaches to narration. In news journalism, which is the prototypical form of journalism, narration only plays a minor role. Text types such as breaking news and news reports are better suited to the task of conveying straight information. News journalism only recognizes narrative types of text (news feature, storytelling) as a kind of supplement (Wolff 2011, 171). In literary journalism, by contrast, narrative types of text are of key importance. Literary journalists want to reach out and appeal to people. Because they are not interested in the straight reporting of news, they can borrow narrative techniques from literature. Yellow press publications and magazines also use storytelling, but they do so to make their publications more attractive and to ensure their commercial success. It is therefore no surprise that these different positions have often led to mutual distrust (Eberwein 2013). We can resolve the contradiction between reporting and narrating if we understand the communicative act of narration as the assertion of a story (Ryan 2004, 6). This conception allows us also to regard breaking
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news and news reports as narratives because they act as representations of stories (Renner 2012a). According to the terminology adopted in this volume, we can regard news features and storytelling as narratives in a narrow sense, and breaking news and news reports as narratives in a broader sense. However, these different text types differ significantly in their perlocutionary effects, this is to say, in their power to influence readers. The purpose of breaking news and news reports is to keep audiences up to date, while news features are intended to let audiences “intellectually and emotionally participate in the event, and witness it through an authentic narrative” (Haller 2008, 72). From a narratological point of view, headline news and news reports concentrate on representing sequences of events, while news features are about the experience of these events (Fludernik 1996). This is why the presentation format of breaking news and news reports is prosaic and abstract, while news features are more dramatically structured and focus on people, motives, and actions. While all variants of journalistic narration must observe journalism’s obligation to the truth, they do not have to take the same verification approach. From the beginning, journalism has always had two different methods of maintaining its obligation to the truth: the eyewitness account, and information from a credible source.3 News features follow the eyewitness principle, meaning that authors must be personally on location and must have seen what they are reporting with their own eyes (Haller 2008, 35). This is different from headline news and news reports, where it is sufficient for authors to rely on information from a reliable source. This variety of research methods has had far-reaching consequences for the organization of journalism. On the one hand, it leads to a distinction between the tasks of the reporter in the field and of the editor in the office. On the other hand, it opens the possibility of basing the research for breaking news and news reports on reliable sources. This creates a division of labor which makes news journalism particularly effective, since it can rely on a network of correspondents and news agencies. 2.2 Author and narrator The obligation to tell the truth plays a decisive role in shaping the pragmatics of journalistic texts. Insofar as they are factual narrations, these texts are pragmatically defined by the identity of author and narrator. The au3 In his dissertation De Relationibus Novellis, the first scholarly work on newspapers, Tobias Peucer had already distinguished between eyewitnesses and earwitnesses (Peucer [1690] 2015, 113).
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thor-narrator must therefore “vouch for the truth of the claims that are being made” (Klein and Martínez 2009, 3). In fictional texts, by contrast, a “second, imaginary communication situation” is added to the communicative act of the author. In this secondary situation, “an invented narrator” (Klein and Martínez 2009, 2) is created who is not under obligation to vouch for any truth claims affecting the reader’s real world. In journalism, the responsibility of the author is affected by the fact that journalistic publications are the product of many authors (Bucher 2000, 263). News reports are written by several authors performing different tasks. These texts consist of a combination of news provided by various news agencies, excerpts from press releases, quoted statements, and newly written passages. Although news features and opinion pieces are usually produced by a single author, editors must still decide whether or not they will be published and whether they will be allowed to go to press as originally written. Another facet of the phenomenon of multiple authorship is the intense editing process that journalistic texts must always undergo. Journalistic editing entails much more than the simple checking of spelling and grammar, the writing of headlines and editing texts for layout; it also consists of fact-checking critical information: “From an economic point of view, it is product design and quality management rolled together” (Wolff 2011, 274). The handling of the narrator persona, which represents the journalistic correlate of authorial agency in the text, differs substantially in news features on the one side and news reports on the other. These variations are based on their different methods of verification. News features reproduce the eyewitness point of view of their authors by representing events in a dramatic format, and they use the deictic origo of the I, here, and now of the narrator as a means of orientation for the audience (Doležel 1967, 544).4 News features are narratives with a clearly recognizable, more or less marked homodiegetic narrator. They also have a “very subjective form of representation” (Wolff 2011, 171) that conflicts with the journalistic norm of “accessing every available source in order to get closer to the truth” (Wolff 2011, 171). In journalism, that norm is regarded as the most important safeguard against subjective mistakes; it is also the only way to guarantee that journalism reports the entire truth and does not become an instrument serving the strategic interest of individual informants. In news reports, strict adherence to this norm is fundamental to journalism’s obligation to the truth: “A correct and reliable picture of the events is always
4 This is especially obvious in film and video features on television (Ordolff 2005, 281– 292).
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assembled by an editorial board from a multitude of sources” (Arnold 2016, 52). News editors are like judges who consider many heterogeneous statements in order to form a “master narrative” that will serve as the basis for their sentence (von Arnauld 2009, 32). They extract the core of what happened from the subjective statements of participants and witnesses and present this information in an abstracted and condensed form. In headline news and news reports, the events thus described come into focus because they “seem to tell themselves […], because the mediation of the narrator is barely noticeable, if at all” (Lahn and Meister 2008, 63; Doležel 1967, 544). The focalization of this invisible narrator oscillates between an omniscient and an external point of view: The narrator may know more than what the individual sources are saying, but he does not know what their motives and thoughts may be. Unlike a judge’s master narrative, however, news reports do not contain judgments of events, because that would clash with the norm of keeping information and opinion separate in news journalism. The evaluation of events, which can be seen as “that part of the narrative which reveals the attitude of the narrator toward the narrative” (Labov and Waletzky 1967, 37), is reserved for other types of journalistic writing, such as op-eds, editorials, caricatures, satirical commentary, and so forth. In accordance with the principle of multiple authorship, these opinion-generating pieces are generally composed by other authors than the people who write the corresponding news reports. 2.3 Real events and narrated stories Journalistic narratives are factual texts because they refer to our reality (Klein and Martínez 2009, 3). However, this ‘reference to reality’ cannot be understood exclusively as representation in the sense of the correspondence theory of truth (/ II.1 Klauk, / II.2 Bartmann, / I.6 Zipfel); for instance, the same events can be reported in widely different ways by media from different nations (Renner 2012b). Likewise, in the media coverage of scandals and polarizing conflicts, the same data or circumstances can figure in drastically divergent accounts (Renner 2013, Renner 2018). Therefore, journalistic texts cannot be treated merely as a reflection of existing reality. Communication studies recognizes “that the reality of mass media is the result of a multitude of selective decisions, evaluations, and interpretations” (Schmidt and Zurstiege 2000, 127). The semiotician Jurij M. Lotman, who researched the textual and cultural relativity of events and themes, offers a narratological explanation of this phenomenon. He de-
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fines an event as “the shifting of a persona across the borders of a semantic field” (Lotman 1977, 233). From this formula we can deduce that facts and actions do not become events automatically, but only acquire event status in conjunction with the cultural world views that define the borders of semantic fields (Lotman 1977, 233–234). The theoretical reconstruction of Lotman’s reflections demonstrates how these borders are defined by semantic distinctions. In fictional stories, narrators posit and presuppose the existence of such distinctions, while in factual stories semantic distinctions can be found in the rules, norms, and convictions that are regarded as true in a given society or social group, and that bind these groups together. In factual narration, we can speak of a border transgression when an empirically observable violation of a social rule by a main character takes place (Renner 2012a, 60–65; Renner 2013, 271–272). Whether or not a given event constitutes a violation of social norms is open to conflicting interpretations. A case in point is the firing of FBI Director James Comey by President Donald Trump in May 2017. If one regards Comey’s dismissal as an obstruction of justice, it constitutes a newsworthy and scandalous event. However, if one follows President Trump’s arguments, then the firing was a legitimate and unspectacular procedure. These opposite interpretations led to an extremely polarized coverage, and American society was unable at the time to develop a common public opinion about this event. Journalistic reporting relates to public opinion in a double manner. On the one hand, journalism is based on the systems and conceptions of order through which societies organize the coexistence of their citizens. These conceptions of order define what is to be regarded as an important event and therefore worth reporting. On the other hand, in helping to form public opinion, journalism contributes to the revision or solidifying of the present existing conceptions of order (Renner 2013, 285–286). 2.4 The time of narration and the time of the story A particular challenge for journalistic narration is the journalistic principle of having to provide up-to-date information. Unlike historiography, factual narratives in journalism do not recount past events, but event sequences that are often still unfolding while they are being told.5 In journalism, 5 There are two minimal narratological criteria for considering a story complete: 1) the dismantling and restitution of an existing order – in other words, the sequence of complication and resolution; and 2) the success or failure of the main people involved in the story in reaching their goals (Renner 2012a, 62).
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narrated time continually intersects with the time of narration. Therefore, some media specific methods evolved to enable journalism to cover stories and events that are still progressing. Among the radio and TV techniques that are particularly well suited to live coverage are live-tickers, breaking news and special editions. The usual procedure is the serialization and constant updating of the coverage. TV and broadcast news shows are updating their coverage every hour, newspapers and magazines do so every day or every week. From a narratological perspective, journalistic narrative therefore requires a distinction between micro-stories told by individual texts and macro-stories told through a series of installments. “Individual journalistic texts, whether they are narrative or not, can be regarded as components of a narrative macro-text, or a macro-narrative, which itself follows a narrative structure (complication / resolution)” (Robert 2013, 53). This observation also concerns the relationship of journalistic narration in a stricter and in a broader sense. In news features and other distinctive journalistic narratives, the selection of events is narrowed down to such an extent that the story being told can be treated as having at least partially come to an end, an approach which facilitates the use of established means of storytelling. News reports by contrast are subordinated to the telling of macrostories, and they are organized in such a way as to be easily updated. In the structure typical of news reports, the most important information is placed at the beginning, and the remaining information follows in an order of decreasing relevance. This principle of “inverted pyramid” (Meier 2007, 181) not only simplifies the editing of news, but also makes it easier for readers to stay up-to-date. It was developed in American journalism and was later adopted in Germany, in combination with a so-called “five paragraph rule.” This rule transforms the story’s natural order into the artificial narrative order of the journalistic text (Lahn and Meister 2008, 138), whose purpose it is to stress the topicality of the news. The content is presented in five information “packages” that begin by addressing the current situation, then provide background information and finally turn to possible future courses of action (Wolff 2011, 70). This format strictly determines what verb tense should be used in the first sentence, the socalled lead sentence: “If what is reported is still happening […], the first sentence has to be in the simple present tense […]. If the event is over, the deed done, the damage incurred, and the word uttered, and if there remains an impact on the present situation, then the first sentence has to be in the present perfect” (Wolff 2011, 60). The rest is written in the simple past. A similar rule also applies in Anglo-Saxon journalism; it requires the present tense for headlines (Thomson Reuters 2018). The structure of news reports adapts the coverage of ongoing stories to the commu-
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nicative situation of the recipient; this is why the present tense is also used in breaking news (Thomson Reuters 2018). Journalistic macro-stories are open toward the future. They connect past events to the present situation and suggest possible courses of action. In order to do this, the lead sentence or the headline must condense the current situation in a way comparable to the representation of a state of affairs in court (von Arnauld 2009, 37). This strategy transforms the narration of a story into an argument whose purpose is to shape public opinion concerning the appropriateness of possible future actions. Supplementary op-eds offer diverse evaluations of the current situation, and news features enable the recipients to apprehend the reported story not only intellectually, but also emotionally (Renner 2018). 3. Markers of factuality The obligation to truth in journalistic articles is based on their publication in news outlets. It is on this basis that the truth contract between the authors of news reports and their audience is established (Klein and Martínez 2009, 3). The observance of this contract is guaranteed by the laws that regulate the media, and it can be checked through comparison with the news coverage of competing media. Deviations from other articles or contradictions between them do not function as signposts of the fictionality of the texts (/ IV.8 Lavocat) but are regarded as evidence of a faulty or irresponsible journalistic practice. Marks of high quality in a piece of journalistic writing, on the other hand, include the deployment of intrinsic “authentication strategies” (Hattendorf 1999, 77) that underscore journalism’s obligation to truthful reportage. Among these strategies, the quoting of sources is the most important factor. All essential information must be referred to the original source; in critical cases two mutually independent sources are requested. If a journalist needs to protect a source by keeping him or her anonymous, this must be made explicit to the audience, in order to comply with the principle of authentication through transparency (Hattendorf 1999, 258). Statements must be marked as direct or indirect quotations in newspapers and magazines, or as original recordings in radio and television programs. Quotations must be decontextualized and then recontextualized to fit in the news report, a process which requires skills and integrity, in order to preserve the original wording as well as the communicative intent of the quoted utterance (Perrin 2015, 13–14). Another authentication strategy that has become increasingly important in the course of technological development is the addition of visual materi-
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al. The manually produced woodcuts used in newspapers in earlier periods were considered as authentic as photographs are today (Bucher 2016, 64– 68). With the spread of photography, the documentary function of images gained even more significance. Digital media now offer completely new possibilities for verifying the truth of journalistic statements. They oftentimes provide a direct link to sources, for instance to the websites of government agencies, companies, or organizations; links also allow readers to access live cameras capturing ongoing events or digitized documents (Renner 2013, 289). By giving access to such sources, journalism enables readers to assume the function of eyewitnesses, and to form their own opinions. The remarkable importance of mentioning the sources in order to underscore the truth claims of journalism demonstrates that for journalism researching the facts is more important than telling them. In journalism, as the first maxim of the Committee for Concerned journalism requests, what matters is the truth of the story, whether the story is reported as news feature or news report. In its third maxim, the Committee states that journalism’s “essence is a discipline of verification.” The maxim stating that journalism “must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant” is only the seventh (Kovach and Rosenstiel 2001, 12–13, emphasis removed). This order reflects the priorities of journalism and affirms its status as factual narrative. Based on an original translation by Michelle Miles
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ELSA SIMÕES LUCAS FREITAS
Factuality and Fictionality in Advertisements 1. Advertising discourse Due to the way in which advertisements function (Johnson 2008, 9–10), thriving on ambiguity and ellipsis, they challenge standard attempts at classification. Advertisements also often disguise their discursive status, assuming the form of other discourses (Cook 1992). Advertisements persuade us into acquiring something we do not yet possess (in the case of commercial advertising, which promotes goods for sale) or make us alter behaviors that could impact our own lives or the lives of the surrounding community – as in the case of non-commercial advertising (e.g. corporate, political campaigning or fund-raising for nonprofit organizations). With this kind of advertisement, the intended action should be perceived as benefiting the individual and society rather than the advertiser (Shanahan and Hopkins 2007). Advertising is often criticized for resorting to vagueness, half-truths, exaggeration or blatant lies (O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy 2004), for instance when it extols the virtues of products or services, promotes a political candidate or even when it scares us into adopting life-saving behaviors. However, when we look at contemporary commercial adverts – especially those marketed as props for a coveted lifestyle – there are, for many goods, no distinguishing factual characteristics to foreground (Cook 1992). Here, discursive ‘relevance’ loses its original purpose (saying what is provable and truthful), and the success of the advert comes to depend on viewers’ subjective readings, interpretive skills, cultural and social background, and on an array of emotional associations triggered by the way the advert approaches the product. Nowadays, advertising’s main purpose is to influence consumers rather than to provide factual claims about what is being sold or stated (Potter 2015).
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2. Factuality and reality in advertisements In advertisements, factuality is a complex issue. Persuasiveness is advertising’s major trait. Criticism of its nonfactuality in fact denies its contemporary discursive quality, which is conative (address-oriented) and deliberately ambiguous rather than descriptive and referential (Cook 1992). In some types of ads, the connection to reality is, perforce, more obvious, as in corporate or political advertising. However, even in those cases, there is often a twofold appeal to rationality and emotion due to the need to refer to specific context with the use of real-life objects. Instead of piling up facts, which would be unappealing and eventually irrelevant, advertisements engage us in stories well told, which can strike us as even more real than reality itself. This effect of perceived realism in stories (Cho, Shen and Wilson 2014) arises from the fact that the narratives in them often feel more plausible, more typical, and more consistent than the events in real life, which often strike us as random, meaningless and lacking a sense of closure. The feeling of completeness conveyed by the stories adverts tell us is reinforced by the existence of multimodal campaigns, which reach our minds and our senses in different but complementary ways with a similar overall message, which in turn creates a transmedial storytelling effect. Adverts take advantage of this, thereby manipulating convention and detail to create suggestive yet plausible versions of reality, albeit beautified and stereotyped. In other contexts, television advertisements can even make use of hidden cameras or real people (instead of actors) caught in authentic situations in order to enhance their reality effect. Such a strategy is often employed in the case of product tastings at supermarkets or in demonstrations of positive reactions to new products. In these situations, the fact that the situation and the customer’s depicted reaction are ‘real,’ features prominently in the advertisement. This results in an impression of factuality and increases the credibility of the ad, although the advertisement itself may appear less artistic and vivid than others (Myers 1999). When commercials use narratives, certain media are preferable: television is the story-telling medium par excellence, mimicking real-life situations and interactions; radio also easily accommodates narrative processes; even the print medium, although more limited in reproducing the elapsing of time, circumvents this handicap and introduces ‘before’ and ‘after’ effects that convey truthfulness and factuality. In multimedia campaigns, all these advantages are maximized for the benefit of credible storytelling and memorization.
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2.1 Narrative in advertisements as a reality-enhancing strategy Framing a product or a service within a narrative is a common strategy in advertising, since it provides a vehicle for the intended factuality effect. Both in the case of commercial and non-commercial advertising, placing a product, a politician, or a victim within the frame of a credible narrative will make them more meaningful to viewers (Isaac and Grayson 2017), who will then be less likely to forget what they saw or read and more prone to act on what they have seen. Providing a narrative setting for a product, the actions of a politician, or even the positive consequences of a money donation will help viewers in three ways. First, viewers will visualize themselves as if they were acting in that same way, with familiar visual codes associated with specific wellknown formats guiding them towards the ideal interpretation (Segel and Heer 2010). Secondly, they will identify with the message by means of character-related factors (based on perceived psychological similarity between characters and viewers and the characters’ likeability) and in relation to storytelling techniques, such as choice of viewpoint (Cohen 2001) and linguistic cues (van Krieken et al. 2017). Lastly, in anticipation, viewers will experience the glow and enjoyment that come from having bought the desired product, supported the right candidate or deserving charities, helped people in need or contributed to community wellbeing, as if the experience were already part of their lives. In order to enhance narrativity, advertisements mimic everyday scenes such as true-to-life conversations in natural-looking settings as well as realistic narrative situations which are cleverly recreated (Freitas 2014). This is done for the purpose of credibility and to save resources: if the narrative formats are familiar – and these are chosen to match the perceived interests of target-audiences – there is no need to spell everything out, and the eulogistic message can be delivered in medias res. Inserting advertising messages into narrative structures, however, also presents specific difficulties, since the storyline will be constrained in terms of time and space: much is left to suggestion and implicitness (Bezuidenhout-Raath 2005), and informational gaps have to be filled by the audience, who need to actively participate in the narrative by supplying the missing elements according to their individual or shared knowledge (Freitas 2010). 2.1.1 Advertisements using (explicit and implicit) narrative formats and their impact on factuality and fictionality Advertisements capture our attention. When the advert draws attention to metatextual devices such as the embedding of real promotional messages
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about real goods (that can actually be bought) within a fictional frame that reproduces the characteristics of fictional formats, it achieves a mise-enabîme structure that strengthens factuality effects. Another common way of drawing our attention to adverts it is by telling us a full-length or abbreviated story and that can be achieved with the help of intertextuality. For instance, in the case of adverts with intertextual references to literature, a factual message can acquire a welcome sheen of artistic fictionality (which is different from a blatant lie). When it comes to the reproduction of well-recognized formats such as soap-operas, ads lean on the sense of familiarity conveyed by these formats which helps viewers accept the promotional message. Although these persuasive strategies are anchored in fictional formats, paradoxically they contribute to the advert’s factuality effect: nowadays, factual claims are often meant to be read tongue-in-cheek (Freitas 2012, 430). The type of mental simulation and transportation (/ I.7 Gerrig and Gagnon) derived from the use of narratives in adverts can be found across virtually all advertisements. Although this is true, perhaps more obviously so in commercial advertising, non-commercial varieties also resort to such simulation, since it enhances the ad’s appeal to the addressees and their engagement with it. The fact that we construct cognitive schemas which accommodate the story being told (imagining ourselves as its protagonists) can positively contribute to desired behavioral changes (Escalas 2004). An example of the use of narrative format that mimics a soap opera episode can be found in a Portuguese multimodal campaign for the detergent Tide. A mother storms into a café where her son is sitting with his girlfriend and confronts her with a ‘filthy’ bra that she found at home. The girl looks surprised and the son embarrassed. A quick close-up of another girl, a sexy blonde barmaid behind the counter, shows her looking anxious and frightened. Then the mother shows her son’s girlfriend the detergent she should be using, namely the one she herself uses and demonstrates its superiority by comparing her own pristine white blouse with the girlfriend’s yellowish bra. Surprised, the girlfriend replies that the bra is not hers, upon which they all look at each other and exchange loaded glances. In this ad, the narrative effect is based on soap opera schemas, building in the intended target audience a sense of belonging to and sharing a common cultural background. This is done by means of textual and visual triggers (Cook 1994, 11) such as exaggerated and almost farcical facial expressions, slice-of-life situations, topped by the cliffhanger, with an ominous male voice asking “Who does the filthy bra belong to?” In the case of a long-lived brand such as Tide, the use of such a standard TV format enhances familiarity. This rubs off onto the product, with positive results,
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especially when we use a likeable celebrity as the main protagonist, as in the case of the actress portraying the mother (Tripp et al. 1994). The fact that the mother is shown as a ‘stereotypical mother’ is another bid for increased verisimilitude: she looks and sounds like a member of the target audience and thus the likelihood that the message will sink in is increased (Chang 2011, 416). Perception of realism in a narrative involves many dimensions and these also affect the outcome of advertising messages. It would seem that exaggerating an advertisement’s fictionality might stand in the way of the audience’s appreciation of the message. However, if the narrative frame matches an intrinsic part of the audience’s life experience, the effect can operate in the opposite direction. Therefore, overt fictionality may even result in a perceived reality effect. After all, reality is not one-dimensional (Cho, Shen and Wilson 2014, 830). Advertising can therefore be described as a discourse about the real world which employs verisimilar storytelling techniques to make claims about products and services whose actual qualities, i.e. their factuality, have been displaced by the persuasive perlocutionary effects of the fictionalizing mode of narrative employed in this genre. References Bezuidenhout-Raath, Ilze. “Advertisements.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2005. 7–8. Chang, Chingching. “Opinions From Others Like You: The Role of Perceived Source Similarity.” Media Psychology 14 (2011): 415–441. Cho Hyunyi, Lijiang Shen, and Kari Wilson. “Perceived Realism: Dimensions and Roles in Narrative Persuasion.” Communication Research 41.6 (2014): 828–851. Cohen, Jonathan. “Defining Identification: A Theoretical Look at the Identification of Audiences with Media Characters.” Mass Communication & Society 4.3 (2001): 245–264. Cook, Guy. The Discourse of Advertising. London: Routledge, 1992. Cook, Guy. Discourse and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Escalas, Jennifer Edson. “Imagine Yourself in the Product: Mental Simulation, Narrative Transportation, and Persuasion.” Journal of Advertising 33.2 (2004): 37–48. Freitas, Elsa Simões Lucas. “Advertising the Medium: On the Narrative Worlds of a Multimedia Promotional Campaign for a Public Service Television Channel.” Intermediality and Storytelling. Eds. Marina Grishakova and Marie-Laure Ryan. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2010. 258–284. Freitas, Elsa Simões Lucas. “Advertising and Discourse Analysis.” The Routledge Handbook of Discourse Analysis. Eds. James Paul Gee and Michael Handford. London: Routledge, 2012. 427–440. Freitas, Elsa Simões Lucas. “The Language of Advertising.” The Routledge Companion to English Studies. Eds. Constant Leung and Brian V. Street. London: Routledge, 2014. 505–515. Isaac, Matthew S., and Kent Grayson. “Beyond Skepticism: Can Accessing Persuasion Knowledge Bolster Credibility?” Journal of Consumer Research 43 (2017): 895–912.
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Krieken, Kobie van, Hans Hoeken, and José Sanders. “Evoking and Measuring Identification with Narrative Characters – A Linguistic Cues Framework.” Frontiers in Psychology 8 (2017): 1–16. Johnson, Fern. Imaging in Advertising: Verbal and Visual Codes of Commerce. London: Routledge, 2008. Myers, Greg. Ad Worlds: Brands, Media, Audiences. London: Arnold, 1999. O’Shaughnessy, John, and Nicholas Jackson O’Shaughnessy. Persuasion in Advertising. London: Routledge, 2004. Potter, David M. “The Institution of Abundance.” Readings in Advertising, Society, and Consumer Culture. Eds. Roxanne Hovland, Joyce M. Wolburg, and Eric E. Haley. London: Routledge, 2015. 36–47. Segel, Edward, and Jeffrey Heer. “Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data.” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 16.6 (2010): 1139–1148. Shanahan, Kevin J., and Christopher D. Hopkins. “Truths, Half-truths, and Deception: Perceived Social Responsibility and Intent to Donate for a Nonprofit Using Implicature, Truth, and Duplicity in Print Advertising.” Journal of Advertising 36.2 (2007): 33– 48. Tripp, Carolyn, Thomas D. Jensen, and Les Carlson. “The Effects of Multiple Product Endorsements by Celebrities on Consumers’ Attitudes and Intentions.” Journal of Consumer Research 20 (1994): 535–547.
IV. Literary Issues: Fact, Truth and the Real
MICHAEL MCKEON
From Mimesis to Realism: The Role of Factuality and the Real in the History of Narrative Theory and Practice This chapter aims to answer the following question: to what extent and in what ways has literary narrative had the avowed ambition to render the factual and the real? The terms that are central to a historical approach to this question are mimesis, verisimilitude, probability, realism, and fictionality, and they will be taken up in that order. My title anticipates my argument that Aristotelian mimesis and modern realism are equivalent concepts and practices – although not as structuralist narratology has understood them to be. In accord with its methodological precept that structure and history can and should be separated from each other, structuralism has ignored the historical contexts and development of these categories and thereby misconstrued their meaning. Structure, like its analogue form, has a history that is vital to its understanding. And although the realm of narrative content is the dimension in which the factual is manifested, the choice of whether and how to render factuality is a formal determination. It is from this perspective that the question of factuality will here be approached. 1. Aristotelian mimesis Verisimilitude and probability entered theoretical discourse on drama and narrative toward the end of the sixteenth century through Italian encounters with Aristotle’s concept of mimesis. In the Poetics, Aristotle argues that poetic imitation (mimesis) does not seek strict veracity and does not confront us with the immediate presentation of the real; it gives us pleasure by representing a similarity to or likeness of the real. It is “natural for all to delight in works of imitation. […] [T]hough the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view the most realistic representations of them in art” (Aristotle 1941, 1448). In this view, imitation is based on and motivated by the awareness of a distance between the object and the act https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-034
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of imitation, between the spatio-temporal present and its representation. To elaborate Aristotle’s celebrated distinction, history undertakes the factual description of actual events and in the order of their occurrence; poetry undertakes the virtual imitation of what might happen, reordering events to make a plot that is whole (Gr. holos) – that is, one that is composed of parts (actions) whose relationship to each other is probable or necessary (eikos ē to anankaion) (Aristotle 1941, 1450–1451, 1451).
2. Verisimilitude: Italian theory According to Douglas Lane Patey, “Italian theorists variously render Aristotle’s εικός as verisimile or probabile, but most frequently follow mediaeval rhetoric in choosing the former” (Patey 1984, 77).1 A sampling of texts by the still indispensable Bernard Weinberg confirms Patey’s generalization, but also documents much variation in the way verisimile and probabile are construed. Thus, with respect to every poem, Denores holds that “insofar as it is an imitation, it must be verisimilar” (Weinberg 1961, 675).2 Tasso agrees that verisimilitude must be a condition of imitation (686). Zinano characterizes history and poetry as distinct kinds of truth – in actuality (what has happened) and in potentiality (what could happen). Though we might suppose that the latter partakes of verisimilitude, Zinano intends his distinction to be dichotomous, between absolute truth (uerita` ) and absolute invention or fiction (fintione). This suggests that verisimilitude occupies the territory between these two concepts and can even combine them (Weinberg 1961, 670, 671). For Beni, the stricter constraints on the verisimilar are evident in his argument that poets should “entrust their plot to prose” because those whose characters speak in verse “throw decorum and verisimilitude into disorder” (Weinberg 1961, 707). An extreme instance of this literalizing tendency is Castelvetro’s restriction of poetic art to the standards of the natural and historical actuality it imitates (see Weinberg 1961, 503–504). Buonamici stays closer to Aristotle’s position on the imitative distance from the presentation of the real that is required to create pleasure: “the work of verisimilitude in the spectator can never cause him – unless he is an imbecile – to mistake the thing representing for the thing represented” (Weinberg 1961, 707, 695).
1 Liddell and Scott (1976) translates εικός as “like truth, i.e. likely, probable, reasonable” (484). 2 All translations from the Italian and Latin are by Weinberg.
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Although probabile is less commonly the translation of eikos among Renaissance Italian theorists, Oddi and Bulgarini among others treat it more or less synonymously with the verisimile (Weinberg 1961, 653–654, 889). According to Sassetti, “[a] probable proposition is verisimilar, so that in order to know the nature of verisimilitude we must know that of the probable” (Weinberg 1961, 844). Sassetti’s observation might be taken to adumbrate the idea that the verisimilitude of imitation is a function of the probability of imitation. This at least may be Viperano’s insight. Imitation, at one remove from the immediate presentation of what actually has happened, re-presents it virtually on the concrete model provided by probability (and necessity). This involves re-ordering an actual and contingent diversity of actions by constructing a plot that is a single action and achieves virtual unity (see Weinberg 1961, 763–764). The importance of this insight is that it conjoins two Aristotelian fundamentals. The well-constructed plot, whose unity of action distinguishes it as qualitatively the most important part and ‘soul’ of tragedy, provides a formal model for the singular and unified artifactuality of mimesis as distinct from the multiplicitous and chaotic factuality of the real – that is, a model for verisimilitude as distinct from veracity (Aristotle 1941, 1450). When theorists overlook the importance of that distinction, Aristotle can appear to affirm the immediate reflection of the real in, and thereby the factuality of, poetic mimesis. In the seventeenth century, the unity of action will figure as one of the ‘three unities’ of French neoclassicism. Of the Italian theorists, Riccoboni and Tasso come closest to the genuinely formal implications of this quasiAristotelian doctrine in arguing that radical limits on the time and place represented, and correspondingly on their representation, will help ensure a plot whose action is single and unified (Riccoboni 1579, Tasso 1875; see Weinberg 1961, 587, 1057–1058). But the two unities of time and place were also advocated for reasons other than formal. In justifying the limit on representational time, Riccoboni and Bonciani echo Castelvetro, who maintains that a disparity between representational and represented time will tax the imagination of spectators and destroy verisimilitude (see Weinberg 1961, 69, 508–509, 540, 587). In Maggi’s words, such a disparity “will absolutely produce an effect of incredibility” (Weinberg 1961, 415). Again: by attempting to eliminate the distance between the representational and the represented, the artifactual and the factual, these theorists reveal a basic misunderstanding of Aristotle’s call for verisimilitude and probability, which on the contrary enable the spectatorial experience of that distance.
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3. Verisimilitude: French theory What was known to English speakers as the seventeenth-century ‘French heroic romance’ was widely associated with the claim to vraisemblance. The earliest and most celebrated heroic romance was d’Urfé’s pastoral L’Astrée (1607–1627), widely proclaimed to be vraisemblable even though most commonly read as a roman à clef (several keys were printed after d’Urfé died).3 Perhaps the indirect, allegorical historicity of a roman à clef was thought to justify taking L’Astrée as vraisemblable rather than simply vrai. In his preface, the translator of L’Astrée (1657), John Davies, writes: “What was before censur’d as extravagance of imagination, is now reconcil’d to probability, and restrain’d by Judgement ” (Millet 2017, 67). Madeleine de Scudéry, the most popular and prolific author of heroic romances, was widely praised for their vraisemblance. But authors and theorists were becoming increasingly sensitive to the discrepancy between the romance attribution of vraisemblance and the roman à clef’s indirect claim to historical vérité or factuality. In the twelfth century, romance had begun to detach from the body of the chanson de geste, and over the next several centuries, romance and history were gradually separated, then dichotomized through the analytic skepticism of that epoch’s major developments: humanism, the Reformation, the scientific revolution, and the invention, then maturation of print as a deep and permanent feature of modern culture. After 1660, history and romance had become not only opposed but also vastly unequal as vehicles of truth (see McKeon 2002 [1987], 36–47). This is despite the brilliance of Don Quixote (1605, 1615), which at the century’s opening had made available to European readers a highly selfconscious understanding of history and romance as both antithetical and inseparable. With hindsight, many modern readers have seen Cervantes’s dialectical synthesis as the first novel. But contemporary authors like Sorel who were most immediately influenced by Don Quixote can appear more focused on a partial Cervantic inheritance – the dogged historicist critique of romance – than on sustaining a dialectical reciprocity of history and romance.4 Sorel’s 1627 parody of d’Urféan pastoral romance, revised in 1633, was translated as The Extravagant Shepherd. The Anti-Romance: or, The
3 Roman à clef: Harth (1983, 38–41). Vraisemblable: Harth (39–40nn.5,6). Harth cites Charles Sorel, La Bibliotheque françoise (1664), and the preface to Madeleine de Scudéry’s Ibrahim (1641), written by her brother Georges. The English translator of Ibrahim (Henry Cogan, 1652) renders Georges’s vraisemblable regarding L’Astrée as “truly resembling” (see Millet 2017, 36). 4 Paul Scarron (Le Roman Comique, 1651) and Antoine Furetière (Le Roman bourgeois,1666) re-enact Sorel’s Cervantic method, the latter more effectively.
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History Of the Shepherd Lysis (1653). “The Author to the Reader” observes that the most Extravagant actions of our Shepherd-Lover, have for their Presidents [sic] those of so many brave Hero’s, whom he hath endeavor’d to imitate. […] And though they have given the name of Romance to those charming and delightful Histories, and that his pretends more right to the title, as being nothing but charms and delight it self: Yet we have call’d him the Anti-Romance; and that because Romances contain nothing but Fictions, whereas this must be thought a true History. (Sorel 1653, e2r-e2v)
In other words, Sorel’s ‘imitation’ of romance is, like Don Quixote, a parody, a negation of a negation that through historicist critique supersedes romance by preserving and absorbing it as an old model for something new. Anti-romance seeks fulfilment as a ‘true history’ not in the narrow sense of the historically true (vrai ), but as a vraisemblance reflexively aware of its doubleness, its obliquity. The obliquity of parody is for Aristotle a defining property of imitation or mimesis itself. As is already apparent in the popularity of the roman à clef, French authors and theorists are more inclined than their Italian predecessors to claim, however ironically, the factuality of history as a positive norm for their narratives. In the wake of the first voyages of discovery, the French led the way in generating scores of ‘imaginary voyages’ that parodied the conventions of factuality in authentic travel narratives, which reasonably enough called themselves histories. None achieved vraisemblance more ingeniously than those that relied on the passage of time to authenticate their apparent romances as histories in the making. According to Vairasse d’Allais (whose narrative was first published in English), “Columbus was looked upon (here in England, and afterward in France) as a brain-sick Fellow.” But “the discovery of America […] has sufficiently evidenced the truth of Columbus his Assertion. The Histories of Peru, Mexico, China, &c. were at first taken for Romances by many, but time has shewed since that they are verities not to be doubted of ” (Vairasse D’Allais 1675, A3v-A4r). However, the doubleness of Sorel’s parody (and of Aristotle’s mimesis) is lost in D’Allais, because the implication is that vraisemblance will be authenticated only through its cancellation by, and its transformation into, the vrai. French authors also dominated the field, at least at first, of the secret history, the chronique scandaleuse, and the libelous memoir. In 1690, the comtesse d’Aulnoy confided to her readers that “[it] is not sufficient to write things true, but they must likewise seem probable, to gain belief ” (d’Aulnoy 1691, A4r). And because she has resisted this impulse, “I do not doubt but there will be some, who will accuse me of hyperbolizing, and composing Romances.” Nonetheless she assures us that “you have here no Novel, or Story, devised at pleasure; but an Exact and most True Account of
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what I met with in my Travels” (d’Aulnoy 1691, B1v). Pierre Bayle made d’Aulnoy the occasion for a broader reflection on the problem: It has prevailed, as a general opinion, that her works are a mixture of fictions and truth, half romance, and half history; […] Booksellers and authors do all they can to make it believed that these secret Histories have been taken from private manuscripts [… because] such like adventures, please more when they are believed to be real, than when they are thought to be mere fables. From hence it is, that the new romances [les nouveaux romans] keep as far off as possible from the romantic way: but by this means true history is made extreamly obscure. (Bayle 1734–1748 [1697], IV, 365–366)
Testimonies like these suggest that whether or not veracious, the claim to historical factuality is usurping the authority, or absorbing and altering the meaning, of vraisemblance. Increasingly, the claim to factual historicity is being marked explicitly so as to replace, or at least to supplement, the questionable, traditionally implicit and unmarked, claim to verisimilitude. At the turn of the eighteenth century, the claim to historicity – the assertion that fictional narratives tell the stories of actual people – gaining in popularity, also anticipates the same stance in the early novel (see Tieje 1913, 213–252). One sign of this development is the way the unweighted Aristotelian distinction between ‘history’ and ‘poetry’ is being conceived as one between histoire and the pejorative roman. Bayle’s phrase nouveaux romans designates narratives that overwrite their verisimilitude with marks of historicity. But because French has no separate word for what English calls romance, roman had to do double service, at times signifying a narrative norm (as in roman héroïque and roman à clef ) and at times a critique of contemporary narrative (as in Bayle’s nouveau roman and Sorel’s anti-roman). D’Aulnoy’s English translator uses both romance and novel pejoratively; in the French source text, roman would have been ambiguous and rhetorically counterproductive. In English, the clear pejorative was romance, whose generic status by the end of the seventeenth century had swelled to epistemological proportions and engrossed everything from the exaggerated, idealized, fabricated, erroneous, impossible, incredible and deceptive, to falsehood and outright lies. Perhaps, in its negative application, roman evoked the English romance. During the 1660s, however, a genuine shift in terminology was in progress, and for a while sustained. The term nouvelle came into use to designate an actuality-grounded and politically-subversive alternative to the traditional noblesse culture of both the old romans and the old histoires, and it claimed historicity in a variety of ways (see Harth 1983, 171–179; also Darnton 1982). These experimental shifts in usage testify to a diminished investment in the distinctive meaning of Aristotle’s vraisemblance. From expressing the goal of imitation or mimesis to capture a heightened form of the truth of
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things ‘as they might be’ by exploiting the distance entailed in representation, vraisemblance has come to seem a weak gesture at direct presentation, perhaps supplemented by the illusion of ‘historical’ or ‘factual’ immediacy – an effort to present the vrai that is doomed to mere semblance. Some French theorists lose touch with the formal significance of vraisemblance and advocate it to persuasive ends. In Rapin’s words, “[e]ven the truest things should not be related if they seem unbelievable or extraordinary, unless you give them an air of truth or at least the coloring of verisimilitude” (Rapin 1677, trans. Harth, 1983, 145). In fact, “[v]raisemblance is whatever conforms to the opinion of the public” (Rapin 1674, trans. Patey 1984, 81). The greatest impact of seventeenth-century French theory, within immediate circles and beyond, was made by Corneille’s ‘Troisième Discours,’ which affirms the doctrine of the three unities a good deal more boldly than do its French proponents earlier in the century, and which disregards the formal justification for the unities of time and place advanced by Riccoboni and Tasso (see above, section 2). On the topic of the unity of time Corneille advocates not mimetic vraisemblance but, by implication, the vrai: The dramatic poem is an imitation, or rather a portrait of human actions, and it is beyond doubt that portraits gain in excellence in proportion as they resemble the original more closely. A performance lasts two hours and would resemble reality perfectly if the action it presented required no more for its actual occurrence. (Corneille 1970, 109–110)
Corneille’s famous construal of Aristotle diminishes as far as possible the crucial distance between representational virtuality and represented actuality that defines the imitative nature of poetic vraisemblance. The fact that this is the term Corneille candidly employs here to identify the aim of mimesis even as he describes that aim as the immediate reflection of the real makes clear how far vraisemblance has diverged in meaning from Aristotle’s eikos (Corneille 1970, e.g. 105, 109, 110, where vraisemblance is translated as “probability”). Of the unity of place Corneille also maintains that “we ought to seek exact unity as much as possible” (Corneille 1970, 113). But place seems to entail more difficulties than time, and this may be why Corneille frankly describes spatial more emphatically than he does temporal adjustment as a way to “deceive the spectator” (Corneille 1970, 114). But deception, once named, has a powerful justification. The pleasure the spectator takes in dramatic representation requires it: “his mind […] must not be hindered, because the effort he is obliged to make to conceive and to imagine the play for himself lessens the satisfaction which he will get from it” (Corneille 1970, 108). By obscuring discrepancies between the representational and the represented, “deception” ensures that the greater deception entailed in
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maintaining the two unities, and hence the mental absorption of the spectator, on which pleasure is thought to depend, will not be disrupted. Later in the discourse, Corneille returns to this topic: “[M]ost spectators [are] warmly intent upon the action which they see on the stage. The pleasure they take in it is the reason why they do not seek out its imperfections lest they lose their taste for it” (Corneille 1970, 114). And here Corneille appears to raise the possibility that the spectators themselves play a role in maintaining their pleasure – paradoxically, the role of self-consciously resisting or negating (“they do not seek out its imperfections lest they lose their taste for it”) the self-conscious awareness that what they experience is a representation and not actually present. In Sorel’s parodic deployment of imitation, what is resisted in the experience of representation is not the potential consciousness of a fissure between form and content, but on the contrary the unconsciousness of it, of the separability of form and content. In the end, Corneille’s approach to the unities, although (or perhaps because) it turns on its head what Aristotle means by mimesis, throws into high relief and raises to the level of debate some of the crucial categories that would preoccupy theorists in the next few years: pleasure, deception, and consciousness.
4. Probability: English theory Perhaps even more than the French, at the turn of the century a powerful strain of naïve empiricism polarized English debates on the nature of narrative truth on the horns of the factual versus the false, ‘(true) history’ versus ‘romance.’ Limits on space allow no more than citational sampling from my own research to support this generalization, one whose texts range from 1654 to 1727 and take in devotional, casuistical, ‘literary,’ and ‘scientific’ discourse, collections of documents, political allegories, travel narratives, and books of wonders.5 Printedness could be seen both to confirm the documentary truth of the text and, less often, to exemplify the deceitful rhetoric of romance (McKeon 2002 [1987], 46, 48). An increasingly pervasive language of ‘fact’ and ‘matter of fact’ testified to the truth of, among other things, ‘Scripture-History,’ the Resurrection, and witchcraft. But factuality also might be subjected on occasion to caveats like the following: “Facts unably related, tho with the greatest Sincerity,
5 See McKeon (2002 [1987], 57, 70, 88–89, 111–112, 102, 115, 433n.73, 438n.114, 438n.115).
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and good Faith, may prove the worst sort of Deceit” (82, 85, 117).6 The positivist view of ‘fact’ is most significantly refuted by Fielding’s satiric usage in what amounts to the first theorization of realism, Joseph Andrews (1742), Bk. 3, Ch. 1 (see below, section 5). Before that theorization challenges strategies of factualizing and historicizing they continue to dominate, culminating in the signature trope of the ‘claim to historicity,’ the assertion that the fictional figures and events depicted in a narrative have, or have had, an actual existence. The claim could be made most obtrusively on title pages and in paratexts, as well as throughout texts themselves, by insinuations of characters’ extratextual activities. I will assume the reader’s familiarity with the claim to historicity in Behn, Defoe, Haywood, Richardson, and others.7 However, a second feature of English theory and practice that distinguishes it even more decisively from that of Italy and France moderates this naïve empiricism to such a degree that the claim to historicity, having dominated narrative for several decades, by the middle of the eighteenth century begins to be superseded by realism. After 1660, English discourse greatly favors “probability” over “verisimilitude” (not to mention vraisemblance) (Patey 1984, 77–78, 83).8 This striking difference between French and English terminology cannot be attributed to a single cause. However, one factor must be that by the latter decades of the seventeenth century, English literate culture, arguably more than French, had become suffused with the excitement and controversy generated by the new philosophy and, among other things, its reconception of probability. Bacon’s program, innovative though it was, had as its premise the same goal of achieving certainty that had grounded earlier and very different systems of knowledge. The experience of his experimentalist followers soon led them to revise that goal from certain to probable truth, and the means of attaining natural knowledge from axioms to hypotheses. For Bacon, probability still had its ancient association with opinion and rhetoric. But by the middle of the seventeenth century, the distinction between knowledge and prob-
6 For two excellent studies that take distinct approaches to the subject see Poovey (1998) and Shapiro (2000). 7 For many examples see McKeon (2002 [1987], Pts. 1 and 3); and / IV.9 Paige. 8 English translations of d’Urfé, d’Aulnoy, Rapin, Corneille, and Du Bos that render vraisemblance as “probability” provide concrete evidence of this preference: see above, section 3, and Rapin (1674, A7r, a2r). Thomas Rymer translates Rapin’s vraisemblance into “probability”; Patey translates it back. See also Du Bos (1733 [1719], Sect. 30 and 1748, Ch. 30). Other evidence is not hard to find: see Millet (2017, 53, 83, 90, 195, 247, 256, 297, 431); Williams (1970, 34, 61, 114, 132–133, 139–140, 151, 193, 257, 302, 309, 310, 341, 393).
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ability was waning, and the concept of persuasion was being used to discriminate degrees of assent to propositions based on the evidence of the senses, reason, and testimony (Shapiro 1983, 25–26, 32, 33, 37, 38; Patey 1984, Ch. 1; Hacking 1975, Ch. 3). Around 1660, methods of statistical quantification and computation took off, transforming the concept of probability (Hacking 1975). These developments in the theory of natural knowledge bear an evident relation to those we have been tracing in the theory of literature. We can hear this in Locke’s terminology: in maintaining that the “highest degree of Probability” pertained to a “matter of fact” that, “consonant to the constant Observation of our selves and others, in the like case, comes attested by the concurrent Reports of all that mention it, we receive it as easily, and build as firmly upon it, as if it were certain Knowledge” (Locke 1975 [1689], Bk. IV, Ch. xvi, para. 6, 661). Newton, a committed experimentalist with a famous distaste for hypothesis, warned around 1704 that “if without deriving the properties of things from phaenomena you feign hypotheses […] your system will be little better than a romance” (Shapiro 1983, 283n.158). The new philosophy’s turn from certainty to probability and the contemporaneous narrative turn toward claims to historicity, distinct as they may be on the spectrometer of skepticism, both evince the broad and implacable wave of empirical epistemology that had been gathering for the past century or so. The claim to historicity seeks to achieve by other means what is sought by the doctrine of the unities: the seamless accord of narrative form and content, the representational and the represented, the virtual and the actual. It is the earliest and most primitive narrative technique of emulating the new-philosophical principle that all knowledge, all access to truth, is a function of experience, which is to say of our sense impressions. For a while, the claim to historicity was made and disseminated widely. But Bacon knew that the defects of the senses, obvious in individual experience, require that the knowledge of nature be distanced, abstracted, and generalized from the many variable circumstances of particular sensations, and to this end his followers developed experimental models for abstracting from experience. After 1660, the Royal Society began to sponsor such trials, around the same time that the concept of probability was becoming more sophisticated through innovations in theory and techniques of quantification. This is also when the doctrine of the two unities was beginning to be challenged actively on the grounds that the tight fit of form and content only frustrated the pleasures of artistic experience. In significant cases (as we shall see), these challenges were made in implicit or explicit comparison with scientific modes of knowledge, and through thought experiments that recurred to Aristotle’s resonant remarks about mimesis.
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As formulated by members of the Royal Society, experimental method was a recognizable if rudimentary means of controlling for variables. ‘Experience’ is the product of the senses as they are deeply embedded in the spatial and temporal contingencies of social practice; ‘experiment’ names the protracted and wide-ranging effort to disembed experience, to detach what is generalizable – nature as such – from the diversity of concrete practices. Our normal knowledge of nature is conditioned by our experience. Experiment seeks to ‘free’ nature from these conditions by treating them as variables that can be controlled for by methods of quantification. That is, variable conditions can be recognized for what they are, and their effects can be neutralized by means of a process of distantiation that involves multiplying and averaging the number of observations, observers, experiments, and experimenters. This process allows one to isolate the constant ‘nature’ that can be seen to persist, invariably, across a range of artificial variations. The ambition of experiment is to replicate and refine sense experience; the ambition of the unities is to erase it. 5. Realism Intellectual history deals with both terms and concepts. The use of the terms verisimilitude and probability has guided us toward an understanding of their conceptual meaning as it evolved over time. The term realism offers no comparable guidance because it was coined around the turn of the nineteenth century – in philosophy, in 1797; in literature, in 1817 (OED) – that is, after literary realism had begun to be practiced in the eighteenthcentury novel. To contend that a concept has pre-existed what later emerges as its accepted term is by no means unusual. To be plausible it requires the demonstration of a pre-history that connects the emergence of the term with conceptual developments that approximate and anticipate their semantic fulfilment in that term. The importance of verisimilitude ultimately owes its authority to its rendering of Aristotle’s concept of mimesis; but in long-term usage that authority has proved uncertain in capturing Aristotle’s rather straightforward meaning. Perhaps ‘seeming truth’ lent itself too easily to the careless shorthand ‘truth.’ Probability, for a long time less favored, comes into its own in English usage in proximity with new-scientific usage, where early on the absolutism of certainty was replaced by the skepticism of probability. By returning to the meaning of mimesis I will pick up the thread that ties it to eighteenth-century realist theory and practice as well as to the epistemology of the new science and its language of probability. I will then turn to two notable and opposed ways that realism has been construed after its coinage.
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Dryden’s dialogic Of Dramatic Poesy appeared eight years after Corneille’s discourse on the unities was published, and Corneille is cited throughout on key matters of imitation and representation. One of Dryden’s speakers begins with a panegyric to “these last hundred years,” in which “almost a new nature has been revealed to us” through discoveries in “optics, medicine, anatomy, astronomy” (Dryden 1962 [1668], Vol. I, 26). However, English poetry has languished in comparison not only with that of the Ancients but also with French poetry, this speaker continues, because it has not maintained, as these have, the unities of time and place. Another speaker criticizes the English practice of presenting on stage, rather than narrating in the French mode, actions that “can never be imitated to a just height”: “For what is more ridiculous than to represent an army with a drum and five men behind it […]? When we see death represented, we are convinced it is but fiction; but when we hear it related, our eyes (the strongest witnesses) are wanting, which might have undeceived us” (51). The central problem of English dramaturgy in this Corneillian view is that it draws attention to the gap between the how and the what, the form and the content, of representation, a gap that destroys credibility. The normative status of visual witnessing betrays the perspective of naïve empiricism. A third speaker, commonly seen as Dryden’s spokesman, questions the critique of a staged army in battle by arguing that the testimony of the senses is always subject to the influence of another powerful faculty: “for why may not our imagination as well suffer itself to be deluded with the probability of it, as with any other thing in the play” – like the premise that the actors are “kings or princes” (62)? And soon both speakers who earlier defended the two unities allow that we participate to some degree in our own theatrical deception. One, apparently persuaded by some of what he has just heard, remarks: “For a play is still an imitation of nature; we know we are to be deceived, and we desire to be so; but no man ever was deceived but with a probability of truth” (79). The language of delusion and deception recalls Corneille’s but strikingly affirms it, positing a conscious agency and underscoring a distance between the apparent facticity of what is represented and the audience’s awareness of its representational provenance. The role of the imagination is not to close the gap but to subtend it, suggesting that the imaginative adjustment of the representational to the represented is an integral feature of mimesis and its probability. In 1712, Addison extended Dryden’s proto-realist insight by explicitly comparing the imagination to the empirical or scientific understanding with regard to their shared if unequal distance from the realm of the senses. Addison shows that these two mental faculties, although their products differ greatly, are closely comparable in their experimental
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methods of abstracting from sensible experience and controlling for variables. Whereas the extreme abstraction achieved by the understanding transforms sense impressions into concepts and numbers, the imagination’s detachment stops as it were half way, and produces images or representations that provide a virtual resemblance to the actual object. Addison is at pains to describe four degrees of imaginative distantiation from the spatio-temporal presence of sense impressions. One of these stipulates the superiority of reading – even plays – over the modes of intake proper to all other media, owing to the abstracted nature of written language. Another, the distance of virtual images from what they actually represent, is the key to the peculiar pleasures of the imagination because it introduces “a new Principle of Pleasure, which is nothing else but the Action of the Mind, which compares the Ideas that arise from Words, with the Ideas that arise from the Objects themselves” (Addison 1965, Vol. III, 566–567, Addison’s italics). The comparison of ideas presupposes their separation, and enables the pleasure of reflexive reference by which the self-conscious mind moves back and forth between the two similar but different ideas or images (Vol. III, 535–539, 558–561, 566–570). So, Addison’s analysis allows him to restate Neander’s defense of drama in a yet more positive register. Not only is there no need for a close approximation to actual time and place in order to maintain the belief of the dramatic spectator. In fact, that would be detrimental to the kind of belief and pleasure that are appropriate to drama, and to art in general. Addison now invokes Aristotle on mimesis: if pity and fear are the emotions proper to tragedy, he asks, why is it that “such Passions as are very unpleasant at all other times, are very agreeable when excited by proper Descriptions”? (Addison 1965, III, 567–568) By this stage in his discourse, Addison has already answered that question by comparing the understanding to the imagination, a comparison that likely was inspired in turn by the ongoing revolution in empirical epistemology and the insight that all knowledge, whether scientific or literary, must be both grounded in the actuality of sense impressions and abstracted from that grounding. Like Dryden and Addison, Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry (1757) and Samuel Johnson in his “Preface” to The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765) recur to Aristotle’s touchstone mimesis, and like their predecessors they remark on the benefit artistic mimesis would derive from having access to something like scientific quantification.9 Rather than enter into their arguments, however, I will turn to Fielding, who pursues the
9 For a fuller argument from which this account of the relation between drama and science derives, see McKeon (2009).
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Aristotelian topos from the dramatic into the narrative mode. His broad refutation of the doctrine of the unities facilitates the first articulation of the theory of realism. Fielding’s commentary, in the middle of his novel Joseph Andrews (1742), is, first of all, a rebuttal of the claim to historicity as practiced by Richardson in Pamela (1740). Most historians, Fielding writes, are so preoccupied with getting the empirical facts of time and place right – if possible by quantitative measure – that they may as well be called “Chorographers” and “Topographers” (Fielding 1999 [1742], Bk. III, Ch. 1, 162). Fielding sees himself as a “Biographer” because he is concerned instead with the faithful representation of Aristotle’s unity of action and what Fielding calls “the Actions and Characters of Men” (162). He gives the term ‘fact’ a satiric twist by applying it not to the quantitative measures of time and place but to this qualitative component of historical narration: “the Facts we deliver may be relied on, tho’ we often mistake the Age and Country wherein they happened” (162). But his sober implication is also that as in scientific experiment, factuality matters as a means to an end. By the same token, empirical quantification plays a minor role in assessing an individual fact, but a vital one in abstracting from multiple facts, which for Fielding is the means by which character is best represented. I question not but several of my Readers will know the Lawyer in the Stage-Coach, the Moment they hear his Voice. […] I describe not Men, but Manners; not an Individual, but a Species. Perhaps it will be answered, Are not the Characters then taken from Life? To which I answer in the Affirmative; nay, I believe I might aver, that I have writ little more than I have seen. The Lawyer is not only alive, but hath been so these 4000 Years. (Fielding 1999 [1742], 164)
By proclaiming that he has represented not an individual but a species – a generalized composite of many individuals – Fielding not only rejects the claim to historicity (which even if true would be no better than basing his representation on a single sense impression), but also replaces that claim by the implication that his abstracted lawyer, divested of extraneous variables, represents a characterological constant: the general type of the lawyer species. The growing importance of probability at this time in both scientific experiment and literary narration underscores their common methodological commitment to abstracting from a broadly inclusive range of data a ‘statistically’ probable knowledge of their respective objects of study. In accord with Fielding’s focus on literary narration, the probability of his plot is achieved by selecting and reordering its events to represent not what is but what might be. But probability can also be understood as a matter of self-conscious verisimilitude or reflexive reference. The narrator’s intrusion into the narrative, which here takes up the entire chapter,
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is typical of Fielding’s technique in that it interrupts the reader’s ongoing experience of the representation of events on the level of content by making her conscious of its representational process or form. This is reflexive reference, the self-conscious experience of form as content, whereby the reader takes in a representation that is similar to the actual while at the same time being reminded of its representational virtuality. Through this experience the reader is given the means of comparing the virtual with the actual, which creates the Addisonian pleasures of the imagination. What makes this case atypical of Fielding’s technique, however, is that the substance of the narrator’s interruption is an explanation of just this phenomenon of reflexive reference or self-conscious verisimilitude. And so the experience of a doubled consciousness, the actual compared with the virtual, is in this instance reinforced or redoubled by the account of how “several of my readers,” like the actual readers of this account, might compare the actual lawyers they have known with the narrator’s virtual lawyer. But the atypicality of Fielding’s technique can also be understood in terms of probability. For this chapter, as an ‘event’ that interrupts and reorders what Aristotle might call the ‘historical’ narration of what is, reinforces narrative probability by explaining explicitly the technique of narrating what might be that it also exemplifies. After the 1740s, the realist technique of narratorial intrusion underwent creative development.10 A case in point is free indirect discourse, which can be seen as a substantial refinement of Fielding’s intrusive technique. True, Burney (in her third-person narrations) and then Austen forgo Fielding’s obtrusive embodiment of his reader within his text (although the less obtrusive invocation of the reader remains an occasional strategy), instead temporarily locating the reader function within one or another character through that character’s focalization. They transform Fielding’s punctual moment of intrusion into an extended temporal process that conflates, then re-separates, narrator and character, a process whose dialectical delicacy sustains the momentary illusion of interior depth. The reflexive effect of free indirect discourse, if plausibly continuous with that of Fielding’s interruptive intrusions, is so subtly achieved that the negligent reader can miss the ruffling of the narrative surface and project onto the author a deceptive claim to transparency. But if so, the repudiation of realism for this supposed deception represents a failure not of the author but of the inattentive reader.
10 I will note in passing Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), in which Laurence Sterne follows Fielding’s lead in applying a critique of the dramatic unities to narrative form (see Vol. II, Ch. 8).
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Free indirect discourse extends, deepens, and perfects the doubled state of consciousness that Fielding’s realism inherits from Aristotelian mimesis. On reading Radcliffe, one reader writes that “the reader experiences in perfection the strange luxury of artificial terror, without being obliged for a moment to hoodwink his reason, or to yield to the weakness of superstitious credulity” (Williams 1970, 393). Here the account of a doubled consciousness acutely anticipates Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief ” (see McKeon 2000a, 607–608). This famous phrase has been seen as descriptive of the way readers respond according to the emergent modern notion of the aesthetic. The phrase also describes readers’ response to realism, which is rightly understood to be the narrative version of the aesthetic. In the words of another reader, “[t]he illusion is lasting, and complete […] I interrupt the unhappy Clarissa, in order to mix my tears with hers: I accost her, as if she was present with me. No author, I believe, ever metamorphosed himself into his characters so perfectly as Richardson” (McKeon 2000a, 608). This response describes the celebrated and seemingly paradoxical achievement of novelistic identification, which requires of the reader not the feeling of a character’s immediate presence, but on the contrary the sense of a distance, hence difference, sufficient to establish a sympathetic proximity. Recourse to Aristotle on mimesis, and therefore to realism, is not confined to the English. Du Bos, whose understanding of realism was informed by reading Addison (see Patey 1997, 60), interprets the difference between our response to what is re-presented, on the one hand, and on the other to what is temporally and spatially present, as equivalent to that between the artificial and the real, art and nature: “Painters and poets raise those artificial passions within us, by presenting us with the imitations of objects capable of exciting real passions. […] Here then we discover the source of that pleasure which poetry and painting give to man” (Du Bos 1748, Vol. I, 22–23). Then, having quoted Aristotle on the pleasures of mimesis, Du Bos echoes both Aristotle and Addison: this “is a pleasure free from all impurity of mixture. It is never attended with those disagreeable consequences, which arise from the serious emotions caused by the object itself ” (24). 11 So, modern literary realism sustains the essential import of classical mimesis. Yet, realism (like mimesis) also has been subject to widely divergent interpretations, particularly during the twentieth century. In its early
11 For other formulations of realism in early French theory, see, e.g., Jean-François Marmontel’s Éléments de Littérature, especially the entries on “Drame,” “Illusion,” “Poète,” and “Vraisemblance,” (2005 [1787], 418–425, 633–638, 926–936, 1164–1179).
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decades, for example, three critics of different national cultures and theoretical approaches – José Ortega y Gasset, György Lukács, and Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin – conceptualized the form of the novel in ways that are strikingly similar in their attention to the central element of self-conscious reflexivity.12 At mid-century, however, the structuralist movement coalesced and generated approaches to mimesis, realism, and the novel that exerted a powerfully negative influence on their accurate understanding.13 For several decades, Genette’s misreading of Plato and Aristotle provided the foundation for the theory of narrative (narratology). Genette falsely attributes to Plato, a dialectician, the structuralist argument that diegesis and mimesis, narration and imitation, or telling and showing stand in dichotomous opposition to each other. He does this by suppressing Plato’s recognition of a third or mixed mode that combines diegesis with mimesis and that dominates Homer’s epic narration. As a consequence, Genette erroneously finds in Plato a reduction of mimesis to dramatic dialogue, and on this basis incorrectly takes Plato’s text to be a critique of mimesis. Moreover, Genette wrongly attributes this same inaccurate reduction of mimesis to Aristotle, who, Genette falsely claims, criticizes diegesis in comparison with mimesis. By these misconceptions, Genette holds that, for Plato and Aristotle, narration enables us to apprehend its object through the distancing mediation of a narrator, whereas imitation would delude us into the belief that we apprehend its object immediately and transparently. Genette appears not to recognize that for Aristotle, mimesis and diegesis cannot be compared or contrasted in this fashion because they occupy different orders of description. For Aristotle, all poetry is mimetic. This is not a qualitative judgment about the superiority of mimesis; it is an analytic judgment about the nature of poetry, including narrative. So, Genette is right to treat realism as the modern equivalent of classical mimesis; but because his understanding of mimesis is defective, his assessment of realism is also defective. Drawing on a celebrated essay by Roland Barthes, Genette glosses the “feeling of literal fidelity” putatively created by mimesis as a “referential illusion,” an illusion that language is referring to something beyond itself (Genette 1980 [1972], 165). In this theory, the realist illusion is created by adding to narration words – “details” or “descriptions” (Genette 1980 [1972], 166) – that are not structurally “functional” (Barthes 1982 [1968], 11–12) in achieving its narrative ends
12 See McKeon (2000b) for this comparison, in contrast to Watt (1957). 13 See McKeon (2017) for the fuller argument from which this account of structuralism is derived.
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of telling, and therefore, by the logic of the opposition, must aim to show, or (illusively) refer. The normative antithesis between diegesis and mimesis is the microversion of structuralism’s macro-dichotomy of structure and history. Yet on both levels, the criteria of the distinction are perhaps inevitably obscure. On the micro-level of the sentence, linguistic rules purport to render the distinction systematic, but the indeterminacy of structural “signification” ensures that its grounding must be a hermeneutic act (e.g., see Barthes 1982 [1968], 11). On the macro-level, the opposition between contingent historical detail and immanent structure, unless undertaken as a demanding project in historical demonstration, is defective, merely rhetorical and unlikely to persuade. I think this must also be said of Barthes’s one-page history of vraisemblance in the cited essay. Classical culture, he posits, made a sharp distinction between the vraisemblable and the real. But, according to Barthes, “there is a break between the old ‘vraisemblance’ and modern realism,” because he takes realism “to refer to any discourse which accepts statements whose only justification is their referent” (Barthes 1982 [1968], 15– 16). And there is little more to Barthes’s gesture towards historical narration than this. Certainly it ignores or misrepresents all historical ‘details’ that confirm the continuity of modern realism and classical vraisemblance. One of these absent historical details is the naïve empiricist claim to historicity, truly a “referential illusion” that virtual characters have an actual existence (16). Diametrically opposed to realism, the claim to historicity played a crucial role (as we have seen) in provoking the emergence of realism in explicit refutation of that claim. Barthes appears to collapse this dialectical sequence into a single term, absorbing within the naïve empiricism of the claim to historicity its realist antithesis, which in the Barthesian version of history never comes into being in its own right. Instead, the structuralist understanding of narrative’s relation to the real comes to a halt at the claim to historicity, which is also the moment of the two unities. Corneille, acknowledging that the “deception” of the audience entailed in the unities approaches a knowing self-deception justified by their (supposed) production of pleasure, comes close to discerning in the unities an instigation to realist self-consciousness. Barthes, by reducing realism to the claim to historicity, reduces the epistemological insight that consciousness can entertain simultaneously the actuality and the virtuality of things to the crude ontological equation of the actual with the virtual.
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6. The rise of fictionality? When did the assumption of fictionality become a convention of literary narrative? In recent years, some critics have argued that literary fiction emerges only in the eighteenth century and under the aegis of the novel: according to Gallagher, “the novel discovered fiction” (2006, 337). This is a disarmingly simple claim. What does it mean? Gallagher’s evidence for it is that novels feature characters who are “nobodies.” “Nobody was the pivot point around which a massive reorientation of textual referentiality took place, and the location of this pivot was the mid-eighteenth-century novel” (1994, xvi). That is, Gallagher’s evidence for the novel’s “discovery” of fiction at this historical moment can be seen in the replacement of traditional narrative claims to extra-textual reference by the novel’s acknowledgment that it is about “nobody.” Halfway through her book, however, Gallagher writes that “[t]here was no sudden novelistic revolution that purged English narrative of somebody and replaced him or her with nobody. Nevertheless, in the middle decades of the century, fictional nobodies became the more popular and respectable protagonists” (1994, 165). Gallagher’s equivocal stance on this matter is reflected in her inability to define the difference between narratives about somebodies and those about nobodies, or to affirm the chronology of this change, without including substantial qualifiers that vitiate the coherence of both oppositions (see 1994, 165). Certainly the notion that pre-novelistic narrative is devoted to extra-textual reference is belied by Aristotle’s account of mimesis. 14 Both before and after the statements I just quoted, Gallagher trains our attention in Nobody’s Story on narratives whose content, and sometimes whose form, raise interpretive questions about the relation between embodied and disembodied personhood and between referential and nonreferential naming. We are left in no doubt about the importance of these matters. But as these statements suggest, Gallagher must be aware that she has given us no plausible basis for associating disembodiment or nonreference with the emergent novel, or either of these with the emergence of fictionality. Equally puzzling is Gallagher’s acknowledgement that in fact all sorts of prenovelistic narratives are devoid of actual reference and therefore may be called fictional (1994, xvi; 2006, 338). That is, even as she pursues the incidence of non-referential naming as evidence of fiction,
14 Paige supports Gallagher’s thesis that before the novel, narrative was taken to refer to actually existent subjects, replacing her caution by a boldly spurious misreading of the Poetics. According to Paige, Aristotle stipulates as a generic rule that “tragedy deals with real people” (Paige 2011, 8).
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Gallagher posits a very different notion of what she means by claiming that the novel discovered fiction. Tradition may have “tacitly sanctioned” what moderns mean by fiction; but the explicit “concept ” of fiction arose only with the eighteenth-century novel (Gallagher 2006, 337, 338; cf. McKeon 2005, 746n.159). Yet Gallagher also affirms that this concept “developed slowly in early-modern Europe” (338); and if this is so, it cannot be correlated with the novel. And in any case, the sort of evidence from intellectual history that might support a thesis that the concept either of narrative fiction or of fiction as such became ‘fully’ explicit at this time plays no part in Gallagher’s argument; and we are thrown back on the admittedly defective criterion of “nobody.” Gallagher’s conviction that the novel and fiction are coterminous requires of her a historical argument that evidently cannot be made. The problem, I think, is that her central concern with “nobody” and its implication of disembodiment is not fruitfully coordinated with the category fiction, which points in a different direction. Going by the kinds of interest Gallagher brings to her authors, the semantics of “disembodiment” are extremely various: generality, publicness, absence, absence of personal name, anonymity, allegorical evasion of libel, typographical reproduction, exchange value, literary property, legal nonentity, public credit, mutilation, blackness (Gallagher 1994, 8; see “Index,” s. v. “disembodiment”). The thread that connects most of these is not fictionality but virtuality, which implies a dialectical relation to actuality, a movement between these two categories, and thereby a sense of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historical process. By this I mean that the intense and unprecedented awareness of empirical actuality was the precondition for the discovery of its virtual dimension in mentality, which contemporaries processed both as the antithesis and refutation of naïve empiricism, and as its refinement and extension (see McKeon 2005, Ch. 1, 2, 4, 6 and passim). Before (say) the seventeenth century, to view most narrative figures as making no claim to actual existence was a traditional and tacit assumption entailed in the customary practice of storytelling and hearing and made explicit only when challenged. What becomes explicit in the mid-eighteenth century is not fictionality as such, but the potential of virtuality as an instrument of knowledge whose inspiration and momentum derive from contemporary impulses toward humanist, empiricist, historicist, and analytic scrutiny of the actual. It is the self-conscious worldliness, the realism, of literary virtuality that gets – not so much “discovered” as purposively shaped to serve as a technique of emulating the methods under development for exploiting the actuality of the material world. Unlike fictionality, realism works as a double consciousness. It enjoins the willing suspension of disbelief in the virtual to achieve the productivity of an Addisonian
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comparison with the actual. Before this period, many habits of thought, whether or not narrative, ‘went without saying’ and were ‘taken for granted’ because they were deeply embedded in social and material practice and did not require external standards of veracity to win assent. Like all other forms or bodies of thought that sought the status of knowledge, literature now became explicitly equipped with the mental capacity of epistemological distance through its powers of virtuality. Gallagher seems to affirm that what distinguishes the modern from the pre-modern practice of fiction is the fact that it had to be explicitly acknowledged and defended, hence explicitly conceptualized in these terms. The traditional prose literary genres – epic, romance, allegory – had been experienced tacitly as mimetic fictions, virtual representations of the actual that gave pleasure in part by improving on what in actuality was painful, arbitrary, or simply humdrum. We might expect that when historical and empirical truth began to be accorded a new-found privilege in the early modern period, the term ‘fiction’ would be subjected to critique, its resources of virtuality discredited as incompatible with a newly narrowed standard of truth. We encounter instances of this turn in the seventeenth century (e.g., see Sorel, above, section 3). But as Sorel himself (or his translator) makes clear, the critical term of choice was, overwhelmingly, ‘romance.’ Natural philosophy was in the process of reconceiving the certainty of common experience and deductive logic as the probability born of experiment, a reconception that self-consciously acknowledged the skepticism that must underlie the pursuit of knowledge in an analytic age. After the false start of the claim to historicity, the novel discovered that to make its truth acceptable in the modern world required that its knowledge be grounded in actuality at the same time that its virtuality was embraced, not by advertising the non-existence of its subjects but by building into its formal procedure the claim to its own species of probability. This was achieved through the practice of realism. As, toward the end of the century, romance, ultimately under the aegis of romanticism, was being positively revalued, the concept ‘fiction’ began to assume its blander function in the modern world of authorizing virtuality as an autonomous category severed – or freed, as you will – from dialectical connection to actuality. References Addison, Joseph. The Spectator. Ed. Donald F. Bond. 5 Vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Ingram Bywater. The Basic Works of Aristotle. Ed. Richard McKeon. New York: Random House, 1941.
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Aulnoy, Marie, comtesse d’. Mémoires de la cour d’Espagne. Paris: Claude Barbin, 1690. Aulnoy, Marie, comtesse d’. The Ingenious and Diverting Letters of the Lady ___ Travels into Spain. London: Samuel Crouch, 1691. Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect.” [1968] Trans. R. Carter. Ed. Tzvetan Todorov. French Literary Theory Today: A Reader. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. 11–17. Bayle, Pierre. Dictionnaire Historique et Critique. Amsterdam: Reinier Leers, 1697. Bayle. Pierre. The Dictionary Historical and Critical of Mr Peter Bayle. [1697] Trans. P. Desmaizeaux. 2nd ed. London: Knapton et al., 1734–1748. Beni, Paolo. Pavli Benii Evgvbini Disputatio. Padua: Francesco Bolzetta, 1600. Bonciani, Francesco. Lezione sopra il comporre delle Novelle. [composed c. 1574] Prose Fiorentine. Venice: Carlo Roberto Dati, 1727. 161–212. Bulgarini, Bellisario. Difese in Risposta all’Apologia, E Palinoda Di Monsig. Alessandro Cariero. Siena: Lvca Bonetti, 1588. Buonamici, Francesco. Discorsi Poetici Nella Accademia Fiorentina In difesa d’Aristotile. Florence: Giorgio Marescotti, 1597. Castelvetro, Lodovico. Poetica d’Aristotele Vvlgarizzata, et Sposta. Vienna: Gaspar Stainhofer, 1570. Corneille, Pierre. “Trois Discours sur le Poème Dramatique.” [1660] Œuvres de P. Corneille, avec les notes de tous les commentateurs. Vol. 12. Paris: F. Didot, 1855. Corneille, Pierre. “Of the Three Unities of Action, Time, and Place.” [1660] The Continental Model: Selected French Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, in English Translation. Eds. Donald Schier and Scott Elledge. Rev. ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970. Darnton, Robert. The Literary Underground of the Old Regime. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Denores, Giason. Apologia contra l’auttor [Guarini] del Verato. Padua: Paolo Meietti, 1590. Dryden, John. Of Dramatic Poesy: An Essay. [1668] John Dryden. Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Critical Essays. 2 Vols. Ed. George Watson. London: Dutton, 1962. 10–92. Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste. Reflexions Critiques sur la Poesie et sur la Peinture. [1719]. Nouvelle edition. Paris: Pierre-Jean Mariette, 1733. Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste. Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music. 5th ed. 3 Vols. Trans. Thomas Nugent. London: John Nourse, 1748. Fielding, Henry. The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews And of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams [1742] and An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews [1741]. Eds. Douglas Brooks-Davies and Thomas Keymer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Gallagher, Catherine. Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1920. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Gallagher, Catherine. “The Rise of Fictionality.” The Novel, Vol. 1: History, Geography, and Culture. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 336–363. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. [1972] Trans. Jane B. Lewin. Foreword Jonathan Culler. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. Hacking, Ian. The Emergence of Probability. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Harth, Erica. Ideology and Culture in Seventeenth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983. Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott. A Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Understanding. [1689] Ed. Peter H. Nidditch. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. Maggi, Vincenzo, and Bartolomeo Lombardi. In Aristotelis Librvm De Poetica Commvnes Explanationes. Venice: Erasmiana Vincentium Valgrisium, 1550.
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Marmontel, Jean-François. Éléments de Littérature. [1787] Ed. Sophie Le Ménahèze. Paris: Éditions Desjonquères, 2005. McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. [1987] 2nd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. McKeon, Michael. Ed. Theory of the Novel: A Historical Approach. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000a. McKeon, Michael. “Watt’s Rise of the Novel within the Tradition of the Rise of the Novel.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 12.2–3 (2000b): 253–276. McKeon, Michael. The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. McKeon, Michael. “The Dramatic Aesthetic and the Model of Scientific Method in Britain, 1600–1800.” The Eighteenth-Century Novel, Vols. 6–7: Essays in Honor of John Richetti. Eds. Albert J. Rivero and George Justice. New York: AMS Press, 2009. 197–259. McKeon, Michael. “The Eighteenth-Century Challenge to Narrative Theory.” Narrative Concepts in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Literature. Eds. Liisa Steinby and Aino Mäkikalli. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2017. 39–77. Millet, Baudouin. Ed. In Praise of Fiction: Prefaces to Romances and Novels, 1650–1750. Leuven: Peeters, 2017. Oddi, Nicolò Degli. Dialogo in difesa di Camillo Pellegrini. Venice: Guerra, fratelli, 1587. Paige, Nicholas D. Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Patey, Douglas Lane. Probability & Literary Form: Philosophic Theory & Literary Practice in the Augustan Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Patey, Douglas Lane. “Ancients and Moderns.” The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. 4: The Eighteenth Century. Eds. H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Rapin, René. Reflexions sur la poetique D’Aristote. Paris: François Muguet, 1674. Rapin, René. Reflections on Aristotle’s Treatise of Poesie. Trans. Thomas Rymer. London: H. Herringman, 1674. Rapin, René. Instructions pour l’histoire. Paris: Sébastien Mabre Cramoisy, 1677. Riccoboni, Antonio. Aristotelis Ars Rhetorica and Aristotelis Ars Poetica [and De re comica]. Venice: Paolo Meietti, Bibliopolam Patauinum, 1579. Sassetti, Filippo. Sopra Dante. [Composed c. 1573.] Collezione di Opuscoli Danteschi inediti o rari. Vols. 40–41. Florence: S. Lapi, 1897. Scudéry, Madeleine, and Georges de. Ibrahim ou l’illustre Bassa. Paris: de Sommaville, 1641. Shapiro, Barbara J. Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Shapiro, Barbara J. A Culture of Fact: England, 1550–1720. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Sorel, Charles. L’anti-roman; ou, L’histoire du berger Lysis. [1633] 2nd ed. Ed. Anne-Elisabeth Spica. 2 Vols. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2014. Sorel, Charles. The Extravagant Shepherd. The Anti-Romance: or, The History Of the Shepherd Lysis. Trans. John Davies. London: Thomas Heath, 1653. Tasso, Torquato. Discorsi del poema heroico. Naples: Stamparia dello Stigiola, 1594. Tasso, Torquato. Del Giudizio sovra la sua Gerusalemme da lui medesimo riformata. Le Prose Diverse di Torquato Tasso. Ed. Cesare Guasti. 2 Vols. Florence: Successori Le Monnier, 1875. Tieje, Arthur J. “A Peculiar Phase of the Theory of Realism in Pre-Richardsonian Fiction.” PMLA 28.2 (1913): 213–252.
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Urfé, Honoré d’. L’Astrée. Paris: Toussainct du Bray, 1607–1627. Vairasse d’Allais, Denis. The History of the Sevarites or Sevarambi. London: Henry Brome, 1675. Viperano, Giovanni Antonio. Io. Antonii Viperani De Poetica Libri Tres. Antwerp: Ex officina Christophori Plantini, 1579. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957. Weinberg, Bernard. A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance. 2 Vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Williams, Ioan. Ed. Novel and Romance, 1700–1800: A Documentary Record. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970. Zinano, Gabriele. Discorso Della Tragedia. Reggio: Hercoliano Bartholi, 1590.
ROBYN WARHOL
Realism in the Nineteenth-Century Novel In modern criticism and theory of the nineteenth-century European novel, realism refers to a literary mode designed to represent the world ‘as it really is.’ The nineteenth-century realist novel purported to show the lives of ordinary people doing everyday things within a social context based on present or historical political realities. Characters in realist novels are represented as having complex psychologies, depicted through detailed renditions of thought processes, motives, epistemological uncertainty and affective ambivalence. For nineteenth-century novelists the project of realism was a departure from highly conventionalized and idealistic modes like romance, epic, and tragedy, but realism developed its own set of conventions to signify its representational faithfulness to reality. Those conventions add up to verisimilitude, a set of literary gestures intended to enhance the impression that the text is a truthful account of something that really happened – or at least, something that really could have happened (/ IV.1 McKeon). Verisimilitude works in concert with other novelistic conventions that would seem to contradict it, such as highly coincidental plots and omniscient narration, to create what Roland Barthes (1986 [1968]) called the “reality effect” (l’effet de réel) in realist novels. Barthes’s conception of the reality effect arose within a poststructuralist discussion of the semiotics of fictive discourse. He defines “realism” as “any discourse which accepts ‘speech acts’ justified by their referent alone,” and declares that out of the preponderance of concrete descriptive detail in the nineteenth-century novel “a new verisimilitude is born” (Barthes 1986 [1968], 147). Barthes begins by quoting seemingly insignificant descriptive details from a realist text (in Gustave Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart” from Three Tales, “an old piano supported, under a barometer, a pyramidal heap of boxes and cartons”) and a historical account of Charlotte Corday’s last moments in prison before her execution (in Jules Michelet’s Histoire de France: La Révolution; “after an hour and a half, there was a gentle knock at a little door behind her”) (Barthes 1986 [1968], 141). In the example from Michelet – despite their appearance in historical, rather https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-035
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than fictitious discourse – the littleness of that door, the gentleness of that knock are no more verifiable as real-world ‘facts’ than the barometer hanging over the piano in Flaubert’s fiction. Pointing out that previous theories of realism had dismissed such incidental details as structurally “superfluous,” mere fillers (141), Barthes asserts that concrete descriptive details constitute “the referential illusion” in novelistic discourse that has no realworld referent (148; emphasis in original): […] eliminated from the realist speech-act as a signified of denotation, the ‘real’ returns to it as a signified of connotation; for just when these details are reputed to denote the real directly, all that they do – without saying so – is signify it; Flaubert’s barometer, Michelet’s little door finally say nothing but this: we are the real; it is the category of the real […] which is then signified; in other words, the very absence of the signified […] becomes the very signifier of realism: the reality effect is produced, the basis of that unavowed verisimilitude which forms the aesthetic of all the standard works of modernity. (148; emphasis original)
For Barthes, the nonreferentiality of fictive discourse does not disrupt the “illusion” that the world being described is real, because if the items described do not denote actual objects in the world, they signal “the category of the real” connotatively through the semiotic chain of signification. Even when a word in a realist novel, like “Rouen” in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, has a real-world referent, Barthes argues (144), its function in fictional discourse is not to signify the actual place, but to serve as the vehicle for metaphor and connotation that will contribute toward filling out the reality effect. The referential illusion conceived by Barthes is different from the socalled illusion of reality posited by earlier theorists of the realist novel such as Henry James, for whom realism was more an effect of epistemology than of signification. James, like Barthes, equates realistic novelistic discourse with historical writing, but whereas Barthes sees the affinity in history’s necessary recourse to fictiveness, James sees any narratorial departures from a historical stance as an abrogation of the implicit contract between novelist and reader. Fiction, according to James, “must speak with assurance, with the tone of the historian” (James 1986 [1884], 167). He faults Anthony Trollope for his narrator’s habit of acknowledging that the events of the fictional world are in the hands of the author: “In a digression, a parenthesis, or an aside, [Trollope] concedes to the reader that he and his trusting friend are only ‘making believe.’ He admits that the events he narrates have not really happened, and that he can give his narrative any turn the reader may like best” (167). Indeed, Trollope admits in his own autobiography – published just a year before James’s essay – to having made plot choices based on criticisms of his characters overheard at his club, and whether or not his famous anecdote about how Mrs. Proudie
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came to be killed off is true, his telling that story in the history of his own life suggests a jocular alignment between Trollope the author and the narrator of Trollope’s novels on the question of authorial control over a character’s fate (Trollope 2014 [1883], 108). For James this was no joking matter, as he held the narrators of novels and histories to an equal standard of assurance. About Trollope’s narratorial confession, James declares, “[s]uch a betrayal of a sacred office seems to me, I confess, a terrible crime; it is what I mean by the attitude of apology, and it shocks me every whit as much in Trollope as it would have shocked me in Gibbon or Macaulay” (James 1986 [1884], 167). What Ian Watt was to call “formal realism” or “realism of presentation” evolved out of James’s theory and practice, defining Anglo-American conceptions of the realist novel through the end of the twentieth century (Watt 2001 [1957], 117, 297). The Rise of the Novel, Watt’s 1957 account of formal realism’s development in what he deemed the first English novels, attributes conventions for achieving verisimilitude to eighteenth-century works by Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, and Henry Fielding. Striking in its combination of socio-historical contextual analysis with its taxonomy of formal conventions, The Rise of the Novel is still a touchstone for discussions of AngloAmerican realism more than sixty years after its publication.1 Discursive rather than systematic in approach, The Rise of the Novel identifies realist strategies for making novels seem to be true. One such strategy was the pretense that the published work was a found manuscript, edited or presented by the novelist (/ IV.9 Paige). Defoe published The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner [...] Written by Himself (1719) anonymously and Richardson put out Pamela (1740) as a set of genuine letters between a maidservant and her parents, annotated here and there by the ‘editor’ who actually composed them. Novels framed as ‘found’ manuscripts, sets of letters, or diaries, such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) and Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848), persisted into the nineteenth century, sometimes – as in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) – adding a veneer of verisimilitude to novels that stray far from the constraints of realism in their supernatural characters and events. Formal realism entails other gestures toward truthfulness, but that truthfulness is always fictitious. For example, eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century novelists adopted the convention of ‘masking’ names (such
1 Google Scholar, accessed on September 24, 2018, lists 33,300 citations of The Rise of the Novel, 10,900 of them having appeared since 2014. https://scholar.google.com/ scholar?q=Ian+Watt+The+Rise+of+the+Novel&hl=en&as_sdt=1,36.
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as Pamela’s Mr. B------), places (such as “the ----------shire Militia,” stationed in the fictitious village of Meryton in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice), and dates (phrases like ‘In the year 18----, in the town of S--------’ abound in Victorian novels). These persons, places and dates are fictional, but the convention of pretending to mask them suggests that the story has historical referents that could, but should not, be traced, as if to provide a cover of anonymity for the people whose experiences are being narrated. To be sure, the pretense does not render these fictional people and places referential. Catherine Gallagher includes characters among the “nobodies” she locates in the eighteenth-century British novel, arguing that fiction itself was unfamiliar territory for audiences in the first part of that century because “[a]s far as the reading public and most writers were concerned, narrative came in two forms: referential truth telling and lying” (1994, xvi). Gallagher notes that “what Ian Watt called ‘formal realism’ was not a way of trying to hide or disguise fictionality; realism was, rather, understood to be fiction’s formal sign” (1994, xvi–xvii). More broadly and somewhat paradoxically, formal realism attends to the particulars of time and place represented in the novel, when they have historical referents (for instance, London and Paris during the French Revolution in Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities [1859]) or even when they do not (for instance, the fictional town at the center of George Eliot’s Middlemarch [1871–1872], which is imagined from a distance of forty years after the action of the novel is supposed to have taken place). A realistic setting includes descriptions of geographic locations, domestic interiors, public places, modes of dress and behavior that are presented as representative of the time and place being invoked. Where and when action is supposed to have taken place is more pertinent to realism than it would be to its narrative counterpart, romance (Watt 2001 [1957], 32). Whereas romance may have recourse to supernatural and highly implausible events, Watt argues, formal realism adheres to plots that readers would recognize as the sort of thing that might actually happen (84). No literal deus ex machina can appear at the end to arrange human events into a satisfactory conclusion; for any ghostly figure that a character happens to see in a realist novel – like the spectral nun that terrorizes Lucy Snowe in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) – there will turn out to be a logical explanation (in order to gain access to his sweetheart, Ginevra Fanshawe’s beau has disguised himself as the nun who had died tragically at the convent that is now the girls’ school where Lucy teaches). In the later twentieth century, magical realism would emerge in novels like Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) or Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), where the conventions of formal realism blend with unexplained supernatural events. In nineteenth-century realist novels, a logical explana-
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tion will usually be offered. Thus, in a classic realist novel like Jane Eyre (1847) ghostly apparitions are usually accounted for: the scary light little Jane sees in the Red Room at her aunt’s house is probably someone carrying a lantern across the yard; the mysterious wailing Jane hears upstairs in Thornfield Hall is Mr. Rochester’s furious wife, Bertha. Yet sometimes realist novels include an unaccountable incident, as when Jane – many miles away from the distressed Mr. Rochester – hears his spectral voice calling her name. Usually, though, in nineteenth-century realist novels actions can be explained under the accepted laws of physics and psychology. While individual events in a realist novel are meant to be plausible, nineteenth-century novels follow highly conventionalized plots. As Hilary Dannenberg (2008) has extensively documented, the plots of realist novels rely heavily on coincidence to bring a large, albeit limited, number of characters into contact with one another through multiple connections. Unknown parentage, secret relationships, and dual identities make their way from the traditions of folklore and romance into the conventions of realist fiction. So does the marriage plot, the story of ‘girl meets boy, girl loses boy through misunderstandings and/or the devious intervention of third parties, and girl marries boy in the end.’ As Nancy K. Miller (1980) observed about eighteenth-century feminocentric novels in French and English, a woman protagonist in a nineteenth-century British realist novel is generally limited to two possible fates at the end of her story: she can get married or she can die. Though the marriage plot ceased governing French novels in the realist period, it persisted throughout Anglophone novels of the nineteenth century: all six of the unmarried heroines of Jane Austen’s completed novels marry their heroes at novel’s end, as do the surviving heroines of all but one (Villette) of the novels of the Brontës, of Charles Dickens, and – with one notable exception, Lily Dale in The Small House at Allington (1862–1864) – of all 47 of Anthony Trollope’s novels. Heroines in realist fiction whose fate precludes their hearts’ desire generally do die in the end, like social misfit Maggie Tulliver in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and ‘fallen’ women Ruth Hilton in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853) and Tess Durbeyfield in Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891). When George Eliot marries Dorothea Brooke to Mr. Casaubon early in the plot of Middlemarch, then follows the couple on their disastrous honeymoon, and dwells with Dorothea in the unhappiness of an unsuitable partnership before killing Dorothea’s first husband off, the novelist is charting out unfamiliar realms in realist plotting. That Dorothea ultimately marries Mr. Casaubon’s nephew, whom she adores, at the novel’s end is testimony to the determinative power of the marriage plot, even for a novelist as dedicated to realism as Eliot.
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Individualized characterization is, as Watt declared, a defining trait of formal realism. In realist novels, the protagonists and the characters with whom the protagonists interact most frequently are presented as having complex, recognizable psychologies. The realist conventions for representing major characters involve endowing them with not only an individual personality but also a particular class status, a specific personal history, a recognizable psychology, and a unique viewpoint. The social class and economic station of a character tend to be clearly established, either by narratorial commentary explaining the character’s antecedents or by the figure’s appearance, manners, and dialog. Realist novels make free use of dialects, from the barely decipherable (to a non-Yorkshire resident) utterances of Hareton Earnshaw in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, via the detailed rendition of Manchester speech among the factory workers in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), to the upper-class drawl of titled gentlemen in Trollope’s Palliser series. Realist characters have distinctive voices, established by consistent choices of diction, slang, speech patterns, syntax and turns of phrase as well as pronunciation. Their parentage, place of origin, and backstory are known, or could conceivably be found out by others in the storyworld, and their lifestyles are underwritten by their economic status. They dress appropriately to their income levels and occupations. Their public behavior and private ruminations follow expected conventions for persons of their gender and rank in their particular surroundings. If a figure in a realist novel acts in a manner that is ‘out of character,’ such an action is remarkable enough to qualify as a point of plot. Major characters with seemingly complex psychologies are a hallmark of formal realism. The psychology of a character is, of course, a construction, built out of the details of consciousness which a novelist attributes to a fictitious person. The effect of complexity can be achieved by having a character undergo mental and emotional conflicts, perplexities, and ambivalences, which may be expressed to other characters in dialog, revealed in dreams and reveries, or reported in narratorial speech. What to say or do next, how to feel about someone, how to manage a social or familial relationship, how to achieve an emotional or financial goal, whom to trust, whom to marry, where to find a place in the world: these are the kinds of questions realist characters must work through as their authors endow them with mixed and conflicted thoughts and feelings. As D. A. Miller (1989) has observed, Trollope uses the fluctuations of ambivalence to create characters who return constantly to the same question but take hundreds of pages to make up their minds, such as Kate Vavasor in Can You Forgive Her? (1864–1865) whose conflict over whether to marry her cousin George, her suitor John Grey, or no one at all extends throughout the
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nineteen months of the novel’s initial serialization before being settled in the last installment. Miller comments that the illusion of complexity in Trollope’s characters is an effect of their continual mental movement back and forth between possible decisions; indeed, the virtual disappearance of the married Alice from subsequent volumes of the Palliser series suggests that once she is no longer ambivalent, she is not, as a character, worth revisiting. By contrast, Phineas Finn, the eponymous hero of the second Palliser novel (1867–1868), is such a bundle of mixed feelings about matters political and personal, Trollope brings him back, now a widower, for Phineas Redux (1873–1874), to begin his series of indecisions about marriage and career all over again. The register of emotion is moderate in realist novels; although a climax in the story will be accompanied by heightened emotion among the characters – grief at a sudden death, joy at a much-desired engagement, terror at an act of violence – the emotional tenor of realism is less extreme than that of sensation fiction, Gothic fiction, or sentimental novels. Character-narrators of first-person novels, such as Jane Eyre or David Copperfield, have ample opportunity to express their conflicting thoughts and desires, not only in the speech and behavior of the younger selves whose actions they are reporting, but also in the retrospective commentary they provide on their earlier experiences. For example, Jane Eyre – a character whose feelings are always intense and often conflicting – writes of her interactions with St. John Rivers after they learn that they are cousins: I daily wished more to please him; but to do so, I felt daily more and more that I must disown half my nature, stifle half my faculties, wrest my tastes from their original bent, force myself to the adoption of pursuits for which I had no natural vocation. He wanted to train me to an elevation I could never reach; it racked me hourly to aspire to the standard he uplifted. The thing was as impossible as to mould my irregular features to his correct and classic pattern, to give to my changeable green eyes the seablue tint and solemn lustre of his own. (Brontë 2006 [1847], 460)
Jane the character both wishes to please her cousin and feels stifled in the attempt; she aspires to his standard, while the effort “rack[s] [her] hourly.” Jane the narrator declares the task to have been impossible; in retrospect, she can assert that the elevation St. John assigned to her was one she “could never reach.” The combined effect of mixed feelings and of a coordinated exhibition of past and present selves gives Jane the deptheffect that is typical of first-person realist narrators. In realist novels with extradiegetic narrators, characters’ psychologies are often anatomized within the narrator’s commentary. Trollope can achieve the effect of depth by narrating a few conflicting emotions through repetition and variation. An example is the ambitious young clergyman Mark Robarts in Framley Parsonage, whose mixed feelings about his patron-
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ess, Lady Lufton, lead him into financial difficulties when he gets involved with a ‘fast’ set of people he knows she dislikes. Mark loves and respects Lady Lufton while at the same time chafing at her guidance and resenting her assumed authority over him. His feelings for Lady Lufton continually oscillate as he decides to defy her wishes by going to Gatherum Castle for a house party, telling himself that she is unreasonably prejudiced against her social betters and that the professional benefit to himself of such a connection can only be a boon. He continues to have conflicting feelings about his patroness as he experiences both guilt and gratitude at her forgiveness when he has fallen into debt. Throughout the novel Mark cycles repeatedly through these feelings, and though his oscillations of emotion become predictable, they also contribute to the illusion that his is a complex psychology. A character’s psychology can also enter the text through free indirect discourse, where the narrator slips into the speech or thought patterns of a focal character. The more consistently the narrator provides glimpses into an individual character’s consciousness, the more complex the character’s psychology will appear to be, an effect that persists in realist novels from Austen to James.2 Despite their focus on complex characters, realist novels still trafficked in character types and plot functions that originated in folklore, romance, and commedia dell’arte, though formal realism grants these figures personal names and specific traits. Types that were present in eighteenth-century fiction and prevalent in Jane Austen’s novels persist throughout the nineteenth century. One could list the foolish parent (Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice [1813], Mr. Woodhouse in Emma [1815], or Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion [1818]); the heroine’s nemesis (Miss Bingley in Pride and Prejudice, Mrs. Elton in Emma, Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey [1818]); the rake (Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility [1811], Wickham in Pride and Prejudice, Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park [1814]); the heroine’s foil (Elinor vs. Marianne in Sense and Sensibility, Jane vs. Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice), and so forth. In Austen as in realist novels generally, even the type-characters have idiosyncrasies that set them apart as individuals, such as Mr. Woodhouse’s persistent wish that everyone should avoid indigestion by eating porridge instead of cake, or Mrs. Elton’s presumptuous habit of calling the novel’s hero “Knightley” instead of “Mr. Knightley” the way everyone else does. The large casts of minor characters in Dickens’s serialized novels are made recognizable by their tics of speech and action. For
2 See Lynch (1998) for an account of techniques like free indirect discourse that novelists like Austen use to lead readers to a sense of their own individuation in the context of a mass-consumption economy.
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example, there is Mr. Pumblechook’s offering to shake hands and saying “May I?” whenever he meets Pip during the period of his prosperity in Great Expectations (1861); or Mr. Micawber’s continued assurance that “Something will turn up” in David Copperfield (1850); or the continual puffing and blowing that accompanies Mr. Pancks’s tugboat-like movements in Little Dorrit (1855–1857). Character types specific to Dickens abound across his many novels in the realist tradition, for example the well-meaning but helpless ingénue (Agnes in David Copperfield, Florence in Dombey and Son [1846–1848], Ada in Bleak House [1852–1853], Bella in Our Mutual Friend [1864–1865], and countless others) whose personalities would hardly be distinguishable from one another except for the differing circumstances in which they find themselves. Minor characters, whether they fill stock types or not, are crucial to the fabric of realism. The distribution of narrative attention over a proliferation of minor characters can result in a realist novel’s appearing to occur in a complete world, if not the ‘real world,’ as Alex Woloch has detailed in The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (2003). Watt specified that realist characters operate within a specific time and place, but more recent critics have theorized the mechanics of creating a realist storyworld that appears to have as much depth and complexity as its protagonists do. Jonathan Grossman, in Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel (2012), demonstrates how railroad systems and timetables work to structure the connected communities and coinciding plots of Dickens’s novels, giving a sense that life goes on elsewhere while the characters enact their experience in the narrative here and now. Helena Michie’s work on the temporality of meanwhile and in the meantime (2010) indexes the simultaneity of public and private events represented in realist novels that struggle to articulate the completeness of the narrated moment. Woloch’s account of minor characters and Dannenberg’s analysis of coincidences in realist novels point to similar effects. Dannenberg also catalogues counterfactualities in realist fiction, as do studies by Andrew Miller on the optative in realist dialog (2008) and by Robyn Warhol on narrative refusals (2010). To use Warhol’s narratological terminology, counterfactuality in the form of unnarration (a narrator’s saying that s/he will not tell what happened) and of disnarration (a narrator’s telling what did not happen in place of saying what did) are abundant in realist novels. When a narrator chooses to spell out a possible occurrence that does not happen in the storyworld, the effect is to reinforce the implicit assertion that what does occur in that storyworld is what ‘really happened.’ Although modernist novelists positioned themselves as repudiating the practice of their Victorian realist predecessors, many of the conventions of realism survive in early twentieth-century fiction – often in radically
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altered but still recognizable form. Even two centuries after their initial development in the novel, realist conventions like detailed description, the specificity of time and place, and ‘relatable’ characters (that is, characters who strike audiences as being psychologically similar to themselves) are alive and well in popular culture. If films and novels using conventions of verisimilitude can be praised by their fans as being good because they are so ‘realistic,’ it is not because they are any more referential than other modes of fiction. The idea behind realism might have been that art should imitate life, but contemporary perceptions of ‘the real’ have been structured by the conventions of realist art. Twenty-first-century subjects see reality through the lens of realism. References Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect.” [1968] The Rustle of Language. Ed. François Wahl. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1986. 141–148. Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. [1847] Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006. Dannenberg, Hilary. Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Gallagher, Catherine. Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. Grossman, Jonathan. Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” [1884] The Art of Criticism: Henry James on the Theory and Practice of Fiction. Eds. William Veeder and Susan M. Griffin. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986. 165–196. Lynch, Deidre. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Michie, Helena. “Victorian(ist) Sentences; Synchronic Temporalities.” On Periodization: Selected Essays from the English Institute. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc= acls;c=acls;idno=heb90047.0001.001;node=heb90047.0001.001 %3A10;rgn=div1;view= text. Ed. Virginia Jackson. Cambridge, MA: English Institute in collaboration with the American Council of Learned Societies, 2010 (1 October 2018). Miller, Andrew. The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Miller, D. A. The Novel and the Police. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Miller, Nancy K. The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722–1782. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Trollope, Anthony. An Autobiography. Vol. II. [1883] Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Warhol, Robyn. “‘What Might Have Been Is Not What Is’: Dickens’s Narrative Refusals.” Dickens Studies Annual 41 (2010): 45–59. Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. [1957] Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
MATÍAS MARTÍNEZ
Authenticity in Narratology and in Literary Studies In contemporary culture the label ‘authentic’ is pervasive. Not surprisingly, though, its precise meaning is difficult to grasp. A reason for this may be that the word authenticity is in use in everyday language as well as in academic terminology. This creates problems from both sides. On the one hand, everyone has an implicit understanding of the concept and, as a result, its meaning tends to be vague and non-systematic. On the other hand, some academic usages do not conform with everyday intuitions. A case in point may be, for example, the distinction between sincerity and authenticity proposed by Lionel Trilling in his well-known study of the cultural career of these concepts since the Renaissance, which probably does not mirror ordinary use of the two lexemes (Trilling 1972, 2).1 A second problem is the variety of meanings attributed to authenticity as an academic term. No core concept is discernible here that stays stable across various disciplines.2 Even within the confines of literary studies and narratology, the diverse meanings attributed to authenticity cover, as we shall see, a broad range. A third impediment for any reconstruction of the meaning of authenticity is the gap between the word and the concept. Authors may refer to the concept of authenticity without using the word.
1 According to Trilling, the concept of sincerity emerged at the Renaissance as a crucial moral concept that means “the avoidance of being false to any man through being true to one’s own self ” (Trilling 1972, 4). Trilling holds that sincerity has been replaced since the eighteenth century by authenticity, i.e. the demand to be true only to oneself as an ultimate ideal and cutting “through all the cultural superstructures” (9). 2 See the surveys and essays in Bendix (1997) for anthropology; Funk, Gross and Huber (2012), Haselstein, Gross and Snyder-Körber (2010), Kemal and Gaskell (1999) and Knaller and Müller (2006) for aesthetics and media studies; Godlovitch (1999) for musicology; Lacoste, Leimgruber and Breyer (2014) for linguistics; Salmela (2014) for psychology; Straub (2012) for literary theory; Varga and Guignon (2014) for philosophy; and Weixler (2012) for narrative theory. Also see / III.2 Freeman. Knaller (2007) delineates a history of both the word and the concept. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-036
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Instead they may use, synonymously, expressions such as accuracy, genuineness, originality, purity, sincerity, truthfulness, veracity, veritableness, or verisimilitude. These problems put anyone who tries to provide a definition of authenticity into an uncomfortable position. It is impossible to find a single consistent meaning without neglecting some current usages. Authenticity is a complex concept that includes interrelated but heterogeneous meanings. In the face of this, it seems advisable to restrict the area of application in this essay and to deal with authenticity strictly as a text-related phenomenon – not as a feature of, say, persons, states of mind, performances, or objects. I will delineate three textual dimensions in regard to which the concept of authenticity is being used, namely with respect to a text’s origin, to its reference, and to its stylistic strategy (Martínez 2004). As we shall see, these dimensions can be discussed for fictional as well as factual narratives.
1. Authenticity as appropriate origin According to some usages, a text needs to possess a proper genealogy or history of production in order to qualify as authentic. If we can transfer empirical psychological findings concerning the evaluation of material art objects to literary art works, the acceptance of an art work as authentic depends on the recipient’s conviction that the work is truly and materially the product of its artist or author. The two “key factors underlying the value of original artwork” are “the assessment of the art object as a unique creative act (performance) and the degree of physical contact with the original artist (contagion)” (Newman and Bloom 2012, 558). In textual criticism the authenticity of a text means that the text derives entirely, in all its details, from its author. In order to establish a text’s authenticity, its author may need to authorize it. This does not necessarily mean that the author declares himself/herself to be the sole creator of the text (a copy-editor or editor may have contributed) but that he/she approves of its final shape. The connection between authenticity and authority is also crucial for narratives with religious claims (/ III.9 Mauz). A sacred narrative qualifies as authentic insofar as it is divinely inspired. The actual existence of this inspiration, however, has to be authorized by the church. Authenticity is thus established by the authority of an institution (authentia auctoritatis): “Munus autem authentice interpretandi verbum Dei scriptum vel traditum soli vivo Ecclesiae Magisterio concreditum est, cuius auctoritas in nomine Iesu Christi exercetur” (Dei Verbum 1965, cap. II, § 10) [“The task of giving an authentic interpretation of the Word of God, whether in its written form or in the form of Tradition, has been entrusted
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to the living teaching office of the Church alone. Its authority in this matter is exercised in the name of Jesus Christ” (Catechism 1994, 27).]. In law we find a similar connection between the authenticity of a document and its authorization by the court. Documents have to be formally authenticated by the court in order to count as evidence: […] a record is authentic if it is what it claims to be, that is, if its identity (i.e., the whole of the attributes that uniquely identify it, such as the name of its author and its date) and integrity (i.e., its wholeness and soundness) can be either presumed or verified. The same can be stated for the concept of record authentication, which the juridical system considers to be both the process of establishing authenticity and the legal attestation of it as affixed to a record. (Duranti 2005, 2)
In linguistics the concept of the native speaker establishes a close link between a (typically oral) discourse and its possibly authentic origin, as Florian Coulmas argues: “The native speaker is [...] seen as being the gate keeper of authenticity because [...] the ultimate judges of naturalness can only be the [native] speakers of a language. [...] nativeness is the one universally accepted criterion for authenticity” (Coulmas 2017 [1981], 5). In fictional narratives one might, from one perspective, expect that its originator, the author, should not be important for the text’s authenticity. After all, in fictional discourse the author does not speak directly to the reader, with affirmative force, but expresses himself/herself only indirectly through the mouths of the narrator and the characters. In other words: the author of a fictional discourse does not utter authentic propositions; instead, he/she imagines authentic propositions uttered by fictive characters. Nevertheless, some readers make authenticity claims with respect to the author also in the case of fictional narratives. In such cases, the author is expected to possess an appropriate identity; if he/she does not, his/her narrative is deemed to be inauthentic. If a text is authentic, it is read as symptomatic, as a true expression of experiences or identity features of its author. Such a symptomatic reading may transcend the individuality of the author and include collective identities (nation, race, class, gender) which the author shares or is taken to be a part of. Let us take the case of Holocaust literature. In his novel Efraim (1967), the German author Alfred Andersch created an autodiegetic Jewish narrator, Georg Efraim, who relates his life in post-war Germany. Andersch, who himself was not Jewish, was criticized for this narrative device. He was said to have usurped Jewish identity. Another example for the importance of the author’s identity for authenticity claims of fictional narratives is the novel The Hand that Signed the Paper (1994) by the Australian writer Helen Demidenko. In this novel, a young female Ukrainian narrator tells the story of her uncle, a peasant who during World War II collaborated with the Germans in the mass murder of Jews. The first editions of the
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novel included textual and paratextual hints that the narrator has much in common with the author Demidenko, who was also of Ukrainian origin. Based on these hints, the novel invited a reading as a covert autobiographical account of a second-generation Holocaust testimonial. Some time after the publication the author’s real identity was disclosed to be the Anglo-Irish writer Helen Darville and this caused an uproar in the press (cf. Meyer 2006). Scandals like these indicate that in the case of fictions told by authors who give voice to (typically victimized) groups of which they themselves are not a member there are some readers who consider these texts to lack authenticity and thus hold them to be morally problematic (/ IV.5 Phelan). 2. Authenticity as true reference Another dimension of textual authenticity is its postulated reference to historical facts. In this sense, a narrative is authentic only if it is factually true, that is, if it depicts events which actually occurred in the depicted manner. Factual narratives which include made-up material are considered to be inauthentic. For example, autobiographical narratives claim that they are truthfully based on the author’s memory. As Ochs and Capps note, to remember is “a factual mental verb. Factual verbs presuppose the certainty of a proposition. [...] Remembering, then, is an authenticating act: Rememberers [sic] publicly claim to have brought to conscious awareness a state, event, or condition that is real in their eyes; they believe it to be true” (Ochs and Capps 2001, 284). Fictional narratives, on the other hand, can claim historical ‘authenticity’ by referring to specific historical persons, events, or locations. They do so by mentioning for instance proper names like Napoleon, World War II, or Freiburg or by using other textual and paratextual signals. A fictional narrative’s referential authenticity depends on the degree to which particular parts of its storyworld can be identified with particular counterparts in reality. This transition between fiction and fact is of peculiar importance in genres situated in the grey area between fictional and factual discourse such as the historical novel, the autobiographical novel, autofiction (/ IV.6 Iversen), the nonfiction novel or the roman à clef. 3. Authenticity as stylistic strategy The third dimension of textual authenticity conceives of authenticity as the product of textual strategies, or style, which are redeployed in order
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to achieve an impression of authenticity. It seems that there exist two contradictory stylistic ideals of the authentic text. On the one hand, authentic discourse can be linked to elaborated speech. In classical rhetoric, a speaker’s elocutio includes the command of techniques of evidentia (enargeia) that will enable him/her to represent events as if the recipient were to see them with his/her own eyes (Quintilianus 1995, IV.2.123; VIII.3.61). In order to achieve evidentia, classical rhetoric recommends the use of detailed descriptions, of deictic adverbs suggesting spatial presence on the scene, of the historical present, of addresses to the reader, and of direct speech in the representation of conversations between characters (Lausberg 1973, 402). The impression of authenticity can also be achieved by including linguistic features of particular sociolects or dialects into the direct speech of fictional characters. In the nineteenth century this stylistic device was frequently used, for example, by authors of the US-American ‘local color’literature, the colonial novel, the regional novel, and the ‘Dorfgeschichte’ as well as in naturalism (/ IV.2 Warhol). Since then this device has become widespread. According to this stylistic norm, it would be inauthentic if a peasant or a working class member spoke in erudite language. On the other hand, the impression of authenticity may be created not by means of masterful stylistic ornatus but, on the contrary, by resorting to unlearned, imperfect, fragmented or tainted discourse. Such sermo humilis was seen as characteristic of Christian religious discourse beginning with the Gospels (Auerbach 1965). Its ‘humbleness’ or modesty mirrors the incarnation of God as a suffering mortal being. However, it goes without saying that such a sermo humilis may be the deliberate product of a skillful rhetoric. To some extent, Roland Barthes’s famous ‘reality effect’ (effet de réel ) is akin to this discourse strategy which conveys the impression of authenticity by being seemingly deficient. Barthes considers the excessive mentioning of diegetic details of the storyworld that he detects in writings by Jules Michelet and Gustave Flaubert to be superfluous in terms of narrative functionality and proposes that they produce an air of authenticity by connoting the inexhaustible particularity, or concreteness, of reality (Barthes 1968; but see / IV.1 McKeon). Both elaborated discourse and sermo humilis are means of generating evidentia and thereby enhance the recipient’s immersion in the storyworld. According to this effect-related attitude, it is not important whether the narrative is factually true or not. Verisimilitude, however, is important because it increases the persuasive effect. Donald Spence’s concept of “narrative truth,” as opposed to “historical truth,” also points to the rhetorical dimension of textual authenticity:
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Narrative truth can be defined as the criterion we use to decide when a certain experience has been captured to our satisfaction; it depends on continuity and closure and the extent to which the fit of the pieces takes on an aesthetic finality. [...] Historical truth is [...] dedicated to the strict observance of correspondence rules; our aim is to come as close as possible to what ‘really’ happened. (Spence 1982, 31–32)
4. Intersections: Testimonial authenticity and self-reflexive authenticity The three aspects (or meanings) of textual authenticity distinguished here do intersect, of course, with each other in various ways. Two interesting cases of such intersections are testimonial authenticity and self-reflexive authenticity. As Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps observe, testimonial or experiential narratives tend to display their authenticity by couching the narrated facts within subjective mental events like ‘thinking,’ ‘knowing,’ ‘intending’ or ‘feeling’: I knew there was something wrong with him. As Ochs and Capps put it: Even though remembering is imperfect and malleable, tellers of personal experience work to authenticate their memories and, in so doing, to make their narrative accounts sound credible. [...] Reconstructions of past life events are authentic when tellers direct their attention to and psychically inhabit those events. (Ochs and Capps 2001, 284– 286)
This strategy of staging the text as an authentic testimony of an eye witness in order to gain credibility echoes the goal of evidentia in classical rhetoric. Testimonial authenticity links to the stylistic evocation of experience on account of the objective nature of the reported occurrences which are authenticated not as factually true or verisimilar, but as experientially true (‘I can vouch for having felt that way’). However, despite Ochs and Capps’s reference to the linguistic markers of asseveration, this kind of authenticity is primarily achieved through the authorization of the experience through the teller’s personal testimony and thus not necessarily a stylistic technique. In recent years, another strategy of creating an effect of authenticity has become prominent in literature as well as in other media. Antonius Weixler, who calls it “meta-discursive authenticity” (Weixler 2012, 9), points out that one way of producing the impression of authenticity is to criticize traditional kinds of authentic discourse and to explicitly affirm that authenticity is impossible to achieve. Such texts tend to use antimimetic and anti-illusionistic devices (for instance, paradoxical combinations of factual and fictional features) in order to achieve a second degreekind of authenticity.
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5. Authenticity in theories of fictionality The term authenticity has also been used in connection with some theories of fictionality. Lubomír Doležel links authenticity with the truth claim of voices within the fictional text. Authentic voices are crucial for establishing the “fictional existence” (Doležel 1998, 145) of a particular world of fiction. Doležel defines “authentication” as “the transformation of a possible entity into a fictional entity achieved by the performative power of the fictional text” (279) and postulates a variety of modes of authentication (145–168). The actual domain of a fictional world can be established by the “authoritative narrative” (149) of an anonymous third-person narrator or through the accounts of characters as long as these accounts do not contradict each other or the heterodiegetic narrator’s propositions. Graded modes of authentication obtain in the case of subjectivized third-person narrators or of first-person narrators. In self-voiding narratives (skaz, metafiction) or in impossible fictional worlds, according to Doležel, the logic of authentication can be subverted. In his theory of fictive discourse, Félix Martínez-Bonati discriminates between “real authentic sentences” (by which a speaker addresses somebody in a real communicative situation) and “real inauthentic sentences” (which, as in indirect discourse, represent real authentic sentences but without proper illocutionary force). In fictive discourse, the real author produces real inauthentic sentences, whereas the narratorial voice utters “imaginary authentic sentences” (Martínez-Bonati 1981, 78–80). So Doležel links the ‘authenticity’ of speech within fictional texts to its truth-value with regard to the storyworld and hence his account bears on the referential meaning of authenticity, whereas Martínez-Bonati is instead concerned with the communicative source of a speech and therefore links authenticity to a proper origin. 6. An example: Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments In order to exemplify the distinctions proposed in this essay, let us reconsider Binjamin Wilkomirski’s notorious alleged Holocaust autobiography Fragments. Memories of a Wartime Childhood (first published in German in 1995 under the title Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939–1948, English translation 1996) (/ IV.8 Lavocat). The book relates the cruel infancy of a Jewish boy, born in 1938 Poland, who was forced to live, at the age of three to four years, in the concentration camps of Majdanek and Auschwitz-Birkenau. His mother and his five siblings were murdered. After the liberation and some years in Krakow, he was transferred to an orphanage
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in Switzerland and eventually adopted by the Swiss couple Doesseker. His traumatic experiences during the Holocaust were repressed. It was only much later, as an adult, that Wilkomirski, with the aid of psychotherapy, could recover his Holocaust memories and eventually tell of them in writing. Wilkomirski’s supposedly autobiographical account produced an enthusiastic reader response and was soon translated into nine languages. As a child survivor of the Holocaust, Wilkomirski became a public person. He met Holocaust scholars and other survivors, gave lectures and talks in schools and universities, participated in conferences, starred in TV documentaries, and figured in fundraising tours for the Holocaust Museum in Washington. He even met his real father again: Yakow Maroko, a Majdanek survivor who had lost his son in the concentration camp, had recognized Wilkomirski in a TV documentary. However, in 1998, Wilkomirski was accused of fraud. The true story as it emerged is this: Wilkomirski was no Holocaust victim. Instead, he was born in 1941 (not 1938) in Switzerland under the name of Bruno Grosjean. His father left his mother during her pregnancy. The child grew up under difficult circumstances. When he was two years old, his mother had to give him away. He lived partly with alternating foster parents, partly in an orphanage. At the age of four he was adopted by the wealthy Zürich couple Doesseker. Later on Wilkomirski began to develop an interest in Jewish history, culture and religion (neither his biological mother nor his foster parents or his adoptive parents were Jewish). From 1972, when he was thirty-one, he began to claim that his true identity was that of the Holocaust victim Binjamin Wilkomirski, a story which he made public in Fragments. Although Wilkomirski/Grosjean/Doesseker until today apparently insists upon the veracity of his memoirs, the fraud cannot be disputed anymore. Besides lots of other evidence, a DNA-test confirmed Wilkomirski’s descendance from his biological (Swiss) father. After the disclosure of Wilkomirski’s true identity the publishers withdrew Fragments from the market. Wilkomirski’s Fragments is an illuminating example of the conceptual entanglement between the concepts of factual narrative, fiction, and authenticity. After its publication, Fragments was first of all read as an authentic trauma narrative. This reading corresponds to the attitude Wilkomirski himself adopts inside and outside his text. He explains at the very beginning of the text that he is not able to present his memories in an orderly fashion. Instead, his memories consist of isolated blocks of images depicting, mostly, violent events of his early childhood which unexpectedly rise to the surface: My earliest memories are a rubble field of isolated images and events. Shards of memory with hard knife-sharp edges, which still cut flesh if touched today. Mostly a chaotic
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jumble, with very little chronological fit; shards that keep surfacing against the orderly grain of grown-up life and escaping the laws of logic. If I’m going to write about it, I have to give up on the ordering logic of grown-ups; it would only distort what happened. (Wilkomirski 1996, 4)
The title, Fragments, already indicates the dispersed nature of these longtime suppressed but eventually recovered memories. After the disclosure of Wilkomirski’s real identity, however, Fragments was regarded as a fraud, that is, as a feigned and therefore referentially and subjectively inauthentic trauma narrative. The broken promise of referential authenticity caused strong reactions from severely disappointed readers. Recipients’ reactions would certainly have been different had Wilkomirski presented his text from the beginning as a fictional trauma narrative, that is as the imitation of an authentic trauma-narrative in a fictional textual frame. In this case, Fragments could have been praised for its stylistic authenticity which would have been attributed to Wilkomirski’s skillful deployment of the rhetorical repertoire of trauma narratives without laying himself open to accusations of mendacity. Wilkomirski has encountered the disclosure of his fraud with astonishing reluctance. He himself, it seems, still believes that in his book he faithfully depicts the truth of his personal life, perhaps following the suggestion included in Fragments: “Legally accredited truth is one thing – the truth of a life another” (154). According to this reading, his memories would be objectively wrong but subjectively authentic. Fragments could then be read as an instance of an authentic trauma narrative, but in a revised sense. The historically false content would then expose the true traumatic experiences of a Swiss orphan which have been relocated within a frame of induced false memories of a Holocaust victim in the sense of Freudian screen-memories (Deckerinnerungen, see Freud 1953 [1899]). Finally, in still another perspective, Fragments could be read as a collective victim narrative authentically depicting the essence of the universal experience of being a victim. The huge international acclaim that Fragments earned immediately following its publication indicates that many readers where so eager to welcome this depiction of universally valid suffering that they ignored concerns about its historical accuracy which were soon advanced by some emotionally less engaged critics. Some of the different readings which I have proposed may be recognized already in a passage in the “Epilogue” of Fragments. Wilkomirski here summarizes competing versions of his identity: “As a child, I also received a new identity, another name, another date and place of birth. The document I hold in my hands – a makeshift summary, no actual birth certificate – gives the date of my birth as February 12, 1941. But this date has nothing to do with either the history of this century or my personal histo-
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ry” (154). Here we find the historically true personal identity (“document”) as opposed to Wilkomirski’s subjective account of it (“personal history”) and in contrast to the assumptions of the collective memory (“history of this century”). The various possible readings of Fragments, I have argued, correspond to the varieties of concepts of authenticity. Thus, one has the promise of referential authenticity when the text is read as a trauma narrative; the skillful command of the textual repertoire of Holocaust literature in order to evoke, within a fictional frame, the impression of authenticity; and, finally, the referentially misleading but subjectively truthful Deckerinnerung which comes to the fore by tracing the authorial origins of the text. The example of Wilkomirski’s Fragments suggests that the term authenticity is as complex as it is problematic. Its enduring appeal in academic as well as in public discourses is not always accompanied by conceptual clarity. Indeed this is, perhaps, the very reason for its success. References Auerbach, Erich. “Sermo humilis.” Literary Language and its Public in Late Latin Antiquity and in the Middle Ages. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965. 25–66. Barthes, Roland. “L’Effet de réel.” Communications 11 (1968): 84–89. Bendix, Regina. In Search of Authenticity. The Formation of Folklore Studies. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Catechism of the Catholic Church. [Trans. of Dei Verbum.] Ed. United States Catholic Conference. Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1994. 27. Dei Verbum. Constitutio dogmatica de Divina revelatione. http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_ councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_lt.html. 1965 (13 April 2018). Coulmas, Florian. “Introduction: The Concept of Native Speaker.” [1981] A Festschrift for Native Speaker. Ed. Florian Coulmas. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter Mouton, 2017. 1– 25. Doležel, Lubomír. Heterocosmica. Fiction and Possible Worlds. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Duranti, Luciana. Authenticity and Authentication in the Law. http://www.interpares.org. InterPARES 2 Project, September 2005. (12 March 2018). Freud, Sigmund. “Über Deckerinnerungen.” [1899] Gesammelte Werke 1. 3rd ed. Frankfurt/ Main: S. Fischer, 1953. 529–554. Funk, Wolfgang, Florian Gross, and Irmtraud Huber. Eds. The Aesthetics of Authenticity. Medial Constructions of the Real. Bielefeld: transcript, 2012. Godlovitch, Stan. “Performance Authenticity. Possible, Practical, Virtuous.” Performance and Authenticity in the Arts. Eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 154–174. Haselstein, Ulla, Andrew Gross, and MaryAnn Snyder-Körber. Eds. The Pathos of Authenticity. Heidelberg: Winter, 2010. Kemal, Salim, and Ivan Gaskell. Eds. Performance and Authenticity in the Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
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Knaller, Susanne. Ein Wort aus der Fremde. Geschichte und Theorie des Begriffs Authentizität. Heidelberg: Winter, 2007. Knaller, Susanne, and Harro Müller. Eds. Authentizität. Diskussion eines ästhetischen Begriffs. Munich: Fink, 2006. Lacoste, Véronique, Jakob Leimgruber, and Thiemo Breyer. Eds. Indexing Authenticity. Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2014. Lausberg, Heinrich. Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik. Eine Grundlegung der Literaturwissenschaft. 2 vols. 2nd ed. Munich: Hueber, 1973. Martínez, Matías. “Authentizität und Medialität in künstlerischen Darstellungen des Holocaust.” Der Holocaust und die Künste. Medialität und Authentizität von Holocaust-Darstellungen in Literatur, Film, Video, Malerei, Denkmälern, Comic und Musik. Ed. Matías Martínez. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2004. 7–22. Martínez-Bonati, Félix. Fictive Discourse and the Structures of Literature. A Phenomenological Approach. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981. Meyer, Therese-Marie. “The Case of the Double D.” Where Fiction Ends: Four Scandals of Literary Identity Construction. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006. 73–148. Newman, George E., and Paul Bloom. “Art and Authenticity. The Importance of Originals in Judgments of Value.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 141.3 (2012): 558– 569. Ochs, Elinor, and Lisa Capps. Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Quintilianus, Marcus Fabius. Institutiones Oratoriae. Libri XII. 2 vols. 3rd ed. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995. Salmela, Mikko. “Emotional Authenticity.” True Emotions. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2014. 75–103. Spence, Donald. Narrative Truth and Historical Truth. Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton, 1982. Straub, Julia. Ed. Paradoxes of Authenticity: Studies on a Critical Concept. Bielefeld: transcript, 2012. Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Varga, Somogy, and Charles Guignon. “Authenticity.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. Stanford: Metaphysics Research Lab, 2014. 1–41. Weixler, Antonius. Ed. Authentisches Erzählen. Produktion, Narration, Rezeption. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2012. Wilkomirski, Binjamin. Fragments. Memories of a Wartime Childhood. [1995] Trans. Carol Brown Janeway. New York: Schocken Books, 1996.
JOHANNES FRANZEN
Factuality and Convention 1. Introduction As with any form of discourse, the question of what you can and cannot do in fictional or factual narration is a question of cultural negotiations. These negotiations bring forth a set of conventions which govern the distribution of prohibitions and licenses. Thus, factuality as a concept is mainly used to describe the opposite of fictionality. Fictional narratives differ from factual narratives insofar as they do not have to adhere to the same standards. One might even say that the term ‘factuality’ can be defined as the conventionalized set of rules which the author of a fictional text is allowed to break. A novelist does not have to adhere to the same restrictions as a journalist, and a dramatist has more liberty than a historian. These freedoms are based on a promise given to the readers of fictional discourse: the significant elements of this story are invented. As such they have no equivalent in reality. The “Distinction of Fiction,” a term coined by Dorrit Cohn, seems to be mainly defined by the licenses associated with the promise of inventedness, a distinction between what Cohn calls the “biographer’s constraints” and the “novelist’s freedom” (Cohn 1999, 22). From the perspective of literary theory, factuality often looks like nothing more than the shackles an author of a poetic work wants to lose to gain the epistemological, aesthetical and ethical autonomy which is necessary to create a work of art. This view entails an obvious evaluative implication, namely that fictional discourse is superior to the factual mode (Franzen 2016, 20), a concept that goes back to Aristotle’s assertion that poetry “is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history: for poetry tends to express the universal, history the particular” (Aristotle 1951, 35). In recent years, the freedoms of fictionality have been explained by using what has been called an ‘institutional’ theory (Köppe 2014). This means that fictionality has to be seen as a rule-governed practice, a regulated activity which is based on certain conventions: “Fictive utterance is https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-037
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ultimately a kind of communication, involving an interaction between speaker (writer) and audience (reader)” (Lamarque and Olsen 1994, 32– 34). Another way to characterize this institution is by using the metaphor of a contract between author and reader. This has been stated among others by Umberto Eco, who writes: “The basic rule of dealing with a work of fiction is that the reader must tacitly accept a fictional agreement, which Coleridge calls ‘the suspension of disbelief’” (1994, 75). Authors are allowed to defy the norms of factuality because they adhere to the conventions which govern the use of invented narratives. However, the notion of a clear-cut distinction between fictionality (freedom) and factuality (norms) cannot be upheld. Depending on the cultural and historical context the freedom of fictionality has obvious limits. Factuality, on the other hand, has to be seen as a much more dynamic concept which constitutes an institution in its own right with a whole set of prohibitions and licenses. In the case of factual narratives, it seems obvious where transgressions might occur: where authors do not tell the truth, where they do not adhere to formal conventions, or do not bow to reigning representational taboos. But similar transgressions may be observed in the case of fictional narratives: they can be accused of distorting reality by offering up cheap clichés or by presenting certain topics in a way which is aesthetically and ethically indecorous. Some of the licenses which are customarily associated with fictionality can even be observed in some types of factual narratives. Thus, factuality should not merely be defined as a foil to literary invention. In what follows, the institutional theory of fiction will be applied to the concept of factuality which is described as a regulated social practice that also strongly depends on cultural conventions. Two main questions will be posed: (1) What are the specific norms that govern factuality? (2) Are there representational licenses depending on the context of factual narratives? 2. Norms When Stephen Glass, a journalist with the The New Republic, was outed as a notorious forger of supposedly real stories, it seemed obvious which rules of factuality had been breached. An article in Forbes providing evidence about the many falsehoods of Glass’s “bad journalism” was titled “Lies, damn lies and fiction” (Penenberg 1998). This allusion to fiction not only tries to discredit the author’s claims of reporting the truth; it also refers to the system of norms underlying any concept of factuality. In and of itself, fiction is not a bad word, but it can become one if an author abuses its licenses. Making things up is allowed only in certain contained
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contexts – in all other situations it signifies rule breaking plain and simple. This might be the reason why there is a lack of theorizing about factuality. What constitutes a factual narrative seems patently evident: its author’s claim to the truth and its embeddedness in our real-world ‘reality.’ In contrast, fictionality is a complex and somewhat peculiar status of a text; no one will doubt that a theory of literary invention is an important task. Factuality, then, is often seen as the default position from which a fictional text can deviate in interesting ways. One famous definition of factuality in a theory of fictionality is given by John Searle, who defines a passage from an article in the New York Times as an assertion, i.e. a “type of illocutionary act that conforms to certain quite specific semantic and pragmatic rules.” These rules are: (1) The essential rule: the maker of an assertion commits himself to the truth of the expressed proposition. (2) The preparatory rules: the speaker must be in a position to provide evidence or reasons for the truth of the expressed proposition. (3) The expressed proposition must not be obviously true to both the speaker and the hearer in the context of utterance. (4) The sincerity rule: the speaker commits himself to a belief in the truth of the expressed proposition. (Searle 1975, 322)
For the purposes of this essay, it is of no importance whether these rules correctly define the boundaries of factuality; they are merely used as an example of a set of norms which might govern the rule-based institution of factuality in a certain collective. In any case, from Searle’s perspective the articles of Stephen Glass clearly contain “defective assertions” insofar as they transgress almost all of the stipulated rules (1, 2 and 4). They are not true, they cannot be bolstered by evidence and – unless he was delusional – the author must have known that they were forgeries. However, all these norms seemingly did not apply when Glass in 2003 published a novel called The Fabulist. The book recounts the tribulations of a young journalist who is unmasked as a forger. The narrator describes himself as “compulsively imaginative.” He elaborates: “by that I mean I am always speculating, wondering, considering and writing the world around me into a story” (Glass 2003, 181–182). A paratextual note is given at the very beginning of the novel, in which the author hints at the autobiographical background of his narrative, while at the same time asserting: “This book is a work of fiction, a fabrication, and this time, an admitted one” (Glass 2003). This note, in many ways, epitomizes the complex problems of convention-based concepts of fictionality and factuality. The assertion of fictionality (admitting to the inventedness of the story) should free the author from having to adhere to the norms of factuality. These all-important signals of fictionality (Zipfel 2014) are essentially what differentiate a work of fiction from a forgery in the sense of the often quoted defense of invention by
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Philip Sidney: “the poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth” (Sidney 1974, 52). Taking into account the conventions of factuality and fictionality by signaling the non-truth of its narrative, Glass’s novel gains the licenses that go with the status of literary invention. Even so, such a “contract of fiction” which is based on “professing the work’s fictiveness” must, as Gérard Genette asserts, be taken with a “touch of suspicion” (Genette 1997, 215). Glass’s novel is an obvious roman à clef in that it can and should be read as a version of the author’s own life story. Behind the official profession of inventedness lies the thinly veiled possibility of a factual reading, which makes some of the norms of factuality (as exemplified by Searle’s rules) pertinent again. Thus, one can sympathize with the outraged reaction of Leon Wieseltier, the literary editor of The New Republic, who – after the publication of The Fabulist – called Glass a “creep” and went on: “Even when it comes to reckoning with his own sins, he is still incapable of nonfiction” (Kirkpatrick 2003). Hurled at a declared work of fiction, this seems to be a strange kind of accusation; but then, fiction signals are not an on-off switch. They are based on complicated questions of context that decide whether an author can lay claim to the licenses of fictionality. Glass might have thought that it was a neat trick to tell the story of his illicit inventions in the mode of permitted invention, but his critics would have none of it. It seems that by being a well-known forger the author had forfeited his right to literary invention. But not, of course, to all invention – had Glass ventured into the realm of fantasy stories and written a novel with no trace of his life’s story, even his most adamant detractors would not have found cause to condemn his endeavor. In this case, however, the narrative proved to be not fictional enough. Glass’s case shows that fictionality, like factuality, can be restricted, too. The conventions governing what can and cannot be done in a fiction are highly context-sensitive. In what follows, I will try to broaden and complicate the concept of factuality from the vantage point of the institutional theory of fictionality. First of all, there is the question of how the status of a text can be signaled. As the example of Glass’s The Fabulist shows, it is not sufficient to just apply the generic term novel or a flimsy profession of inventedness to make a text fictional. It is the culture represented by the readers who will decide whether it accepts the underlying claims. But what about the signaling of factuality? Since most texts that readers encounter in everyday life are about real people and events, they do not need to be marked as factual. This is especially true for journalism which, with the context of its publication, automatically lays claim to the truth of its narrative. The most efficient factuality signal is the absence of any signposts of fictionality. Glass did not have to profess the truth of every journalistic article he forged,
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but he needed to mark the fictional status of his novel to legitimize the rule-breaking that goes with it. However, the context of a journalistic publication transports a certain kind of claim to factuality that differs from other such claims. Depending on the genre of narrative that is marked by this context of publication, the strictness of the underlying rules can vary – and this is a question of convention and cultural negotiation. Certain kinds of factual text have licenses similar to fictional discourse. Also, what is permitted in a factual text and what is forbidden does depend on the cultural context and the historical moment of publication. By taking as a starting point the most important licenses of fictionality, some light can be shed on the convention-based freedoms of some factual texts. 3. Licenses 3.1 Epistemological licenses The authors of fictional texts have the freedom to invent characters, events and places that do not exist. Factual texts, in contrast, have to commit themselves to the truth, which means they have to offer their referents as existent in the real world. However, based on the conventions of communication, there are differences in the application of this rule. A work of historiography has to adhere to different standards from an anecdote which is told at a dinner with friends. While Searle’s “essential rule” (Do not make things up!) holds true for both of these genres, the pressure of evidence that will be applied by the audience will be very different. Exaggerations and small scenic inventions will be tolerated in the case of the anecdote but will be perceived as a grave offense in the case of historiography. This does not mean that there are genres of factual texts that allow the author to invent freely;1 your friends would still be irritated if they found obvious falsehoods in your story. But there are conventions that govern the pressure applied to the truthfulness of a narrative. Certain kinds of factual discourse will take freedoms in the way they construct reality, and these freedoms are based on cultural negotiations. They are also based on the historical moment of publication. Factual texts in the Middle Ages took liberties with the facts, which would be unthinkable
1 I will not talk about the case of thought experiments and other kinds of hypotheticals in scientific text, since they are a special case of fictional discourse which is well established as a part of some genres of factual narratives.
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from a modern perspective. These liberties do not make the texts fictional, but they imply very different standards with regard to Searle’s “preparatory rule” (/ V.2 von Contzen). A special case of factual texts that lays claim to some of the epistemological licenses of fictionality is the factual literary narrative (/ IV.10 Pettersson). Creative nonfiction is as much (and sometimes more) concerned with its aesthetics as with the truths of its story. Authors such as Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace or David Sedaris have used the form of the personal essay to write about cultural problems in a style that has been praised for its beauty or humor as much as for its insightfulness. Problems arise when fabrications in these works are uncovered. This was the case with Wallace and Sedaris who had to admit to embellishments in their work. The online-magazine Slate even published a visual guide, classifying authors according to how much they could “make stuff up.” The reason the authors give for this guide is that “recent years have seen a cornucopia of storytellers – journalists, memoirists, humorists, novelists, and so on – fudging facts” (Anderson et al. 2012). Unsurprisingly, at the top of the chart with a clear ‘No’ one finds the journalist (embodied by Stephen Glass). Second place among those authors who should not invent elements of their stories is the memoirist (embodied by James Frey, who was uncovered as a liar, too). While this chart is obviously satirical, there is some truth to the claim that different kinds of creative nonfiction are under different kinds of pressure. This can be measured by the anger that is directed against authors who are exposed as liars. So while the condemnation of journalists and memoirists is based on the strict social norms that govern the expectations with regard to the factuality of their narratives, this might not be the case with ‘Humorous Journalists’ (David Foster Wallace) or straight up ‘Humorists’ (Sedaris) and even less for ‘Stand-Up Comedians’ (Louis C. K.). Recipients will tolerate more inventions and exaggerations because the main function of these genres is not to provide information but to amuse and entertain (a basic aesthetic effect of a text) and this in some cases trumps the obligation to only tell the truth. This context-based release from responsibility becomes more complicated if the narrative in question does not have the protective shield of humor. After the writer Mike Daisey performed his one-man show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs in the context of the journalistic format This American Life on NPR, it turned out that many important details of this exposé on working conditions in Chinese Apple factories were fabricated. Daisey was widely condemned by journalists who refused to accept his assertion that he manipulated the facts to convey a ‘greater truth’ about the crimes of the company. The New York Times titled its article on the
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scandal “Theater, Disguised as Real Journalism” and criticized the author’s argument that “some characters and events had been invented in service of a greater narrative truth” (Carr 2012). In contrast to Sedaris’s humorous inventions, Daisey’s forgeries had very serious implications, which might be one of the reasons why he was given no leeway in regard to the epistemological licenses of factuality. 3.2 Aesthetic licenses Factual narratives have fewer aesthetic freedoms than fictional texts. This is an assertion that has been contested (among others by Searle). Since the status of a discourse depends on the set of rules it adheres to and since these rules depend mainly on the referential parameters of this discourse, the formal qualities of the narrative in question need not determine its status. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or other works by the New Journalists use literary devices while not renouncing their factuality (/ IV.5 Phelan). Without the paratextual context one could not decide whether these texts are fictional or factual. Though this might hold true in the case of these special works, it does not for most other genres of factual narration. If a piece of conventional journalism were told backwards or as a ‘stream of consciousness,’ this would be perceived as highly irritating; a natural scientist in a highly specialized journal will not use excessive metaphorical language, as this might endanger the precision of her argument. As in the case of epistemological licenses, there exists a scale of genres that is determined by different kinds of pressure to adhere to certain rules. Since factuality is a social institution, the place of a factual narrative in this continuum depends on the conventional expectation of the readers, who will be irritated by some formal devices only in a certain context. Thus, in the same way that fictional narratives are allowed to do more than factual narratives, some factual texts are allowed to do more than others. 3.3 Ethical licenses Finally, fictional narratives are allowed to transgress certain ethical boundaries. This, of course, does not mean that a fictional text can represent anything in any possible manner. Literary inventions as much as factual narratives have to accept conventional prohibitions. If in a culture there exists a rule that forbids the depiction of sexual or violent acts, then both factual and fictional discourse will be under the similar pressure. One might even say there is a higher pressure on fictional texts, because the
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author’s freedom gives him the possibility to avoid inventing certain unpleasant situations. Authors of fictional texts have the freedom to select the elements of their narratives, whereas a historian who is writing factual historiography is not allowed to omit the atrocities committed in a war or the sexual escapades of a tyrant (unless he is forced to because the tyrant is ruling the country he lives in). On the other hand, authors of fictional texts do not have to take responsibility for what their narrators and characters say and do. Thus, they can explore the minds of reprehensible characters. They can also criticize these characters as harshly as they want, because – since these characters do not exist – they will not be hurt by the depiction and cannot start a libel suit against the authors. In contrast, authors of factual narratives have to take responsibility for their assertions, and they have to be careful in their depiction of real people because their assertions might have consequences. However, even in the case of ethical restrictions, one finds licenses depending on the genre of narrative and the context of publication. What might be considered a grave infraction in a journalistic text might well be considered harmless in the context of private gossip. An author may be as ruthless in the depiction of a long dead historic figure as with an invented character. 4. Conclusion The exploration of some of the licenses and prohibitions of factual discourse illustrates the obvious advantages of an institutional approach. The boundary between fictionality and factuality might not be permeable but is – depending on the context – shifting. Thus, different manifestations of factual discourse can be analyzed by reconstructing the set of conventions which govern their norms and licenses. Factual narratives that are historically or culturally different are better understood if they are seen as regulated by different conventions. This means that there are many kinds of factual discourse which can be described by listing the many kinds of context that govern what is allowed and what is not allowed in a text. References Anderson, L.V., David Haglund, Natalie Matthews-Ramo, and Jim Pagels. “Can I Make Stuff Up? A Visual Guide.” http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat /2012/03/21/ mike_daisey_david_sedaris_david_foster_wallace_and_other_storytellers_who_can_ make_stuff_up_.html. Slate 21 March 2012 (20 June 2017). Aristotle. Aristotle’s Theory of Poetry and Fine Art, with a Critical Text and Translation of The Poetics. Ed. S. H. Butcher. New York: Dover, 1951.
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Carr, David. “Theater, Disguised as Real Journalism.” New York Times (18 March 2012). Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1999. Eco, Umberto. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Franzen, Johannes. “‘Mehr Bild als Roman.’ Fiktionalität, Faktualität und das Problem der Bewertung.” Der Deutschunterricht 4 (2016): 20–28. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Glass, Stephen. The Fabulist. A Novel. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003. Kirkpatrick, David D. “A History Of Lying Recounted As Fiction.” New York Times (7 May 2003). Köppe, Tilmann. “Die Institution Fiktionalität.” Fiktionalität. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Eds. Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. 35–49. Lamarque, Peter, and Stein Haugom Olsen. Truth, Fiction, and Literature. A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Penenberg, Adam L. “Lies, Damn Lies and Fiction.” Forbes (11 May 1998). Searle, John R. “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse.” New Literary History 6.2 (1975): 319–332. Sidney, Sir Philip. The Defence of Poesie. Ed. A. V. Dorsten. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974. Zipfel, Frank. “Fiktionssignale.” Fiktionalität: Ein Interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Eds. Tilmann Köppe and Tobias Klauk. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. 97–124.
JAMES PHELAN
The Ethics of Factual Narrative The stresses the ape was reacting to [after his suborbital flight into space] were probably of quite another sort. Here he was back in the compound where they had zapped him through his drills for a solid month. Just two years ago he had been captured in the jungles of Africa, separated from his mother, shipped in a cage to a goddammed desert in New Mexico, kept prisoner, prodded and shocked by a bunch of humans in white smocks, and here he was, back in a compound where they had been zapping him through their fucking drills for a solid month, and suddenly there was a whole new mob of humans on hand! Even worse than the white smocks! Louder! Crazier! Totally out of their gourds! Yammering, roaring, brawling, exploding lights beside their bug-eyed skulls! Suppose they threw him to these assholes! Fuck this – At some point in the madhouse scene out back of Hangar S, a photograph was taken in which Ham was either grinning or had on a grimace that looked like a grin in the picture. Naturally, this was the picture that went out over the wire services and was printed in newspapers throughout America. Such was the response of the happy chimpanzee to being the first ape in outer space. ... A fat happy grin. ... Such was the perfection with which the Proper Gent observed the proprieties. (Wolfe 1980, 187–188)
This passage from Tom Wolfe’s narrative about the early days of the United States space program is a quintessential example of the New Journalism described by Wolfe in his 1973 “Manifesto” (Wolfe and Johnson 1973). Wolfe violates the conventions of traditional journalism by employing narrative techniques associated with the novel in order to get at aspects of actual people and events that traditional journalism misses. While some features of New Journalistic practice such as reporting dialogue that is imaginatively reconstructed rather than recorded have become accepted conventions, other deviations from conventional journalism remain more ethically controversial. I choose the passage above because it contains a few such features – Wolfe’s representing the consciousness of “the ape” (called Ham); his satirical take on the ‘Perfect Gent’ – and because considering them in relation to Wolfe’s larger project prompts a general discussion of the ethics of factual narrative. For all its wit and humor, this passage describing the aftermath of Ham’s space flight is subject to at least three ethical objections, all of which https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-038
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are tied to the factual status of The Right Stuff. (1) Wolfe’s representation of Ham’s consciousness is fraudulent. Wolfe moves from the explicit “probably” of the extradiegetic narration in the first sentence to an implied “certainly” in the direct thought report at the end, but Wolfe obviously never had access to Ham’s thoughts. Wolfe’s narration is not only epistemologically impossible but ethically dishonest, an example of the New Journalism as Irresponsible Journalism. (2) Wolfe thoroughly anthropomorphizes Ham, transforming him from an ape into a veritable human unfamiliar with multiple aspects of the space program and especially with the avid photographers who covered it. Wolfe’s treatment denies Ham’s species identity in a way that may be as objectionable as the treatment Wolfe represents Ham as receiving from NASA. (3) By juxtaposing the two paragraphs, Wolfe communicates not only his judgment that the members of the mainstream media (the Perfect Gent) radically misrepresent Ham and his experience but also his sense of superiority to them. Wolfe’s implied message, reinforced in other passages of his narrative, is along these lines: ‘The American media got it so wrong, those poor benighted fools in thrall to a Cold War narrative about the perfection of the Mercury Program, but I get it so right.’ In what follows, I propose a rhetorically-oriented theoretical framework within which to address each of these objections. This framework will also lead me to another passage from Wolfe’s narrative and one from Tobias Wolff’s memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of a Lost War (1994). More generally, I aspire to move the discussion of the ethics of factual narrative beyond issues of lying and other deceptive acts of narration in memoirs such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (/ IV.7 Korthals Altes). 1. Toward a rhetorical ethics of factual narrative: Basic principles I start by identifying four basic principles, the first three of which are also relevant to fictional narrative (see Phelan 2013). 1. The communicative exchanges between authors and audiences have an ethical dimension: storytelling involves moral values. 2. This ethical dimension involves both an ethics of the told (moral values relevant to characters, situations, and events) and an ethics of the telling (moral values relevant to author-narrator-audience relationships). Furthermore, these two ethical arenas often intertwine. 3. Authors and narrators in factual narrative, like those in fictional narrative, engage in three main kinds of telling – reporting, interpreting, and evaluating – and all three have an ethical dimension. 4. A narrative’s status as factual or fictional has a major influence on its ethical dimension.
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2. Factuality, fictionality, and borderlines Authors and audiences have qualitatively different relationships with discourses that seek to directly represent or comment on aspects of the actual world (factuality) and those that invent characters, events, spaces, and other items that populate a storyworld (fictionality). I also find it useful to identify a third mode constituted by discourses in which authors deliberately blur the line between factuality and fictionality. Let me start with rhetorically-oriented definitions that seek to capture the sources of these qualitative differences. Factual discourse is intentionally and sincerely communicated reporting, interpreting, evaluating or other commenting on/of/about actual events and states of affairs. Its purpose is to intervene directly in its audience’s understanding of/engagement with those actual events and states of affairs. Fictionality is intentionally communicated invention, whether explicitly signaled or just implied. Its purpose is to intervene indirectly in its audience’s understanding of/engagement with actual events and states of affairs (for more see Nielsen et al. 2015). Borderline discourse deliberately makes it impossible to differentiate between invention and reporting (and related commentary on the actual). Its purpose is to transcend the differences between factual and fictional discourse in order to intervene in its audience’s understanding of/engagement with the actual world. Since the three modes provide different means to the same ends, some comparisons and contrasts will help illuminate the main concern of this essay, factuality. First, these definitions allow us to distinguish these three modes from lying, which purports to be an instance of factuality, though it actually relies on invention. Because a liar intends to deceive his audience, we regard the lie as ethically deficient. Since someone using any of the other three modes is not engaged in deception, such a usage does not automatically generate the same default negative judgment. (We can all think of occasions in which a lie is justified, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule.) Furthermore, the discovery of a lie – or a series of them in a fraudulent memoir – does not convert the discourse into a fiction, because the discovery does not erase the underlying act of deception. These definitions also help us recognize that just as factual discourse includes more than the narrative genres we associate with it (history, biography, journalism, memoir, etc.), fictionality includes more than generic fictions (the novel, the short story, the fiction film, etc.). Just as factual discourse occurs outside of narrative so too does fictionality – in thought experiments, counterfactuals, hypothetical models, and so on. We can
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profitably think of generic fictions as having developed out of humans recognizing the value of authorizing zones of discourse built on a commitment to invention and its possibilities. But we humans have also come to recognize that just about all discourse can be enhanced by integrating some fictionality into it – whether it is the political speech that invents a rosy future, the national security briefing that imagines what will happen if certain measures are not taken, or any one of countless other inventions tied to illuminating actual states. Similarly, we humans have also come to recognize the advantages of integrating instances of factual discourse within the authorized zones of invention that characterize generic fictions. Thus, fictionality is pervasive throughout factual discourse, and factual discourse is pervasive through fictional discourse, including generic fictions. But the frequency of such cross-border traffic typically does not impede an author’s ability to signal – or an audience’s ability to recognize – that at the global level one mode is dominant (or that neither is dominant). 3. Authors, narrators, and audiences in factual and fictional narrative (part I) The influential work of both Philippe Lejeune (1975) and Gérard Genette (1993) has led to the dominant view that in factual narrative the default condition is that Author equals Narrator, and in fictional narrative the default is Author does not equal Narrator.1 Although this dominant view is generally serviceable, I propose to subsume it under a more comprehensive account that distinguishes author from narrator in both modes. This rhetorical account also includes attention to audiences, and I find it helpful to start with them – and with fiction. Fictional narrative has four audiences: actual, authorial, narrative, and the narratee. The actual audience and the narratee are easily understood: the first refers to flesh-and-blood readers, and the second to the audience addressed by the narrator. The authorial and narrative audiences follow from rhetorical theory’s adaptation of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous concept of the “willing suspension of disbelief ” (1907 [1817], 6) In this account, the willing suspension gives rise to a double consciousness that operates when we read fiction: in one half of our consciousness, that of the narrative audience, we respond to fictional characters and events as if they were actual, while in the other half, that of the authorial audience, we retain the knowledge that they are invented. This double consciousness helps explain why we feel real emo-
1 See Walsh (2007) for an argument about authors as narrators of fiction.
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tions about invented people (a consequence of our narrative audience consciousness) and why we also tacitly read fiction looking for an answer to the so what?-question (a consequence of our authorial audience consciousness). This view of audiences in generic fiction is continuous with rhetorical theory’s view of the author-narrator relationship: fiction typically employs a narrator who, as part of her difference from the author, views the characters and events as actual and autonomous. This view in turn is consistent with the idea that the narrator is located in the fictional world. Distinguishing between authors and narrators in this way also enables us to recognize with Wayne C. Booth (1961) that authors can establish – or erase – multiple kinds of distance between themselves and their narrators. Indeed, the extensive work on the nature and kinds of unreliable narration is powerful testimony about the significance of the concept of distance.
4. Audiences and local fictionality in global nonfiction: Ethical objection 1 There is more to say about all these audiences in fiction (see Phelan 2017; 2018), but the key point for my present purposes is that they help us recognize what is similar and different about factual narrative. Difference first: factual narrative does not generate a narrative audience. Furthermore, this difference also holds when factual narrative integrates local instances of fictionality into its global concern with actual events. In addition, this difference is crucial for addressing the first ethical objection to Wolfe’s representation of Ham I raised earlier, his unwarranted presumption that he can know Ham’s consciousness. Consider the passage below, from Tobias Wolff’s In Pharaoh’s Army. In a chapter entitled “A Federal Offense,” Wolff tells the story of how the father of one of his fellow soldiers, Stu Hoffman, shows up and takes Stu away from the army on the night before they are to ship out to Viet Nam. Once Wolff realizes why Stu’s father has come, Wolff objects that leaving would be a “federal offense,” an objection that does nothing to stop Stu’s exit with his father. Wolff ends the chapter by describing his thoughts while on the army bus the next morning. He realizes that he has always had the conviction that something would happen to prevent his actually going to Viet Nam, and thus finds himself shocked to be en route. Nothing could stop [the bus]. Except ... what? A breakdown? We’d just have to get on another bus. My pals from the Haight – the Hug Patrol in a human chain across the road? Nah, a bunch of softies, they’d never get up this early. Hijackers. A gang of hijackers in front of a barricade, wielding shotguns and pitchforks and clubs, shining bright lights into the driver’s eyes. The driver stops. The hijackers pound on the door
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until he opens it. They come up the steps and down the aisle, flashing their beams from face to face until they find the ones they’re after. They call our names and then we know who it is behind the blinding lights. It’s our fathers. Our fathers, come to take us home. Crazy. But not as crazy as what they actually did, which was to let us go. (Wolff 1994, 128)
In this passage of embedded fictionality (Wolff reports the actual event of his imagining this scenario), Wolff does not invite his audience to adopt a double-consciousness and believe in the reality of the hijackers. Instead, Wolff invites his audience to retain a single consciousness within which they recognize how his invented scenario indirectly captures the psychological state of the experiencing-I: he deeply desires some deliverance even as he knows that it is impossible. Furthermore, Wolff uses the narratingI’s interpretive and ethical judgment of the invented scenario – “Crazy” – to set up that I’s thematizing of the events, which he implicitly endorses. It is not Stu’s father but rather all those other fathers, who committed something tantamount to a “federal offense.” Wolff’s turn to fictionality in order to explore more deeply the ethics of the told works brilliantly. Tom Wolfe’s first paragraph about Ham is another example of local fictionality within a global factual narrative, and, again, its fictionality has consequences for its ethical dimensions. Like Tobias, Tom does not ask his audience to adopt a double-consciousness and regard Ham as both a real and an invented ape but rather to follow his inventions about Ham’s consciousness as a way to register NASA’s – and the American media’s – ethically dubious handling of Ham. From this perspective, the first objection to the ethics of Wolfe’s telling does not hold because Wolfe’s turn to fictionality renders any objection to his dishonesty a category error. Unlike Tobias, Tom does not explicitly signal that the scenario is fictional, but he does clearly signal the turn to fictionality through the increasing outrageousness of his attributions to Ham’s consciousness. Indeed, the passage is funny in part because of its swift movement from the extradiegetic narrator’s identification of “stresses of another sort” to the direct thought report of “Fuck this – .” The passage is effective because Wolfe also uses that humor to convey his serious points about what Ham has had to endure. In short, Wolfe’s turn to fictionality, considered in itself, is ethically sound. (I’ll complicate this judgment below, when I consider the other ethical objections to Wolfe’s telling.) This defense raises questions about Wolfe’s frequent representations of the consciousness of his human characters. Are these representations ethically dishonest, instances of fictionality, or something else? Let’s take a closer look. His first chapter, “The Angels,” contains substantial internal
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focalization through Jane Conrad, the wife of test pilot Pete. Here is an excerpt from an account of Jane’s anxiety when Pete is one of only two men in his squadron unaccounted for. When she calls the base to inquire about Pete, she is told that he cannot come to the phone and that she cannot be told why: The world froze, congealed in that moment. Jane could no longer calculate the interval before the front door would ring and some confident long-faced figure would appear, some Friend of Widows and Orphans, who would inform her, officially, that Pete was dead. (Wolfe 1980, 5)
If we were to follow Dorrit Cohn’s contention (1999) that any such representation of another’s consciousness by a historian or journalist counts as a signpost of fictionality, we would conclude that Wolfe deploys fictionality here. But in my rhetorical view, there is no one-to-one correspondence between a technique and the fictional or factual status of a communication (see Phelan and Nielsen 2017). Instead, the status depends upon the larger context of author-purpose-audience relationships within which the technique gets deployed. In this case, Wolfe presents his view of Jane’s consciousness not as his invention but as his accurate account of her psychological state. The message underlying the passage about Ham is ‘watch as I invent the content of his consciousness,’ whereas the message underlying the passage about Jane is ‘this is how it was for her.’ In addition, Wolfe’s practice in this and many other passages contributes to his effort to establish such representations of consciousness as a convention of factual narrative. Note that if Jane Conrad were to object that this passage misrepresents her consciousness, and, thus, that it is ethically deficient, her objection would reinforce the factual status of Wolfe’s account. The larger point here is that an author representing the internal consciousness of another character in a factual narrative may or may not be an instance of fictionality, and it may or may not be ethically deficient.
5. Authors, narrators, and audiences in factual and fictional narrative (part II) The absence of a narrative audience in nonfiction also has consequences for the similarities and differences between author-narrator relationships in factual and fictional narrative. Again difference first: in fiction, the author is located in the actual world, and the narrator, as noted above, in the fictional world, whereas, in nonfiction, both agents are located in the actual world. From this point of difference, it is a short step, one facilitated
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by factual narrative’s concern with the actual, to the dominant view that the author is the narrator in that mode. I suggest, however, that this view obstructs a recognition of an important similarity between author-narrator relations in factual and fictional narrative. In both, the narrator, like other elements of narrative such as character and temporality, is a resource that the author can use in some ways rather than others (for a further development of this argument, see Phelan 2017). To adopt a metaphor from musical performance, in both factual and fictional narrative, the author is the conductor of the narrative symphony who works with an overarching conception of how to perform the piece, and the narrator is one of the musicians (often one of the leads) who takes direction from the conductor. Thus, the author can give the narrator one kind of voice rather than another, can shift from the narrator’s perspective to that of a character (as Wolfe does in moving from the narrator’s perspective to Ham’s), and, indeed, can decide to have the narrator recede into the background and move internal monologue (again as Wolfe does) or character-character dialogue into the foreground. Furthermore, just as the author of a fictional narrative can minimize or maximize various kinds of distance – including ethical distance – between herself and the narrator, so too can the author of nonfictional narrative. Thus, both the situation underlying the standard view – author erases distance from narrator – and the situation in which an author deploys an unreliable narrator are viable options for the author-narrator relationships in nonfiction. Famous examples of unreliability include Frank McCourt’s in Angela’s Ashes and Dave Eggers’s in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and they depend on the author opting for narration primarily from the flawed perspective of the experiencing-I (for a detailed analysis of McCourt’s practice, see Phelan 2005). 6. Ethical objections 2 and 3 I turn now to the other two ethical objections identified earlier, namely that Wolfe’s thorough anthropomorphizing of Ham denies him his species identity and that Wolfe’s denigration of the mainstream media is simultaneously a boast about the superiority of his account. As principle #4 indicates, in considering the ethical dimensions of author-narrator relations in nonfiction, we can profitably attend to the same three axes of communication relevant to those relations in fiction: the axis of reporting, involving facts, characters, and events; the axis of reading or interpreting, involving particular construals or takes on what is reported; and the axis of ethics or evaluations, involving moral judgments about
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what is reported and interpreted. As we move to consider these additional ethical objections, it will be helpful to consider how Wolfe’s claim for the superiority of his account over previous journalistic ones is built into his project. He has done more research than previous journalists, and he breaks journalistic conventions in telling his story. Crucial to Wolfe’s revision is his account of how the Mercury Project both perpetuated some aspects of test-pilot culture and radically altered others. Central to test-pilot culture is the concept of “the right stuff,” the ineffable quality that allows some pilots to excel. Those with the right stuff can push planes to the edge of their capabilities, thereby often endangering their own lives – but never losing them. The right stuff allows those who possess it to creatively improvise in ways that either saves both themselves and their expensive planes or lets them walk away largely unscathed from any wreckage. Test pilots are hyper-aware of the pyramid of excellence which ranks each one of them according to the group’s collective judgment of how much right stuff each one possesses. Since the Mercury Project was designed to select the seven best candidates for the USA’s space program, it naturally attracted many test pilots, willing and eager to measure themselves against each other and the standards of this new competition. The test pilots entered the selection process because they saw it as another arena in which those with the most right stuff could move up in the pyramid of excellence. But once the details of early space exploration became clear, the value of having the right stuff was thrown into question. Since the astronauts would not control the flights of their space capsules, they would have no more opportunity for displaying their right stuff than Ham. Yet, through the operations of the mainstream media and their linking of the Mercury Project with the Cold War, the astronauts would have a kind of fame and even fortune not at all possible for any test pilot, even for Chuck Yeager, the man at the top of the pyramid of excellence. Wolfe constructs The Right Stuff around these paradoxes. Any judgments about the ethics of the told, then, are tied to Wolfe’s claims for the accuracy and insight of his overall account. If we judge Wolfe’s reports, interpretations, and evaluations to more adequately capture the context and texture of the Mercury Project than the narrative generated by the mainstream media – or those offered by other accounts – then we endorse the ethics of the told. A full assessment would require consulting other accounts, but Wolfe’s publisher, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, brings forth compelling evidence in support of Wolfe’s narrative in a paratext in the Bantam Books edition (1980). This paratext, “Tom Wolfe on The Right Stuff,” includes testimony from four astronauts, Michael Collins, Wally Schirra, Joseph Kerwin, and Russell Schweickart, praising
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Wolfe’s account. Collins, for example, offers this assessment: “Improbable as some of Tom’s tales seem, I know he is telling it like it was. He is the first gifted writer to explore the relationship between test pilots and astronauts – the obvious similarities and subtle differences” (371). The ethics of the telling, on the other hand, are more tied to intratextual than extratextual matters because they involve Wolfe’s treatment of his subject matter and his relation to his audience. Here I find that objections 2 and 3 have more force, especially when we consider how objection 3 casts new light on objection 2, and, even to some degree, on objection 1. Wolfe’s treatment of the mainstream media drips with condescension, an attitude that the various devices of his telling attempt to get his audience to share. Consider once again the second paragraph in Wolfe’s discussion of Ham: At some point in the madhouse scene out back of Hangar S, a photograph was taken in which Ham was either grinning or had on a grimace that looked like a grin in the picture. Naturally, this was the picture that went out over the wire services and was printed in newspapers throughout America. Such was the response of the happy chimpanzee to being the first ape in outer space. ... A fat happy grin. ... Such was the perfection with which the Proper Gent observed the proprieties. (188)
Wolfe shifts the technique in the first two sentences from the direct thought report of “Fuck this – ” to the narrator’s reporting, interpreting, and evaluating of the production and dissemination of the photograph of the grinning (or grimacing) Ham. Furthermore, Wolfe erases any distance between his take and that of the narrator. “Naturally” combines interpretation and evaluation in an especially efficient and effective manner, one that also presupposes the audience’s agreement. “Naturally,” the press, the Perfect Gent, gets it egregiously wrong. Wolfe then has the narrator shift to a double-voicing of “happy” and “A fat happy grin.” One voice conveys the non-ironic message sent by the wire services, and the other voice ironizes that message, especially with the phrase “fat happy grin,” and its radical misrepresentation of Ham. Wolfe continues the irony in the last sentence, in part through the repetition of “Such was.” By juxtaposing the two paragraphs, Wolfe deepens his interpreting to the point that it combines with his evaluating in the ethics of the told: the American media, however well-meaning, is totally in thrall to a false narrative about the Mercury Program. With this event, they are so clueless that they entirely miss or deny Ham’s revulsion – at them! Wolfe’s labeling the press the “Proper Gent” is his way of labeling the perceptions associated with their false narrative. They view every aspect of the astronauts and the space program as conforming to proper American ideals. All the astronauts are patriots willing to sacrifice their lives so that the USA can reach the moon before the USSR. And so on. In this way, the mainstream media is
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not so much reporting the news about the Mercury Program as constructing propaganda about it. Throughout the paragraph – and throughout the narrative – as Wolfe makes this case about the ethical deficiencies of the Perfect Gent, he implicitly advances the one about the superiority of his account, a move that highlights the self-interest and arrogance of his ridicule. Indeed, recognizing these aspects of this paragraph sheds further light on his representation of Ham’s consciousness. Both the move to fictionality and the particulars of Ham’s thought are devices that serve his purpose of implicitly calling attention to his superiority and the mainstream media’s deficiencies. In other words, Wolfe uses Ham – and the brilliance of his own fictionality – in the service of his ethically dubious hatchet job on the media.
7. Conclusion: Principles of rhetorical ethics I round off this essay with a few comments on how the analysis of Wolfe’s narrative sheds further light on the basic principles I set forth in section 1. First, the analysis demonstrates the importance of the fictional or factual status of a narrative (or part of a narrative) for determinations of its ethical dimension. Our judgments of the ethics of Wolfe’s representation of Ham’s consciousness, for example, are directly tied to our understanding of its factual or fictional status. Second, the analysis demonstrates the utility of the distinction between the ethics of the told and the ethics of the telling, as well as the importance of recognizing that the two kinds of ethics can influence each other. In factual narrative, the ethics of the told provides an important baseline, a condition of fundamentally accurate reporting, plausible interpreting, and sensible evaluating upon which the ethics of the whole narrative depends. Furthermore, in factual narrative our judgments of the ethics of the told are tied to judgments of the relation between the narrative and extratextual matters. If Wolfe were fabricating, seriously distorting, or misevaluating the role of the right stuff for the early astronauts, his narrative would be deficient in the ethics of the told in a way that would undermine its claims about the Mercury Project. On the other hand, getting the baseline right is necessary but not sufficient, as attention to the ethics of the telling indicates. While Wolfe’s representation of Ham’s consciousness is a viable instance of fictionality, Wolfe’s use of that representation in the service of thoroughly denigrating the mainstream media and implicitly celebrating his rival narrative is ethically suspect. In sum, applying the principles of rhetorical ethics to The Right Stuff, I find Wolfe’s narrative to be both ethically powerful and partially flawed.
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References Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1999. Coleridge, Samuel. Biographia Literaria Vol. 2. [1817] Ed. John Shawcross. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907. Genette, Gérard. Fiction and Diction. [1991] Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte Autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Nielsen, Henrik Skov, James Phelan, and Richard Walsh. “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” Narrative 23 (2015): 61–73. Phelan, James. Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Phelan, James. “Narrative Ethics.” The Living Handbook of Narratology. Eds. Peter Hühn et al. http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narrative-ethics. Hamburg: Hamburg University, 2013 (10 Dec 2017). Phelan, James. Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2017. Phelan, James. “Fictionality, Audiences, and Character. A Rhetorical Alternative to Catherine Gallagher’s ‘The Rise of Fictionality’.” Poetics Today 39.1 (2018): 113–129. Phelan, James, and Henrik Skov Nielsen. “Why There Are No One-to-One Correspondences between Fictionality, Narrative, and Techniques: A Response to Mari Hatavari and Jarmila Mildorf.” Narrative 25 (2017): 83–91. Walsh, Richard. A Rhetoric of Fictionality. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. Wolfe, Tom. The Right Stuff [1979]. New York: Bantam Books, 1980. Wolfe, Tom, and E. W. Johnson. Eds. The New Journalism. New York: Harper and Row, 1973. Wolff, Tobias. In Pharaoh’s Army. Memories of the Lost War. New York: Knopf, 1994.
STEFAN IVERSEN
Transgressive Narration: The Case of Autofiction This chapter takes as its object the debate surrounding the term autofiction. It begins by sketching the development of the discussions of the term’s usefulness and applicability before offering suggestions as to how one might differentiate between several forms of autofictive practices. A recurring motif will be how texts affiliated with ideas about autofiction inherit as well as transgress the conventions of factual narration. From a political text, we expect to hear the voice of a motivated and motivating ideologically invested person; from an autobiographical text, we expect to hear the voice of a historically anchored, real person; from a novel, we might expect to hear the voice of a narrator. Certain genres go together with certain ideas about subjectivity. The identity of a genre is tied to specific kinds of identity. Literary narrative is no stranger to blurring genres or identities, experimenting with expectations about subjectivity as well as genre, including the possibilities and limits of factual narration. A substantial body of critically acclaimed as well as widely read literature presents readers with narratives that contain too much factual information to be read as purely invented, yet too many strategies typically tied to fiction to be read as purely factual. Seen from one perspective, this urge to mingle the invented with the referential can be said to have been present in novels since their early institutionalization in the eighteenth century. (Compare the entries on pseudofactuality / IV.9 Paige, / I.9 Birke.) Seen from another perspective, different strands of contemporary literature seem extraordinarily preoccupied with storytelling practices that set out to interrogate traditional notions of identity and self; they set out to destabilize known generic distinctions and demarcations, particularly with regard to the forms and functions of factual narration. Authors such as Philip Roth, Delphine de Vigan, Michel Houellebecq, Christine Angot, Karl Ove Knausgård, and Catherine Millet, to name just a few, produce texts that are difficult, or impossible, to label as either fiction or nonnonfiction. A string of terms has been suggested in order to designate such experiments, with “autobiographical fictions” (Ramsay 1991), “New https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-039
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Journalism” (Wolfe and Johnson 1975; / IV.5 Phelan), and “self-narration” (Schmitt 2010) as some of the more prominent. Arguably the most widely used designation for such texts, while by no means universally acknowledged either by practitioners or theoreticians, is the term autofiction. First deployed in 1977 by French writer and critic Serge Doubrovsky on the back cover of his non-conventional autodiegetic narrative Fils, the term autofiction has, as have cultural artifacts using the term to denote their practice, given rise to a string of morally, aesthetically and even at times legally motivated controversies. While few critics see autofiction as designating a stable genre and even fewer use it without reservations, the debates surrounding the term have proven to be very productive in their attempt to come to terms with a type of narrative transgression that, one the hand, is fairly easy to recognize yet, on the other, very hard to precisely pin down. 1. History of the term The term autofiction was coined in 1977 by Doubrovsky, who characterized it as follows: “Fiction, of facts and events strictly real, if you prefer, autofiction, where the language of adventure has been entrusted to the adventure of language in its total freedom” (2013, 2). It is fitting that this definition – if this paradoxical, metaphorically rich, chiastically enthusiastic (or enthusiastically chiastic) passage can be said to qualify as a definition – was printed not inside his book Fils, which it was meant to describe, but precisely on the back cover of the book: autofiction is first and foremost to be distinguished by its faith in the power of transgression. As evident from the quoted definition, early Doubrovsky sees autofiction as “auto” because the material of the text is not only real but “strictly real”; and as “fiction” because of its writing strategies, because of its giving way to a radical freedom of semiotic playfulness employed in the act of telling. Looking at Fils and Doubrovsky’s later Le Livre brisé (1989), one finds that the what of the narrative refers to real persons and events, at times painstakingly so, for instance, when author-narrator Doubrovsky tells about his alcoholic wife, who killed herself while being written about. The how of the narrative resembles experimental fiction: anti-retrospection, unmarked transitions between visions, dreams and events, etc. In his highly influential Le Pacte autobiographique (1975), Philippe Lejeune hypothetically referred to such texts as based on “an internal contradiction from which some interesting effects could be drawn,” even if this would result in a “game that we practically never play seriously” and of which, more importantly, “no example […] comes to mind” (1989, 18–19). Yet
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Doubrovsky produced such texts in which, to use Lejeune’s terms, the author, the narrator and the protagonist share the same name even if the paratextual markers designate the work to be a piece of fiction. To Doubrovsky there is nothing unserious about the form, which he later referred to as a “postmodern version of autobiography” (2013, 3). To him, autofiction is an evolved, more reflexive, more truthful form of life-writing, not in spite, but because of its formally disjointed and disrupted aesthetic practices. The point of using techniques from fiction is not to undermine the factuality of the lived life but rather to be as sincere about what living as a whole subjective self includes, since life is necessarily entangled in the fictive. The fictions and the play of language in autofiction may serve as detours, but only through such detours may one hope to arrive at a fuller understanding of what a self is, or as Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone put it: “le paratexte doubrovskien assume clairement cette idée d’une fiction feinte ou d’une fiction de fiction, qui servirait de détour à la vérité” 1 (Lecarme and Lecarme-Tabone 1997, 269). Not only does autofiction inherit autobiography’s urge for truthfulness, it radicalizes this urge by circumventing traditional autobiography’s reliance on what in Lejeune’s work is referred to as retrospection. According to the late Doubrovsky, it “overtly” uses the “most intimate details,” the “personal and intimate experiences” in order to produce a “naked exposure” of the “stark nakedness” of the self (2013, 3). In complete contrast to this insistence on what Doubrovsky elsewhere refers to as “brutal honesty,” Genette’s first systematic take on autofiction characterizes it to be either fiction or a lie. In Fiction and Diction (French original 1991), Genette sets out to apply “the procedure adopted in Narrative Discourse” [Discours du récit, 1972] to a new territory: factual narration (1993, 58). This eventually leads him to reconsider the question of “who is speaking?” (voice) by taking up the triangular relation between author (A), narrator (N), and main character (C) which had originally been proposed in Lejeune’s autobiographical pact. With respect to autofiction, the crucial relation in the triangle is that between A and N. For Genette, the basic formula is that A = N equals factual narration (the author is speaking), while A≠N equals fictional narration (a distinct narrator-persona is speaking) (72). The “intentionally contradictory pact characteristic of autofiction” (76) offers onomastic or partial biographical identity between A and N, yet claims to be fiction, potentially foiling the reader’s ability to determine who is speaking; autofiction says, “‘It is I and it is not I’” (77).
1 This translates as ‘Doubrovsky’s paratext patently takes up the idea of a feigned fiction, a fiction of fiction, which might function as a detour to truth.’
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Genette subsequently distinguishes between what he calls “true” and “false” autofictions (77, note 31). True autofictions are “authentically fictional” (77, note 31). In texts such as Borges’s “The Aleph,” the alleged onomastic or biographical identity between author and narrator is merely alleged; the global status of the narrative ultimately reverts back to fiction, captured in a contradictory triangle of A ≠ N, A = C and N = C. False autofictions, on the other hand, are false because they insist on a A = N relation, even though they refer to themselves as fictions. Such texts do not count as proper autofictions but only as “veiled autobiographies” (77, note 31); they are constructed as such “only for legal purposes.” In this category one would probably find Doubrovsky’s works, whose name and oeuvre are not mentioned in Genette’s book. According to Genette, such narratives are “unethical, deceptive, cowardly writing enterprise[s],” as Hughes puts it (2002, 568). One will therefore have to ask: are autofictions fictional narratives that play with real identities for aesthetic effects? Or are they factual narratives that play with fiction in order to more honestly approach the tumultuous realities of a fragmented modern self? Rather than seeking to find a middle ground between these extremes, or to resolve or explain away the paradoxes of such texts, several of the more recent takes on the concept have, perhaps not surprisingly, decided to enhance these paradoxes by turning them into the genre’s raison d’être. In his entry in The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, Frank Zipfel, referring to Darrieussecq and Hughes, sees this third position as a “double author-reader contract,” containing “contradictory reading instructions” (2005, 36). This idea of autofiction as offering two simultaneous, incompatible contracts or reading experiences has also been suggested by Gasparini in Est-il je? Roman autobiographique et autofiction (2004). Gasparini “urges us to consider the genre […] in all its semantic complexity by adopting the reader’s point of view. To do so, one shouldn’t launch into an ‘alternate reading’ but rather into a ‘simultaneous double reading’” (Schmitt 2010, 127). Schmitt himself is skeptical of such a double reading practice, claiming that “in reality” we as readers are making “one definite choice and sticking with it, or occasionally change our minds while reading a text” (128). However, most other recent contributions to the discussion are accommodating of Gasparini’s idea of a double reading. Nielsen defines autofiction as texts that are generically “overdetermined” in that they present themselves as “both fiction and nonfiction” (2011, 131). In reference to Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park (2005), but with relevance to autofiction as such, Nielsen finds that “reading with a double vision […] is not only possible, it is necessary” (134). He suggests the term “double exposure” for explaining the effects such texts have on readers: “autofictions are
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counterparts, in the textual medium, to the double exposure in the visual medium […]” (134). Liesbeth Korthals Altes, who has dealt extensively with texts employing dubious or contradictory author positions, most comprehensively in her Ethos and Narrative Interpretation (2014), argues that the uncertainties produced by such troubling double pacts are crucial for providing this type of writing with its epistemological (and, through that, its cultural and aesthetic) value. The purpose of autofiction is to generate “uncertainties regarding generic categorization, which translates into uncertainties about the point of such works and about what interpretive and evaluative regimes appropriately apply” (191). These uncertainties about situating a work of autofiction in relation to what Korthals Altes, drawing on the work of the sociologists Boltanski and Thévenot, calls “regimes of value,” propels the reader into a metahermeneutic state of higher reflexiveness, forcing the reader to rethink not only generic frames but more broadly frames of value generation and value ascription per se (compare / IV.7 Korthals Altes). 2. Autofiction today: Characteristics and varieties A consensus has been forming in that most critics subscribe neither to Doubrovsky’s idea of autofiction as the (truer) truth nor to Genette’s idea of true autofiction as the “authentically fictional” autofiction. If there is one recurring and appropriate concept which is likely to synthesize the critical attempts to characterize autofiction’s simultaneous paradoxical reliance upon, and challenges to, the assumptions undergirding factual narration, that term is transgression. The explicit and deliberate transgressions performed by autofictive narratives relate to generic, textual and moral boundaries. By combining onomastic similarity (A = N = C) with styles and paratextual markers associated with fiction (the novel), autofiction typically transgresses existing generic boundaries. At the same time, it transgresses the systems of appreciation and value which normally guide a reader’s judgements. Secondly, it transgresses textual borders by turning what Genette referred to as the paratextual threshold (that mediates between experience and the text) into the experience itself. Whereas the designators novel or autobiography normally allow for a fast and safe transition into the events and characters of the fictional or real world, autofictive texts radically expand the size and importance of what normally is merely a doorway, transforming it from an easily traversable one-way entrance into a labyrinth of continuous returns, false exits, and revelations of real-world secrets. These paratextual entanglements are crucial to understanding how the narrative strategies of autofiction both rely on and depart from factual narration. As
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Korthals Altes puts it, autofiction is “tearing down” not only the demarcation between graphe and bios but also the demarcation between the author as textual agent/writer and the author as a person in real life (2014, 191). One moreover needs to point out transgressions on the level of the peritext (situated beyond the text but inside the material framing of the text, e.g. Doubrovsky’s definition of autofiction on the back cover of Fils) and transgressions of an epitextual nature (e.g. non-trivial insertions of extra-textual facts into the text, for instance in interviews, portraits or photographs of the writer, etc.). The generation of meaning and the negotiations of value set into motion through autofictive narration produce a complex that “by far exceeds the words on the page and includes concrete elements of reality” (Schmitt and Kjerkegaard 2016, 554). One could even argue that autofiction consists not so much in a text as in what Haarder, drawing on Erika Fischer-Lichte, calls a performative “feedback loop” between text-internal and text-external elements: The texts are based on stylized use of personal information and the author performs alongside it [the feedback loop] on the media stage. What the author relates concerns real people and will call for reaction from the public – or maybe the people mentioned in the book. (Haarder 2017, 129)
Haarder’s comments tie in with the third transgressive mode, that of engaging moral boundaries. He sees the construction of osmotic zones of continuous exchange between text and life as breaking taboos and challenging social conventions, typically those associated with the intimate and private. Already in Doubrovsky, autofictive texts or performances have focused on narrating not only the private but the extremely private, typically by dwelling extensively on intimate details about the writer and about named and easily identifiable people around the writer. Among such stories, intimate (and salacious) facts abound; at the same time, one encounters a string of more or less legally formalized complaints from those appearing against their will in these theaters of brutal honesty (see / IV.4 Franzen on comparable issues). The noted combination of generic, textual and moral transgressions may help explain the massive impact autofiction has had both on academic discussions and on a broader audience: its radical generic and aesthetic reflexiveness is in itself performing theoretical maneuvers, thus stimulating further scholarly speculations on how to describe and learn from narratives reporting on real lives as well as narratives about invented ones. Autofiction’s radical individualization, its focus on affects, its actualization of trans- and intermedial storytelling practices, its revelatory nature regarding extreme confessions – all these factors render autofiction ideally suited for the contemporary media landscape and make it easy to see why autofiction has become one of the dominant narrative forms of the selfie-generation.
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Despite these agreements about what is distinctive about autofictive narration, texts written or categorized under the label of autofiction still cover very different rhetorical strategies as well as very different aesthetic or performative practices and beliefs. These differences become evident when looking at attempts to relate the phenomenon of autofiction more generally to literary history. By some criteria, autofictive texts are seen as poststructuralist or postmodern, as moves into or towards states of complete textualization such as that of the ultimate eradication of the self. In stark contrast to this position, others see them as part of a post-poststructuralist tendency, a post-postmodern text-type, intent on moving beyond the text, towards the real. I want to suggest a tentative set of distinctions that may be helpful for understanding and navigating important aspects of these different outlooks. I base my proposals on how Doubrovsky’s different works of autofiction relate to either of the two parts of the term. Regarding the “auto” or self/identity part of the concept, an important difference seems to exist between, on the one hand, writings wanting to construct or reconstruct some form of self and, on the other hand, writings out to deconstruct or radically problematize ideas of the self. Regarding the “fiction” or fictionalization part, another difference can be observed between works that embrace the inventive potential of fiction and works that attempt to move beyond fiction, to rid themselves of fiction’s traditional qualities such as its tendency to talk about what is not, rather than about what is. Combining these two distinctions – pro- or anti-auto/self; pro- or antifiction/invention – results in a matrix of four positions, a matrix that makes it possible to think through some of the differences at play in this type of writing. In a pro-fiction, pro-self vein, one finds writings such as those from the early Doubrovsky. They use fiction to dismantle the genre of autobiography in order to reassemble and revitalize it; to arrive at new, more fitting (if less referential) versions of texts about selves and identities. Here, fiction is a way towards insight into the self because the self is a fiction. In contrast to this pro-self position, but equally fond of the inventive potential of fiction, are texts like Borges’s “The Aleph” (1945) and “The Other” (1972); they transport the reality of the author’s name into the text in order to enhance the vertiginous unreality of the fiction, deconstructing rather than reassembling ideas of a constructive self-text. Moving to works that more or less explicitly go against the idea of fiction, one can distinguish between works taken to be anti-fiction and pro-self, and works taken to be anti-fiction and anti-self. The difference can be illustrated by two of the most radical and elaborate experiments with autofictive narration in Scandinavia. The first case is represented by Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård’s celebrated and widely read novel
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Min Kamp [My Struggle], consisting of six massive volumes. It tells the story of (telling the story of ) his life, rhetorically incorporating traits from the memoir, from traditional autobiography and from different essayistic traditions, and it does so with the explicit goal of producing knowledge about what it might mean to be this specific self. In contrast to this, the Danish artist formerly known as Claus Beck-Nielsen spent almost ten years on a project that set out to move beyond the notion of identity, trying to investigate what living without an identity might entail. The first text in this project was the author-less biography, Claus Beck-Nielsen (1963–2001): En biografi (2003) an autodiegetic montage of life-writing, allegedly published posthumously, which documented Nielsen’s real-world attempts to erase his identity, including the erasure of name, social security number, place of living as well as of his relationships and marriage. Despite having radically different ideas about the sustainability of the notion of the self, these two projects explicitly work against the concept of fiction. Knausgård labels Min Kamp a novel but sees its quest as different from that of literature: “Literature has always been related to utopia, so when the utopia loses meaning, so does literature. What I was trying to do, and perhaps what all writers try to do – what on earth do I know? – was to combat fiction with fiction” (Book 1, 218). Nielsen’s writing (and the performances documented by the writing) also set out to move beyond fiction: “Not adding anything. My own body, my own clothes, my life and my history. No fiction. Only reduction” (Claus Beck-Nielsen 111, my translation). Beyond the massive disparities – to reconstruct or deconstruct (the notion of ) identity, to be or not to be – lie comparable moves against fiction. No matter what types of ideological, aesthetic and psychological investments are involved, autofiction only comes into being through its double reliance on, and paradoxical explicit transgressions of, factual and fictional narration. The omnipresence of these genre- and identity-bending works testifies to the fact that the questions they raise about the conceptualizations of genres and the corresponding types of identity remain acute in present-day society, which is rife with doubt regarding the existence and meanings of both the texts and the selves, and of their transgressive figurations.
References [Beck-Nielsen, Claus] Claus Beck-Nielsen (1963–2001): En biografi. Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2003. Darrieussecq, Marie. “L’autofiction, un genre pas sérieux.” Poétique 107 (1996): 367–380.
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Doubrovsky, Serge. Fils. Paris: Galilée, 1977. Doubrovsky, Serge. Le Livre brisé. Paris: Éditions Grasset, 1989. Doubrovsky, Serge. “Autofiction.” Auto/Fiction 1.1 (2013): 1–5. Gasparini, Philippe. Est-il je? Roman autobiographique et autofiction. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004. Genette, Gérard. Fiction and Diction. [1991] Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Haarder, Jon Helt. “A Story We Are Part of: Introducing Performative Biographism by Way of Reading Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle (and vice versa).” Expectations. Eds. Stine Grumsen, Per Krogh Hansen, Rikke Andersen Kraglund, and Henrik Skov Nielsen. Odense: Medusa, 2017. 118–143. Hughes, Alex. “Recycling and Repetition in Recent French ‘Autofiction’: Marc Weitzmann’s Doubrovskian Borrowings.” The Modern Language Review 97.3 (2002): 566–576. Knausgård, Karl Ove. My Struggle: Book 1. Brooklyn: Archipelago, 2012. Korthals Altes, Liesbeth. Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Fiction. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014. Lecarme, Jacques, and Lecarme-Tabone, Eliane. L’Autobiographie. Paris: Armand Colin, 1997. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. [1975] Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Nielsen, Henrik Skov. “What’s in a Name? Double Exposures in Lunar Park.” Bret Easton Ellis: American Psycho, Glamorama, Lunar Park. Ed. Naomi Mandel. London: Continuum Publishing Corporation, 2011. 129–142. Ramsay, Raylene. “Autobiographical Fictions: Duras, Sarraute, Simon, Robbe-Grillet: ReWriting History, Story, Self.” The International Fiction Review 18.1 (1991): 25–33. Schmitt, Arnaud. “Making the Case for Self-Narration Against Autofiction.” Auto/Biography Studies 25.1 (2010): 122–137. Schmitt, Arnaud, and Stefan Kjerkegaard. “Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle: A Real Life in a Novel.” Auto/Biography Studies 31.3 (2016): 553–579. Wolfe, Tom, and E. W. Johnson. Eds. The New Journalism. London: Picador Books, 1975. Zipfel, Frank. “Autofiction.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Eds. David Herman et al. New York: Routledge, 2005. 36–37.
LIESBETH KORTHALS ALTES
Factual or Fictional? The Interpretive and Evaluative Impact of Framing Acts What makes us classify a narrative as factual or fictional, or as a particular genre or mixture of these, and why or when does such a classification matter? This chapter builds on the widely accepted assumption that subsuming a text to a factual or fictional discourse type and genre is an overarching classification act that determines by convention one’s expectations and interpretive strategies. Complementing narratological research on textual, paratextual, and other conventional genre markers, I will develop three hypotheses:1 (1)
Classifying a narrative as factual or fictional involves not only framing it in terms of its discourse type and genre, but also, in many cases, in terms of the kind of author we assume we are dealing with. Our classification additionally depends on the perceived communicative ethos that we attribute to the narrating voice(s) in relation to our image of the author. (The notions of authorial posture and ethos, which will be used to specify cues on the basis of which such framing occur, will be explained below.)
(2)
The named framing acts are interconnected. The author’s posture and the ethos which we attribute to prominent narrative voices and to the author both work as framing keys for classifying a narrative as fictional or factual, or they back up such a classification. Conversely, discourse types and genres, and the impression whether they are being perceived as fictional or factual, raise expectations regarding their author’s posture and ethos.
1 These hypotheses have been presented previously in Korthals Altes (2014, 2016). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-040
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These interconnected framing acts have a substantial impact on how a particular narrative should be interpreted and what normative expectations and value standards apply.2
The perspective this chapter adopts can be characterized as meta-hermeneutic as it aims to reconstruct pathways of meaning-making and value attribution. The proposed approach should lead to a better understanding of the interplay between such framings acts and of their impact on interpretation and valuation processes; it should also help clarify what is at stake in controversies raised by narratives perceived to be ambiguous or deceptive as to their factual or fictional orientation. Take the case of James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces (2003). The book was marketed and hailed as the author’s authentic memoir, which, as the blurb on the cover of my edition states, narrates with “unflinching honesty” his recovery from drug and alcohol addiction. After Oprah Winfrey invited Frey to her show on 26 October 2005, the book’s sales soared. In the following January, however, The Smoking Gun exposed some central facts in Frey’s memoir to have been made up, causing widely expressed indignation (“A Million Little Lies: Exposing James Frey’s Fiction Addiction” 2006). In a show on 26 January 2006, Oprah publicly confronted the author with his ‘deception’ (Winfrey 2006). Ultimately Frey’s publishers decided to include in future publications a note from the publisher and one from the author himself as disclaimers of the factual nature of the memoir.3 (/ Phelan) While memoirs by generic convention raise expectations of factual truth (Lejeune 1975), the body of published memoirs demonstrates a range of positions. In some, the implicit rule of factually correct and truthful reference seems dominant; others foreground the subjective act of memo2 For reasons of space other factors that co-determine one’s framing of a narrative are not discussed in this chapter. Among such factors are interpretive contexts, interpreters’ familiarity with cultural, discursive and situational repertoires, as well as their tolerance for ambiguity and cognitive dissonance, which determine the range of interpretive frameworks and strategies available to them (see also Korthals Altes 2014). 3 See for instance the comment from the publishers that comes with the information on the book on Amazon, which expresses an interesting shift in ambiguity tolerance toward norms of factual accuracy for works published under the banner of literature (fictional or nonfictional): “When the Smoking Gun report appeared, our first response, given that we were still learning the facts of the matter, was to support our author. Since then, we have questioned him about the allegations and have sadly come to the realization that a number of facts have been altered and incidents embellished” (Doubleday & Anchor Books n. d.). The publishers thus settled for a moral (if not moralistic) norm, which may be expected to raise eyebrows among those who cherish a more ‘autonomous’ conception of literature.
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rizing, stylization and other aesthetic concerns, ‘embellishments of the truth’ considered to enhance the memoir’s narrative interest or, importantly, its claim to literary – rather than, for instance, historical or personal – interest and value. What then explains the fierceness of the public trial to which Frey was submitted? Highlighting what mostly goes unnoticed, this case draws attention to deep-seated normative expectations attached to how we frame a narrative, which determines our selective co-construction of narratives and our moral, aesthetic or other response to and judgments about these narratives, not only in literature. Frey’s memoir, uncertainly positioned on the fiction/nonfiction axis, is used as an illustration for this chapter’s argument, which in its generality, however, aims to be valid also for other, non-literary, types of narratives. 1. Discourse type and genre as framing In his seminal work Frame Analysis, Erving Goffman described frames as tools that allow individuals or groups “to locate, perceive, identify, and label events and occurrences, thus rendering meaning, organizing experiences, and guiding actions” (1974, 21).4 Frames “help us to navigate through our experiential universe, […] and generally function as preconditions of interpretation” (Wolf 2006, 5; I prefer the gerund framing, highlighting the process’ dynamics). Framing requires procedural knowledge and categorizing skills, allowing us “to act in relevant and adequate manner” (Sperber and Wilson 1995, in Wolf 2006, 5). Hence, the importance of framing keys (Goffman 1974, 43–44), such as genre indications. Research on narratives, thus, has identified conventional institutional, paratextual and textual keys to signal factual or fictional framing (Cohn 1999; Zipfel 2014; / IV.4 Franzen). I will argue that the posture and ethos projected by, and attributed to, authors often also work as powerful framing keys for factuality or fictionality, though this has been acknowledged less widely. On the basis of their experience, people usually have no problem framing a narrative as being factual or fictional, or as belonging to a particular genre. Routine discursive and generic framing implies what Doležel has called “assembling instructions” (1988, 489). These consist, among others, in a (tacit) communication contract and in conventional expectations regarding kinds of plot, style, characters, themes and relevance. A text’s (sub)genre also determines whether a narrative’s and its author’s fidelity to
4 This mental process is also central in the notion of frame developed in artificial intelligence research, whatever their other differences; see for instance Minsky (1977).
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historical or (auto)biographical facts become relevant at all to interpreters (Korthals Altes 2014, Ch. 5; Walsh 2007). The author’s adhesion to, and responsibility for, standpoints expressed in the narrative are additional issues. Generic framing keys, however, cannot guarantee the reception that may have been intended by an author or publisher; nor do they ensure the adequacy of the genre classification performed by readers. Indeed, as soon as generic conventions get established, their markers can be used in a playful, ironic, ambiguous or misleading manner, with aesthetic, commercial or other pay-off for authors, and their publishers (/ IV.8 Lavocat). New information, as in Frey’s case, may also lead one to re-frame a factual narrative as fictional, or even meta-fictional, or to frame it as only deceptively factual/referential, all of which imply quite different negotiations of the narrative’s meaning, relevance and worth. Narratives themselves – and not just in literature – can moreover exploit the capacity of semiotic representation systems to embed various discursive and ontological levels, which may each display powerful framing cues as to discourse type, genre and communication attitude. The complexity of such embeddings has been mapped and explored for its rhetorical and ideological effects by a number of narratologists and literary scholars (Genette 1988 [1983]; Bal 1981). However, for the perspective presented here, the linguist Dominique Maingueneau’s analysis of the layeredness of discourse, and of narrative discourse in particular, appears more fruitful. Like much of Goffman’s conceptual framework, to which he seems indebted, Maingueneau’s approach is inspired by the theater and its staging of discourse. Maingueneau distinguishes between three different kinds of scenes on which interpreters can frame a narrative: 1. the narrative’s global scene (“scène englobante,” Maingueneau 2004, 191). This refers to its pragmatic status as discourse type, for instance, as fiction or nonfiction, or also as literary, religious, or other discourse; 2. its generic scene (“scène générique,” 191), which is determined by genre markers, with their corresponding conventional expectations; 3. its scenography or scenographies (“La scénographie,” 192). This term refers to the concrete communication situations, acts, and genres evoked within the narrative, such as a confession, a conversation, an accusation, and so on.5 In the case of Frey’s book, the global scene would be the book’s framing as nonfiction, through the book’s cover and its marketing on Oprah’s show. Its generic scene results from being labeled as a memoir. Salient scenographies 5 Translations of these terms are mine.
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in the narrative (and narrative mode) are those of the confession, and of first-hand experience story-telling, as well as exemplum. Maingueneau’s model draws attention to the rhetorical, epistemic and ethical or ideological framing effects of these various scenes in which narratives engage their interpreters (2004, 190–193). However, the hierarchy that his model suggests, with the global scene embedding and overruling the framings suggested by the generic scene and textual scenographies, does not sufficiently take into account the complex negotiations of (generic and other) framings into which interpreters can be drawn. The reception of Frey’s memoir shows that an interpreter’s determining framing results from their negotiation of the rhetorical appeals in the different scenes, but also from their impression of the author and from the reader’s rapport with the work.6 In order to develop this point, I need to explain two more notions, those of authorial posture and ethos. 2. Authorial posture and ethos as cues for – and effects of – framing The notion of posture has been defined by Jérôme Meizoz (2007) in the context of a sociology of literature. It refers to an author’s mode of selfpresentation and self-fashioning, which includes his or her personal way of endorsing or initiating a social role and status, and of affiliating with or setting him- or herself off against socially sanctioned models of being a writer. Through their posture(s), authors – and their publishers – also define their position in the literary field and suggest a specific horizon for the reception and valuation of their works (Maingueneau 2004; Meizoz 2007; Korthals Altes 2014). Many writers – not just literary writers, but also historians, cultural analysts, or journalists – are known for the ways in which they have created a distinct posture, a particular way of being an author in their kind of field, thereby ‘authorizing’ and legitimizing their (kind of ) work (/ IV.2 Warhol). As Meizoz showed, for instance, JeanJacques Rousseau established a posture for the writer who was not by birth or education legitimately part of the Parisian intelligentsia. He transformed that social handicap into a symbolic value. His posture cultivated an ethos of honesty and ‘naturalness,’ in contrast to the court’s habitus of flattery and the use of masks (Meizoz 2010). Balzac and Zola, for their part, coined the posture of the writer as scientist, later adopted by genera-
6 This chapter, as mentioned, leaves out the discussion of the importance of interpreters’ cultural literacy – in the case of literary narratives, their experience with (different kinds of ) literature.
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tions of realist and naturalist writers: the writer as botanist, collecting and dissecting social species, or as physician, studying the diseases of society in its social and individual manifestations. To each of these postures belongs a particular ethos, with ingredients such as: scrupulous epistemic honesty, or disinterested personal commitment. Zola, for instance, scrupulously kept notebooks, and the many photographs he took also ‘guaranteed’ the authenticity and factual accuracy of his (fictional) writing. Even writers who shun publicity or who project puzzling or contradictory persona markers cannot avoid being ‘frozen into’ one or more specific postures by readers, critics or publishers, which determine the way in which their work and their basic communicative attitude, or ethos, is classified. A famous contemporary example is Michel Houellebecq, whose authorial posture for many of his readers remains contradictory and elusive, the more frustratingly so since his works convey controversial ideological or ethical material. Critics and readers often seek to get a hold on ‘what kind of author’ he is – which amounts to framing the author in order to disambiguate the work. Postures include elements of an ethos, projected by authors, or attributed to them by their interpreters. The concept of ethos, borrowed from rhetoric, refers to a speaker’s effects of character and attitude, as these support or discredit their trustworthiness and authority. Aristotle distinguished ethos as one of three means of persuasion, alongside pathos (emotion based) and logos (argumentation based). Ruth Amossy, following Aristotle, defines ethos as “the image of self built by the orator in his speech in order to exert an influence on his audience” (2001, 1). Audiences construct a speaker’s or writer’s ethos on the basis of their way of speaking or writing. Ethos cues are perceived on the basis of communicational codes and topoi, i.e. culturally sanctioned and codified grounds for authority and trustworthiness; other persuasion effects can also be obtained through one’s display of character (Amossy 2001, 6; Korthals Altes 2014, Ch. 7). A key scene in Frey’s memoir nicely illustrates such an ethos topos. The scene can be read as a mise en abyme of the kind of affect and effect Frey’s book aims to achieve. The protagonist (by convention identified with the author), who is in rehab, goes through excruciating stages of selfhatred and abjection. After a sleepless night, he is sitting on a bench at the lake. Leonard, an older inmate, tells him his own dramatic life story, which deeply moves ‘The Kid,’ as Leonard calls him: I [the autobio narrator] stand. I think about saying something else, but I don’t know any words to express the strong, simple and deep appreciation I feel. I reach up and out and I put my arms around Leonard and I hug him. I don’t know any words, so I let my actions speak. Strong, simple and deep appreciation. The actions speak true. (231, my italics)
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The text displays a cluster of conventional signs expressing ‘true emotion.’ Firstly, stylistically, the detailed and repetitive evocation of the protagonist’s/narrator’s feelings emphasizes the pathos of the scene. Secondly, there is the topos of emotion as an inner state that eludes language (‘true emotion lies before and beyond language’); hence, the incapacity to speak works as an index of true emotion, as would other involuntary bodily expressions, such as tears, a gasp, or an outcry (see Korthals Altes 2014, Ch. 6). Thirdly, the act of standing up marks the solemnity of the moment. The text here stages within the narrative a scenography of sharing one’s lifestory as exemplum, which draws its efficacy and authority from first-hand experience and goodwill towards the addressee, and rests on an ethos of authenticity and trust. This is precisely the scenography and the ethos claimed by Frey for his own memoir. Often posture and ethos are not consciously perceived, as they belong to convention-based default expectations. Yet they arguably play a decisive role as framing keys and as support for narratives’ authority and relevance. Some narrative (sub-)genres by convention also seem to elicit more than others readers’ expectations regarding their authors’ or narrators’ ethos, which is to be displayed in the authorial posture as well as the work’s mode of narration and narrative voice (expected to be congruent). Such ethos expectations are particularly strong in narratives that claim to tell the (f )actual truth about real events, persons or experiences, or that express powerful ideas and world-views. When the narratives touch upon socially sensitive topics and values, this is especially true. Expectations of congruence between the world views and ethos displayed by an author and those in his work also link closely with the normative conceptions pertaining to the encountered discourse type. Cues for an author’s posture or ethos can be textual, pertaining to the text that is the object of interpretation; or they can be para- and extratextual, gleaned by interpreters from a broad variety of sources. These include prefaces, cover blurbs, or acknowledgements, interviews and meetings with readers, pictures on book covers, or even from what is known of their biography and public or private conduct. Posture or ethos cues are not only discursively conveyed, through language, but also non-discursively, for instance through an author’s bodily attitude, facial expression, dress, and so on (Meizoz 2007). Interestingly, Frey’s memoir displays modes of writing that may work as discursive cues for incompatible posture, ethos, and generic classifications, in particular regarding its framing as more or as less factual (and as more, or less, literary). The text displays emphatic cues for a nonfiction autobiographic framing, devices such as the sustained narration in present tense for events in the past or the many dialogue scenes or internal mono-
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logues, with their particularly colloquial tone. These may be perceived as the author’s authentic, ‘natural’ (‘not crafted’) spontaneous expression (for one example, see Frey 2004 [2003], 182). The use of particular sociolects also ‘demonstrates’ the author’s inside knowledge and support that he ‘belongs to’ the social milieu associated with drug addiction and rehab. Style and mode of narration thus reinforce both the pathos-based ethos of authenticity and truthfulness and the posture of the writer as ‘one of them,’ ‘speaking from first-hand experience,’ ‘authentically.’ These discursive posture and ethos effects were endorsed and authenticated by the author on Oprah’s show. As framing keys, they condone a quite straightforwardly autobiographic, referential (fact-oriented) and ‘mimetic’ reading. Such a reading is the more readily adopted as it responds to a currently widespread hunger for emotional sharing, with ‘authenticity’ as a core value and ethos (somewhat paradoxically, given the heavily codified expressions of that authenticity) (/ IV.3 Martínez, / III.2 Freeman). However, from the first page on, these same narrative devices could also be framed quite differently, as crafted and literary (see also Nielsen 2011). Literature has a long history of representing – rather than just using – all kinds of sociolects, for the purpose of vraisemblance or ironic mention, among other effects (Bakhtin 1981). Besides the present tense, known for increasing the vividness of a scene, it is unmarked conversation turns, snippets of internal monologue, or shifts in time, which require just a bit more effort from the reader (‘who is speaking or thinking here, at what stage in time?’), that arguably induce a framing of the narrative as literary, even slightly experimental writing. Importantly, literature is by convention entitled to more invention and stylization. When framed as connoting ‘literariness,’ such devices feed one’s construction of Frey’s posture as a ‘writer of literature.’ Consequently the text’s ethos cues (or a different dominance of cues) serve not so much as cues for authenticity, but rather as intimations of the author’s authority in terms of knowledge of the human condition and his mastery of literary techniques. This all too brief analysis underlines that while style and modes of narration do indeed discursively ‘express’ an authorial posture and ethos, the way in which this occurs is determined by the interpreter’s initial framing of the work’s genre; it also depends on the author’s intentions, ethos and posture. These in turn are reinforced by one’s perception of style, or one is forced to modify them on the basis of one’s stylistic impressions. 3. Framing and valuation One of the most interesting perspectives that this attention to framing acts opens up, is indeed their impact on how we interpret and evaluate a narra-
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tive. On how such framing processes are interlocked with valuation, Boltanski and Thévenot’s work (1991) offers an insightful perspective. Central to their approach is the idea that people categorize a particular state of affairs, an action or artifact as belonging to a particular world, which correlates with its own values, or value regimes. In contemporary French society six such worlds can be distinguished: the inspired world (example: the arts; leading values: creativity, originality, even ambiguity); the domestic world (the family; mutual love, care); the world of opinion (the media; notoriety); the civic world (politics; justice, the common good); the industrial world (professional spheres; efficiency, zeal, skillfulness); and the world of commerce (enterprises; profit; 1991, 201–260). Like Boltanski and Thévenot’s notion of value regimes, their six worlds model suggests more systematicity than is actually warranted. But used bottom up rather than top-down, the model has strong heuristic potential, if only because it suggests the relevance of a systematic investigation of the valuation standards that are actually applied to narratives by concrete interpreters. Granted, narratives are not necessarily classified as belonging to one world (or, in other words, one relevance context) only. Yet perceiving a particular world as dominant for the classification of a narrative’s relevance and worth may affect the ways in which the values pertaining to other potentially relevant worlds function. This perspective seems particularly fruitful when exploring the axiological and ethical consequences of framing narratives in terms of factuality/fictionality and genre, as the Frey case shows. In Frey’s case, many readers had felt cued for an autobiographic, nonfiction, reading of his work as belonging to the civic and domestic worlds where values of authenticity, trustworthiness, honesty, and sincerity are by convention salient. This framing activates folk morality at a first degree level; it also, specifically, allows the private value of confessional writing to translate into more general value, as an exemplum for others. But this value generalization requires authentication through the author’s personal ethos. In the show in which Oprah confronted him, Frey mentioned his desperate desire to get the book published after many rejections, and one publisher’s suggestion to frame it as fully autobiographic, since emotion sells. In the all-round indignation after The Smoking Gun’s revelation, this candidly confessed pragmatic concern may have fueled a framing of the memoir as a product belonging to the world of commerce, rather than to the inspired (‘art’) or civic worlds (‘personal confession/expression’). It was considered not just a betrayal of his readers’ trust, but also a strategic, ‘basely materialistically’ inspired deception. Had Frey through his posture or paratexts provided stronger cues for a more complex understanding of ‘honesty’ and truthfulness in autobiographic writing, his inventions and embellishments of the facts might have been more acceptable to his critics (a com-
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parison with Dave Eggers or the French autofiction writer Christine Angot (/ IV.6 Iversen) could highlight how, under specific conditions, added ‘literary’ value may result from the mental oscillation caused by genre, postural and ethos ambiguities (see Korthals Altes 2014, Ch. 6 and 7). Indeed, in what appears as a frame-shift, infringements of the factuality norm within autobiographic genres can transform into (positively valued) aesthetic license. The narrative is then suddenly perceived as more markedly ‘literature,’ even as metafictional; it reflects on and plays with the readers’ expectations and social, aesthetic or ethical norms. Clearly, the metahermeneutic perspective proposed in this chapter leaves many questions unanswered. I hope I have convincingly highlighted the crucial role played in interpretation and valuation processes by framing acts: deciding on a narrative’s status as factual or fictional communication, or interpreting the author’s ethos. The perspective and heuristic concepts presented here open up fruitful avenues for historical, (meta)ethical, social and intercultural comparative research, which leads into the very heart of our negotiation of meanings and values in culture, and in their messy, risky and dynamic mixtures. References “A Million Little Lies: Exposing James Frey’s Fiction Addiction.” http://www.thesmoking gun.com/documents/celebrity/million-little-lies?page=0,0. The Smoking Gun (4 January 2006): n. pag. (20 July 2011). Amossy, Ruth. “Ethos at the Crossroads of Disciplines: Rhetoric, Pragmatics, Sociology.” Poetics Today 22.1 (2001): 1–23. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bal, Mieke. “Notes on Narrative Embedding.” Poetics Today 2.2 (1981): 41–59. Boltanski, Luc, and Laurent Thévenot. De la justification: les économies de la grandeur. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. Boltanski, Luc, and Laurent Thévenot. On Justification. Economies of Worth. Trans. Catherine Porter. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Doležel, Lubomír. “Mimesis and Possible Worlds.” Poetics Today 9.3 (1988): 475–496. Doubleday & Anchor Books. “Product description of A Million Pieces.” https://www. amazon.de/Million-Little-Pieces-Oprahs-Book/dp/0307276902. n. d. (21 June 2018). Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. [2003] London: John Murray Publishers, 2004. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse Revisited. [1983] Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Goffman, Erving. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. New York: Harper and Row, 1974. Korthals Altes, Liesbeth. Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Meanings and Values in Fiction. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2014.
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Korthals Altes, Liesbeth. “Actes de cadrage, narratologie et herméneutique – à propos de l’indétermination énonciative dans Sujet Angot de Christine Angot.” Polyphonies: voix et valeurs du discours littéraire 6 (2016): 94–120. Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Maingueneau, Dominique. Le Discours littéraire: Paratopie et scène d’énonciation. Paris: Armand Colin, 2004. Meizoz, Jérôme. Postures littéraires: Mises en scène modernes de l’auteur: Essai. Geneva: Slatkine, 2007. Meizoz, Jérôme. “Modern Posterities of Posture.” Authorship Revisited. Conceptions of Authorship around 1900 and 2000. Eds. Gillis Dorleijn, Ralph Grüttemeier, and Liesbeth Korthals Altes. Leuven: Peeters, 2010. 81–93. Minsky, Marvin. “Frame-System Theory.” Thinking: Readings in Cognitive Science. Eds. Philip Johnson-Laird and Peter Wason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. 355– 376. Nielsen, Henrik Skov. “Theory and Interpretation, Narration and Communication, Authors and Narrators – James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces as a Test Case.” Théorie, analyse, interprétation des récits/ Theory, Analysis, Interpretation of Narratives. Ed. Sylvie Patron. Bern: Peter Lang, 2011. 73–94. Walsh, Richard. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. Winfrey, Oprah. “James Frey and the Million Little Pieces Controversy.” The Oprah Winfrey Show. Texas: Harpo Productions, 26 January 2006. Wolf, Werner. “Introduction. Frames, Framings and Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media.” Framing Borders in Literature and Other Media. Eds. Werner Wolf and Walter Bernhart. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 1–42. Zipfel, Frank. “Fiktionssignale.” Fiktionalität: Ein Interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Eds. Tilmann Köppe and Tobias Klauk. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2014. 97–124.
FRANÇOISE LAVOCAT
Pseudofactual Narratives and Signposts of Factuality Fiction theorists have spent a great deal of time reflecting on (and arguing over) the criteria of determining fictionality (much more than those of factuality) – their existence and, if affirmed, whether they are found inside or outside of artifacts. We know that Hildesheimer’s Marbot (1983 [1981]), one of the most recent and famous hoaxes, or pseudofactual texts,1 has become a hot topic among fiction theorists. This fake biography of a young English aesthete and contemporary of Byron’s has been much discussed, notably by Käte Hamburger (1992), Dorrit Cohn (1999), and JeanMarie Schaeffer (2010 [1999]).2 Let us take a few moments here to review the terms and issues of this debate. For Dorrit Cohn, the total success (in her eyes) of this hoax orchestrated by Hildesheimer lies in its perfect imitation of the academic codes of historical biography. Moreover, all fictional language or any signposts of fictionality are carefully avoided. Hence, for Cohn, there exist signals of both fictionality and factuality. Jean-Marie Schaeffer, on the other hand, like John Searle (1975), believes that there are no internal signposts of fictionality or factuality. According to him, Hildesheimer failed to get Marbot recognized as a work of fiction (which was his avowed intention), because he did not establish a sufficiently clear
1 Since certain signposts of fictionality are included in Marbot, can the work really be considered a hoax? As Hildesheimer creates complete ambiguity, and the work first seems to be one of nonfiction, I believe that it can. In my opinion, the term hoax is also appropriate for earlier texts. According to Paige, given that the concealment of a narrative’s fictionality is a widespread practice at the end of the seventeenth century (Paige 2017), there is no real necessity to consider The Letters of a Portuguese Nun a hoax. However, the remarkable reception of this text, as well as the relatively late identification of its supposed author, associated with a collective emotional investment, justifies the use of this term in a broader sense. We can also speak of pseudofactual artifacts. I borrow the term “pseudofactual” from Paige (2011) / IV.9 Paige. 2 See also K. K. Ruthven (2001, 152) and Stern (2011), among others. Olivier Caïra voices his irritation with what he sees as an excessive critical attention lavished on Hildesheimer’s controversial hoax (2011, 15). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-041
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pragmatic framework.3 According to proponents of the pragmatic approach, the identification of a cultural artifact’s fictional or documentary status relies solely on this criterion. It is noteworthy that this entire debate arises over a pseudofactual artifact. However, in tests which consisted in having people read the beginnings of fictional or factual texts (without any generic or paratextual clues), the margin of error on readers’ parts was minimal; readers immediately and without hesitation correctly identified the status of these texts (Hayward 1994).4 In the vast majority of cases, the signposts are so apparent that we have to ask ourselves what reasoning could have led 5 Searle and Schaeffer to arrive at the counter-intuitive conclusion of their absence. They no doubt had in mind the narrow but intriguing body of work that features pseudofactual artifacts. Hoaxes provide the ideal environment for questioning both the existence of factuality and of its signposts. Why, incidentally, should one speak of pseudofactual rather than of pseudofictional artifacts? There are indeed hardly any factual works (i.e., works with a biographical or documentary purpose) that disingenuously declare themselves to be fictional, except as a strategy to escape censure, win a trial,6 or take a philosophical position. But it seems to me that these strategic declarations have little or no effect on the manner in which the work itself is read (for instance, readers of Barthes’s autobiography do not read it as a fiction, despite the author’s statements that it is fiction7). Such infrequent pseudofictional frameworks are weak, weaker than pseudofactual ones. The vast majority of pseudofactual hoaxes are therefore a testament to the privilege of the factual; readers often avidly cling to pseudofactual hoaxes, evincing both an overwhelming blindness and a great eagerness to enrich and pro-
3 I borrow the expression “cadrage documentaire” (‘documentary framework’) from Olivier Caïra (2011, 137). 4 The study demonstrates that “readers can make those distinctions with remarkable accuracy given even very small samples and no other contextual or paratextual cues” (1994, 417). “[…] readers are sensitive to […] generic differences and are able to hypothesize correctly much of the time on the genre of a work” (1994, 418). 5 “There is no textual property, syntactical or semantic, that will identify a text as a work of fiction” (Searle 1975, 325). 6 Olivier Caïra examines this in the case of Pays Perdu by Pierre Jourde (2011, 145–148). 7 On the back of the title page of Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes is a handwritten epigraph, printed in white on a black background, stating: “[…] all this must be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.” But the photos and texts are interpreted as providing information on the life of Barthes himself. What we have here is a type of coquetry, recalling Barthes’s dissertations on the indistinguishability of history and fiction (1989 [1967]).
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long their pleasure in being deceived. I will explore the extent to which hoaxes procure and facilitate this pleasure, taking as my two examples, first, The Letters of a Portuguese Nun (1669) and their unusual reception as well as, second, the inevitable Marbot (1983 [1981]). In certain respects, hoaxes function like a magnifying glass, allowing us to see more clearly signposts of factuality. In what follows, I will first set forth from a theoretical standpoint the difference between signposts of fictionality and signposts of factuality (section 1). Next, I will explore the nature of these signals (section 2) and emphasize their inherent fragility in an interpretive context (section 3). I will go on to comment on the blindness one can observe in the reception of certain hoaxes (section 4), which sheds an intriguing light on the phenomenon of reading, ending by demonstrating that fictional and factual texts are profoundly different – not just because of their internal fictionality signals or their pragmatic framework, but also (and perhaps most importantly) because of the modes of reading they generate and expect from the reader. I will attempt to define these modes of reception by drawing on the works of neuroscience. 1. Signposts of factuality Signposts of fictionality have always incited more interest than those of factual artifacts. The prestige of literary narratives found in fiction (at least in the twentieth century) does not, however, sufficiently explain this imbalance. I posit that this disparity is partially founded on a difference in status between signposts of fictionality and factuality. Following in the footsteps of Käte Hamburger, Dorrit Cohn, and Gérard Genette, Ansgar Nünning, especially in his lexicon article “Fiktionssignale” (2001; see also Nünning 2005), is particularly enlightening and (as far as I am aware) provides the latest, most comprehensive overview of the subject of signals of fictionality. After briefly touching on indicators linked to the question of communication (title, publisher, collection, paratext, preface, etc.), he delves more deeply into internal signals within the text. In Nünning’s view, the fundamental difference between fictional and factual texts lies in the fact that authors of fiction bask in far greater freedom than historians.8 Reference is principally seen as a restrictive, even impoverishing framework. Signposts are thus always far more numerous in fictional territory, because it is equipped with more modes of expression – a fact that stems from our conception of fiction as an anomaly in
8 Nünning (2005) speaks specifically of history, not of general factual discourse.
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ordinary language (Searle 1975). The following summary of signposts of fictionality and factuality, as put together by Nünning, demonstrates the privilege of fictional discourse, which additionally includes the possibility of integrating referential elements: Representation of consciousness; free indirect discourse; creation of a plot; dialogues; presence of a narrator, possibility of an unreliable narrator; metafiction and selfreference; possibility of non-chronological temporality; semantization of space and objects
Fiction
Dependence on intertextuality, identifiable sources; hidden narrator, neutrality of expression.
History
Tab.1: (adapted from Nünning 2005, 36–45)
Our purpose here is not to discuss these criteria (for example, whether there must really be a narrator present in all works of fiction), but instead to remark on their disparity in terms of quantity and functions. When literary theorists examine historical narrative, they only find signposts pointing to the neutrality of historical discourse and denoting constraint. This analysis leaves no room whatsoever for an appreciation of the possible appeal of nonfiction. Of course, one could provide more detail on these ‘indicators of reality.’ But even so, we can see that the essential qualities of history (as factual discourse) go beyond the features listed above and that to explain them in terms of mere constraint is clearly insufficient. The narratological approach seems to fall short of a proper explanation. For a more convincing model we need to turn to Renauld Dulong, who proposes a pragmatic and sociological examination of the “operators” 9 of factuality. Notably, his analysis brings to light the privilege of factuality, which he reminds us is “a constitutive condition of the modern organization of communities, none of which can persist without the memory of hard facts” (1997, 66; my translation). He essentially distinguishes two modes of factualization inherent in the production of evidence. The first relies on reasoning, whereas the second inspires immediate conviction; it seems to be situated on the same level as belief and triggers an affective process that inhibits any kind of reasoning. Moreover, all signals of factual-
9 The author uses “operator” to refer to devices that exist in physical form and that immediately persuade the receiver of the message’s truth (1997, 86).
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ity are rhetorical processes, with the purpose of authentication and persuasion, which reinforce the referential link. I believe that this analysis highlights two paradoxes. The first is that plausibility is a necessary foundation for the belief in the authenticity of referential links that must, however, distinguish themselves from the ordinary (Dulong 1997, 75). Any narrative that is either factual or pseudofactual (aside from those taking a firm stance of banality) has an association with the Aristotelian adunaton pitanon (probable impossible),10 though to varying degrees: to be plausible the pseudofactual must be to some extent implausible. A cloistered nun having a loving relationship with an officer (Lettres Portugaises); a man remembering his past in a concentration camp at the age of four (Wilkomirski’s Fragments; see below; also see / IV.3 Martínez); a young unknown aesthete at the beginning of the nineteenth century inventing psychoanalysis (Marbot): these hero(in)es of pseudofactual narratives are typically situated at the intersection of the impossible and the plausible, a problematic area subject to interpretation. The second paradox is that the attractiveness of factuality, which should lead the receiver to rationally verify the quality of evidence submitted, is created by an immediate conviction in the truth of the artifact and biases the chain of inference leading to verification. The similarity between, on the one hand, the conviction evoked by witness accounts or factual texts and, on the other, religious belief is reinforced by the fact that devices for underlining factuality (photographs, for example) evoke a link with matter, the body, and desire, generating an attitude of respect, pity, and emotional engagement (Dulong 1997, 80). As I see it, reference thus determines the nature of signposts of fictionality and factuality in an essentially different manner. Signposts of fictionality aim to bring about fictional immersion. They give access to another world and draw the reader or spectator in so that he or she engages in activity with no direct link to his or her immediate interests in the real world. The plot, characters, and treatment of space and time are conceived so as to initiate and maintain this interest, which, from an anthropological standpoint, is in no way self-evident (Lavocat 2016). As for signposts of factuality, their primary objective is to create belief in the authenticity of their referentiality (or to directly impact on readers’ real-world actions and beliefs).
10 “In general, impossibility should be referred to poetic needs, to the ideal, or to popular belief. Poetics needs make something plausible though impossible preferable to what is possible but implausible” (Poetics, 25, 9–13 [1995, 135]). About the interpretation of this passage in the late Renaissance, see Lavocat (2010).
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This difference in quality between signposts of fictionality and of factuality sheds a great deal of light on the reception of fictional works presented as factual accounts. The following analysis aims to explore the nature and functioning of these signposts of factuality through two famous pseudofactual texts. I will also investigate the degree to which signposts in these types of artifacts are specific to the factual mode. 2. Signposts of factuality in hoaxes What kinds of signposts of factuality play a strategic role in hoaxes? They can be defined both positively (in including elements that make one believe in the referentiality of the wording and the possibility of confirming its accuracy) and negatively (in avoiding novelistic conventions as well as fictional language). Moreover, we can divide them into three categories. The first concerns the pragmatic framework of both the paratext and the text itself. For instance, the author, whether through the mediation of a character (supposed author, translator, or editor) or in other ways, provides false information on the status and (more often than not) origin of the artifact. The second category relates to generic conventions. The pseudofactual text will choose forms specifically dedicated to factual genres, such as letters, news reports, autobiographies, diaries, scholarly biographies, and dictionaries, and it will avoid the invoking of other conventions that are associated with fiction and its most common genre – the novel. The third category is stylistic, but not wholly determined by literary conventions. The style of factuality, insofar as it is cultivated by a pseudofactual artifact, systematically draws on a rhetoric of authenticity.11 This is most often built around the fiction of a character with a tendency to speak naïvely, often a woman, especially one who is young and withdrawn from the world (like a nun or a woman from the countryside or a small town12). During the twentieth century, in the most effective hoaxes this mode most often appears in the shape of the reconstructed words of a child or victim,
11 K. K Ruthven entitles chapter 6 of his Faking Literature “Rhetorics of Authenticity” (2001, 146–170). I agree with his introductory statement, which claims that forgery is a problematic reconciliation between rhetoric and ethic. But Ruthven does not develop this argument, and the chapter deals mainly with the topics of signatures and scientific investigations of authenticity. 12 I am alluding to the Memoirs of the Life of Henriette-Sylvie de Moliere by Madame de Villedieu (1683 [1672–1674]), the first memoir novel. In a fragment of a letter, which serves as a kind of preface, the supposed author depicts herself as an unprofessional writer, a stranger to Paris, unaccustomed to social and literary conventions.
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and often both.13 The paradigm centers on the protagonist’s inexperience of the world and on his/her discourse as a gage of their sincerity. A certain kind of auctorial character, who elicits empathy for the protagonist(s) and attracts the confidence of the reader, plays a decisive role in the functioning of a hoax. In the long run, these signposts raise anthropological and social considerations. The case of The Letters of a Portuguese Nun is exemplary in illustrating all three categories of signposts.14 Leaving aside the first criterion (the very effective declaration of the publisher at the head of the first edition), I will first discuss an instance of reception that highlights the second kind of signpost concerning generic conventions. In 1956, Raymond Mortimer, in his preface to an English translation of The Letters From a Portuguese Nun, defends the theory of the letters’ authenticity. He argues that, if we had been dealing with a novel, we would have been given the story of a first meeting, a description of the lovers, and a real introduction to characters who are otherwise merely mentioned.15 It does not occur to him that these gaps may be intentional. He explicitly examines the question of the letters’ authenticity, based on his own experience as a reader of novels. The third category of signposts (stylistic and attributed to an imaginary author) is even more pertinent to the general evaluation of the Letters and its rhetoric of authenticity. The author of the English translation of the Letters into poetic form, published in London in 1709,16 uses his preface
13 This is crucial to the effectiveness of persuasion in Bruchstücke. Aus einer Kindheit 1939– 1948 (Wilkomirski 1996 [1995]), Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years (Defonseca 1997), Sleepers (Calcaterra 1996). 14 The key words of the appreciation of this work are “nature,” “simplicity,” and “sympathy.” See, for example, this preface (1817): “The language of nature is universal […], proceeding only from the heart; to the heart only does it speak; and wherever there is sensibility, there will it be understood. One of its principal charms is simplicity and it is a charm of no small influence […] But the chief excellence of the language of nature is the force and truth with which it represents our sentiments and emotions, and the power which it possesses of commanding our sympathy” (Letters from a Portugaise Nun to an Officer in the French Army, 1817, 4–5). 15 See: “My belief in the authenticity of the letters depends chiefly, however, upon internal evidence. I have yet to read an invented love-story in which the first meeting of hero and heroine is not described. Again would the novelist use casual references to Mariana’s brother and to Sister Brites without any further word about these characters? And Emmanuel and Francisque: the writer assumes that their identities are known. Presumably they are servants, they might be dogs. Some explanatory phrase would be inserted automatically by any romancer” (Letters From a Portuguese Nun, Written in the year 1667 by Mariana Alcoforado 1956, 11). 16 The title of this translation speaks for itself in this regard: “Love without Affectation, in Five Letters from a Portuguese Nun, to a French Cavalier.”
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to turn his attention to an interesting confrontation between the style of the nun and that of another famous author of notoriously fictional love letters, Ovid. Interestingly, for this writer, the fictionality of Ovid’s Heroides is detectable from its very coherence and lack of repetition (1709, v–vi). On the other hand, as the better imitator of nature, the Portuguese nun jumps from subject to subject and contradicts herself: it is precisely this emotional volatility, discontinuity, and these contradictions that resonate so truthfully. We are thus faced with an aesthetics of discontinuity and contradiction, which is supposed to reflect both the chaos of passion and a mimetic harmony between the style of the author and the real person he is depicting in terms of gender,17 rank, and nationality, and this aesthetics of verisimilitude simultaneously engenders an appreciation of factuality. The presence of discontinuity contradicts the imposition of a well-formed plot, which is the mark of a novel. The rhetoric of authenticity consists in escaping novelistic conventions, as well as reiterating an ancient mistrust of narrativity and emplotment, which are equated with fiction. If, along with Paul Ricœur (1984 [1983]) we see emplotment as a primitive modality of experience, which helps us grasp the world and render it intelligible, factual stories and hoaxes propose an alternative, founded on emotion and possessing moral dimensions, to the detriment of narrative tension.18 3. Reversibility of signposts of factuality The fragility of signposts of factuality is abundantly clear. When one studies the topos of the found manuscript, for which German academia has 17 About gender issues and the Letters of a Portugese Nun, see, for instance, Kauffman (1986) and Goldstein (1997). 18 However, it should be recalled that two series of male responses to the letters, supposedly written by the French lover of the Portuguese nun, were published in 1669, as well as seven “New letters from the Portuguese Nun.” Readers in the seventeenth century favored editions that published all the letters together, which form a kind of novel with a happy ending (the lover ends up announcing that he is going to join the Portuguese nun). In France, between 1669 and 1700, out of 49 editions, 13 contained only the 5 letters of the first edition, 7 the “New Letters” only, 7 the male responses only, 18 the two sets of letters and their ss, and 5 anthologies including the letters of the Portuguese nun and other texts (see Gonçalves Rodrigues 1943). The preference for editions that interweave the twelve letters and their answers can be interpreted as an attempt to introduce a novelistic dimension. In the nineteenth century, when the authenticity of the letters becomes crucial, the ‘novelization’ of the letters disappears. After the discovery of Mariana Alcoforado (1810), the numerous ensuing re-editions and translations have favored the five first letters.
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the suitable term Herausgeberfiktion, a signpost of factuality (Herman and Hallyn 1999), or of the Hollywood disclaimer (e.g. “all persons are fictitious”), a signpost of fictionality (Caïra 2011, 138–145), one notices that their reiterated use over time deprives them of their effectiveness, and that they can even turn into the obverse signal: the editorial framework becomes a sign of fictionality and the disclaimer about the fictionality of the characters a hint that the film might be a kind of roman à clef. In fact, most of the criteria that allow readers to carry out a preliminary assessment of a text’s fictionality or factuality are fluctuating, ambivalent, and dependent on historical, cultural, literary, individual, and collective contexts. Rousseau’s opinion of The Letters of a Portuguese Nun is an example of this. His opinion was that they could only have been written by a man because women do not experience such lively passion and would not know how to express it in this fashion.19 The case of Marbot allows us to bring to light this ambivalence of the signposts of factuality, an aspect which Dorrit Cohn did not explore. For her, Hildesheimer’s fake biography presents a perfect imitation of a work aiming to be seriously informational. However, from an academic point of view, the text as a serious biography fails to meet the standards of historiographical scholarship. Marbot does not contain a bibliography. In addition to this, Marbot’s documentary apparatus is practically nonexistent; it appears in the work in a mischievous manner since the index does not contain any of the names of the fictional characters in the work (including Marbot and his family). The book additionally includes photos of paintings that are fairly easy to verify (especially in the current age of the internet) and do not represent the people of whom they are supposed to be portraits. The possibility of their identification depends not only on the reader’s cultural expertise and attentiveness, but also on the kinds of information available in different contexts and periods. Cohn also points out that, as part of the perfection of the hoax, the fictional character of Marbot is inserted into a tightly knit historical fabric. But again, from a scholarly perspective, is not this historical background ultimately a little too crowded? Marbot meets all of the famous men of his time – Goethe, Leopardi, Coleridge, and Byron. Yet this signpost, like many others, is ambiguous: the life of the character is delineated by the presence of these well-known historical figures, who serve as a gauge of factuality, unless we judge (rightly
19 “They [the women] know not how to describe, or to feel even love itself. Sappho alone, as I know of, and another female author, deserve to be accepted. I would venture to lay a wager, that the Portuguese Letters were written by a man.” (Letter to D’Alembert (1759, 139, note).
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so) that these figures are a little too numerous and well known, in which case the signpost of factuality becomes a signpost of fictionality. Many signposts function in the same ambivalent manner. (/ I.9 Birke) This is particularly true when it comes to the narrator. The tone and posture of the narrator in Marbot can be interpreted in very different ways: we can just as easily find them to be characteristic of a historian (similar to those of the authorial voice in Hildesheimer’s Mozart), or consider them to be ironic because pedantic, which would then turn the narratorial ductus into a sign of fictionality (Stanley 1993, 46–78). To summarize. Internal signposts of fictionality and factuality certainly exist because hoaxes exploit or avoid them. But these signposts are extremely ambivalent and susceptible to switching sides, due to both overuse and readers’ very diverse cultural backgrounds. It is perhaps from this insight that we can understand the opposing positions of Dorrit Cohn and Jean-Marie Schaeffer. There is yet another reason, however, why these signposts are so hard to assess: it involves the very specific pleasures attached to factuality. 4. The pleasures of factuality: A cognitive approach During the last few decades, we have spent much time studying the pleasures and benefits of fiction – for individuals, society, and even the human species. But what exactly are the pleasures of factuality? David Shields (2010) compares one’s contact with reality – through factual artifacts – to a drug, whose impact provokes an emotional shock much stronger than does insipid fiction. The already somewhat dated hypotheses surrounding the “quasi-emotions of fiction” (Walton 1990), or emotions that are more “pale” and “offline” (Currie 1995), corroborate this point of view. Anna Abraham’s work in neuroscience (2008, 2009) provides an enlightening way of looking at the situation. According to her, the difference between fact and fiction resides in their degree of self-relevance – that is to say, the relationship to oneself created by factual and fictional scenarios. Real entities are, in certain respects, more interesting than fictional ones, because we have more information on them and because they touch our lives more closely. Admittedly, fictional entities also have a tendency to elicit an emotional investment; but those containing referential entities, as opposed to fictional scenarios, mobilize neuronal networks linked to our relationship to self and others, empathy, and emotions in general. Fiction stimulates zones associated with semantic memory, which involve more concepts, whereas nonfiction has a stronger relationship to memory in particular contexts, along with that which has been personally experienced
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by the subject. More recent work in the field of neuroscience decisively confirms these results (Sperduti et al. 2016). This may explain why interest in a text always drastically decreases when it is revealed to be a hoax. The public radically turns its back on a work when it moves from biographical or documentary status to fiction (for example, neither Marbot nor Marc Ronceraille,20 nor indeed Wilkomirski’s Fragments, are being published any longer). The Letters of a Portuguese Nun present a different case altogether, because they have already been integrated into the French literary heritage.21 (/ IV.9 Paige) According to Anna Abraham’s analysis, successful hoaxes owe their privileged reception to the heightened degree of the text’s relationship to oneself that a reader experiences – this relationship of personal concern will correlate with empathy, with emotion and moral assessment. After they have been uncovered, successful hoaxes often give way to compensatory and healing actions. The public’s craze for Wilkomirski and his fake autobiography was based on a desire for reparation against the backdrop of a personal and collective trauma. Belief in the authenticity of artifacts and their purported authors resembles an act of faith, intimately linked to the functioning of the empathetic relationship. Moreover, in all factually based literature (take Carrère or Mauvignier,22 for example), as with hoaxes, moral assessment plays a crucial role; the author and narrator, whether real or assumed, calls for a reading that is both morally and emotionally charged. The assessment of probability and the resulting empathetic response are interdependent and may enter into competition; this could explain why some credulous readers’ positive evaluation of the possibility of certain states of things seems incomprehensible to those who think of the artifact as fictional. This is evidenced by the passion for defending the historicity of fictitious entities, which has even
20 Marc Ronceraille is a fictive author. With the complicity of the editors of Le Seuil, and of several well known intellectuals and journalists of the time (Philippe Sollers, Bernard Pivot), the literary critic Claude Bonnefoy devoted a scholarly book in the prestigious collection “Ecrivain de toujours” (1978) to Marc Ronceraille as well as a television broadcast (Apostrophes, 1978). After the revelation of the hoax by Bonnefoy, interest in the book dissolved completely. 21 With regard to the late receipt of the letters in Portugal, and the nationalist enthusiasm for this work, which has made the public extremely reluctant, until today, to admit that the author was not Portuguese, see Klobucka (2000). 22 See Carrère’s Lives Other than My Own (2011 [2009]) and Mauvignier’s Ce que j’appelle oubli (‘What I call Forgetting,’ 2011). In his book, Carrère evokes some of the lives that were shattered by the 2004 tsunami in Indonesia and, in a completely different context, by cancer. Mauvignier tells the murder (which actually happened) of a homeless person by the security guards of a department store.
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prompted some to sue those who challenged this reality!23 The parallels between these phenomena of belief as induced by factual and pseudofactual texts as opposed to religious texts are thus confirmed (Dulong 1997, 81–83). We seem to come to a controversial conclusion. Our empathetic, moral and emotional investment is diminished when we are exposed to fiction. Moreover, as Anna Abraham has noticed, along with several specialists of fiction (Pavel 1986; Vermeule 2010), we often grant fictional characters the courtesy status of real human beings. This may explain why pseudofactual artifacts are so much more numerous than pseudofictional ones and why, over the centuries, so few fiction writers have not claimed in one way or another that their work was related to reality (through historical reference, allegory, allusion, or what Lamarque and Olsen call “pseudo reference,” i.e. the fact of being ‘about’). To conclude. It is time to recall some crucial distinctions. The difference between factual and fictional artifacts relies on different ways the reader has of evaluating the possible and the impossible. The evaluation of probability carried out by the reader when dealing with a text of uncertain status, for instance a hoax text, is not altogether the same as the appraisal of likelihood in a fictional work. The reading of a literary work takes into account the work’s overall coherence, which is based partly on the construction of a plot, and the genre to which it belongs. When one encounters hoaxes, questions of genre and plot construction, or of overall coherence, do not matter, at least not in the same way; the evaluation of probability is essentially conducted on the basis of assumptions, knowledge, and beliefs that derive from the real world and our experience of it. As Dulong emphasizes, signposts rooted in language are easily falsifiable (1997, 76). By contrast, the representation of a paradoxical or impossible entity or situation and the presence of an unreliable narrator seem to be the most stable fictional signposts. Searle, although he asserted the absence of internal signals of fictionality, nevertheless stresses that the ontology of fiction admits of the impossible (specifying that the range of possibilities is conditioned by plausibility, which itself depends on generic conventions24). To this extent, impossible entities or states of affairs are 23 I allude to the trial instituted in 1967 by the writer Claude Aveline against Frédéric Deloffre, who had proved that the author of the Letters of the Portuguese Nun was Gabriel de Guilleragues. 24 See: “As far as the possibility of the ontology is concerned, anything goes: the author can create any character or events he likes. As far as the acceptability of the ontology is concerned, coherence is a crucial consideration. However there is no universal criterion for coherence: what counts as coherence in a work of science fiction will not count as coherence in a work of naturalism” (Searle 1975, 311).
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indeed signals of fictionality (unless, for instance in a historical account, the paradox is an allegory, or joke). Finally, when it comes to the status of the narrator, factual texts may also have unreliable narrators, but this lack of reliability stems from the ignorance or involuntary blindness of the authors. While factual texts may have authors-narrators who are liars (we have only to think about fake news and propaganda), they are not willfully and openly unreliable (Nünning 2005, 23). A factual text in which the author-narrator declares himself to be a liar is almost inconceivable. In the case of pseudofactual texts, where the lie is built into the auctorial or narrative position, the unveiling of the hoax and ensuing awareness of its falsehood generally condemn the text to lasting oblivion.25 Indeed, with most pseudofactual artifacts,26 the evaluation of the possible and impossible is closely bound to an axiological dimension and deontic order: the reader must take sides with the author-character.27 Such a choice is inseparable from the phenomenon of belief. This interdependence of truthfulness and readerly belief, associated with a strong emotional participation on the part of the reader, to me seems characteristic of hoaxes. This constellation may explain why the reader is ready to sacrifice the emotional rewards28 of experiential plot effects such as surprise, curiosity and suspense, inherent in the introduction of plots into cinematographic or novelistic works of fiction, in order to taste the fruits of factuality. It may also allow us to understand why, when a single element is challenged, the reader’s attitude gives way to a lack of belief and the whole edifice crumbles; only boredom remains for most hoaxes once belief in their factuality has been dispelled. This unique fragility is specific to artifacts claiming to be factual, insofar as the effects aiming to engender belief are magnified, and, in most cases,
25 This is why Julia Abramson’s dissertation, which insists on the philosophical and educative scope of hoaxes, seems optimistic to me. Her argument perhaps applies to Diderot, who, through his mise en abyme of The Nun (La Religieuse) (describing himself as the author of The Nun in order to deceive a friend), both showcases and at the same time undermines the hoax. 26 This articulation of modalities does not apply to Marbot; the work does not encourage the reader to have an empathetic relationship with its character. The hoax’s modest success (unless we ask narratologists) is perhaps a result of this. 27 This schema particularly describes letters, memoir novels, and fictional autobiographies – all first-person (pseudofactual) narratives. Impostors such as Dösseker (a. k. a. Wilkomirski) and de Wael (alias Defonseca) strongly appeal to the reader’s confidence: not believing them would be tantamount to joining the camp of their persecutors. They even imply that the suspicious reader might be a sympathizer of Nazism. This guilt rhetoric is extremely effective. 28 On the “pathic dimension” of narrative tension see Baroni (2007).
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they dominate the stylistic dimension and rhetorical elements dedicated to bringing about fictional immersion. So, in addition to the traditional narratological and pragmatic approaches towards signposts of factuality and fictionality, I propose we add an analysis that aims at understanding the effects of pseudofactual artifacts, as well as an approach that deals with modalities, through the contribution of cognitive science. References Editions and translations of Letters of a Portuguese Nun Letters From a Portuguese Nun to an Officer in the French Army. Trans. W. R. Bowles. London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1817. Letters From a Portuguese Nun, Written in the year 1667 by Mariana Alcoforado. Trans. Lucy Norton. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1956. Letters of a Portuguese Nun (Marianna Alcoforado). Trans. Edgar Prestage. London: Davis Nutt, 1893. Lettres Portugaises. Nouvelle édition, conforme à la 1ere. (Paris, Cl. Barbon, 1669), avec une notice bibliographique de ces Lettres. Paris: Firmin Didot, 1824. Love without Affectation, in Five Letters from a Portuguese Nun, to a French Cavalier. London: Meere, 1709. The Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun, by Gabriel Joseph de Lavergne, vicomte de Guilleragues. Trans. Guido Waldman. London: Harvill Press, 1996.
General References Abraham, Anna, and D. Yves von Cramon. “Reality = Relevance? Insights from Spontaneous Modulations of the Brain’s Default Network when Telling Apart Reality from Fiction.” PloS ONE 4.3 (2009): 1–9. Abraham, Anna, D. Yves von Cramon, and Ricarda I. Schubotz. “Meeting George Bush versus Meeting Cinderella: The Neural Response when Telling Apart what is Real from what is Fictional in the Context of our Reality.” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20.6 (2008): 965–978. Abramson, Julia. Learning from Lying: Paradoxes of Literary Mystification. Neward: University of Delaware Press, 2005. Apostrophes. Dir. Roger Kahane. Antenne 2, 1978. http://www.ina.fr/video/CPB78051004 (29 October 2018). Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Stephen Halliwell. The Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Baroni, Raphaël. La tension narrative. Suspense, curiosité, surprise. Paris: Seuil, 2007. Barthes, Roland. “The Discourse of History.” The Rustle of Language. [1967] Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Barthes, Roland. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. [1975] Trans. Richard Howard. Écrivains de toujours. New York: Hill and Wang, 2010. Bonnefoy, Claude. Marc Ronceraille. Ecrivains de toujours. Paris: Seuil, 1978.
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Caïra, Olivier. Définir la fiction: Du roman au jeu d’échecs. Paris: Les Editions de l’EHESS, 2011. Calcaterra, Lorenzo. Sleepers.A True Story. When Friendship Runs Deeper Than Blood. New York: Arrow Books, 1996. Carrère, Emmanuel. Lives Other than My Own. [2009] Trans. Linda Coverdale. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2011. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Currie, Gregory. “Imagination as Simulation: Aesthetics Meets Cognitive Science.” Mental Simulation. Evaluations and Applications-Reading in Mind and Language. Eds. Martin Davies and Tony Stone. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. 151–169. Defonseca, Misha. Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years. Boston: Mount Ivy Press, 1997. Dulong, Renaud. “Les opérateurs de factualité. Les ingrédients matériels et affectuels de l’évidence historique.” Politix 10.39 (1997): 65–85. Genette, Gérard. Fiction and Diction. [1991] Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. Goldstein, Claire. “Love Letters: Discourses of Gender and Writing in the Criticism of the Lettres Portugaises.” Romanic Review 88.4 (1997): 571–590. Gonçalves Rodrigues, Antonio. Mariana Alcoforado, História crítica de una fraude literária. Coimbra: Coimbra Editora, 1943. Hamburger, Käte. “Authenticity as Mask: Wolfgang Hildesheimer’s Marbot.” Neverending Stories. Eds. Anne Fenn et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Hayward, Malcolm. “Genre Recognition of History and Fiction.” Poetic 22.5 (1994): 409– 421. Herman, Jan, and Fernand Hallyn. Le topos du manuscript trouvé, hommage à Claude Angelet. Louvain and Paris: Peeters, 1999. Hildesheimer, Wolfgang. Mozart. [1977] Trans. Marion Faber. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982. Hildesheimer, Wolfgang. Marbot: A Biography. [1981] Trans. Patricia Campton. London: Dent, 1983. Kauffman, Linda S. Discourses of Desire. Gender: Genre and Epistolary Fiction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986. Klobucka, Anna. The Portuguese Nun: Formation of a National Myth. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000. Lamarque, Peter, and Stein Haugom Olsen. Truth, Fiction and Literature. A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. Lavocat, Françoise. “Mimesis, Fiction, Paradoxes.” https://journals.openedition.org/ methodos/2428#. Penser la fiction. Issue of Methodos: savoirs et textes 10 (2010). (5 March 2018). Lavocat, Françoise. Fait et Fiction, pour une frontière. Paris: Le Seuil, 2016. Mauvignier, Laurent. Ce que j’appelle oubli. Paris: Minuit, 2011. Nünning, Ansgar. “Fiktionssignale.” Metzler Lexikon Literatur- und Kulturtheorie: Ansätze – Personen – Grundbegriffe. 2nd rev. ed. Ed. Ansgar Nünning. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2001. 178. Nünning Ansgar. “How to Distinguish between Fictional and Factual Narratives: Narratological and Systems-Theoretical Suggestions.” Fact and Fiction in Narrative: An Interdisciplinary Approach. Ed. Lars-Ake Skalin. Örebro Studies in Literary History and Criticism 4. Örebro: Örebro University Press, 2005. 21–56. Paige, Nicholas D. Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Paige, Nicholas D. “Examples, Samples, Signs: An Artifactual View of Fictionality in the French Novel, 1681–1830.” New Literary History 48.3 (2017): 503–530.
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Pavel, Thomas. Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986. Ricœur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Volume One. [1983] Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. A Letter from M. Rousseau, of Geneva, to M. d’Alembert, of Paris, Concerning the Effects of Theatrical Entertainments on the Manners of Mankind: Translated from the French. London: J. Nourse, 1759. Ruthven, K. K. Faking Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie. Why Fiction? [1999] Lincoln: Nebraska University Press, 2010. Searle, John R. “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse.” New Literary History 6.2 (1975): 319–332. http://www.jstor.org/stable/468422. (16 February 2018). Shields, David. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. New York: Knopf, 2010. Sperduti, Marco, et al. “The Paradox of Fiction: Emotional Response toward Fiction and the Modulatory Role of Self-Relevance.” Acta Psychologica 165 (2016): 53–59. Stanley, Patricia. H. Wolfgang Hildesheimer and His Critics. Colombia, SC: Camden House, 1993. Stern, Simon. “Sentimental Frauds.” Law & Social Inquiry 36.1 (2011): 83–113. Vermeule, Blakey. Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010. Villedieu, Madame de. The Memoires of the Life, and Rare Adventures of Henrietta Silvia Moliere as They have been very Lately Published in French. [1672–1674] London: William Crook, 1683. Walton, Kendall L. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. Wilkomirski, Binjamin. Fragments. Memories of a Childhood, 1939–1948. [1995] Trans. Carol Brown Janeway. New York: Schocken Books, 1996.
NICHOLAS PAIGE
Pseudofactuality As part of her study of what she called the documentary novel, Barbara Foley used the word pseudofactual to describe the oft-remarked truth pretense accompanying many novels published before 1800 in England and France (Foley 1986). In her understanding, pseudofactual insistence that novels were literally true corresponded to a historical stage in the evolution of the novel, specifically, its break with respect to romance: “If writers wished to be taken seriously as interpreters of social reality,” she writes, “they were constrained to simulate familiar modes of nonfictional discourse” – notably journalistic reports, letter collections, and autobiographies (115). This simulation was not a dissimulation: the pseudofactual posture was inherently ironic, and spuriously asserting literal truth was in fact a way of asserting a more general truth (128). By the nineteenth century, the ironic posture had been superseded by “unabashedly fictional” realism, grounded on the assumption that the propositional value of novels lay in the analogy they offered with respect to historical actuality (144). Though “pseudofactual” was Foley’s own coinage, scholarly interest in the phenomenon dates at least to the early twentieth century (Tieje 1913). In the wake of Ian Watt’s work on “formal realism” (1957), a number of studies of both the English and French traditions suggested that the truth affirmations Foley called pseudofactual constituted a stage in realism (May 1963; Mylne 1981; Showalter 1972; Day 1987). Foley’s argument, however, was distinct, part of a growing interest in fictionality as a development within the history of the novel. These studies include Lennard J. Davis (1983), Michael McKeon (1987), Catherine Gallagher (1994, 2006; Gallagher and Greenblatt 2000), and Jan Herman et al. (2008). Generally speaking, this group of critics insists that the novel’s maturation can be better described as an overcoming of literal reference – after the empiricist revolution that encouraged novelists to claim it (McKeon 1987; / V.3 Detering and Meierhofer) – and an embrace of fictionality. According to Gallagher, whose accounts, with McKeon’s, have been the most influential, the early novel’s pseudofactuality was the site of a type of collective conceptual https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-042
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work, through which the culture developed representations that could train readers in the “cognitive provisionality” necessary for modern life (Gallagher 2006, 347). If the early novel’s truth pretense has been the subject of much scholarship, “pseudofactuality” as a term has been taken up only by Paige (2011).1 Moreover, available accounts have been primarily interpretive in nature – they seek to elucidate what the truth pretense means, historically speaking – and thus leave us well short of a systematic description of pseudofactuality as a historical phenomenon or artifact. How did its truth assertions differ from those long made by poets about their sources? How widely was it used in the early modern period? Was it given up, or does it persist to this day? Was the pseudofactual posture inherently ironic, or – as some propose – did writers at first use it seriously? What reasons can help explain the popularity of a conceit we now find so antiquated and unnecessary? In asking these questions, the present chapter attempts to delineate with more precision the contours and characteristics of the pseudofactual novel, which have never been described systematically. Focused on the situation in France, it does not attempt a geographical canvass. My assumption is that the phenomenon is endemic to the early European novel, even if I would also expect the details – the years of its rise and fall, the exact extent of its ‘market dominance’ – to differ somewhat from country to country.2 Novelists can have a number of things in mind when they assert the truth of their narratives. They may aim at a moral truth (advanced via fable or allegory); they may be speaking of social representivity, which is what Balzac no doubt had in mind when asserting, at the outset of Old Man Goriot (1835), “All is true” (Balzac 2011, 4; emphasis in original). However, the truth affirmations of the early novel that have preoccupied scholars are of a more literal sort. Here too we can make some distinctions. One concerns subject matter. Poets had long written about heroes from history or legend: indeed, these were arguably the most prestigious subjects. In this understanding, which has been called Aristotelian (Paige 2011), the work of the poet was to create a compelling plot out of the coordinates provided by tradition. Though that tradition could be prefatorily adumbrated by the writer, what was at issue was less the empirical truth of the work 1 Though Foley herself was responding to and building on Davis (1984), her book never drew the attention of the scholars mentioned above. 2 For the broadly similar situation in Germany and Denmark, see Wirth (2008) and Zetterberg Gjerlevsen (2018), respectively. Quantitative information in the present chapter, which pertains only to France, comes from Paige (in progress); see also Paige (2017).
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(i.e., its historical accuracy) than the writer’s position with respect to a long line of authorities (in the medieval sense of auctoritas (Ziolkowski 2009)). Although many novelists in seventeenth-century France – the leading producer of novels at the time – followed this basic compositional model, it is still not quite what scholars of the pseudofactual have generally had in mind. For the pseudofactual work does not situate itself with respect to a received tradition: instead of telling anew a tale of known somebodies, it offers a narrative of nobodies, which is to say, protagonists of whom readers would not have heard before picking up the book.3 As such, and unlike the Aristotelian novel, it is invested in establishing an origin for the narrative – adducing eye-witness testimony and private source documents, as opposed to Aristotelian referencing of known authorities. Here, I will limit the compass of the “pseudofactual” to these nobody novels with literal truth claims. Even then, however, there are complications. The pseudofactual novel’s most visible formal characteristic is its use of the first person: documents purportedly produced by nobodies – chiefly, letters and memoirs – constitute the novel itself, which is then prefaced by an editorial assurance of truthfulness or an account of the documents’ pedigree. At the same time, many nobody novels of the period have heterodiegetic narrators; sometimes these narrators are first-person witnesses, but more often such works are narrated in the third person, after some sort of paratextual affirmation that we are reading a ‘true story.’ While pseudofactuality is most paradigmatically associated with first-person documents, the pretense of literal truth in fact characterizes more widely the nobody novels of the early modern period. If these distinctions are accepted, what does the career of the pseudofactual novel look like? When does it develop, and when does it flag? It is clear that the truth pretense itself is old, for Lucian’s frequently-adduced second-century CE True Story already spoofs such claims; and in Renaissance humanist circles, hoaxes and forgeries were common (Grafton 1990). But how widespread truth claims were in very early novels – that is, narratives of love and valor, as opposed to the travel and historical narratives Lucian mocks – is not entirely clear. Greek novels such as the Aethiopica (Heliodorus, ca. fifth century CE) and Leucippe and Clitophon (Achilles Tatius, second century CE) do not have them, whereas Chrétien de Troyes prefaces his Cligès (ca. 1176) by carefully noting that he has found the story of his otherwise unknown hero in a patron’s library. Quantitative research suggests that in the first half of the seventeenth century in France, roughly
3 I borrow (while modifying) the distinction between somebodies and nobodies from Gallagher (1994).
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half of all nobody novels contained explicit truth claims, and that that percentage increased greatly in the second half of the century; starting around 1720, levels declined somewhat, stabilizing at around the 50-percent mark, until the closing decades of the eighteenth century, at which time the pretense recedes to minority status. In this respect, the general scholarly consensus that the eighteenth century marked the end of pseudofactuality seems justified. The pseudofactual novel’s historical trajectory becomes more complicated, however, when one considers that pseudofactuality is as much a morphological matter as a paratextual posture. Certainly, one defining feature of pseudofactual novels is the truth pretense itself; in this sense, one may consider pseudofactuality as something added on to the novel, something that at some point would be “dropped.” 4 But I have also noted that the most paradigmatically pseudofactual novels are specifically first-person document novels, in which “editors” offer letters or memoirs not written for publication. Historically speaking, these novels have a tightly circumscribed destiny. In France, they are virtually non-existent before the 1660s and remain relatively rare, as a percentage of total production, until the 1720s; from the 1740s to the 1780s, they make up roughly half of all novels; the 1790s mark the beginning of an abrupt fall-off in their popularity. It is the success of this particular morphological variant that has understandably led to the association of pseudofactuality with the eighteenth century. Yet the complication is that roughly 40 percent of document novels during the form’s heyday did not contain truth claims: some were presented as fictitious creations of an author, while many others were published with no information at all on their literal truth. In the case of the former, a form associated with pseudofactuality is nonetheless being used in a manner we may want to call fully fictional: the non-identity between the author’s name and that of the protagonist creates the fictional pact (Lejeune 1989, 14–15) that governs the reception of most modern first-person novels. (A second, more minor complication is that the use of the commonplace of the editor survives the period, to resurface especially in modernist and postmodernist fiction. However, these later works of Herausgeberfiktion – Svevo’s Zeno’s Conscience, Sartre’s Nausea, Nabokov’s Pale Fire – typically follow the fictional pact of modern first-person novels
4 “Historians of the novel have shown that, as the [eighteenth] century advanced and readers learned to accept the norms of literary realism, novelists tended to drop claims to reality or factuality” (Cohn 1999, 3).
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in general, in that they give their “editors” names that do not match the name of the author on the title page.)5 As Foley indicates with the prefix pseudo, literary historians generally conclude that the truth pretense did not aim at securing the belief of readers.6 Anecdotally, this conclusion seems warranted: already in 1709, Richard Steele was warning readers of The Tattler that “memoirs” was simply French for “novel”; and in a famous letter to William Warburton, Richardson spoke in 1748 of his editorial pose as a way of keeping up the “air of genuineness” about Clarissa’s letters without actually having his readers think them genuine.7 Whence, then, the interpretation of pseudofactuality as a type of protofictionality. More precisely, however, the typical contention is that the pseudofactual posture was initially received seriously and then at some point in the eighteenth century became tinged with unmistakable irony. It is doubtful that such a thesis can be supported by the evidence. Certainly, some texts may indeed have functioned as hoaxes (as occasional works still do): the apocryphal status of memoirs ascribed to celebrities of the day is in some cases as debatable today as it probably was at the time; Daniel Defoe may well have intended to deceive readers of at least certain of his works. It would still remain to be shown, however, that cases of intentional deception characterized the earlier part of the period, and that irony becomes visible only later. Yet the vast majority of pseudofactual novels are accompanied neither by hoax-like seriousness nor by manifest irony, but rather by more neutral affirmations of truth (Paige 2017).8 And this is the case at all points in the pseudofactual novel’s history: notwithstanding the fact that some novelists take more pains than others to buttress their affirmations, the overall quality of the pretense does not change appreciably between 1700 and 1800. But then why did a posture that few if any credited persist for so long? Why, even though some authors presented their document novels as their own creations in the 1730s, were most authors continuing to offer pseudo-
5 One notable exception – though the body of the novel is in the third person – is the editorial presentation in Eco’s The Name of the Rose. 6 See, however, / IV.8 Lavocat. 7 Steele’s remark is cited by Mylne (1981, 75). For a reading of Richardson’s letter, see Paige (2011, 9–11). For the reception history of two famous instances of pseudofactual novels – Rousseau’s Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse and Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto – see Paige 2011 (114–138 and 189–194). 8 In a separate category of works, the truth pretense is advanced as a joke: this happens when the posture is parodically applied to works that on account of their subject matter (e.g., fairy tales) could not be true. Though obviously related to neutral pseudofactual affirmations, the parodic variant is not treated in the present chapter.
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factual guarantees through the 1780s? Rather than postulating a historical progression from gullibility and credence to reflexivity and doubt, and notwithstanding (relatively rare) instances of intentional deceit, one might better understand the pseudofactual posture not semantically but pragmatically or rhetorically. That is, truth affirmations in early novels do not ask to be received or rejected (though they may be evaluated for their semantic content if the context demands it or if individual readers are so inclined). Rather, they perform a function with respect to the values of speaker and audience. (As an analogy, when public speakers choose to preface their remarks by asserting their pleasure at being able to address their audience, their statement is under normal circumstances semantically empty but performatively meaningful.) These values doubtless relate to two key aesthetic presuppositions of the time. First, before the revolution traceable to Kant and Hegel, the value of art was typically indexed to the value of the thing represented, and just as illustrious heroes made for better subject matter than commoners (who were in turn preferable to objects from the nonhuman world), subjects that existed were deemed superior to those that were the product of the poet’s fancy. Second, and relatedly, according to Aristotelian doctrine derived from the Poetics, things that actually happened possess a kind of automatic verisimilitude, and thus produce a greater and more reliable emotional impact on the percipient.9 Conversely, that which was not literally believable could have no impact, according to the ubiquitous Horacian commonplace incredulus odi. Novels were offered as real documents and true stories not in the hopes that readers would credit the fabrications, and not because people were as yet conceptually unequipped to process fictionality, but – much more simply – because many thought it important to respect the governing aesthetic premises of the day. Many, but certainly not all: others denounced the contrivance as absurd and unnecessary. Values, however, are notoriously resistant to argument, and indeed only late in the eighteenth century were the old suppositions about how artworks captivated our interest dislodged by new suppositions – modern aesthetics along the lines of Kant and Hegel, as well as Coleridge’s now proverbial idea of the suspension of disbelief. Thus, rather than the result of an inability to conceive of fictionality, the mysterious longevity of the pseudofactual pretense more plausibly stems from the fact that for both writer
9 “It is what is possible that arouses conviction, and while we do not without more ado believe that what never happened is possible, what did happen is clearly possible, since it would not have happened if it were not” (Poetics 1451b, in Russell and Winterbottom 1972, 102–103).
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and readers of this period, pretending truth was an act of allegiance to the aesthetic and moral seriousness of the novel. Thus, data from France suggest that the pseudofactual novel was in all probability the result of a shifting valuation of literal truth within the aesthetic presuppositions of the time. Whereas most modern novelists downplay or completely occult any real-world sources for their narratives – thus enhancing the works’ autonomy from workaday “referential” discourse – eighteenth-century writers on the contrary played them up by advertising the literal truth that, for them, grounded aesthetic effect. Yet such presuppositions are always and still shifting, precisely because they are presuppositions: the dropping of the pseudofactual apparatus around the end of the eighteenth century must not be taken as the discovery of the true ‘nature of fiction.’ The relation of novels to literal truth is, instead, in perpetual renegotiation. The revival of the old pseudofactual apparatus in later works of avowed fiction is probably less important in this context than the foregrounding of preparatory research that surrounds many novels since Naturalism, or the varied texts that – from the time of Truman Capote to the present – go under names such as literary journalism, creative nonfiction, and the nonfiction novel.10 Equally apposite are the many twentieth- and twenty-first-century works (starting perhaps with Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, 1913–1927) that deliberately trouble the boundary between novel and autobiography.11 Doubtless, such narratives help test and explore the boundary between fact and fiction. But their explorations are conditioned by historically specific preoccupations and need not be viewed as close cousins to the many pseudofactual narratives of the eighteenth century and before. References Balzac, Honoré de. Old Man Goriot. [1835] Trans. Olivia McCannon. London: Penguin, 2011. Cohn, Dorrit. The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Davis, Lennard J. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Day, Geoffrey. From Fiction to the Novel. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987. Foley, Barbara. Telling the Truth: The Theory and Practice of Documentary Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986.
10 In addition to Foley (1986), see Hollowell (1977). 11 See Lejeune (1986, 37–72) and / IV.6 Iversen. For two different approaches to Proust’s ambiguity specifically, see Cohn (1999, 58–78) and Lucey (2006, esp. 215– 249).
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Gallagher, Catherine. Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Gallagher, Catherine. “The Rise of Fictionality.” The Novel. Vol. 1. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 336–363. Gallagher, Catherine, and Stephen Greenblatt. “The Novel and Other Discourses of Suspended Belief.” Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 163–210. Grafton, Anthony. Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Herman, Jan, Mladen Kozul, and Nathalie Kremer. Le Roman véritable: Stratégies préfacielles au XVIIIe siècle. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2008. Hollowell, John. Fact & Fiction: The New Journalism and the Nonfiction Novel. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1977. Lejeune, Philippe. Moi Aussi. Paris: Seuil, 1986. Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Ed. Paul John Eakin. Trans. Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. Lucey, Michael. Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. May, Georges. Le Dilemme du roman au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: PUF, 1963. McKeon, Michael. The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Mylne, Vivienne. The Eighteenth-Century French Novel: Techniques of Illusion. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Paige, Nicholas. Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Paige, Nicholas. “Examples, Samples, Signs: An Artifactual View of Fictionality in the French Novel, 1681–1830.” New Literary History 48.3 (2017): 503–530. Paige, Nicholas. Technologies of the Novel: Quantitative Data and the Evolution of Literary Systems. In progress. Russell, D. A., and M. Winterbottom. Eds. Ancient Literary Criticism: The Principal Texts in New Translations. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Showalter, English. The Evolution of the French Novel, 1641–1782. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972. Tieje, Arthur Jerrold. “A Peculiar Phase of the Theory of Realism in Pre-Richardsonian Fiction.” PMLA 28.2 (1913): 313–352. Watt, Ian P. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Wirth, Uwe. Die Geburt des Autors aus dem Geist der Herausgeberfiktion: Editoriale Rahmung im Roman um 1800, Wieland, Goethe, Brentano, Jean Paul und E. T. A. Hoffmann. Munich: Fink, 2008. Zetterberg Gjerlevsen, Simona. “The Threshold of Fiction: Revisiting the Origin of the Novel through Danish Literature.” Poetics Today 39.1 (2018): 93–111. Ziolkowski, Jan M. “Cultures of Authority in the Long Twelfth Century.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 108.4 (2009): 412–448.
ANDERS PETTERSSON
Factuality and Literariness 1. Introduction The aim of this chapter is to discuss why factual narratives are not normally deemed valuable from a literary perspective, but also how differences between periods and contexts affect the perception of the literariness of narratives. The two themes make it necessary to adopt a double perspective on literariness. On the one hand, a fixed literary perspective will have to be introduced, a perspective from which the lesser literary value of typical factual narratives becomes comprehensible. On the other hand, in order to explain when and why factual narratives are more prone to be regarded as literary, the account must also be sensitive to the historical and contextual variability in ways of understanding what literature is. The concepts of factuality and literariness are both complex. The notion of factuality raises ontological and epistemological questions that cannot be dealt with in this short essay. I will concentrate on factual discourse, defining factual discourse as discourse dominated by assertion, that is, by the introduction of statements for the truth of which the speaker or writer vouches. My focus will be on factual narrative in this sense and on what can endow a piece of factual discourse with literary quality. The nature of the literary is contested, and a really in-depth discussion of the nature of the literary is also out of the question here. I will take it for granted that the distinction between what is to be considered literature and what not is socially and historically constructed, and I will illustrate how the distinction has been applied in different ways and for different purposes over the ages. There is then no straightforward answer to the question of what literature is, since the concept of literature is a category introduced by individuals and societies for sorting texts, and there is no unified idea about what texts the category should comprise and why. The principal question to be raised concerning literariness is, rather, according to what criteria the sorting of texts into ‘literary’ and ‘non-literary’ has been performed over the centuries, and for what reasons. (I do not, of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-043
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course, deny that there are important, observable differences of many kinds between texts, nor that the purposes and purposefulness of the various definitions of literature can be rationally discussed. What is being denied is that there is a true manner of distinguishing between literature and non-literature, a manner dictated, so to speak, by cultural reality itself.) In what follows, I will first review the historical alterability of the concept of the literary, combining the review with comments on what kinds of factual discourse exhibit literariness according to the varying ways of judging what is literary. I will then introduce an idea about what is central to literature against the backdrop of how literature is understood today. If one accepts this idea, it will be obvious why factual narratives are not normally considered to be of any considerable literary value, but why it is still entirely possible for certain factual narratives to be seen as valuable from a literary perspective. To make the latter point I will look more closely at two pieces of factual discourse by Winston Churchill and Svetlana Alexievich (Aleksievicˇ), writers who have both been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. 2. Literature and factual discourse The most basic meaning of the Latin word litteratura – from littera, letter of the alphabet – was literacy, the abilities to read and write, and the teaching of these abilities, which in its more advanced stages included the study of poetry, oratory, and historical writings (cf. Wölfflin 1888, 50–52). But literature successively came to denote secular learning rather than just literacy, and that was the principal meaning carried by the word and its cognates in various European languages well into the eighteenth century. However, during the eighteenth century the word ‘literature’ began to change its meaning again. More and more, literature came to refer to books, more precisely to the kinds of books that were, so to speak, the material embodiments of secular learning (cf. Wellek 1978, 18–20). For the ancient Romans, then, litteratura did not refer to literature in our present sense. Actually, they had no equivalent concept of literature (cf. Shiner 2001, 21). They did have the concept of poetry (poesis), but poetry was, to all intents and purposes, defined by being in verse. The ancient Roman world of texts was in many ways different from ours, and to the extent that the Romans explicitly subdivided it, the divisions were partly different. In ancient Rome, poetry, oratory, history, and to some extent also philosophy, constituted a group of types of text of great cultural and educational importance. There were naturally also everyday texts and utterances
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of many kinds, and religious texts, and legal and administrative texts, but the genres crucial for what could be called liberal education were poetry, oratory, history, and to some extent also philosophy (cf. Fantham 1996, 17). This aspect of the Roman heritage long remained fundamentally important for Western European culture. When the term literature was taken up in modern European languages, it was related to learning, in particular humanistic learning. Learning in the humanities was supposed to be conveyed in a form that did not only provide information but also, implicitly, a cultured perspective on the world. The most famous specimens of humanistic learning were not of a narrow specialist nature; they adopted wide views on subjects considered culturally important. Such works were paradigmatic examples of literature in the term’s premodern sense. Works of humanistic learning were also expected to be formulated in an educated style. This educated style was profoundly inspired by the classical Latin taught in school, and thus by the classical rhetorical schooling underlying the prose of writers like Cicero and Caesar. The style was marked by well-planned discourse ‘wholes,’ wellbuilt sentences, and the imaginative but judicious use of figures and tropes. The old grouping poetry-oratory-history-philosophy still played a formative role for the idea of literature when the concept of literature in our modern sense finally took shape during the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Initially, not only poetry, fictional prose, and drama were considered to be literature, but also, in principle, oratory, history, and philosophy. This explains why works of humanistic learning like Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Macaulay’s History of England (1848, 1855) were considered to be literary even under the changed understanding of the term. But it is an oversimplification to say that the concept of literature in our modern sense came into being around 1800. The Western concept of literature has continued to change. Very broadly, one can say that the idea of what is literature kept narrowing over a century or more, so that ‘literature’ in the sense of the word relevant here began to coincide, more or less, with imaginative literature: poetry, fictional prose, and drama. History, oratory, and philosophy faded out of the picture. In the mid-1940s, René Wellek could write in his and Austin Warren’s influential Theory of Literature: The centre of literary art is obviously to be found in the traditional genres of the lyric, the epic, the drama. In all of them, the reference is to a world of fiction, of imagination […]. If we recognize “fictionality”, “invention”, or “imagination” as the distinguishing trait of literature, we think thus of literature in terms of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Balzac, Keats rather than of Cicero or Montaigne, Bossuet, or Emerson. (Wellek and Warren 1966 [1949], 25 and 26)1 1 In the preface, Wellek is said to be “primarily responsible” for the chapter in question (8).
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But that was not the last word on the concept of literature. Today, the general sentiment in the humanities is far more relativistic than in 1949, and the need for a clear demarcation of the literary is making itself less felt. This is Robert Dale Parker, writing in 2008: The truth is, there is no exact, definitive, and widely agreed meaning for the term literature […]. For more traditional critics, literature refers to poetry, drama, and fiction and perhaps sometimes to more self-consciously artful essays or autobiography. In recent years, however, […] the term has opened up considerably. It can include any writing people wish to study with the same critical intensity and appreciation that critics traditionally bring to poetry, drama, and fiction, and not only writing, but also film […]. While in the narrow sense of the term, literature often continues to refer to poetry, drama, fiction and perhaps essay and autobiography, critics seem comfortable moving back and forth between narrower and broader uses of the term, without worrying over definitions and flexible categories. (4–5)
Obviously, the concept of literature has gone through more or less constant historical change. It is also doubtful that there has been, at any point in time, any firm consensus among experts about the content of the concept. For example, Terry Eagleton, writing at more or less the same time as Parker, views the concept differently. Eagleton thinks that people in general have a fairly good idea of what they mean by literature. According to him, a literary work is generally supposed to be a work which is fictional, or which yields significant insight into human experience as opposed to reporting empirical truths, or which uses language in a particularly heightened, figurative or self-conscious way, or which is not practical in the sense that shopping lists are, or which is highly valued as a piece of writing. (2012, 25)
Eagleton contends that the more of these five traits one can find in a text, the more the text will come across as being paradigmatically literary. The diversity in the present expert understanding of the concept of literature also has to do with the fact that some regard the term as being non-evaluative, while, for others, a text has to be artistically good in order to be called literature. For example, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (2006, 832) defines “literature” as “written works, especially those regarded as having artistic merit,” thereby in effect making literature valuable by definition (otherwise all written works would be literature) and also, by restricting literature to writing, excluding all orally delivered verbal art and, of course, such things as films. Still more features should be added to the picture of the modern notion of literature. The concept as such may have come into being in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but it was always also projected backwards on earlier texts. Where the older Western tradition is concerned, a wider conception of literature has always held sway, and the application of the concept to the pre-1800 textual world has in fact been importantly
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influenced by the older perspective on texts according to which poetry, oratory, history, and, to some extent, philosophy make up a group of works central to secular culture. René Wellek is representative when he maintains, in 1978 – slightly contrary to his earlier stance – that one should include “Montaigne, Pascal, Burke, Gibbon, Berkeley, etc.” in literature, “for how can we imagine a history of English literature in the eighteenth century without Gibbon, Berkeley, and Burke?” (21). Thus some factual discourses have conventionally been regarded as literature. Another important factor is the institutional context in which the judgment about literariness is being made. When a library classifies a book as literature, it normally applies fairly strict criteria, limiting literature, by and large, to prose fiction, poetry, and drama. Literary specialists devising courses in literary studies or writing histories of literature may be much more inclusive, and so may the bodies which award literary prizes. In 1895, Alfred Nobel stipulated in his will that most of his estate should be used for establishing five annual international prizes, one of them going to the person who “during the preceding year” had “produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an ideal tendency” (quoted from Gyllensten 1978, inside of front cover). When rules for awarding these prizes were laid down a few years later, it was decided that “under the term ‘literature’ shall be comprised, not only belles-lettres, but also other writings which, by virtue of their form and method of presentation, possess literary value” (quoted from Gyllensten 1978, 15) – an example of how historically resilient the original, wide modern conception of literature has proved itself. Over the years, six writers of factual discourse – Theodor Mommsen, Rudolf Eucken, Henri Bergson, Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill, and Svetlana Alexievich – have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Some of their factual works have obviously been deemed to be literary – at least in a given sense and in a given institutional context. Even the latest two of these prize winners, Churchill (1953) and Alexievich (2015), would be viewed differently in other contexts. Libraries seem to be rather consistent in classifying their relevant works as history. Churchill is hardly viewed as a literary writer even in literary circles: for example, he has not made it into the Reference Guide to English Literature, which is otherwise broad enough to devote entries to both the playwright Caryl Churchill and the eighteenth-century poet Charles Churchill (1991, 381–384). Alexievich is a different case: she received a number of literary prizes before the Nobel, and she is included in S.I. Cˇuprin’s overview of contemporary Russian literature (2012, 28). When Churchill’s historical writings and oratory were presented as literary by the Swedish Academy, the older, wider sense of the term must have been applied, while the
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more widespread characterization of Alexievich’s documentary works as literature is no doubt to be viewed in the light of recent tendencies to expand the concept in new directions. 3. The experience-inviting use of language Thus far I have adopted a relativistic view of what literature is, understanding literature to be whatever competent people have called literature. I would now like to point to what is arguably a fundamental expectation concerning texts that we currently call literary: a literary text is supposed to possess some kind of deeper import over and above the factual information being provided or the pragmatic requests being made. The use of language almost always involves the introduction of representations, of pictures of actual or imagined realties. Writers of factual discourse try to make their pictures answer to actual facts – to produce seriously meant statements – or at least they are expected to do so. Writers of literature are under no such obligation. However, literature, like all human utterance, comes with a presumption of relevance to the addressee.2 Readers of literature are supposed to have the chance to get something worthwhile out of the texts they read, although the expected nature of that profit is far less clear than in connection with factual discourse. The profit from literature will not typically consist in new, reasonably reliable empirical information. To borrow the words of the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff about fictional discourse: authors of literature invite us “to reflect on, to ponder over, to explore the implications of, to conduct strandwise extrapolation on” the representations with which they confront us, not in the first place to take the representations as conveying information or requests (1980, 233). Our possible profit can be of many kinds: we may be expected to engage with the author’s representations “for our edification, for our delight, for our illumination, for our cathartic cleansing, and more besides” (Wolterstorff 1980, 233). I will call the way of using language indicated by Wolterstorff ‘experience-inviting.’ By foregrounding experience-inviting use of language as a particularly important element in our current ideas about what constitutes the literary, I automatically move other candidates for this role into the background. Fictionality is often regarded as a more or less defining feature of literature,
2 Many theorists have referred to this absolutely essential aspect of human communication. The expression “relevance to the addressee” was introduced by Mats Furberg (1971, 93–94).
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but this is not the case here. Nor do I think of a ‘literary’ style or form as a really crucial element. The contemporary texts that we consider literary are often fictional, and they often have a carefully crafted form. But I am inclined to see experience-inviting as the cardinal point, the end to which fictionality and significant form can serve as productive means. If one attempts to put together a material of actual or imagined realities fit to give rise to important experiences in the reader, form will be important, and it will be easier to make the representations conducive to a freer play of thoughts and feelings if one is at liberty to use fictions and does not have to restrict oneself to the true and actual. But the real goal will be to invite important experiences. It will come as no surprise to my readers that I regard the concept of experience-inviting discourse, just like the concept of literature, as a constructed category introduced for sorting texts, not as reflecting some kind of natural division inherent in cultural reality itself. The point of introducing the concept of experience-inviting discourse is to indicate differences in the way of using language arguably important for our current intuitions about what are and are not literary texts. I would like to add that I also think of experience-inviting as a matter of degree. Texts can be clear examples of an experience-inviting use of language, or just contain elements tending towards the experience-inviting, and so on. Contemporary fiction, poetry, and drama are almost without exception experience-inviting discourses. This does not mean that literature can be defined as experience-inviting discourse. It should be obvious by now that the concept of literature cannot, except by stipulation, be given any substantive definition: the last section gave a glimpse of how heterogeneous are in fact the texts actually considered, or considered by some, to be literary. Yet I believe that the idea of experience-inviting discourse captures a core aspect of what we are now inclined to think of as literature. Factual discourse, as I have defined it, is basically intended to convey information. The aim of conveying information points in another direction than the aim of introducing representations meant to invite valuable experiences of a relatively personal and open-ended nature. Consequently, factual discourses do not normally score high on the scale of literary value. Still, nothing prevents factual discourse from also entertaining the ambition to incite the kind of wider cognitive and emotional response associated with experience-inviting discourse, thus acquiring more or less of a literary character. Let us revert to Churchill and Alexievich for two examples of this.
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4. A speech by Winston Churchill and a book by Svetlana Alexievich Churchill was perhaps particularly successful as a verbal craftsman in his speeches. A good example of his rhetorical art is the broadcast from 9 February 1941 known as “Give Us the Tools.” The speech looks back at Britain’s difficult times during the beginning of the Second World War, analyzes its present situation, and cautiously predicts more promising developments to come. This is one of the earlier passages of the speech: All through these dark winter months the enemy has had the power to drop three or four tons of bombs upon us for every ton we could send to Germany in return. We are arranging so that presently this will be rather the other way round; but, meanwhile, London and our big cities have had to stand their pounding. They remind me of the British squares at Waterloo. They are not squares of soldiers; they do not wear scarlet coats. They are just ordinary English, Scottish and Welsh folk – men, women and children – standing steadfastly together. But their spirit is the same, their glory is the same; and, in the end, their victory will be greater than far-famed Waterloo. (Churchill 1974 [1941], 6344)
Churchill’s style is full of tropes, figures, and allusions. In the passage just quoted, a kind of simile stands out: ordinary British people are compared with the British soldiers at Waterloo – Churchill evokes the country’s proud history and promises an even prouder victory at the end of this war. Antitheses are prominent (we–the enemy; their bombs–our bombs; the past months–the near future; etc.). The passage ends with a conspicuous climax: their spirit is the same – their glory is the same – their victory will be even greater. For good measure, there is the colorful, alliterative “far-famed,” with its Anglo-Saxon, Beowulf-like ring. But the speech is far from being a piece of cheap rhetoric. Churchill’s military analyses are succinct and exact, and with the benefit of hindsight one must say that his assessments of the possible future plans of Britain’s enemies are prescient. The increase in material help, the provision of “tools,” from the United States, is an important ground for Churchill’s guarded optimism. This material support represents an important theme of the speech and dominates its ending. At this point, Churchill also lets his audience feel the weight and reassurance of his own personal role as a leader. He refers to a personal message from President Roosevelt in which the world-historical role of their two nations is emphasized with the help of an inspiring quotation from Longfellow, written down in the President’s own hand. Churchill has his answer to Roosevelt ready. His speech closes with these words: “We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle, nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools, and we will finish the job” (6350). “Give Us the Tools” introduces much factual information but grows into something exceeding the factual. The speech gives a relatively con-
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crete picture of the state of the war and also a grand, but less explicit, interpretation of the importance to mankind of a victory for the British side; in doing so, it offers to its listeners a way of understanding, intellectually and emotionally, a desperately important part of their lives. The account is backed up by Churchill’s personality – his public figure and the confidence, determination, and vitality projected by his voice. The rhetorical flourishes are important ingredients in Churchill’s speech, but they do not constitute its very core. Alexievich, for her part, is known as an author of books centered on the bloody twentieth-century history of the Soviet Union and, later, Russia. Her most recognized works are built up of passages from interviews with ordinary people, interspersed with her own comments. In her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War (U vojny ne ženskoe lico, 1985 and later), the topic is the experiences of Soviet women participating in the Second World War. Alexievich’s point of departure is her feeling that the Soviet war with Germany – called, in Russia, The Great Patriotic War – has always been described exclusively from a male perspective. Yet around one million Soviet women took part in armed battle during the Second World War. Alexievich bases her narrative on talks with survivors and renders part of what they say – in an edited form, no doubt, but ostensibly verbatim. The Unwomanly Face of War opens in Alexievich’s own voice, however, with an explanation of how she has come to feel the need to write this book – the ubiquitous presence of memories of the war in her childhood, the books about the war written by men about the men’s war, the incidental oral narratives she heard from women, which confronted her with a perspective on the war unknown to her, the growing urge to make these female experiences public as an important part of history. These introductory pages are often personal and emotional. Once again about the same thing … I’m interested not only in the reality that surrounds us, but in the one that is within us. I’m interested not in the event itself, but in the event of feelings. Let’s say – the soul of the event. For me feelings are reality. And history? It is in the street. In the crowd. I believe that in each of us there is a small piece of history. In one half a page, in another two or three. Together we write the book of time. We each call out our truth. The nightmare of nuances. And it all has to be heard, and one has to dissolve in it all, and become it all. And at the same time not lose oneself. To combine the language of the street and literature. The problem is also that we speak about the past in present-day language. How can we convey the feelings of those days? (Alexievich 2017 [1985], xxi–xxii)
The bulk of the book, the rendering of female experiences in the words of the women themselves, women who are normally identified by name, is organized into 16 loose themes (“I don’t want to remember”; “Grow up, girls … you’re still green”; and so on). Many passages are deeply troub-
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ling, like this paragraph from an account by Valentina Mikhailovna Ilkevich, a partisan liaison during the war. I didn’t want to kill, I wasn’t born to kill. I wanted to be a teacher. But I saw how they burned a village … I couldn’t scream, I couldn’t weep loudly: we were on a scouting mission and came close to that village. I could only bite my hands; I still have the scars; I bit them till they bled. Till the raw flesh showed. I remember how the people screamed … The cows screamed … The chickens screamed … It seemed to me they were all screaming with human voices. All of them alive. Burning and screaming … (258)
But the women tell many stories, about many aspects of female life in arms during the war, similar and dissimilar stories, about the very dramatic and traumatic but also about quite everyday events and situations, also humorous situations, also love. It is left to the reader to make them all part of history. Churchill’s “Give Us the Tools” and Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War are both factual discourses. Churchill’s speech is a series of statements presented as being meant seriously, and so are Alexievich’s utterances in her own name. The stories told by the women in Alexievich’s book may be edited, but Alexievich must still be said to guarantee their authenticity: she clearly implies that Valentina Mikhailovna Ilkevich actually told her, in more or less those very words, of the events that we find reported. The texts by Churchill and Alexievich also have a deeper import. The listener or reader is expected to take in the facts being recounted, but they are also invited, on the basis of what they are confronted with by the author, to form a kind of cognitive and emotional perspective on wider issues of relevance to their lives. The two texts illustrate how the factual and the experience-inviting can function together – the experience-inviting being able to work also on the basis of the factual – and how this can move a text closer to what we arguably think of as literary. Whether Churchill’s speech and Alexievich’s book are really to be considered literary is another matter. As I have attempted to make clear, literariness is very much a question of definition, and of point in time, and of institutional context.
5. Conclusion I have discussed why factual narratives are not normally deemed valuable from a literary perspective, and also how differences between periods and contexts affect the perception of the literariness of narratives. I argued that the contemporary core idea of the literary is in fact closely associated with the idea of what I call experience-inviting discourse. If that is so, this
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explains why factual narratives – designed to convey information, but not primarily to invite rewarding experiences in any wider sense – are usually of limited value from a literary point of view. However, as exemplified in the essay, it is entirely possible for factual discourse to invite important wider experiences without abandoning its factual basis. The latter possibility is always open and has always been so. With increasing specialization, however, the more prestigious genres of factual discourse – natural and humanistic science, nonfiction books meant for the general public, journalism, etc. – may be more limited to the purely informative than before 1900 or 1800. I have downplayed the idea that fictionality is a principal characteristic of the literary, and also the idea that carefully crafted style has such a role. With respect to literariness and context, I have suggested that a more liberal understanding of what is literary comes into play in the presentation of literary awards or in literary studies than, for example, in the context of library classification. The concept of literature is complex. As we have seen, when used about older periods, the concept is customarily used in a broader manner than when it refers to modern times. To put it simply: the older the culture, the greater the number of its texts that will conventionally be thought of as literature. No conventional history of Ancient Greek literature will avoid bringing in Greek philosophy, oratory, and history. Throughout the essay, I concentrated on factual discourse. I regard genres like historical novels, faction, autobiographical fiction, and autofiction, as literary genres, not as factual discourse – not as discourse whose prime aim is to convey information – and for this reason I have kept such genres aside. It should also be emphasized that I consistently confined myself to Western culture. This is an essay about factuality and literariness in a Western context. References Alexievich, Svetlana. The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II. [1985] Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. New York: Random House, 2017. Churchill, William S. “Give Us the Tools.” [1941] Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963. Vol. 6. Ed. Robert Rhodes James. London: Chelsea House, 1974. 6343– 6350. Concise Oxford English Dictionary. 11th ed. Rev. ed. Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Cˇuprin, S.I. Malaja literaturnaja ˙enciklopedija: Russkaja literatura segodnja [Concise Literary Encyclopedia: Russian Literature Today]. Moscow: Vremja, 2012. Eagleton, Terry. The Event of Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012.
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Fantham, Elaine. Roman Literary Culture: From Cicero to Apuleius. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Furberg, Mats. Saying and Meaning: A Main Theme in J. L. Austin’s Philosophy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971. Gyllensten, Lars. The Nobel Prize in Literature. Trans. Alan Blair. Stockholm: The Swedish Academy, 1978. Parker, Robert Dale. How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Reference Guide to English Literature. 2nd ed. Vol. 1. Ed. D. L. Kirkpatrick. Chicago: St. James Press, 1991. Shiner, Larry. The Invention of Art: A Cultural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Wellek, René. “What Is Literature?” What Is Literature? Ed. Paul Hernadi. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. 16–23. Wellek, René, and Austin Warren. Theory of Literature. [1949] 3rd ed. London: Jonathan Cape, 1966. Wölfflin, Eduard. “Litteratura.” Archiv für lateinische Lexikographie und Grammatik … [Archive for Latin Lexicography and Grammar …] 5 (1888): 49–55. Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Works and Worlds of Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.
V. Factuality and Fictionality in Various Cultures and Historial Periods
MARGALIT FINKELBERG
The Factual in Antiquity 1. The signaling of the factual in history and poetry Let me start with an historical example. Sometime in the late first century of the Common Era Homer was declared a liar. All credit for this assertion goes to Dio of Prusa, an illustrious orator who in his Trojan Oration famously represented the Trojans as the victors in the Trojan War. According to Dio, Troy had never been sacked by the Greeks: in fact, it was the Greeks who had lost the war because of their unprovoked attack on Troy. Dio repeatedly praises the Trojans and elevates Aeneas, a hero virtually ignored by the Greek authors. At the end of the speech he asserts that the truth about the Trojan War can now be told because “the situation has changed […] for Greece is subject to others and so is Asia” (Oration 11, para. 150). The “others” are of course the Romans. It is not out of the question that Dio’s speech was meant as a rhetorical exercise rather than as a serious treatment of the Trojan theme. The important thing, however, is that the Trojan Oration was part of a trend (Merkle 1996, 578–579; Kim 2010, 179–181). Texts participating in this trend included not only such acknowledged masterpieces as Lucian’s True Stories and Philostratus’s Heroicus but also two accounts of the Trojan War written in Greek prose somewhere between the first and the third centuries CE: the History of the Destruction of Troy by “Dares the Phrygian” and the Journal of the Trojan War by “Dictys of Crete.” Both Dares’s History and Dictys’s Journal are presented as editions of recently discovered ancient manuscripts written by participants in the Trojan War: they are thus eyewitness accounts, and therefore far superior to Homer. In the Preface to Dares’s book, written by one Cornelius Nepos who allegedly found the document and translated it into Latin, we find: Thus my readers can know exactly what happened according to this account and judge for themselves whether Dares the Phrygian or Homer wrote the more truthfully – Dares, who lived and fought at the time the Greeks stormed Troy, or Homer, who was born long after the War was over. (Frazer 1966, 133) https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-044
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Although undeniable forgeries, whose strategy of drawing their authority from miraculously discovered manuscripts was quite widespread at the time (Grafton 1990, 18–22), these two compositions were to become the authoritative sources on the Trojan War for a millennium and a half. Their overwhelming popularity was due to the Latin translations, apparently made in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. As a result, Dictys and Dares became, as one scholar put it, “the foundational texts of Trojan historiography” (Patterson 1991, 114) for centuries to come. Not only did they entirely replace Homer as the primary source on the Trojan War: the image of the Greek participants that they communicated, although not invariably negative, was far from flattering. On the surface of it, the challenge to the authority of Homer presented by Dictys and Dares can without difficulty be accounted for by means of a simple dichotomy: the factual (‘truth’), which is negotiated as the firsthand knowledge of an eyewitness, is opposed to the counterfactual (‘lies’), embodied by traditional myth. The situation, however, is far from being as straightforward as it may seem at first sight. It would not be difficult to show that throughout Greco-Roman civilization first-hand knowledge did indeed act as the most conspicuous signal of factuality. It is firmly established in this capacity already in Homer. To quote Bruno Snell, “the uncomplicated views which he [Homer] holds concerning knowledge always apply in the same stable ratio: the wider the experience the greater the knowledge” (1982 [1953], 137). It is owing to this ratio that the eyewitness possesses greater knowledge than the recipient of hearsay, that the older man has the same advantage over the younger and that, in general, mortals can never compare in knowledge with the omnipresent and omniscient gods. When the author of Dares’s History claims that Homer lived many years after the Trojan War and therefore possessed no first-hand knowledge of it, he only uses the information that Homer himself supplies. Homer never pretends to speak from within the period he describes: what he claims is that, thanks to his contact with the Muses, he faithfully preserves the memory of the past. The Muses, however, did witness the events of the past, and they transmit the truthful account of these events to the poet. The locus classicus is the invocation of the Muses introducing the Catalogue of Ships: Tell me now, you Muses who have your homes on Olympus – you are goddesses, and attend all things and know all things, but we hear only the hearsay (kleos) and have no knowledge – tell me who were the leaders of the Danaans and their rulers. (Iliad, Book 2, lines 484–487)
What the Muses communicate to the singer and, through his mediation, to other mortals, is information about events that they have personally witnessed.
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Autopsia, or ‘seeing with one’s own eyes,’ was also the leading principle of budding historiography. In the first historiographical composition ever written, Herodotus similarly distinguishes between opsis, or eyewitness experience, and akoē – things heard by report: Thus far I have spoken of Egypt from my own observation, relating what I myself saw, the ideas that I formed, and the results of my own researches. What follows rests on the accounts given me by the Egyptians, which I shall now repeat […]. (Book 2, para. 99)
Like Homer, Herodotus manifestly prefers first-hand knowledge to oral testimony (the motif of transmitting information via written records will emerge much later); at the same time, he would accept the latter whenever personal knowledge of a particular issue is unavailable. Herodotus’s emphasis on autopsy and evidence, shared with early scientific writers, becomes one of the leading principles of both Greek and Roman historiography (Longley 2012). Both epic poetry and historiography thus based their authority on the principle of first-hand knowledge. The correlation is however not symmetrical, for historians, Herodotus included, were often called liars nevertheless. The most conspicuous example is that of the explorer Pytheas of Massalia (Marseille) who lived in the second half of the fourth century BCE. Pytheas claimed to have gone into the outer (Atlantic) ocean, visited Britain, and proceeded along the northern parts of the European continent, meeting on his way some previously unknown ‘Scythic’ (presumably Germanic) tribes dwelling around the estuary of a great river (presumably the Rhine). Although Pytheas based his reports on first-hand knowledge, this did not prevent him from being treated (unjustly, as it appears now) as a liar by historians, notably Polybius and Strabo. As distinct from this, Homer, though criticized by some for his inadequate representation of the gods, for the immoral behavior of his heroes, as well as for the lack of advanced knowledge in his poems, had never been envisaged as an unreliable historical source. Relating this phenomenon to Homer’s contact with the Muses provides only a partial explanation for it. While the privileged position of the Muses as eyewitnesses of past events was taken very seriously indeed by the Greeks of the Archaic Age (Finkelberg 1998, 71–73), by the fifth century BCE it had become hardly more than a poetic convention. Evoking a contact with the divine for validating one’s account will continue to be used in religious and philosophical contexts (Parmenides’s Goddess immediately comes to mind here), but not in literary ones. It is not here, then, that the source of Homer’s authority in subsequent generations should be sought for.
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2. The factual vs. the counterfactual and the nonfactual In his influential book Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths?, Paul Veyne outlines what he calls “programs of truth” (1988, 17–26). These are the socially constructed criteria by which every culture negotiates ideas of truth and falsehood. Alternative programs of truth, such as legend vs. history, myth vs. everyday life, may well exist alongside one another without producing contradiction. In fact, the phenomenon described by Veyne was identified as early as Plato’s Phaedrus, whose Socrates emphatically refuses to endorse the contemporary practice of rationalist criticism of myth, defining the corpus of traditional myths as “what is commonly believed” (to nomizomenon, 230a2).1 For hundreds of years, there had been no alternative “program of truth” as far as the historicity of Homer’s account of the Trojan War was concerned (cf. Finkelberg 2011). Even the most critical historians did not deviate from this pattern. This is how, for example, Thucydides begins his discussion of the Homeric Catalogue of Ships: And we may fairly suppose the Trojan expedition to have been greater than any which preceded it, although according to Homer, if we may once more appeal to his testimony, not equal to those of our own day. He was a poet, and may therefore be expected to exaggerate; yet, even upon his showing, the expedition was comparatively small. (Book 1, para. 10)
By careful analysis of the figures supplied by Homer, Thucydides arrives at a much more modest estimate of the number of warriors involved in the Trojan campaign. Yet, although he criticizes Homer for his lack of precision, Thucydides never doubts the historicity of the Trojan War or the authority of Homer as the principal source of information about it. Likewise, later historians routinely opened their works with a reference to the Trojan War, an event which was universally believed to have stood at the beginning of Greek history. Since the fifth century BCE, the Iliad and the Odyssey had become the basis of elementary education, to be memorized at schools all over the Greek world. Small wonder, therefore, that the authority of Homer in everything concerning the Trojan War had never been doubted. That is, never until the time of Dio of Prusa, a citizen of the Roman Empire, where, some eight hundred years after Homer, a new “program of truth” regarding the Trojan War began to establish itself. As Dio put it, “the situation has changed” (above). It is in this change of
1 Here and elsewhere, the references to Plato follow the so-called Stephanus pagination, the standard system of reference used in editions and translations of Plato’s work.
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situation that the cause of the challenge to Homer’s authority should be sought for. The new vision of the Trojan War as proclaimed by Dio and promulgated by Dictys and Dares could hardly have met with such wide acceptance were it not for Virgil’s Aeneid and the myth of Trojan ancestry of the Romans that it advanced. Now the myth of Trojan ancestry, although greatly enhanced by Virgil, was not invented by him: the identification with the Trojans had begun centuries earlier, at the very dawn of Roman history. What Virgil did, and what was accepted with enthusiasm, was the introduction of the idea of the superiority of Rome, as represented by its antecedent Troy, over Greece (see, e.g., Aeneid 6.489–493). Thus, although he never called Homer a liar or reversed the story line fixed in the Homeric poems, Virgil, who (roughly) wrote a century before Dio, accomplished a thorough revision of the attitude to the Trojan conflict bestowed by Homer. Virgil’s version of the Trojan War was not merely popular: it became so authoritative as to outlive the Roman Empire itself. The earliest attribution of Trojan origins to a northern European people is attested as early as the mid-seventh century CE: the people in question were the Franks, with the Britons following in their steps one hundred and fifty years later (Waswo 1995, 269–274). Throughout the Middle Ages, more and more peoples, states and dynasties lay claim to Trojan ancestry, so much so that the myth of Trojan origins eventually came to play the role of “the founding myth of Western history” (Patterson 1991, 84). Like the Romans before them, the peoples of Western Europe strove to gain in prestige by joining the circle of those whose history had begun with the Trojan War. As the medievalist R. Waswo put it, the foundation myths of Trojan origins were “quite remarkably Virgilian” (1995, 272). Now, both Homer and Virgil were poets, and their epics are universally recognized literary masterpieces. Why, then, were these works of literature received in Greece and Rome and, later, in medieval and early modern Europe as sources of historical knowledge? What happened to the distinction between history and poetry drawn by Aristotle in the Poetics? And where are the works of historians, which circulated in abundance in both Greece and Rome? Why is it the Aeneid and not, say, the Roman Antiquities of Virgil’s contemporary Dionysius of Halicarnassus that provided the authoritative picture of Roman history for generations to come? The answer lies in the fact that the Iliad and the Odyssey on the one hand and the Aeneid on the other functioned in Greco-Roman antiquity not just as literary texts: they were the bearers of historical myths which played a pivotal role in the civilizations to which they belonged. Placed beyond the distinction between the factual and the counterfactual, they were essentially nonfactual.
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In the last analysis, therefore, what caused a given text to be authenticated were not the signals of factuality it exhibited but, rather, the nonfactual “programs of truth” obtaining in a given historical period. The revision of the inherited picture of the Trojan War offered by Dictys and Dares was universally accepted not because it presented itself as issuing from the authors’ first-hand knowledge but, rather, because it suited the new “program of truth” as regards the Trojan War that had consolidated in the Roman period. As a result, the signals of factuality supplied by Dictys and Dares were used to authenticate two blatant forgeries and to invest them with the kind of authority which had never been granted to the authentic first-hand reports provided by Herodotus or Pytheas. We should speak, therefore, not of a dichotomy but of a trichotomy of factual, counterfactual, and nonfactual (or, perhaps, metafactual?), of which the first is to be understood as empirical knowledge, the second as distortion of truth, or lies, and the third as tradition and myth (‘what is commonly believed’). Another sphere where truth claims did not proceed from the factual was that of logical reasoning. Again, Plato is the one who supplies the clearest possible explanation. In the Phaedo, after having presented his arguments for the immortality of the soul, Plato’s Socrates concludes that, insofar as the initial premises (hypotheseis) are sound, there is nothing left but to follow the course of the argument (logos), “and if that be plain and clear, there will be no need for any further enquiry” (107b). But it seems that the argument alone is nevertheless not quite enough, and the dialogue concludes with the myth of an afterlife (so also in the Gorgias and the Republic). Where does the fictional enter this picture? Since up to a fairly late date ancient Greek writers preferred to use ready-made mythological subjects rather than to invent new ones, from the standpoint of factuality all traditional fiction, such as epos and tragedy, fully merged with myth on which it was based. Apart from late antique mythography (as represented today by Apollodorus’s Library), there were no self-contained mythical narratives separate from epic, lyric, or dramatic poetry in which they were embodied. Thus, for example, Sophocles’s tragedy is our most comprehensive source on the Oedipus myth; the latter, however, was just an episode in the lost epic saga of the destruction of Thebes whose historicity, just like that of the Trojan War, was taken for granted. That the Oedipus Rex was also a literary masterpiece and one of the highpoints of Greek drama was relevant only to those few who focused their attention on the issues of fiction and fictionality. That is to say, insofar as we proceed from the factual, we will never arrive at the fictional as separated from myth. This is why in the last section I will reverse the perspective and will try to
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approach the factual from the standpoint of the theory and practice of fiction.
3. The factual from the standpoint of the fictional While the discourse concerning the factual spreads over the entire timespan of Greco-Roman civilization, the discourse of the fictional, and indeed the very acknowledgement of fiction as a self-contained cultural phenomenon, is almost exclusively associated with Athens of the late fifth to late fourth century BCE, finding its most conspicuous expression in the work of Plato and Aristotle. It should be kept in mind in this connection that for a number of reasons the ancient Greek discourse of the fictional, first and foremost, the Poetics of Aristotle, exerted a much greater influence on early modern than on Hellenistic and Roman thought (see, e.g., Halliwell 1986, 287–290). Likewise the trichotomy historia – argumentum – fabula, first attested in the first-century-BCE Rhetorica ad Herennium (1.8.12; / V.2 von Contzen), whose anonymous author was apparently unaware of the tenets of the Poetics, only became influential in the Middle Ages. As Aristotle famously argued, poetry deals with “what may happen” (hoia an genoito) and therefore does not belong to the realm of the factual (“what has happened,” ta genomena) (Poetics, Ch. 9). In the Sophist, Plato arrives at the conclusion that mimetic art should be approached as neither truth nor lies but, rather, as a special kind of reality (240a, 241e; Finkelberg 2014, 154–156). It goes without saying that, insofar as “poetry” is understood as a reality sui generis delivering “what may happen” rather than “what has happened,” it cannot be approached as either factual or counterfactual. We should take into account in this connection that, when discussing “poetry” (poiēsis, “making”), Plato and Aristotle had in mind mimetic, that is, representational, poetry. This is why to all intents and purposes their ‘poetry’ amounted to what we today call fiction (Finkelberg 1998, 172–181; 2014, 158–159). This was not lost on Henry Fielding, who argued in the Author’s Preface to Joseph Andrews that it is immaterial whether epic or drama be cast in verse or in prose; he defined his own novel, “Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes, Author of Don Quixote,” as “a comic epic poem in prose” (1939 [1742], xxxii). To recapitulate, fiction finds itself, together with myth and logical reasoning, in opposition to both the factual and the counterfactual: identified as neither empirical truth nor lies, it fully belongs to the sphere of nonfactual. In view of this, it is even more remarkable that signals of factuality
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can be shown to be employed in the sphere of the fictional as well (/ IV.8 Lavocat). Up to the emergence of the Hellenistic novel, the only form of narrative fiction which did not use the ready-made mythological subjects was the Socratic dialogue. Many dialogues are purely dramatic, but those cast in reported form are invariably delivered by first-person narrators (the standard form of narrative in the archaic and classical texts) who give reports of conversations at which they themselves were present. Three dialogues authored by Plato – the Parmenides, the Symposium, and the Theaetetus – go even further than that, in that they present themselves as second, or even third-hand narratives transmitting such reports. Each one of these narrators expressly signals the factual character of the reports they deliver. In the Parmenides, Cephalus of Clazomenae narrates (first level) how, upon arriving in Athens, he and his compatriots sought to be introduced to Antiphon (second level), who as a youth had often heard from Pythodorus (third level) about the meeting of young Socrates with the philosophers Parmenides and Zeno (fourth level), which had taken place in Pythodorus’s house (126b–c). When they arrive in the house of Antiphon, their host starts to recount the story of that legendary meeting. In the Symposium, Socrates’s follower Apollodorus fulfils the request of an unnamed friend to tell him and his companions of what he heard from Aristodemus, another associate of Socrates, about the speeches in praise of love delivered years ago at a dinner party which took place in the house of the poet Agathon. Furthermore, Apollodorus emphasizes that he consulted Socrates as regards Aristodemus’s account, and Socrates confirmed its reliability (173b). In the Theaetetus, Terpsion asks Euclides, who has just seen the dying Theaetetus being carried home to Athens via their native Megara, to tell him what he had heard from Socrates about his encounter with Theaetetus as a youth. Euclides explains that he took notes of Socrates’s account of the conversation as soon as he got home: And later I filled them up from memory, writing them out at leisure; and whenever I went to Athens, I asked Socrates about any point which I had forgotten, and on my return I made corrections; thus I have nearly the whole conversation written down. (143a)
As with Apollodorus in the Symposium, the consultation with Socrates serves as a guarantee of the reliability of Euclides’s account. The signals of factuality that emerge in these dialogues are identical to those employed in historical narratives. This is not to say, however, that Plato aimed at creating a factual account: signals of factuality were used in his dialogues for enhancing their mimetic effect rather than for the purpose of authentication. Plato and other Socratic writers overtly signaled
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the fictionality of their dialogues. They did not refrain from presenting blatantly implausible encounters between Socrates and his interlocutors (as, for example, in the Parmenides) or from crediting Socrates with arguments that could not be made by him (passim). Everything was conventional here, beginning with the narrative voice (Plato never speaks for himself in his dialogues). The mere presence of Socrates, a bare mention of the spatiotemporal setting with which he had come to be firmly associated were enough for the reader to become immersed into the fictional universe of Socratic dialogue and to subscribe to its conventions. Small wonder therefore that the newfangled genre of Sōkratikoi logoi was recognized as mimetic fiction as early as Aristotle (see Poetics, Ch. 1). Interestingly, the strategy of bringing into play eyewitness reports for the purpose of enhancing the verisimilitude of a fictional narrative has proved more persistent than the use of this strategy in historical or scientific contexts. One may think of Chaucer, who presented the narrator of The Canterbury Tales (ca. 1400) as actually joining the company of the pilgrims and thus becoming, just like Plato’s narrators, the direct recipient of the stories delivered (1.19–42), or of The Manuscript Found in Saragossa by Jan Potocki (1800), whose author adopted the signals of factuality used by Dictys, Dares, and other producers of ancient forgeries, to create a highly sophisticated work of literary fiction. Just as with the invocation of the Muses, the signaling of the factual along the lines of eyewitness testimony has run its course to become a literary convention (/ IV.7 Korthals, / IV.8 Lavocat). References Aristotle. Poetics. Ed. D. W. Lucas. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968. Dio Chrysostom. Discourses 1–11. Trans. J. W. Cohoon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932. Fielding, Henry. The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams. [1742] New York: Random House, 1939. Finkelberg, Margalit. The Birth of Literary Fiction in Ancient Greece. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Finkelberg, Margalit. “The Canonicity of Homer.” Kanon in Konstruktion und Dekonstruktion – antike, religiöse und literarische Kanonisierungsprozesse. Ein Handbuch. Eds. Eve-Marie Becker and Stefan Scholz. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. 137–151. Finkelberg, Margalit. “Diagnosing Fiction: From Plato to Borges.” True Lies Worldwide: Fictionality in Global Contexts. Eds. Anders Cullhed and Lena Rydholm. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. 153–165. Frazer, R. M., Jr. Trans. The Trojan War. The Chronicles of Dictys of Crete and Dares the Phrygian. Bloomington, IN and London: Indiana University Press, 1966. Grafton, Anthony. Forgers and Critics. Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.
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Halliwell, Stephen. Aristotle’s Poetics. London: Duckworth, 1986. Herodotus. The Persian Wars. Trans. George Rawlinson. The Greek Historians. Vol. 1. Ed. Francis R. B. Godolphin. New York: Random House, 1942. 3–563. Homer. The Iliad. Trans. Martin Hammond. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987. Kim, Lawrence. Homer Between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Longley, Georgina M. “Autopsy.” The Encyclopedia of Ancient History. 13 vols. Eds. Roger S. Bagnal, Kai Brodersen, Craige B. Champion, Andrew Erskine, Sabine R. Huebner. Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley/Blackwell, 2012. 983. Merkle, Stefan. “The Truth and Nothing but the Truth: Dictys and Dares.” The Novel in the Ancient World. Ed. Gareth Schmeling. Leiden: Brill, 1996. 563–581. Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Plato. Theaetetus. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1726. The Project Gutenberg Ebook, 2008 (30 April 18). Snell, Bruno. The Discovery of the Mind in Greek Philosophy and Literature. [1953] Trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer. New York: Dover, 1982. Thucydides. The Peloponnesian War. Trans. Benjamin Jowett. The Greek Historians. Vol. 1. Ed. Francis R. B. Godolphin. New York: Random House, 1942. 565–1001. Veyne, Paul. Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on Constitutive Imagination. Trans. P. Wissing. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Waswo, R. “Our Ancestors, the Trojans: Inventing Cultural Identity in the Middle Ages.” Exemplaria 7.2 (1995): 269–290.
EVA VON CONTZEN
Diachrony: The Factual in the Middle Ages While the concept of fictionality has received considerable attention by scholars in recent years, in particular within German medieval studies, the factual has not, or only marginally, been treated.1 (/ V.8 Toral-Niehoff ) Any overview of medieval practices of potential ‘factual’ narration is necessarily reductive, given that we are concerned with a period of over one thousand years with very heterogeneous literary developments across different regions and peoples. These limitations notwithstanding, medieval authors did engage, both implicitly and explicitly, with the question of how their texts related to the ‘real world’ and its facticity. Their reflections and arguments make obvious that medieval literature is a challenge to the concept of the factual: it is based on a different understanding of authorship; it oscillates between claims of historicity and the openness of medieval texts and their materia, which relies on retellings rather than the invention of new stories; it is influenced by the religious context of an unalterable spiritual truth; and it posits a functionality that is closely linked to didactic purposes, which in turn determine the status of a text. In order to do justice to the realities of medieval literary production and reception, I focus on each of these aspects in more detail below, paying special attention to strategies of authentication, discourse modes, and literary conventions. I begin with a number of theoretical considerations. Viewed pragmatically, in the Middle Ages the factual is a strategy of legitimization in which not facticity but the purposes or functions of a text take precedence. The most comprehensive treatment of the factual in the medieval context to date is Henrike Manuwald’s test case of the dragon (2018): does the fictive
1 See especially the articles by Reuvekamp-Felber (2013) and Glauch (2014). Both authors provide detailed overviews of the research on fictionality in medieval studies. See also the studies by Haug (2003) and Green (2002). Cf. also the critique of the concept of fictionality in Braun (2015). The ongoing debate on fictionality that was led in German-speaking medieval studies has so far only marginally had an impact on AngloAmerican medieval studies. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-045
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status of dragons in medieval literature constitute an argument against their factuality? Manuwald suggests differentiating between factuality and facticity, in analogy to fictionality and fictivity (/ I.2 Fludernik and Ryan, / I.1 Rajewsky). Facticity is the status or quality of a claim as being true with respect to the known facts. While fictional texts are indifferent as to their propositions of truth, factual ones are not. Their validity depends on the extent to which they do or do not comply with the maxim of truthfulness: here, historical facts can be the benchmark, but they need not be (Manuwald 2018, 72). The occurrence of dragons across medieval genres is a case in point: their fictional or factual status hinges on the text in question and its particular context of truth claims. Manuwald thus suggests a pragmatic approach that takes into account the specific contexts of communication in which a medieval text is embedded. The dragon as such, then, cannot be taken as a signpost for fictionality; rather, it can be bound to both factual claims of validity and fictional ones. In the legend of St. George, for instance, the dragon constitutes a factual element, but it does not comply with facticity. As part of the religious discourse and its didactic, exemplary message, the dragon is ‘real’ irrespective of whether or not it can be proven by historical evidence. Manuwald’s approach is usefully underpinned by Christian Schneider’s (2013), who has also made a strong case for the significance of reception in determining the fictional status of medieval texts by factoring in the notion of experientiality and the immersive potential of the artwork. Schneider demonstrates that there is a tension between the experiential dimension narrative texts evoke, which create immersive effects, and their claims of (quasi-)historical validity (2013, 63). Building his argument on the notion of experientiality, Schneider points to an important alternative approach to the fictionality-factuality divide: if, following Fludernik (1996), narrativity evokes real-life experience, then fictionality becomes suspended, or rather, superseded, by the larger category of ‘narrativity.’ For Schneider, fictionality is created in a dynamic process that draws the reader or listener into the textual, narratively decoded world, and at the same time signals its differentness. A high degree of narrativity, that is, a narrative that relies on techniques such as visualization and the imagined presentness of the plot, may then count as particularly ‘fictional.’ Metalepsis, too, heightens the extent of narrativity and thus fictionality. By extension, I propose, one could place factual effects at the opposite end of a scalar model: texts that are low in their experiential basis (and thus their narrativity) may potentially signal a higher degree of factuality. Here it becomes fruitful to return to Manuwald’s distinction between factuality and facticity. Narrativity does not hinge on facticity; it is a property of a specific kind of discourse and as such neutral towards any claims
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of validity. These claims only acquire the status of being fictional or factual once they are placed and read in a particular context in which either the one or the other – or any point on a large grey area in between the two – becomes relevant. The notion of experientiality and its associated strategies of narrating experience allow for measuring, or at least approximating, the degree of these effects, which in turn are intimately linked to the function of a narrative. Broadly speaking, there were two main strategies available for medieval authors to authenticate and authorize their writings. One was the reference to the established auctores received from classical and biblical traditions (which had “intrinsic worth” according to Christian truth and were regarded as “authentic”; see Minnis 1988, 10–12). The second strategy was the claim of one’s, or someone’s, own experience, for instance through eyewitness accounts. The significance of tradition is heightened by its unbroken continuity, and by the fact that it is linked to auctores: “Writers of both romance and history base their claims of veracity not in the verifiability of the events they narrate but in one of two traditions: the ongoing textual tradition, [...] or the authorial one” (Seaman and Green 2007, 143). Texts by authors situating their works in established traditions are difficult to reconcile with Fludernik’s notion of experientiality as a case of “quasimimetic evocation of real-life experience” (1996, 12). For the medieval context, however, we have to broaden our understanding of what is experiential: it may not be real-life experience, but experience nonetheless; the experience based on a long chain of written traditions, on continuity and the high degree of assurance that comes with it. For poets, it was thus a commonplace strategy of legitimization to refer to pre-existing written sources on which the work was based and, if possible, to also claim first-hand evidence. This was easily possible especially when the material was linked, however loosely, to one of the main historical traditions: the Fall of Troy, Rome, the Arthurian court, Alexander, and so forth. Both Dares and Dictys, the authors of the two accounts of the Trojan war that brought the Homeric narratives into the medieval period, are regardless of the poor quality of their writings, regarded as ‘better,’ that is, more authoritative, than Homer, because they claimed to be eyewitnesses of the war.2 That claims of truth and validity are more important than the verifiability of facts is also implied in the ancient rhetorical distinction between fabula, argumentum, and historia, which remained an important 2 For a modern English translation, see Frazer (1966). On the importance of eye-witnessing, see e.g. Isidore, Etym. 1,41,1 (Lindsay 1911). Knapp (1980) offers a good overview of medieval conceptualizations of history and fiction in the Middle Ages. See also / I.2 Finkelberg.
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point of reference for authors well into the early modern period. Following this tradition, the relation of texts to the world was measured according to their degree of probability: historia comprised true accounts that actually took place; argumentum events that did not happen, but might have; and fabula, finally, events that neither happened nor could possibly happen because they are ‘against nature’ (contra naturam).3 Some authors renounced the self-description ‘poet’ in favor of that of a ‘historian’ who tells the truth. The author of the Historia Troiana, for instance, rejects the term ‘poet’ because he has not invented his material.4 In this context, poetic language posed a challenge to the claims of validity in texts because poetry always bore the stigma of ambiguity, lack of clarity, dissimulation, and therefore mendacity. One means of avoiding the charge of lying was to resort to the notion of integumentum (‘covering, concealment’), by means of which one could derive figurative truth from literary inventions and thus reinstate a status of value.5 Writers also argued that the form of stories was not necessarily a hindrance to their truth, but indeed the special license poets were given in order to transmit their messages.6 In the influential phrasing by Lactantius, which was taken up by later writers including Isidore of Seville and Vincent of Beauvais, “it is the poet’s task elegantly and with oblique figures to turn and transfer that which has really occurred into other forms.” 7 Poets thus transform true accounts into a different form by poetic means. A further key aspect in the context of legitimizing one’s writing concerns the function of the text in question. Historical truth and moral didacticism – utilitas et delectatio – were inextricably linked. History and fiction thus did not constitute an opposition since they could both serve the same ends. In Meir Sternberg’s words, they are two ‘modes of discourse’ and as such constitute functional categories that may remain constant under the most assorted formal variations [...]. To establish either mode, therefore, one must relate the forms of narrative to the functions that govern them in context and assign them their role and meaning. (1985, 30)
3 See Isidore, Etym. 1,44,5: Item inter historiam et argumentum et fabulam interesse. Nam historiae sunt res verae quae factae sunt; argumenta sunt quae etsi facta non sunt, fieri tamen possunt; fabulae vero sunt quae nec factae sunt nec fieri possunt, quia contra naturam sunt. Cf. also Rhet. Her. 1,8,13 (Caplan 1954). See Mehtonen (1996). 4 Non ego sum, quoniam nil fingo, poeta vocandus (Prol. 12, see Stohlmann 1968). 5 See e.g. Brinkmann (1971; 1980) and Ernst (2004). 6 See in more detail Zeeman (1996; 2007). 7 Officium poetae in eo, ut ea, quae gesta sunt vere, in alias species obliquis figurationibus cum decore aliquo conversa traducant (Lactantius, Divinarum Institutionum libri septem, Migne PL 6: 111– 884, 1.11, col. 171).
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Aristotle had already stressed that poets did not tell history ‘as it was’ but ‘how it may be’; the exemplary, the universally valid was the poet’s aim rather than a concrete case (which the historian deals with).8 Ruth Morse points to the importance of topoi, which construct a system of conventional “rhetorically manipulated reference” (1991, 95) that draws extensively on intertextuality and the hermeneutics of a particular tradition. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, for instance, extensively inscribed fictional material into the history of Britain, and despite its immediate critique of being a forgery, it became a useful propaganda tool for the Plantagenets’s court and allies. Wace, who translated the work into Anglo-Norman, explains that it has suffered from being extended and ornamented by storytellers, and is therefore neither completely true nor completely false.9 Thanks to the Historia, later literary texts such as the anonymous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (late fourteenth century) can situate themselves within a tradition that links historically authenticated events (the Fall of Troy) with the English tradition.10 Returning to the point I have made above – the link between experientiality, facticity, and claims of validity as markers for the ‘factual’ character of medieval literature – we can say that the experiential nature of a romance such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is two-fold: metaphorically, the ‘experience’ of tradition legitimizes the work as part of the historical tradition of the Arthurian material. At the same time, the work depicts first and foremost Gawain’s exploits at court and on his quest to find the Green Knight by relying on a range of narrative strategies that align with experientiality in Fludernik’s narrow sense (patterns of perspectivization, descriptions, narratorial comments etc.). This brings me to the issue of realism, which – though potentially problematic in the medieval context – in narrative texts is often associated with claims of validity. Realism can best be understood in analogy to the two meanings of experientiality we have identified for the medieval context with respect to literary traditions: “Realism in Chaucer, and in other medieval writers, is not merely an imitation of life but also of the characteristics of certain kinds of literature” (Bloomfield 1986, 179). In that realism may be called the effect of a certain expression of experientiality, the two concepts converge. They manifest themselves in a range of strategies that authenticate a work. 8 Ch. 9. See the translation by Halliwell (1995). A good example of how medieval literary theory approached the problem is the case of the late Roman poet Lucan and his epic Pharsalia. See in detail von Moos (1976). 9 Wace, Roman de Brut, ll. 10038–10043. See the edition by Weiss (2002). 10 See the very beginning of the romance, ll. 1–19. For a translation, see Andrew and Waldron (2008).
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One such strategy is the dream, which, at first glance, may appear fantastic, but grants credence to the events in question because the dreamer can claim the truth of his dream (see also Bloomfield 1986). In the modes of allegory, satire, exemplum, and parody, ‘realistic’ details recede behind an experientiality that is based on received (literary and written) traditions; they are thus ‘unrealistic’ only according to modern standards: Allegory may reflect aspects of ‘real’ human experience, but the understanding of that reality comes from generalized interpretation by the reader, not ‘realistic’ characterization or description by the author. While an exemplum may have overtones of realism, its modal requirement of a moral conclusion necessitates narrative closure that is antithetical to realism. In order for readers to recognize satire, the author must present an unrealistic world in which she amplifies and implicitly criticizes the unfavourable character traits and corrupt institutions that are her satirical targets. And parody [...] is art satirizing art, two steps away from reality. (Wheatley 2002, 303)
In texts with a clear didactic function, such as exempla, the status of the factual is difficult to discern. Exempla often feature seemingly fictional elements, yet they do so in the service of their didactic function. Is the ‘truth’ these exempla provide, in terms of the very practical aspect of their moral, from which real-world, practical lessons can and should be drawn, factual? One may posit that in cases of ‘existential knowledge,’ including religious discourses and wisdom literature, the question loses its pertinence because its truth claims cannot be tested against anything outside of their own framework.11 Yet, if we understand religious experience and the experience to be gained from didactic texts as extreme cases on a scalar model of experientiality, that is, as cases in which the experiential is highly metaphorical and only indirectly accessible, they are still part of a framework in which there is an understanding, and a conceptual distinction, between the fictional and the factual, and between fictive and facticity-based elements in narrative. Religious literature, for example, employs the aforementioned differentiations. Thus, realism is a common strategy used to authenticate the ineffability of divine miracles. This is particularly prevalent in renderings of biblical material.12 For instance, in the Nativity scenes of the Middle English mystery plays the shepherds are regularly depicted in a true-to-life manner lamenting the hardships of their work and sharing simple meals.13 11 See also the discussion in Glauch (2014, 98–101). 12 See e.g. Davidson (1975) on the mystery plays of the York Cycle. 13 See e.g. the Second Shepherds’s Play of the Towneley Cycle and the Chester Cycle version, in which each of the shepherd’s contribution to the meal is provided. For the texts, see Stevens and Cawley (Towneley; 1994) and Lumiansky and Mills (Chester; 1974). See also Muir (1999) on the shepherd scenes. On a similar use of realistic details, see Del Lungo Camiciotti (1999) on the Book of Margery Kempe.
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Likewise, in some traditions, the miracle of the Nativity itself, which cannot be narrated, is circumvented, or rather, counterbalanced by the introduction of the midwives and realistic descriptions of their tasks.14 Ursula Peters has demonstrated how in the visionary writings by mystics such as Mechthild of Magdeburg and Marie of Oignies personal spiritual experience became transformed into the literary forms of religious discourse, deploying modes such as prayer, meditation, didactic dialogue, visions, and hagiography (see Peters 1998; Peters and Warning 2009). Saints’s legends and their oftentimes seemingly ‘fantastic’ accounts of miracles are justified by what Wyschogrod has termed the “imperative power” (1990, 6) they inflict on the reader or listener; both their deep embedding in practices of saintly devotion and the license of poetic writing authenticate and legitimize the accounts. To conclude, medieval literature can benefit from a nuanced understanding of factuality and of how it was realized in different genres and contexts. Perhaps the focus on fictionality has obscured our understanding of the manifold ways in which medieval authors engaged with claims of validity and explicitly and implicitly negotiated the complex and complicated relation of their works to the real world. Following cues by Manuwald and Schneider, it appears useful to start from a scalar model involving the four concepts of fictivity / fictionality / facticity / factuality which are aligned with the parameters of the experiential. The classification of a particular text will be based on the identification of strategies that authenticate and legitimize an account and by determining its impact on the audience’s life and the overall function of a passage or work. References Andrew, Malcolm, and Ronald Waldron. Eds. The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript in Modern English Prose Translation. Exeter: The Exeter Press, 2008. Braun, Manuel. “Der Glaube an Heroen und Minnende als ‘Glaube der anderen.’ Zugleich ein Beitrag zur mediävistischen Fiktionalitätsdiskussion.” Interpassives Mittelalter? Interpassivität in mediävistischer Diskussion. Ed. Silvan Wagner. Bayreuther Beiträge zur Literaturwissenschaft, 34. Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 2015. 83–111. Brinkmann, Hennig. “Verhüllung (integumentum) als literarische Darstellungsform im Mittelalter.” Der Begriff der repraesentatio im Mittelalter. Stellvertretung – Symbol – Zeichen – Bild. Ed. Albert Zimmermann. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1971. 314–339. Brinkmann, Hennig. Mittelalterliche Hermeneutik. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1980.
14 See also narratives such as Konrad of Fussesbrunnen’s Kindheit Jesu (‘The Childhood of Jesus’; Quast 2006).
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Bloomfield, Morton. “Chaucerian Realism.” The Cambridge Chaucer Companion. Eds. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 179–193. Caplan, Harry. Trans. Rhetorica ad Herennium. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954. Davidson, Clifford. “The Realism of the York Realist and the York Passion.” Speculum 50.2 (1975): 270–283. Del Lungo Camiciotti, Gabriella. “’Realism’ in the Book of Margery Kempe.” Jahrbuch der Oswald von Wolkenstein-Gesellschaft 11 (1999): 245–258. Ernst, Ulrich. “Lüge, integumentum und Fiktion in der antiken und mittelalterlichen Dichtungstheorie: Umrisse einer Poetik des Mendakischen.” Das Mittelalter: Perspektiven mediävistischer Forschung 9.2 (2004): 73–100. Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Frazer, R. M. Jr. Trans. The Trojan War: The Chronicles of Dictys of Crete and Dares the Phrygian. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1966. Glauch, Sonja. “Fiktionalität im Mittelalter; revisited.” Poetica 46.1–2 (2014): 85–140. Green, Dennis. The Beginnings of Medieval Romance. Fact and Fiction, 1150–1220. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Halliwell, Stephen. Trans. Aristotle: Poetics. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Haug, Walter. Die Wahrheit der Fiktion. Studien zur weltlichen und geistlichen Literatur des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2003. Knapp, Fritz Peter. “Historische Wahrheit und poetische Lüge. Die Gattungen weltlicher Epik und ihre theoretische Rechtfertigung im Hochmittelalter.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 54 (1980): 581–635. Lindsay, W. M. Ed. Isidore of Seville: Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1911. Lumiansky, R. M., and David Mills. Eds. The Chester Mystery Cycle. Vol. 1: Text. EETS S.S., 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974. Manuwald, Henrike. “Der Drache als Herausforderung für Fiktionalitätstheorien. Mediävistische Überlegungen zur Historisierung von ‘Faktualität’.” Geschichte der Fiktionalität: Diachrone Perspektiven auf ein kulturelles Konzept. Eds. Johannes Franzen, Patrick Galke, Frauke Janzen, and Marc Wurich. Baden-Baden: Ergon, 2018. 65–88. Mehtonen, Päivi. Old Concepts and New Poetics: Historia, Argumentum, and Fabula in the Twelfthand Early Thirteenth-Century Latin Poetics of Fiction. Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1996. Minnis, Alastair J. Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. Moos, Peter von. “Poeta und historicus im Mittelalter. Zum Mimesis-Problem am Beispiel einiger Urteile über Lucan.” Beiträge zur Geistesgeschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 98 (1976): 93–130. Morse, Ruth. Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages. Rhetoric, Representation, and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Muir, Lynette R. The Biblical Drama of Medieval Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Peters, Ursula. Religiöse Erfahrung als literarisches Faktum. Zur Vorgeschichte und Genese frauenmystischer Texte des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988. Peters, Ursula, and Rainer Warning. Eds. Fiktion und Fiktionalität in den Literaturen des Mittelalters. Jan-Dirk Müller zum 65. Geburtstag. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2009. Quast, Bruno. “Ereignis und Erzählung. Narrative Strategien der Darstellung des Nichtdarstellbaren im Mittelalter am Beispiel der virginitas in partu.” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 125 (2006): 29–46.
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Reuvekamp-Felber, Timo. “Diskussion. Zur gegenwärtigen Situation mediävistischer Fiktionalitätsforschung. Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme.” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 132.3 (2013): 417–444. Schneider, Christian. “Fiktionalität, Erfahrung und Erzählen im ‘Lanzelet’ Ulrichs von Zatzikhoven.” Fiktionalität im Artusroman des 13. bis 15. Jahrhunderts. Romanistische und germanistische Perspektiven. Eds. Martin Przybilski and Nikolaus Ruge. Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2013. 61–82. Seaman, Myra J., and John Green. “Sacrificing Fiction and the Quest for the Real King Arthur.” Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages. Eds. Eileen A. Joy, Myra J. Seaman, Kimberley K. Bell, and Mary K. Ramsey. New York: Macmillan, 2007. 135–154. Sternberg, Meir. The Poetics of Biblical Narrative. Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985. Stevens, Martin, and A. C. Cawley. Eds. The Towneley Plays. Eds. Vol. 1: Introduction and Text. EETS S.S., 13. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Stohlmann, Jürgen. Ed. Historia Trojana Daretis Frigii: Untersuchungen und kritische Ausgabe. Wuppertal: Henn, 1968. Weiss, Judith. Ed. Wace’s Roman de Brut. A History of the British: Text and Translation. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2002. Wheatley, Edward. “Modes of Representation.” A Companion to Chaucer. Ed. Peter Brown. Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 296–311. Wyschogrod, Edith. Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990. Zeeman, Nicolette. “The Schools Give a License to Poets.” Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages. Ed. Rita Copeland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 151–180. Zeeman, Nicolette. “Imaginative Theory.” Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English. Ed. Paul Strohm. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. 222–240.
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Factual Narrative in the Early Modern Period In the beginning, there were facts. “Omnia per ipsum facta sunt: et sine ipso factum est nihil, quod factum est” – ‘All things were made by [God], and without him was made nothing, which was made,’ says the Vulgata (John 1:3), the definitive Latin translation of the bible. One of the intriguing paradoxes between 1450 and 1750 is that while most scholars and authors held on to this notion of God as the ultimate maker of facts, they seem to have become increasingly unsure about which facts were really God’s, and thus true, and which were either misconstrued by human error, forged by human malice, or invented by human imagination. Initiated by a new paradigm of scientific investigation and a philological critique of tradition, along with an increasingly confident legitimization of fiction and a politicized public sphere, a number of controversies about the matters of fact and the nature of truth emerged. They necessitated new strategies of signaling claims to factuality, and inspired poets to play with fact and fiction, thus shifting the literary field at the threshold of modernity. Without aspiring to address all aspects of factual narrative since the Renaissance, this essay tries to sketch some of its dynamics by first arguing that the establishment of philology and scientific empiricism refigured the epistemology of fact. Secondly, we examine definitions of factuality in early modern rhetoric. Thirdly, we address the fascination for referential indeterminacy that seems to be latent for decades before it becomes programmatic in the novels of the early eighteenth century. The last section prospects a few generic conventions of signaling authenticity in early modern newspaper and sketches the controversy about fact and neutrality that arose within the media discourse in the late seventeenth century. 1. Establishing the facts: Textual criticism, Pyrrhonism, and empiricism in an age of doubt The Quattrocento commenced an age of doubt, in which the Aristotelean tradition was still upheld by many but radically put into question by some. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-046
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Even before the ‘Scientific Revolution’ altered the modes of corroborating truth claims, Humanist philologists created new conditions for truth as well as a strong ethos of documentation. The turn from scholastic to humanistic Latin reconfigured the modes of reasoning and of claiming factuality. While the Scholastics had used Latin as a technical tool for formulating logical propositions reflective of cognitive truths, scholars like Erasmus of Rotterdam (ca. 1466–1536) or Juan Luis Vives (1493–1540) stressed the priority of language and culture in shaping thought. They considered the understanding as well as the acquisition of classical Latin the best way to detect truth (Moss 2003). In order to revive the culture of antiquity, early humanists like Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) traveled around Europe in search of manuscripts, rediscovering classical works of ethnography, such as Tacitus’s Germania, and of the natural sciences like Lucretius’s didactic poem De rerum natura. Not only did these findings revive philosophical ideas of materialism and atomism, but they also fostered new methods of textual criticism. Scholars carefully examined ancient documents, reconstructed their transmission, compared variants, and emended textual corruptions. By investigating their sources critically, philologists were able to disprove myths and forgeries that had survived for centuries. In 1440, for example, the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla (ca. 1405–1457) demonstrated that the Donatio Constantini, a supposedly fourthcentury imperial decree by Emperor Constantine that transferred Roman power to the Pope, was in fact a forgery from the eighth century. Similarly, historian Polydore Virgil (ca. 1470–1555) drew on an array of new sources to question the assumed descent of the Britons from the Trojan Brutus. In his Anglica Historia (1513) he moreover put into doubt the historicity of the legends of King Arthur, much to the dismay of his English contemporaries. In France, too, learned jurists like Jacques-Auguste de Thou (1553– 1617) devised a critical historiography, which compared diverging accounts. De Thou particularly stressed the importance of first-hand testimony for the writing of contemporary history, and asked his friends to send him eyewitness accounts of recent events, which he incorporated into his Historia mei temporis (1604) (Grafton 1997). These tendencies evince an increased necessity for the provision of sources in order to substantiate historical claims with documentation. Humanist scholars thus proved their statements of fact less by applying formal laws of logic but rather by presenting a multitude of supporting evidence. The invention of the printing press in the 1450s and the unprecedented proliferation of texts during the sixteenth century had certainly facilitated access to source material in general, but it also obfuscated the field of recognizable facts – there seemed to be simply “too much to know” (Blair 2010). Polymaths all over Europe sought strategies to visualize knowledge
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by adding chapter headings, marginal glosses, illustrations, and indices. They also published reference books and florilegia, which helped to channel the plethora of information and present it in a form that was easier to memorize. At about the same time, scholars began to use extensive references to verify their assertions. Even though literary works like Ben Jonson’s play Sejanus (1603) also indexed their sources, the general practice of adding footnotes made factual narratives more recognizable and has shaped their characteristic textuality to this day. Not only does the footnote identify “primary evidence that guarantees the story’s novelty in substance” but, by referring to secondary literature, it also “identifies the work of history in question as the creation of a professional” (Grafton 1997, 5). As Pierre Bayle’s famous Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) shows, the art of the footnote could be quite subversive. Bayle first attempted a dictionary of all historiographical errors and omissions about a particular subject, before he changed his project into a more balanced encyclopedia of ancient, medieval, and contemporary persons. He included a learned apparatus, which often dwarfs the main text, and used it to compare original sources with traditional scholarship, to revise generally accepted facts, or to contrast opinions on a particular subject. Bayle’s footnotes suggested that any historical record was more or less saturated with inaccuracies and lies (Grafton 1997, 192–194). Bayle’s Dictionnaire exemplifies a radical strand of skepticism toward historical certainty, which became quite fashionable among French intellectuals in the seventeenth century. Scholars have debated if Bayle should be called a Pyrrhonist, seeking to undermine any assurance about history by pointing out the various contradictions in the evidence (Maia Neto 1997; Hickson 2017). However, though he presented conflicting opinions at great length, he did uphold the goal of resolving the discrepancies and distinguishing between truth and falsehood. But there were other scholars who doubted that knowledge of the past was possible at all and concluded that one must refrain from any historical judgment. This radical skepticism began with the editions and translations of Sextus Empiricus (ca. 160– 210 AD) in the 1560s. Paradoxically, it was extended by the Cartesian methodology of doubt, and thus spread throughout Europe during the course of the seventeenth century. In his Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641), René Descartes (1596–1650) famously tried to resolve the Pyrrhonism of his time by arguing that although we can trust neither our senses nor our logic, we can be sure of the very thought of disbelief, which means that we exist – Cogito ergo sum. Although he subsequently set out to demonstrate that our subjective certainty, if obtained rationally, did in fact correspond to objective truth, Descartes was soon himself denounced as a skeptic (Popkin 2003, 158–174). Yet more extreme thinkers like François
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de La Mothe Le Vayer (1588–1672) applied Descartes’s anti-Aristotelianism to the method of history (Borghero 1983, 70–84). It may not be accidental that the success of historical Pyrrhonism around 1700 coincided both with the rise of the concept of fictionality – especially in France, where proponents of skepticism like Pierre-Daniel Huet (1630–1721) also thought about the novel – and with an increasingly playful approach to fact and fiction in prose narrative (/ IV.9 Nicholas Paige on pseudofactuality). The skeptics’ attack on conventional wisdom soon spread to the field of religion, where claims to factuality were institutionally limited to pronouncements by the clergy. Erasmus of Rotterdam had published a critical edition of the New Testament (1516) which included not only the original Greek text – the Latin Vulgata was much more wide-spread during the Middle Ages –, but also a great number of annotations and commentaries on textual transmission. Taking scriptural scholarship ad fontes opened it up for skeptical exegeses in the seventeenth century. Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676) outraged the French church with his contention, in 1655, that according to Genesis there must have been humans before Adam, the socalled ‘Prae-Adamites.’ In a similarly contagious Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678), the Catholic priest Richard Simon (1638–1712) argued that Moses cannot have been the author of the Pentateuch, but that scribes, who abridged and modified their sources, had composed the bible long after Moses’s death. Simon was trying to defend the bible with philological accuracy against a much more radical criticism, as it was put forward by Baruch de Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670). Here, Spinoza reasoned that the text of the scriptures was corrupted, full of contradictions and reflective of its context of origin; it was not inspired by God, but compiled by scribes. Spinoza considered many of the biblical wonders to be fictitious and lamented that they had been misconstrued in order to seduce the people. In essence, he pleaded that one should not treat the bible differently from any other historical document; theologians should examine it with the same critical mind-set as historians. Although Spinoza’s contemporaries univocally rejected his theses, he exerted great influence on the materialist philosophy of the Enlightenment (Israel 2001) and contributed to the slow decline of the scriptures’ undisputed validity claim. Spinoza may have been one of the first to apply the methods of philological verification to the holy text; as a result, the bible gradually lost its plausibility as a purely factual narrative. Humanist scholars established the necessity of providing source evidence in the sixteenth century, while the skeptics of the seventeenth century radically questioned the very feasibility of ascertaining facts about the past. The rise of experimental empiricism brought an epistemological
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upheaval within the natural sciences, too. Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) is usually credited with being one of the earliest treatises to explicitly formulate the new scientific principles: inductive reasoning, observation and generalization, and the use of experiments to test the human perception. With his methodology, Bacon set out to constitute ‘degrees of certainty’ (“certitudinis gradus”), and to ‘open and prepare a new and certain way for the mind from the immediate perceptions of the senses’ (“novam autem et certam viam, ab ipsis sensuum perceptionibus, menti aperiamus et muniamus”; Bacon 1990 [1620], 70). Even though contributions like Nicolaus Copernicus’s model of the heliocentric universe (De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, 1543) or Andreas Vesalius’s description of human anatomy (De humani corporis fabrica libri septem, 1543) had already done much to discredit the Aristotelean and Galenean traditions, the multitude of scientific discoveries after 1600 much accelerated this process. A new justification of curiosity, hitherto considered sinful, made it acceptable to delve into the unknown (Kenny 2004). Furthermore, instruments like the telescope and the microscope, both invented in the early seventeenth century, broadened the realm of the perceptible. Galileo’s study of the planet’s movements and of sunspots, William Harvey’s analysis of the circulatory system, and Isaac Newton’s theory of colors all employed techniques of empirical observation rather than formal logic. Entertaining popularizations such as Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686) or Eberhard Werner Happel’s periodical Relationes Curiosiae (1683–1691) were among the most successful factual narratives around 1700. Although not a linear or coherent movement but rather “a diverse array of cultural practices aimed at understanding, explaining, and controlling the natural world” (Shapin 1996, 3), the new sciences introduced new standards for what was acceptable as evidence for a proposition to be true and for a narrative to claim factuality. 2. Factual narrative within the conceptual field of early modern rhetoric Any nominalist approach must face the problem that although the words factum, fatto, Tatsache, fait, or fact were widely used, there was no poetics of ‘factual narrative’ in Early Modernity. Renaissance thinkers did discuss the philosophical idea of truth as well as the idea of truthful representation (Ebbersmayer 2006; Moss 2003), but they did not subsume all nonfictional narrative into a single category. Whenever Humanist poetics wanted to distinguish fiction from nonfiction, they usually reverted to historiography. Classical rhetoricians had divided the field of narratio into three modes: fabula, says Cicero (De Inv. 1,27), is that which contains neither true nor
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verisimilar things; historiae are “gesta res” – things that have happened, mostly in remote times; and argumenta are “ficta res” – fictitious, but verisimilar things, meaning events that did not, but could have happened (/ V.2 von Contzen). Most definitions in the Renaissance and Baroque clung to this triad (Heßelmann 2012), often adding the Aristotelean justification of fiction as being the more ‘philosophical’ kind of narration, because it was concerned with the general, not, like historiography, with the particular. That did not mean, however, that rhetoricians generally equated fiction with poetry. Instead, most poetics in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century differentiated literature and history by the order (disposition) and expression (elocutio) used in their representation rather than by their referential status. The term ‘poet,’ argues Julius Caesar Scaliger’s influential Poetices libri septem (1561), ‘is not derived from invention, but from making verses’ (“Poetae igitur nomen non a figendo […], sed initio a faciendo versu ductum est”; Scaliger 1994 [1561], I,2, 72). Both Lucan and Livy wrote histories, but Lucan used verse, and verse makes him into a poet (“differt autem versu. Hoc vero poetae est”; Scaliger 1994 [1561], I,2, 88). Other literary genres, too, such as epic poems and tragedies, contained a historical core, and it was the poet’s task to embellish their factual essence by presenting them in beautiful guise. This allowed him to slightly alter the sequence of events as well as invent minor plot elements and characters, as did Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599) or Pierre Corneille’s tragedy Cinna ou la Clémence d’Auguste (1641). In any case, warns the German poet Martin Opitz, the poet ‘must be careful in this freedom to poetize, and must heed not to forget the historical circumstances and err in their truth’ (“Gleichwol aber soll man sich in dieser freyheit zue tichten vorsehen / das man nicht der zeiten vergeße / vnd in jhrer warheit irre”; Opitz 2005 [1624], 29). While historiography was bound by exact truth, literary works could either modify historical details or invent their subject matter altogether. While narrative could be poetic, not all poetry was factual. It could be mixed, such as the epos, or merely imitate reality without necessarily referring to it, as did comedy. Even though it remained predominant throughout the early modern period, at least two developments undermined this neat classification: firstly, thinkers like Sir Philip Sidney transcended the Aristotelean argument for fiction by particularly emphasizing inventiveness. In his Defence of Poesy (1579), Sidney proposes that the poet is a second maker whose work can be discriminated from all other intellectual activity because it alone is not bound by nature, but follows only human imagination. In enumerating those arts which have “the works of nature for [their] principal object”, Sidney presents a catalogue of factual representations of the world: astron-
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omy, geometry, natural and moral philosophy, law, history, grammar, rhetoric, logic, and so forth, are all similar in that they have to accord with that which already exists, i.e. nature: “Only the poet,” Sidney rhapsodizes, “disdaining to be tied to any such subjection, lifted up with the vigor of his own invention, doth grow, in effect, into another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew” (2002 [1579], 84–85). Because the poet does not predicate, he cannot lie: “The poet […] never affirmeth”; he never conjures “you to believe for true what he writes. He citeth not authorities of other histories” (Sidney 2002 [1579], 103). By contrast, factual narrative must ‘affirm’; it therefore somehow has to demonstrate that it is not only nonfictional, but also non-lying, that it is true. By stressing the freedom of fiction from reference, Sidney implicitly postulates that factual narrative is limited by the necessity to signal its claim to truth. Sidney goes far beyond merely ‘defending’ poetry; he practically devalues factuality in favor of fiction, thus anticipating arguments that would prevail in Romanticism. Even though this position was rare before 1600, there was a general tendency to re-legitimize human invention beyond the mere imitation of nature (Kleinschmidt 1982). Secondly, the proliferation of fictional prose narratives enhanced this process further. To be sure, there had always been fictional novels (e.g. Heliodorus’s Aithiopika), satires (e.g. Lucian) or novellas (e.g. Boccaccio) in prose. However, because most rhetoricians considered fiction to be a subset of poetry, and assumed most poetry to be written in verse, Renaissance poetics treated neither the novel nor shorter prose narrative. This changed in the seventeenth century, when the novel gained popularity in France. One of the first discourses on the genre, Pierre-Daniel Huets Traité de l’origine des romans (1670), deemed the novel ‘mostly false [i.e. fictional] in the details and in the whole of the plot, so that it could be called entirely false’ (“je veux dire […] que la fausseté prédomine tellement dans les romans qu’ils peuvent même être entièrement faux, et en gros et en détail”; Huet 1971 [1670], 48). If entire works of fictitious characters and events were not composed in verse, but in prose, they were harder to distinguish from factual prose narrative, especially when they did not use speaking names, as had most comedies, and did not take place in bucolic times, as had the pastoral. Both the emphatic justification of fiction and the proliferation of prose narrative led to a certain indeterminacy between factual and fictional narrative, which had earlier roots, but amplified and intensified with the romans à clef and the pseudofactual novels in the early eighteenth century.
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3. Playing with indeterminacy: From Historia to the pseudofactual novel The generic term “True History” had been used ironically as early as Lucian’s ᾽Αληθῆ διηγήματα (Verae Historiae), a collection of fantastic travel fictions. In Germany, the Historiae had played with referential ambiguity since the fifteenth century. Originally used for biblical and chronographical ‘histories,’ the term expanded to include fictional narrative and marvelous novels (Knape 1984). Thüring’s von Ringoltingen Melusine (1473), for example, recounts the miraculous myth of the beautiful woman who regularly transmutes into a half-snake. ‘Even though this history seems strange and adventurous, it is true,’ the epilogue assures the reader, and adds that its ‘truth’ (“warheit”) is proven by the fact that the descendants of Melusine still lived as noblemen to this day (Müller 1990, 176). Similarly, the Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587), a possible source to Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (ca. 1588/92), recollects the devilish deeds of the infamous magician ‘mostly from his own bequeathed writings’ (“Mehrertheils auß seinen eygenen hinderlassenen Schrifften”; Müller 1990, 831), and often reinforces that the story be ‘truthful’ (“wahrhafftig”; Müller 1990, 979). It is difficult to determine if and how many contemporaries believed these assertions; Martin Luther at least did take Melusine for an incarnation of the devil (Knape 1984, 359). With the success of the printing press and the emergence of a competitive book market, factuality claims became an important advertisement strategy. Sensational broadsheets about miracles, murders, and prodigies marketed themselves with titles like “Warhafftige Newe zeitung” (‘Truthful news’). Although much of their reports were implausible, they vigorously stressed their veracity, a convention often mocked by contemporaries. Satirist Michael Lindener, for example, parodied the genre by publishing an account of an enormous giant whose body parts are analogous in size to the countries of Europe and who is sent as a present to the King of France. His ironic title: ‘Truthful news of an incredibly large man’ (Warhafftige newe zeytung von einem gar vnerhörten grossen Mann, 1558). By using a factual title for an allegory so obviously false, Lindener and others subverted the genre of Historia and supplied it with a winking indefiniteness of reference. While the fascination for wondrous monsters abated with the scientific revolution in the later seventeenth century, the ambivalent play with fact and fiction did not. In Germany, the encyclopedic novel of the Baroque often digressed into geography, historiography, politics, or the sciences, and it often included lengthy footnotes that provided the reader with the author’s sources. ‘I’ve not simply made up my story out of thin air,’ asserts the erudite poet Philipp von Zesen (1619–1682) in his biblical novel Assenat (1670), ‘but I am able to indicate the writings from antiquity which I
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have used’ (“Ich habe [diese meine Geschicht] nicht aus dem kleinen finger gesogen […]. Ich weis die Schriften der Alten anzuzeigen / denen ich gefolget”; Zesen 1971 [1670], 20). Consequently, philosopher Christian Thomasius (1655–1728) advises that if one takes the plot of the novel from history and mixes it with fiction, one should intertwine the two so intricately that a knowledgeable reader will find it plausible and an inexpert reader will be unable to tell invention and truth apart (cf. Thomasius 1971 [1688], 40). In France, Nicolas Boileau’s L’Art poétique (1674) concurs: ‘The spirit is not moved by that which it does not believe’ (“l’esprit n’est point ému de ce qu’il ne croit pas”; Boileau 1872 [1674], 223). Although understood as being predominantly fictional, the Baroque novel tended to accord with the Aristotelean postulation of mimesis. It had to imitate factual narrative so closely that, ideally, fact and fiction became indistinguishable. Although an expert could still tell what was true or not, the invented elements enhanced the aesthetic appeal only if they were plausible. In England, too, the popular ballads, criminal biographies, controversial broadsheets and pamphlets constituted an “undifferentiated matrix” of fact and fiction, which bifurcated only later into clear-cut categories of literary novels and journalism (Davis 1983, 42–71). Because they retained many of the qualities of the earlier news-novel-discourse, such as their topicality, the voyeurism, or the formal realism of their characters, the novels of Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding display an “inherent ambivalence” towards their referential status (Davis 1983, 223). While Delarivier Manley’s or Christian Friedrich Hunold’s romans à clef used the pretext of fiction to write about matters of public interest, the pseudofactual novel (/ IV.9 Paige) proceeded in inverse manner: Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) purported to be simply the edition of Robinson’s autobiography. “The editor believes the thing to be a just history of fact,” states the preface, “neither is there any appearance of fiction in it” (Defoe 2003 [1719], 3). Even when he had to admit in the sequel that the story had been “imaginary,” Defoe held on to the notion that each episode alluded to a “real story” (Gallagher 2006, 339). Not unlike the Baroque history novel, these pseudofactual narratives assumed that both authors and readers needed to pretend the story was true in order to enjoy it. In France, feigned correspondences, diaries, or intimate memoirs were set in the contemporary present, featured ‘real people,’ and excited the readers precisely because of their verisimilitude, which would have been compromised, authors thought, if their fiction was openly admitted (Paige 2011). Despite its success effectively broadening the field of fiction, the novel’s premise of verisimilitude still required it to look like history, which it did more so than ever because it was written in prose.
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4. Signaling factuality in early modern news discourse The rhetorical concept of Historia opens up a wide range of genres and functions where the illustrated broadsheet is only one element of the early modern news discourse (Schilling 1990). Here, non-periodical and periodical newspapers, including handwritten and printed versions, originate a great variety of forms. The project of the moral weeklies, beginning with Joseph Addison’s and Richard Steele’s Spectator in 1711, merely signals a late outcome of this discourse. The emerging genre of the newspaper, earliest examples of which were published weekly in Strasbourg in 1605 and in Wolfenbüttel in 1609, explicitly justified its catering to readers’ curiosity; it also distributed authentic facts in the tradition of the vera narratio and created a new awareness of a continuing present time and of a European contemporariness (Weber 1997; Meierhofer 2010; Pompe 2012). While gathering and presenting the latest news, periodicals and broadsheets called much attention to their content and textual quality. In contrast to the encyclopedic culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where the principles of erudition and polymathy determine rhetorical invention, i.e. the finding of timeless and often religiously authorized knowledge, the newspaper discourse allows no less than a fundamental shift from this metaphysical determinacy to the topicality and timeliness of occurrences within an immanent world. Even famous chronicles like the Theatrum Europaeum (1633–1738) explicitly refer to newspapers and adopt their material in order to present a historically coherent narrative. However, an academic and sophisticated reaction to the fast professionalization of periodicals and news media failed to appear for several decades. A controversial debate on the ‘use and misuse’ of newspaper began only in the 1670s, culminating in Kaspar Stieler’s most comprehensive German treatise ‘Newspaper’s Delight and Use’ (Zeitungs Lust und Nutz, 1695). Since most of the statements before Stieler appeared in Latin, they completely failed to exercise control on the variety of newspapers printed in the particular national languages. Nevertheless, the debate gives a clear impression of the historical semantics of the factual. Stieler’s essay, written in German, acts on the assumption that curiosity and the desire for news, for true and spectacular stories, has become an indispensable human necessity. Therefore, the newspaper satisfies this need for detailed information about a specific present and its conditions. From this perspective, one can draw an important conclusion regarding the general process of modernity: factuality no longer relates to a divine and spatialized thinking, but rather to a human and temporalized order. Within this relation of factuality to topicality, facts can become obsolete and lose their relevance with respect to the latest accounts. At the end of his reflections, Stieler
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gives the remarkable example of priests who produce ‘fake news’ (“falsche Zeitungen”; Stieler 1969 [1695], 169) about natural catastrophes in order to elicit religious emotions among their audience. At the same time, Stieler can retrieve certain reports that prove the immediate punishment of those ‘lying preachers’ (“Lügen-Prediger”; 169). This detail identifies a textual practice especially of the vernacular newspapers that signals a paradigm change at the turn of the eighteenth century and the age of Enlightenment. In contrast to scholarly journals like the Journal des Sçavans (1665–today) in France, the Philosophical Transactions (1665–today) in England, the Giornale de’ Letterati (1668–1683) in Italy, or the Acta Eruditorum (1682–1730) in Germany, which usually circulated only among learned academics, the vernacular newspapers addressed a wider audience and thus initiated a great transformation of consciousness. At the end of the early modern period, facts were less frequently related to religious ideas or to a concept of creatio ex nihilo. Instead, they now emerge in the course of a self-elucidating process of narrative representation.
References Bacon, Francis. Novum Organum. [1620] Latin German. Ed. Wolfgang Krohn. Hamburg: Meiner, 1990. Blair, Ann M. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. Boileau, Nicolas. “L’Art poétique.” [1674] Œuvres poétiques. Paris: Viollet, 1872. Borghero, Carlo. La Certezza e la Storia. Cartesianesimo, Pirronismo e Conoscenza Storica. Milan: Angeli, 1983. Davis, Lennard. Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe. [1719] Ed. John Richetti. London: Penguin, 2003. Ebbersmayer, Sabrina. “Varietas veritatis. Perspektiven des Wahrheitsbegriffs in der Philosophie der Renaissance.” Die Geschichte des philosophischen Begriffs der Wahrheit. Eds. Markus Enders and Jan Szaif. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2006. 211–231. Gallagher, Catherine. “The Rise of Fictionality.” The Novel. Vol. 1. Ed. Franco Moretti. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 336–363. Grafton, Anthony. The Footnote: A Curious History. London: Faber and Faber, 1997. Heßelmann, Peter. “Der ‘honig der angedichteten umstände.’ Zur rhetorisch-poetologischen Kontroverse um historia, fabula und evidentia in der Romantheorie des Barock.” Spielregeln barocker Prosa. Historische Konzepte und theoriefähige Texturen ‘ungebundener Rede’ in der Literatur des 17. Jahrhunderts. Eds. Thomas Althaus and Nicola Kaminski. Bern et al.: Lang, 2012. 91–119. Hickson, Michael W. “Disagreement and Academic Scepticism in Bayle.” Academic Scepticism in the Development of Early Modern Philosophy. Eds. Plínio Junqueira Smith and Sébastien Charles. Cham: Springer, 2017. 293–319. Huet, Pierre-Daniel. Lettre-traité de Pierre-Daniel Huet sur l’origine des romans. [1670] Ed. Fabienne Gégou. Paris: Nizet, 1971.
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Israel, Jonathan. Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Kenny, Neil. The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Kleinschmidt, Erich. “Die Wirklichkeit der Literatur. Fiktionsbewußtsein und das Problem der ästhetischen Realität von Dichtung in der Frühen Neuzeit.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 56 (1982): 174–197. Knape, Joachim. ‘Historie’ in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit. Begriffs- und gattungsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen im interdisziplinären Kontext. Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1984. Lindener, Michael. “Warhafftige newe zeytung von einem gar vnerhörten grossen Mann.” [1558] Schwankbücher: Rastbüchlein und Katzipori. Vol. 1. Ed. Kyra Heidemann. Bern et al.: Lang, 1991. 196–206. Maia Neto, Jose. “Academic Scepticism in Early Modern Philosophy.” Journal of the History of Ideas 58.2 (1997): 199–220. Meierhofer, Christian. Alles neu unter der Sonne. Das Sammelschrifttum der Frühen Neuzeit und die Entstehung der Nachricht. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010. Moss, Ann. Renaissance Truth and the Latin Language Turn. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Müller, Jan-Dirk. Ed. Romane des 15. und 16. Jahrhunderts. Nach den Erstdrucken mit sämtlichen Holzschnitten. Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1990. Opitz, Martin. Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey. [1624] Ed. Herbert Jaumann. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2005. Paige, Nicholas D. Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011. Pompe, Hedwig. Famas Medium. Zur Theorie der Zeitung in Deutschland zwischen dem 17. und dem mittleren 19. Jahrhundert. Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2012. Popkin, Richard H. The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle. Rev. and exp. ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Scaliger, Julius Caesar. Poetices libri septem. [1561] Vol. 1. Ed. Luc Deitz. Stuttgart and BadCanstatt: frommann-holzboog, 1994. Schilling, Michael. Bildpublizistik der frühen Neuzeit. Aufgaben und Leistungen des illustrierten Flugblatts in Deutschland bis um 1700. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990. Shapin, Steven. The Scientific Revolution. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1996. Sidney, Philipp. An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy. [1579] Ed. Geoffrey Shepherd. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Stieler, Kaspar. Zeitungs Lust und Nutz. [1695] Ed. Gert Hagelweide. Bremen: Schünemann, 1969. Thomasius, Christian. “Schertz- und Ernsthaffter […] Gedancken über allerhand Lustige und nützliche Bücher.” [1688] Romantheorie. Dokumentation ihrer Geschichte in Deutschland 1620–1880. Eds. Eberhard Lämmert et al. Cologne and Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1971. 39–46. Weber, Johannes. Avisen, Relationen, Gazetten. Der Beginn des europäischen Zeitungswesens. Oldenburg: BIS, 1997. Zesen, Philipp von. “[Vorrede zu] Assenat.” [1670] Romantheorie. Dokumentation ihrer Geschichte in Deutschland 1620–1880. Eds. Eberhard Lämmert et al. Cologne and Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1971. 20–21.
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Factual Narrative in Pre-Modern China: Historiography – Its Nature, Function and Influence on Narrative Fiction 1. Introduction The value and function of factual narratives in human knowledge can be self-apparent and universal in some aspects, yet obscure and culturally specific in others. One of the most self-apparent and universal functions of factual narratives is to record and transmit the past in oral or written history; the understanding that knowledge of the past holds significance for the present and the future is fundamental to human consciousness. Confucius, one of the most influential thinkers of the ancient world, regarded the past as the supreme source of wisdom and identified himself as a transmitter of the past who did not invent. In pre-modern China,1 history was the most established and venerated form of factual narrative. Traditional China’s fascination with the past and dedication to the craft of historiography for two millennia provide an immensely vast and sophisticated ground on which to discuss the nature, function, and perceived significance of history and its relationship with other literary genres, especially with narrative fiction. The developments of historical and fictional narratives in pre-modern China were complex and intertwined, as they were in the West. Whereas the value of factual narratives and history have been more or less self-apparent throughout much of Chinese history, the value and nature of fictional narratives in pre-modern China were much more controversial and elusive due to the long-standing intellectual and philosophical esteem awarded to the factual,
1 The beginning of the modern period in China is usually said to coincide with the abdication of the imperial clan, Aisin Gioro, in February 1912. The time before that, called the late imperial period, was still traditional and conventional. Conventionally, the end of the last dynasty marks the end of pre-modern era. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-047
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and a corresponding suspicion of the unverifiable. Despite the polarized attitudes toward factual and fictional narratives, discussions of the development of narrative fiction in pre-modern China cannot ignore its relationship to history, given that history was the primary and canonical narrative form against which narrative fiction was evaluated and defined. This essay examines the nature and function of historical narratives and the relationship between the factual and the fictional in pre-modern China.
2. Basic Characteristics of Chinese Narratives The basic characteristics of Chinese prose narrative were established by the end of the first millennium BC in such texts as the Exalted Documents (ca. 1046–256 BC), the Spring and Autumn Annals (eighth to fifth centuries BC), and the Commentary of Zuo (ca. fifth to fourth centuries BC). These basic characteristics include third person narration, linear chronology, the use of quoted speech, the centrality of human agency, concern with morality and history, certain personality stereotypes, a seemingly objective narrator, and a matter-of-fact tone.2 Early China did not have an epic tradition as in the West, though degrees of narrativity can be detected in poems in the Odes (ca. 1000–600 BC), the earliest anthology of poetry. The following passage about the history of the Western Zhou dynasty (1046–771 BC) is inscribed on a bronze vessel dating to shortly before 900 BC (Shaughnessy 1992, 1): It is said that in antiquity, when King Wen first took control and brought harmony to governing the people, the Deity Above sent down refined de3 and grand protection, which King Wen spread out to all the spirits above and below, and thus united and received tribute from the ten thousand states. Sincere and forceful, King Wu went out on a corrective mission to the Four regions, reaching as far as Yin’s farmers, and, never feeling fearful of the Zu branch of the Di (northern peoples), he punished the Yi underlings (eastern peoples). Exemplary and sage, King Cheng, together with those on his left and right, formed a solid driving force to open up and clear the land for a Zhou state. (Cook and Goldin 2016, 98)
2 See Wang (1977) for an exemplary discussion of the basic characteristics of traditional Chinese narratives. 3 According to Paul R. Goldin (personal communication), de here refers to power that comes from dutifully discharging one’s ritual obligations.
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The following is another historical narrative about the Western Zhou from a chapter in the Exalted Documents; this chapter is considered one of the earliest chapters in that work in terms of date of composition: After the victory over the Shang, in the second year, the king fell ill and was not happy. The two princes said: We shall for the king solemnly take tortoise oracle. The Duke of Zhou said: One cannot distress our former kings. The prince then proffered himself. He made three altars on the same arena [...]. The scribe then put on tablets the prayer, saying: Your chief descendant so-and-so has met with an epidemic sickness and is violently ill. If you three kings really owe a great son to Heaven, then substitute me, Tan, for so-and-so’s person. (Karlgren 1950, 35)
The basic characteristics of the Chinese narrative as listed above can be seen in these narratives situated at the beginning of Chinese literary history, suggesting a remarkable continuity in the narrative tradition, in which historiography occupies the central position. In the first narrative, the Western Zhou kings are depicted as sages spreading virtue to their lands; King Wu in particular is said to be on a “corrective mission,” meaning he ‘corrected’ the people from their former unvirtuous ways. The subject of morality is also seen in the second narrative, in which a filial son offers his life to Heaven in exchange for his father’s. A higher being in the form of the Deity Above, or Heaven, is present in both narratives, but the central concern is human affairs. The characters of sage rulers and filial sons are common personality stereotypes throughout the Chinese narrative tradition.
3. Themes of the Historiographical Tradition The origin of historiography in China can be traced alongside the development of the Chinese character for history, shi 史, which depicts a hand holding a bow drill used to mark oracle bones. Shi as it was used on the oracle bones from 1300 to 1000 BC, which are the earliest records of Chinese writing, refers to the scribes and archivists who recorded divinations in the Shang Dynasty (ca. 1600 BC–ca. 1046 BC) court. By the late seventh century BC, shi had come to denote court historians who recorded state history and managed the court historical archives (Yu 2002, 158). From its meaning of “historian,” shi later acquired the meanings of history and historiography. State affairs were at the center of history writing, and history and state affairs were at the center of a Confucian education. The highest goal for educated men was to serve the state, and all aspects of literary education were seen as means to prepare one for state affairs and governance. The
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earliest surviving book of history in China is the Spring and Autumn Annals,4 which records affairs in the state of Lu from 722 to 481 BC. The Spring and Autumn Annals was a core document in the Confucian curriculum. The following comment by Sima Qian (d. 86 BC), the man venerated as the Grand Historian throughout much of Chinese history, on the Spring and Autumn Annals, elucidates aspects of history’s importance in China: Above, [The Spring and Autumn Annals] makes clear the way of the Three Kings, and below it discusses the regulation of human affairs. It distinguishes what is suspicious and doubtful, clarifies right and wrong, and settles points which are uncertain. It calls good good and bad bad, honors the worthy, and condemns the unworthy. It preserves states which are lost and restores the perishing family. It brings to light what was neglected and restores what was abandoned. In it are embodied the most important elements of the Kingly Way. (cited in Watson 1958, 51)
From the beginning of this comment, it is clear that governance, state affairs, and human affairs were at the center of historical concerns, though certain religious elements associated with shi scribes’ early roles never fully disappeared in historiography.5 The centrality of human affairs was a core characteristic of Confucianism. Confucius famously avoided speaking of the supernatural. In the Analects, in response to a student who asked about serving the spirits and the afterlife, Confucius replies, “When you don’t yet know how to serve human beings, how can you serve the spirits? [...] When you don’t yet understand life, how can you understand death?” (Confucius 2007, 73). This quotation underlines the importance of history’s function to elucidate the “Way,” which is the English translation of the Chinese concept Dao (or Tao); the “Way” is a philosophical term that refers to the grand patterns and principles of the universe. Sima’s comment goes on to make clear the moral and didactic nature of history and its importance in distinguishing the good from the bad and the right from the wrong. At the end he points to history’s role in preserving the past in textual form (“preserve” and “restore” in this passage are used in the sense that history memorializes and textually preserves what may be neglected and forgotten). The importance of history in China can be seen as historical and ahistorical at the same time: historical in the sense that it records events and people of significance that existed during particular segments of time in the past; ahistorical in the sense that it is not confined to particular segments of time and may even be thought of as cyclical. Although China was never static with regard to social, political, intellectual, technological, or cultural progress, progress as depicted in his-
4 The Exalted Documents is not entirely dedicated to historiography. 5 For the role of religion in traditional Chinese historiography, see Kern (2005).
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tory-related writings seems to be generally confined to a larger scheme of cyclicality. The cyclical nature of history was such a dominant idea in the Chinese historical consciousness that it is hard even for modern historians, in the East and the West, to escape the traditional conceptualization of Chinese history as continuous cycles of the rise and fall of dynasties and of unification and disunification. The following passage affords an exemplary expression of the cyclical nature of history: Throughout all the ups and downs of events over the last thirty centuries, from the vast reaches of the past right down to the present, times of tranquility and light have been few; those of storms and gloom have been many. Rare, the eras of decorum and civilization; legion, those of weapons and war. Those two paths – or order and disorder – are merely part of the pattern of Yin and Yang. The Central Plain6 and the grand order of Heaven all belong to Yang. The barbarian tribes, the morally corrupt, human lusts – these all belong to Yin. In those times when the brilliance of Yang was ascendant, all-under-Heaven was at peace and a wise ruler sat enthroned. [...] In those periods when the turbulence of Yin held sway, the barbarians went rampant and the morally corrupt were promoted. [...] This alternation of Yin and Yang all depends upon the good or evil intentions of one man – the emperor.7 (cited in Hennessey 1980, 118– 119)
This is the introductory passage to a dramatized history of the fall of the Northern Song Dynasty (960–1127), compiled at the end of the Southern Song (1127–1279) or in the Yuan (1271–1368). It invokes the idea of one’s connectedness to the vast past and the cyclical nature of history. Although the fall of the Northern Song was a historical event confined to a particular segment of past time, it was conceptualized in the timeless, grander scheme of the alternation between order and disorder, the rise and fall of dynasties, and civilization and its destruction. It was common for history and historyrelated writings to situate particular historical events in a broader framework of cyclicality and repetitive patterns; one wonders how sincere were the ministers who routinely told their emperor that his dynasty would last ten thousand generations, while the libraries were stacked with histories of the rise and fall of previous dynasties. 4. Historiographical Truths To the pre-modern Chinese mind, history not only recorded the past but also reflected truths about the ways of the universe and human affairs. Is 6 The Central Plain is an expression referring to the core area of Chinese civilization; its usage generally transcended geopolitical boundaries. Similar expressions had been used throughout history to denote a generally accepted idea of what was considered to be the core area of Chinese civilization before the establishment of modern nation-state borders. 7 Modified from William Hennessey’s translation.
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the accurate reconstruction of the past reality the ultimate end of historiography? Or are the lessons and truths that history teaches more important? As Kai Vogelsang suggests, “[i]t would seem that ancient Chinese history was not concerned with truth as such, but with ‘acceptable truth,’ it was not about facts, but about good and bad examples” (2005, 152). He cites an example from the Commentary of Zuo. This is a historical work traditionally appended to the Spring and Autumn Annals as a commentary but which can be read on its own. Confucius is quoted as suggesting that it is permissible to alter historical facts for didactic purpose: “The case of a subject summoning his ruler cannot be used for instruction. Therefore the book [the Spring and Autumn Annals] says: ‘The Heavenly King held a reception at Heyang.’ It expresses that it was not the right place and also illustrates virtue” (Vogelsang 2005, 151). In this passage, Confucius explains why the Spring and Autumn Annals misrepresents the event at issue. Whereas in reality the King was summoned to the reception at Heyang, the Spring and Autumn Annals depicts the King as the one who summoned everyone else to the reception. This alteration of fact is held to be justified because it is not morally proper for a king to be summoned by his subjects; this would disrupt the correct socio-political order, a central concern of Confucian moral philosophy. Vogelsang also points out that the essential purpose of historiography in early China was not “mimetic representation of past reality” (2005, 151), which complicates our modern understanding of the history and historiography of pre-modern China. The preference for the elucidation of moral precepts over the mimetic portrayal of reality explains the frequent use of one-dimensional personality stereotypes in Chinese narratives. Sima Qian (ca. 145–86 BC), in his immensely influential Records of the Grand Historian (second to first centuries BC), initiated the historiographical tradition whereby historical figures are portrayed as illustrating value-laden categories like ‘cruel officials’ and ‘flatterers’; this tradition is continued and elaborated in later official histories in order to clearly distinguish admirable historical figures worthy of emulation from despicable exemplars to be avoided. Outside official dynastic histories, moral stereotypes like ‘virtuous ministers’ and ‘chaste women’ are common in historical and fictional narratives and even developed into character types in theater. As noted above, throughout the thousands of years of its existence traditional Chinese histories (and prose narratives in general) were predominantly written in the third person, with very few notable exceptions. (First-person narration is more common in lyrical narratives, which were not usually used for historiographical purpose.) This consistent absence of a first-person perspective suggests a general historiographical disregard for the factual value of firsthand witness accounts, which can be considered a
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signpost of truth and factuality in other cultures (compare / V.2 von Contzen, / V.1 Finkelberg, / V.8 Toral-Niehoff ). Since the Spring and Autumn Annals, the compilation of history in pre-modern China is marked by “tradentship” rather than authorship. Robert Mayer describes a tradent as someone who “claims not to invent new [texts], but merely to pass on established, authentic, ancient ones” (2016, n. pag.). A literary culture dominated by tradentship comprises “the ubiquitous verbatim repetition of phrases, sections, literary structures, and even entire chapters, across many different texts”; Mayer points out that “such repetition is commonplace even where these many different texts are written by ostensibly different authors” (2016, n. pag.). The traditional method of compiling history in China involves the process of historians copying, transcribing, and arranging existing documents to form a new text rather than inventing something original. Respected historians were those who were knowledgeable about existing sources of history and meticulous about choosing the best ones to copy and transcribe; reliable histories were not composed by people who witnessed the events firsthand, but by tradents who knew what information ought to be passed down the line and how to properly reveal historical lessons. However, this is not to say that historians never inserted their own voices into their works. It was common practice for historians to append their personal comments and moral judgments about events to their works, usually in sections distinctly separate from the factual account, to avoid confusing history with commentary. 5. Genre and Factuality In pre-modern China, the extent to which a text could be considered factual and worthy of respect by the literati depended largely on genre. The genre of a text is signaled by form and content. Apart from elegant writing styles, sophisticated diction, and tasteful allusions to classical texts, it is a text’s subject matter that defines its status. The Confucian attitude toward what were considered records of minor significance is well reflected in this quotation from the Analects: “Although [one] may be [dealing with] a lesser Way, it must have things worth noting. But if pursued too far, there’s a danger of becoming mired in it – therefore, the gentleman does not do so” (Confucius 2007, 134). Ban Gu (32–92), a prominent historian in the Later Han Dynasty (25–220), states: “Gentlemen do not undertake [records of minor significance] themselves, but neither do they dismiss such talk altogether. They have the sayings of the common people collected and kept, as some of them may prove useful” (Gu 2006, 22). The matters of minor significance and the “lesser Way” are those not tradition-
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ally covered by historiography. As noted above, the central concerns of historiography since the inception of the Chinese narrative tradition were statecraft, governance, and morality; any narrative texts that fell outside these categories were looked down upon as trivial pursuits, notably narratives about the supernatural and fantastic. Although pre-modern China by no means had a rational, scientific worldview that eschewed the supernatural and superstition, there was a stigma attached to narratives that strayed too far from the realm of the human, as one’s primary loyalty ought to be to serve humanity, the state, and the family. This stigma was also related to a general respect for the factual and verifiable: while the Chinese did not necessarily consider non-human entities to be unreal, they considered them more elusive and difficult to know with certainty, and the gentleman must not indulge in the unverifiable. Scholars of narratives can visualize traditional Chinese narratives on a spectrum that ranges from the verifiable, highly factual historiography compiled by historians who had access to state documents, at one end, to fiction based on folklore and fantasy at the other. Andrew Plaks introduces Chinese narratives with the following statement: Any theoretical inquiry into the nature of Chinese narrative must take its starting point in the acknowledgment of the immense importance of historiography and, in a certain sense, “historicism” in the total aggregate of the culture. In fact, the question of how to define the narrative category in Chinese literature eventually boils down to whether or not there did exist within the traditional civilization a sense of the inherent commensurability of its two major forms: historiography and fiction. (Plaks 1977, 311–312)
The distinction between the factual and fictional in pre-modern China is considerably different from that in the Western tradition. Whereas the English word fiction, as Victor Mair points out, derived from the Latin word fingere, ‘to invent,’ the Chinese term for fiction, xiaoshuo 小說, literally means ‘small talk’ or ‘minor talk.’ Mair explains the difference between fiction and xiaoshuo: Where the Chinese term etymologically implies a kind of gossip or anecdote, the English word indicates something made up or created by an author or writer. ‘[Xiaoshuo]’ [implies] something [...] that is presumed actually to have happened; ‘fiction’ suggests something an author dreamed up in his mind. (Mair 1983, 21)
Sheldon Lu argues convincingly that it was not until the later part of the Ming dynasty that there was evidence of widespread awareness of the intentionally fabricated nature of narrative fiction and its inability to be falsified by real world truths. Based on extant comments on potentially fictional works before the Ming dynasty, it seems that the prevalent preMing way to interpret fiction was to rationalize it as defective or alternative history (Lu, 53–150). Whereas Chinese writers before the Ming dynasty had experimented with degrees of fictionality in narratives that did not
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conform to historiographical standards, it was not until the Ming dynasty that the novel as a literary form fully matured and was recognized by the general public as something that had the freedom to deviate from historical reality and to fabricate. Not coincidentally, the most championed traditional Chinese novels hail from the Ming (1368–1644) and the subsequent Qing dynasties (1636–1912). Prior to the Ming dynasty, it is perhaps best to understand fiction in China as narratives of dubious factual value and verifiability rather than as an established genre characterized by intentional fabrication.
6. The Relationship between Factual and Fictional Narratives Though the factual is not always in perfect opposition to the fictional, it can be helpful to examine them vis-à-vis each other in the context of premodern China, because history and fiction in the Chinese narrative tradition share a very intimate and complex connection. The relationship between history and fiction in pre-modern China is not uniformly agreed upon among scholars. As Wang Rumei and Zhang Yu suggest, their relationship is akin to that between mother and son: “Throughout ancient times fiction depended upon historiography for its maternal body. It was the son of historiography and oftentimes coexisted with historiography in a mother-son symbiosis. This was even more so at the beginning” (Wang and Zhang 2001, 13). On the other hand, Sheldon Lu and Ming Dong Gu argue that the relationship has been characterized by tension and struggle. Lu asserts: Throughout Chinese history, great efforts were made to control fictional discourse by suppression (censorship) or disavowal (denigration and trivialization). In the historians’ catalogues and classifications, fiction was relegated to the margins of discourse and downgraded to the lower ranks of writing. The difference between history and fiction was [...] between canonical and non-canonical texts, between officially sanctioned discourse and non-official discourse, between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. (Lu 1994, 5)
Similarly, Gu posits: Historiography is to [fiction] as a government is to a rebelling force. From the outset, because of a different creative impulse, [fiction] always wanted to form a verbal genre of its own, but it was consistently repressed and oppressed by historiography, which sought to control it by containment or condemnation to oblivion [...]. Dissatisfied with its menial position, [fiction] constantly struggled against the official discourse [history] until it eventually won its independence and became a literary category in itself. (Gu 2006, 5)
Lu and Gu are correct in the sense that Chinese literary history saw a continuous tension between highly controlled and formal historiographical
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genres that emphasized evidence and meticulous scholarship, on the one hand, and fiction on the other, which occupied a marginal status in the narrative tradition almost throughout pre-modern Chinese history, and that resisted standards set by historiography. Despite this tension, the developments of history and fiction were intertwined and interdependent and their distinction ironically relied on their relationship with each other. Scholars have observed that, after the time of Sima Qian (the father of Chinese history writing), history became more and more thematically constrained and rigid and had less and less tolerance for matters such as private life, the supernatural, the unverifiable, the fantastic, and generally things that do not bear directly on state affairs and the government. (Although Sima Qian’s history is mainly concerned with state affairs, it also contains significant portions of unverifiable material and material unrelated to state affairs that would be deemed unfit to be orthodox history in later times.)8 By the Tang Dynasty (618–907), a genre of history called ‘standard history’ was established; it refers to the massive histories of each dynasty meticulously compiled by court historians of the succeeding dynasty. The histories were based on what these court historians considered highly reliable and verifiable records. Alongside standard histories of the previous dynasty, court historians busied themselves with the compilation of various official histories of previous reigns and daily records of governance in their own dynasty, which would in turn be used by the next dynasty to compile another standard history. Historical accounts by private hands had never stopped being produced outside the imperial court, but their reliability and orthodoxy in terms of official historiographical standards were subject to the judgment of bibliographers and court historians. The increasing standardization of history writing clarified what was orthodox history and what was not, albeit standard history and those private histories judged to be more orthodox were never completely devoid of concern with the supernatural, personal life, and the unverifiable. As subject matters unrelated to state affairs were generally not tolerated in history, they found alternative space in fiction. While it is clear that the thematic commonality of traditional Chinese fiction is that which did not belong in history, it is undeniable that traditional Chinese fiction is by and large thematically historical, with the notable exception of the eighteenth-century Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin. Ming Dong Gu points out that the development of traditional Chinese fiction is characterized by an overwhelming “historical inertia,” which refers to the dependence of fictional narratives on the techniques
8 For these arguments, see Huang (1990).
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of historical narratives and their tendency to adapt historical material. In addition, the discourse employed in fiction was not independent from historiographical discourse (Gu 2006, 22). Sheldon Lu points out that, in traditional Chinese fiction, “events seemingly become meaningful if and only if they are related to a historical [...] context. This or that particular episode makes sense insofar as it can be situated in some grand scheme of history” (Lu 1994, 69). The great Chinese novels tend to be based on historical events and figures; what distinguishes them from historiography is that they depict aspects of reality shunned by historians: romance, dayto-day life, life outside the realm of the government and officials, and what lies beyond the world of humans. For example, the novel Water Margin (fourteenth/fifteenth century) is loosely based upon real bandit uprisings in the Song Dynasty, but it focuses on the lives and petty heroism of the bandits rather than the government’s effort to contain them. Another example is Journey to the West (sixteenth century), which narrates the real pilgrimage made by the Buddhist monk Xuanzang (ca. 602–664) to India, but concentrates on Xuanzang and his companions’ day-to-day struggles and encounters with strange and fantastic beings on their journey. Whereas novels situated in specific historical contexts with reference to recognizable historical figures and events belong to a specific novelistic genre of novel in Western literature (i.e., the historical novel), such was by default the common practice of novel writing in late imperial China (Ming and Qing dynasties). No matter how obvious the fabricated nature of the stories, novel writers generally situated their stories in concrete and specific historical periods and made their characters interact with the historical figures and events of the periods at issue. Although they may differ from history in subject matter, late imperial novels usually embody, in a broad sense, the major concerns of the historical periods depicted and reflect historical reality. For example, Plum in the Golden Vase (sixteenth/ seventeenth century) is concerned with moral and governmental corruption and is set in the late Northern Song, a historical period marked by moral and societal deterioration as depicted in established historical narratives. The male protagonist, Ximen Qing, interacts with ministers of the Northern Song court, who from the historical sources are known to have been corrupt; at the end of the novel, his family is deeply affected by the fall of the Northern Song, which was a real historical event that devastated the population. Like history, traditional Chinese novels are set in particular periods of the past but are generally concerned with timeless lessons and grander patterns and principles of human affairs; also like history, it was conventional for novels to be fairly didactic in tone. The following comment by the Qing Dynasty (1616–1912) novel critic Zhang Zhupo (1670– 1698) remarks on the philosophical and didactic significance of Plum in the
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Golden Vase in a way that parallels Sima Qian’s on the significance of the Spring and Autumn Annals quoted above: “While portraying each of his characters with utter fidelity to human nature, the author is also faithful in his portrayal of the way of Heaven. From ancient times it is in ways such as these that Heaven has punished the wicked, rewarded the good, and overthrown the powerful and unscrupulous” (Zhang 1990, 233). We now turn to the relationship on the formal level between fiction and history. Some of the most central features of Chinese narratives were established by the earliest histories, and later fictional works naturally reflect these. The notable narrative features from earlier literary traditions that were perfected in late imperial novels – and are largely absent in historiography – include the omniscient narrator, its much more explicit presence, and its willful control over what is being told. At a stylistic level, we see the weaving of verse into prose narrative, a “simulated context” in which the textual narrator simulates oral story-telling performance,9 and an episodic structure. Despite such formal innovations, it was conventional for fiction writers to frame the central fictional story within a history-like external narrative frame. It was common for long late imperial novels to set the outermost frame as a narrative that resembles what one would expect to find in orthodox history, particularly featuring events concerning the emperor and the imperial court; this outermost historical frame is invoked at the very beginning and the very end, and at some points in the middle as well. Let us use Water Margin as an example. The central story of Water Margin concerns the lives and conquests of petty bandits, which would be considered too trivial a story for history, but its author (whose identity is uncertain) embeds it in a history-like frame. The novel begins by depicting a scene at the court of Emperor Renzong (1010–1063) in which the emperor hears about trouble in his empire and sends some Daoist priests to resolve the issues. This scene may not be historically truthful, but it nevertheless resembles a scene one would expect to find in an orthodox history. At the very end of the novel, the reader is taken back to the imperial court, where the emperor, now Emperor Huizong (1082–1135), judiciously deals with the aftermath of the bandits’ activities. Similarly, Plum in the Golden Vase begins with a summarizing account of earlier Chinese history and the Northern Song court and ends with the restoration of the Southern Song court. This convention of embedding
9 “Simulated context” is a term invented by Patrick Hanan that refers to traditional Chinese fiction’s pretense to be an, or a simulation of an, oral story-telling performance. See Hanan (1977, 87).
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the fictional central story in a history-like outer frame reminds us of Sheldon Lu’s statement above that traditional Chinese fictional narratives made sense by being situated in a grander scheme of history. The history-like outer frame cannot possibly be seen as a device trying to deceive the reader into believing that the novel is historically truthful, as late imperial readers were familiar with the intentionally fabricated narrative. The outer frame’s value perhaps lies in the artistic sophistication involved in double- or multiframe narratives and the intellectual elevation of associating one’s work with history. Whether or not the outer frame is essential to the completion of the central fictional plot is an interesting topic that merits further consideration. Although fiction in many ways challenged and broke free from the dominance of history writing in the narrative tradition, fiction writers nevertheless had a remarkably historical mindset when constructing their story worlds. It is as if narrative as a form of human communication could not be rid of the expectations entrenched in the Chinese consciousness by an extraordinarily resilient historiographical tradition uninterrupted since the dawn of Chinese literary history – at least not until China’s encounter with Western literature in the modern era. Fictional conventions such as embedding fictional central stories in history-like outer frames, a matterof-fact tone, the dominance of a seemingly objective and lucid narrator, and the attachment of concrete historical dates to fictional events – all invoke literary aesthetics usually associated with factual narratives that attest to a certain ‘aesthetics of factuality’ in fiction. This seems to reflect an unease with the threatening nature of untamed fictionality and fabrication, even as the novel became a recognized and celebrated literary form. 7. Conclusion While exploring the importance of the verifiable and factual, namely history, in pre-modern China, one must keep in mind that the fantastic and the supernatural are not negligible elements of pre-modern Chinese literature and consciousness. Many students of the humanities in the East and the West have heard of Zhuangzi’s discourse on a “butterfly dream,” in which Zhuangzi dreams that he becomes a butterfly and ponders, after he wakes up, whether it is he who dreams of being a butterfly or it is the butterfly who dreams of being him. The idea of a dream that seems like reality (or reality that seems like a dream) culminates in the Qing Dynasty fictional masterpiece Dream of the Red Chamber, in which the remarkable realism of the central fictional story contrasts sharply with the narrative frame that in fact questions the reality of the central story, and leaves readers wondering
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whether perceived reality is all just a dream of the red chamber.10 The questioning of the boundary between reality and dream and of the philosophical validity of such a boundary keeps recurring in Chinese literature. It is echoed in the Buddhist and Daoist undertones of many works, whether fictional narratives or not, all of which potentially complicate the problem of factuality. Though reality and factuality are not equivalent concepts, studying factuality in a culture that persistently challenges the validity of the boundary between dream and reality generates a new set of theoretical problems that await future inquiry.
References Confucius. The Analects of Confucius. Trans. Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Cook, Constance A., and Paul R. Goldin. A Source Book of Ancient Chinese Bronze Inscriptions. Cambridge: Society for the Study of Early China, 2016. Gardner, Charles S. Chinese Traditional Historiography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938. Gu, Ming Dong. Chinese Theories of Fiction: A Non-Western Narrative System. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006. Hanan, Patrick. “The Nature of Ling Meng-Ch’u’s Fictions.” Chinese Narratives: Critical and Theoretical Essays. Ed. Andrew H. Plaks. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. 85–114. Hennessey, William Owen. “The Song Emperor Huizong in Popular History and Romance: The Early Chinese Vernacular Novel, Xuanhe yishi.” Ph.D. thesis, University of Michigan, 1980. Huang, Martin Weizong. “Dehistoricization and Intertextualization: The Anxiety of Precedents in the Evolution of the Traditional Chinese Novel.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 12 (1990): 45–68. Karlgren, Bernhard. Trans. The Book of Documents. Bulletin of The Museum of Far Eastern Antiques 22 (1950). Kern, Martin. “Poetry and Religion: The Representation of Truth in Early Chinese Historiography.” Historical Truth, Historical Criticism, and Ideology: Chinese Historiography and Historical Culture from a New Comparative Perspective. Eds. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, Achim Mittag, and Jörn Rüsen. Leiden: Brill, 2005. 53–78. Lu, Sheldon Hsiao-peng. From Historicity to Fictionality: The Chinese Poetics of Narrative. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Mair, Victor H. “The Narrative Revolution in Chinese Literature: Ontological Presuppositions.” Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews 5.1/2 (1983): 1–27. Mao Zonggang. “How to Read The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.” Trans. David T. Roy. How to Read the Chinese Novel. Ed. David L. Rolston. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. 146–195.
10 “Red chamber” is a metaphor for the world of material and sensual pleasure.
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Mayer, Robert. “Authors, Plagiarists, or Tradents?” Kīli Kīlaya, 2016. http://blogs. orient.ox.ac.uk/kila/ (25 January 2017). Plaks, Andrew H. “Towards a Critical Theory of Chinese Narrative.” Chinese Narratives: Critical and Theoretical Essays. Ed. Andrew H. Plaks. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. 309–352. Shaughnessy, Edward L. Sources of Western Zhou History: Inscribed Bronze Vessels. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Vogelsang, Kai. “Some Notions of Historical Judgment.” Historical Truth, Historical Criticism, and Ideology: Chinese Historiography and Historical Culture from a New Comparative Perspective. Eds. Helwig Schmidt-Glintzer, Achim Mittag, and Jörn Rüsen. Leiden: Brill, 2005. 143–175. Walsh, Richard. The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. Wang, John C. Y. “Early Chinese Narrative: The Tso-chuan as Example.” Chinese Narratives: Critical and Theoretical Essays. Ed. Andrew H. Plaks. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. 3–20. Wang Rumei 王汝梅 and Zhang Yu 張羽. Zhongguo xiaoshuo lilun shi 中國小說理論史 (History of the Theory of Chinese Fiction). Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji chubanshe, 2001. Watson, Burton. Ssu-ma Ch’ien: Grand Historian of China. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958. Yü Ying-shih. “Reflections on Chinese Historical Thinking.” Western Historical Thinking: An Intercultural Debate. Ed. Jörn Rüsen. New York: Berghahn Books, 2002. 152–172. Zhang Zhupo. “How to Read the Chin P’ing Mei.” Trans. David T. Roy. How to Read the Chinese Novel. Ed. David L. Rolston. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. 196–243.
MICHAEL WATSON
Premodern Japanese Narratives and the Problem of Referentiality and Factuality 1. Truth, lies, and the writing of history in Japan “Is it because the truth [makoto] is so boring that most stories one hears are false [soragoto]?” (Kenkō 1967, 65) So begins a lively discussion in Kenkō’s Tsurezuregusa (Essays in Idleness, ca. 1330) touching on issues like whether to spoil a good story by correcting factual errors or whether to believe in miracles. The two key terms here, makoto and soragoto, truth and lies, appear in two classic texts: Murasaki Shikibu’s (2001) Genji Monogatari (ca. 1008, The Tale of Genji ) and Jien’s Gukanshō (1219–1220). I will address the first, Genji’s famous “defense of fiction,” in section 8 below. The second text, Gukanshō by the monk Jien, is the first major interpretative historiography of Japan. Concluding his account of a turbulent period, Jien expresses his fears that gaps in his work will encourage people to add stories from hearsay, but hopes that readers have learned to distinguish between “truth [makoto] and falseness [soragoto],” adding that he has written “not one word of embellishment or fabrication [soragoto]” (Jien 1979, 198; NKBT 86:319).1 Many other early texts deal directly with the problem of facts and fictional fabrications in oral and written accounts. Before the introduction of writing, Japan’s ancient myths and legends were transmitted orally from one generation to the next. Personal names, dates, and genealogies are found inscribed on swords and mirrors of the fifth century CE; by the eighth century, two lengthy histories of Japan from its creation had been set down in writing (Lurie 2011, 99–109). Over the next thousand years, many forms of historical narratives were written, together with many related factual and fictional genres.
1 Japanese texts are cited by volume and page from the series Nihon koten bungaku taikei (NKBT) or Shinpen Nihon koten bungaku zenshū (SNKBZ). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-048
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History writing in Japan owes much to Chinese exemplars (see / V.4 Mair and Liu). Dynastic histories were central to the canon in both countries. Sima Qian’s Historical Records (Shiji, written ca. 85 BCE) (1993) played an important role in Japanese education until modern times. In Murasaki Shikibu’s Genji Monogatari (2001 [ca.1008 CE]), Genji’s son Yūgiri completes his education by reading aloud passages from this history (2001, 383). Episodes from the Historical Records are cited or retold in many Japanese works, providing a model for how both factual history and historical fiction was written. During the Meiji period (1869–1912), the introduction of Western methods of empiricism led Japanese historians to doubt the factuality of earlier texts. In the wake of exposure to Western literary theory and foreign literature, scholars started to re-examine Japan’s written heritage and the place of ‘histories’ within it. Untrustworthy histories were accommodated under a newly coined category of bungaku, literature. With this realignment of genres from the 1890s, literary historians also reconsidered the old question of fact vs. fiction.
2. Overview of narrative genres This essay considers factuality and fictionality in key works of the eighth to the fourteenth centuries. The principal genres can be divided into two groups: on the one hand, those that were considered ‘histories’ and, on the other, genres ranging from diaries to fictional tales. Histories in the broad sense include: (A1) chronicles (nendaiki ) based on oral and written sources; (A2) officially-commissioned histories (seishi ) recording imperial reigns; (A3) unofficial histories (gaishi ) like the Gukanshō; (A4) courtier-centred historical tales (rekishi monogatari ); and (A5) war tales (gunki monogatari ). These are here listed in order of their factuality, from the most factual to the least factual. Modern historians often cite the chronicle Azuma kagami (“Mirror of the East,” ca. 1270), but note its limitations. Complied by officials in the shōgun’s headquarters in eastern Japan, it is more reliable concerning events in Kamakura than in other parts of the country. Other historical writings should be placed in the middle of the aforementioned scale: mixing fact with legend or myth, inventing dialogue, embellishing details for literary effect, or exaggerating details (for instance, the number of soldiers in combat is usually out by a factor of ten or more). Deliberate changes are sometimes made to make a moral point, at other times to provide political legitimacy.
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The second group can be ordered on a scale from the decidedly factual to the decidedly fictional: (B1) daily journals by men written in a form of Chinese (kanbun nikki );2 (B2) memoir-like diaries by women in Japanese (joryū nikki ); (B3) anecdotal collections (setsuwashū); (B4) poem tales (uta monogatari ); and (B5) invented tales (tsukuri monogatari ) like The Tale of Genji (Genji monogatari ). 3. Diaries The factual extreme is represented by the journals of male aristocrats of the Fujiwara clan. Two complete examples can now be compared in French translation: Michinaga’s Midō kanpakuki (“Records of the Midō Regent,” 995–1018) and Sukefusa’s diary Shunki (“Spring Records,” 1038– 1054) (Hérail 1987–1991; Hérail 2001–2004). Narrativity is weak in Michinaga, who meticulously recorded the daily changes in weather, his official activities and physical condition, but barely touches on personal feelings or reactions. Sukefusa, on the other hand, frequently debates with himself with interjections like “What shall I do?”; his diary is therefore strong on what Monika Fludernik would call experientiality (1996). In Japan’s literary canon, women’s diaries have attained a high position. Many resemble memoirs: the diarists recall events of the past by reading through poems they have exchanged, adding reflections. One of the earliest surviving examples is the tenth-century Kagerō nikki (“Kagerō diary”) by a woman known only as Michitsuna no Haha, Mother of Michitsuna (936?–995). The bulk of the work is narrated in the first person, but it begins with a third-person description of a woman who decides to write a diary after she looked “at the old romances, and found them masses of the rankest fabrication [soragoto]” (Michitsuna no Haha 1964, 33). The word “romances” in this translation is monogatari, often rendered as “tales.” This fictional genre was beginning to change in the diarist’s lifetime, developing from stories of fantasy, exotic locales, and implausible happy endings to a far more realistic form of fiction, the kind achieved a generation later by Murasaki Shikibu. 4. Early histories The first surviving histories, Kojiki (“Record of Ancient Matters,” 2014 [712]) and the Nihon shoki (“Chronicles of Japan,” 720), draw extensively 2 The term nikki means “diary.” For discussion of ancient usage and the overlapping relation to monogatari (“tales”), see Konishi (1986, 251–260).
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on records now lost and on oral transmission. They are the fruit of a fortyyear historiographical project. According to the Chinese-language Preface to the Kojiki, Emperor Tenmu (631–686) issued a command for historical records to be transmitted safely and accurately, warning that uncorrected errors could ultimately threaten the stability of the imperial realm: We hear that the royal annals and the words of former ages possessed by the noble houses deviate from what is true, and that many falsehoods have been added to them. (Kojiki 2014 [712], 3)
The passage is perhaps the first articulation in the Japanese cultural sphere of the problem of historical truth (factuality) and falsehood (fiction). The term translated as “true” (正実) has a strong moral sense of ‘correct,’ ‘sincere,’ ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic,’ while the term translated as “falsehood” (虚偽) suggests lying and insincerity. Related terms occur in the following passage. Tenmu calls on editors to erase “falsehoods” (偽, itsuwari ) and establish “truth” (実, makoto) (SNKBZ 1:21). 5. Signposts of factuality in the early histories The Kojiki begins with an account of the ‘age of the gods’ (kamiyo) which is narrated with techniques usually associated with fictionality. There is extensive use of dialogue and of inserted poems, including many composed by divine and legendary figures; there are also dream visions. Stories set in the mythical past are followed by an explanation about their relevance today, as when existing clans are identified as the descendants of a divinity. Another common signpost of factuality concerns phrases in the text which serve to provide an explanation of the current place name, as in Celtic tales. The reality of the present affirms the truthfulness of past myth. The shift from narrative (past) to narratorial comment (present relevance) is usually marked by one or more of the following devices: (a) deictics like “the afore-mentioned,” e.g. kono (‘this’) or sono (‘that’); (b) the conjunction kare 故 meaning ‘hence’ in Nara-period Japanese, and (c) a shift in verb forms from those ending in -ki indicating past action to tense-neutral forms indicating the present. All of these are present in the conclusion to the famous tale of Yamato Takeru: These four songs were sung [uta-ki] at his royal funeral. This is why [kare] to this very day they are sung [uta-fu] as part of the grand funeral rites held for the sovereigns of heaven. (Kojiki 2014 [712], 108; SNKBZ 1:237)
The phrase “to this very day” (ima ni itaru made) is an unusually explicit reference to the current, real world of the narrator.
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The Nihon shoki is the first and the most important of the Six National Histories (Rikkokushi ), all of them written in Chinese and covering imperial reigns up to 887. It also makes use of standard narrative devices like dialogue and even interior monologue. Unlike the Kojiki, it takes the form of a chronicle, dating events in the reign of each sovereign by year, month, and day. Another important marker of factuality (absent in the Kojiki ) can be found in the way the Nihon shoki sometimes gives more than one version of events. Alternative versions are prefaced by expressions like “another account says” (或曰, arui wa iwaku) or “in one book it says” (一書曰, issho ni iwaku). Is this a proper signpost of factuality? In a narrow sense, it is not. The device of citing two versions of a story is used at least twice already in the “age of gods” section: in the mythical account of the two brothers who fall out over the loss of a fishhook and in the story of Emperor Jinmu’s military campaigns (Nihongi 1973 [1896], 96, 130; SNKBZ 2:152, 229). Jimmu’s campaigns may be invented, but were long believed to be true, suggesting that factuality is in the eye of the recipient (/ I.9 Birke). Its historical ‘truth’ was vouched for by many later retellings. We are on much firmer historical ground with the tragic story of Prince Arima (640–456), who was executed for treason. Alternative details about the conspiracy he led are given as a note in smaller print (warichū), with each new account prefaced with the expression “one book says” [或本云, aru hon ni iwaku] (Nihongi 1972 [1896], 257; SNKBZ 4:219). These examples all point to the editors’ use of written sources and highlight their concern for clarifying divergent versions, something they learned from Chinese histories. 6. Anecdotal collections Late nineteenth-century scholars invented the term setsuwa 説話 to refer to anecdotal tales found in large collections of Buddhist tales from India and China or religious and secular tales from Japan, based on either oral or written sources. Nihon Ryōiki (ca. 822), “Record of Miraculous Events in Japan,” is the short title for a collection of 116 anecdotes. The compiler, a Buddhist priest called Kyōkai, begins each of the three volumes with humbly-worded prefaces that reveal his struggle to record oral Japanese tales into Chinese: “But my sources in the oral tradition are so vague that I fear there is much I have left out” (Kyōkai 2013, 10), or “I write, yet cannot get my phrases into order. But such is my desire to do good that I cannot cease
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from wasting good paper” (64). Kyōkai never shows any doubt about the factual truth of his “sources in the oral tradition” (口説, kuzetsu), though he does marvel at the more extraordinary of these “stories” (Jp. mezurashiki koto, more literally, “strange things”). Anecdotes are told concisely in a mixture of scene and summary, making effective use of short dialogues. Characters’ thoughts and feelings are reported, as common in fictional narratives of the later Heian period, but the narrative flow is often interrupted by narratorial interjections (“Ah, how sad”) or interpretative comments (Kyōkai 2013, 46, 56). For contemporary readers, the wealth of circumstantial detail would have given a factual ring of truth – although they prove nothing of the sort. These are extraordinary or miraculous events; yet they happened to specific, named persons at known places at specified times (reign or year). This careful chronological and geographical situating of events contrasts with the deliberate avoidance of specificity in later fiction, like The Tale of Genji, which opens with an unanswered question: izure on-toki ni ka, “In a certain reign (whose can it have been?)” (Murasaki Shikibu 2001 [1008], 3). Tale 1:8 of Nihon Ryōiki describes how a deaf person’s hearing was restored after hearing the recitation of a sutra, concluding: “[…] the hearing in both of Norimichi’s ears was restored. All those both near and far who heard of this were filled with wonder and amazement, so we know that tales of a mysterious correspondence [between Buddhas and sentient beings] are not false” (Kyōkai 2013, 27; SNKBZ 10:51–52). This conclusion of the account employs two devices: a summary of how other people reacted to the events and an evaluative comment by the writer: these devices occur frequently elsewhere in premodern Japanese literature, for instance at the end of many episodes in the medieval war-tale Tale of the Heike (Heike Monogatari ), or in the late Heian-period collection discussed next. Konjaku monogatari shū (“A Collection of Tales Now Past”) is the first major setsuwa collection, more than 1200 tales in all, divided into books by country of origin and topic. Like most premodern works, it lacks a preface, colophon, or any internal or external information about the editor or editors. It was traditionally attributed to an eleventh-century noble man, but it is more likely to have been compiled by priests for the use of preachers as a written source for oral sermons. Names, places, and times are specified with less detail than in Nihon Ryōiki, but the tales themselves are longer and more complex in narrative structure. Almost every tale is framed with the same formulas with minor variation. At the opening, the phrase Ima wa mukashi (literally, “Now it is a long time ago”) recurs; at the ending [[…] to nan] katari-tsutaetaru to ya (“thus it was told and handed down”). The final formula is sometimes
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preceded by the writer’s or compiler’s delineation of the existing evidence of factuality. Perhaps the most common device is the mention of people who had directly seen (14:3) or heard of (e.g. 14:1, 14:5, 17:33) the events being narrated. Eyewitness evidence is less common than hearsay (/ V.8 Toral-Niehoff ). Some tales end by asserting that objects mentioned in the tale still existed and can be inspected. A tale about a famous temple in Nara concludes with the claim that an object mentioned can still be seen in the temple garden (12:7), while another assures us that “The scar left by the arrow on the statue of Kannon has never healed, even to this day [ima ni]. People come to see and admire it” (16:5) (Konjaku monogatari shū 2015, 69). In another tale, a man tries to break up a Buddhist statue for its copper, but is prevented from destroying the figure by a passing stranger who hears the statue’s cry for help (12:13). The final narratorial comment forestalls a possible objection that this could not have happened: “In truth when we think about this, the Buddha’s body could not have actually felt pain. But it raised its voice in a cry of pain to show this miracle” (Konjaku monogatari shū 2015, 31, adapted). In these three examples, the expressions translated “still” and “even to this day” (ima ni, ‘now’), “in truth” (makoto ni ) and “actually” (masa ni ) are all markers of factuality (SNKBZ 35:172, 36:167; 35:185).
7. Poetry and poem-tales The centrality of poetry in premodern Japanese society is clear from its pervasive use in diaries, histories, or even in works like The Tale of Genji, which contains almost eight hundred poems by the characters. The poems themselves are rooted in the actuality of the experienced emotions and perceptions; they are imaginative yet factual. One of the great themes of love poetry touches on the question of truth, namely the topos of the lover’s confusion over what is “reality” (utsutsu) and what is merely a “dream” (yume). The genre of “poem-tales” (uta monogatari ) develops the potential fluidity of factuality and fiction by creating a loose collection of biographic sketches on the basis of existing poems or poetic exchanges. The short episodic narratives were created by later editors, who used hints from the poems themselves and from the explanatory headnotes in poetic anthologies, while also drawing on oral anecdotes (itsuwa) about the life of the poet. The poet Ariwara no Narihira (825–880), a well-known figure of the past, is the unnamed protagonist in most of the 125 episodes of the Ise monogatari (The Tales of Ise, tenth century).
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Narrative signposting typical of this genre is found at the beginning of episodes. Many Ise episodes open with the phrase Mukashi otoko arikeri, “Back then, there was this man” (Ise monogatari 2010, 17; NKBT 9:111). The protagonist Narihira, for instance, has poetic and amorous relations with many different women, from imperial princesses to commoners. Most of these are identified only in the most general terms, e.g. “someone’s daughter” (ep. 12), “some insignificant fellow’s wife” (ep. 15), or “a passionate woman” (ep. 37) (Ise monogatari 2010, 43, 49, 91). Rather than providing scenes from an actual life fleshed out with authentic-sounding biographical detail, whether real or invented, the stories sometimes read more like pages from fictional courtly tales. Premodern and early modern commentators have devoted much effort to studying the text, coming to very different conclusions about its fictionality or factuality. The texts have been interpreted as Buddhist allegory or as complete fiction, but also – anticipating most modern scholarship – as a “mixture of fact and fiction” about the historical Narihira (Ise monogatari 2010, 8).
8. The Tale of Genji No discussion of factuality in Japanese literary tradition can ignore The Tale of Genji, Genji Monogatari (ca. 1008), the greatest of the courtly romances. The narrative itself problematizes the idea of clear-cut distinctions between fact and fiction. Chapter 14 (“The Picture Contest”) involves a competition between texts and paintings in which more realistic works are declared superior to the works that are full of fantasy. The issue is not the opposition between fact and fiction, but a weighing between the different shades of factuality and fictionality. “Fireflies” (Chapter 25) is the locus classicus for a discussion of fiction, its dangers and its potential. Like the Kagerō diarist, Genji’s ward Tamakazura is disappointed because she finds nothing in tales that resembles her own life: Among her assemblage of tales she found accounts, whether fact or fiction [makoto ni ya itsuwari ni ya], of many extraordinary fates, but none, alas, of any like her own. (Murasaki Shikibu 2001, 460; SNKBZ 22:210)
There is “hardly a word of truth” (makoto) in tales, comments Genji when he finds her so absorbed. (It is important to keep in mind his sexual interest in Tamakazura.) From criticism of tales and their female readers, Genji moves rapidly to a well-argued “defense of fiction.” Despite its “falsehoods” (itsuwari ), Genji argues that fiction is commendable for its emotional power, its imagination, for filling in details missing in histories
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(“The Chronicles of Japan and so on give only a part of the story” [461]), and for expressing a higher truth through “lies” (soragoto) as in Buddhist parables. He then visits his wife and gives her quite different advice about “real life” (utsutsu) and the choice of fiction suitable for a child – whom he wants protected from romantic ideas as well as negative stereotypes about stepmothers. The Chronicles of Japan are also mentioned in a much quoted passage in the author’s diary (Murasaki Shikibu nikki ). She describes how Emperor Ichijō praised her after listening to someone read aloud from her tale: “‘She must have read the Chronicles of Japan!’ he exclaimed, ‘She seems very learned’” (Murasaki Shikibu 1996, 57; SNKBZ 26:208). What could it have been in her fictional tale that led him to praise its author’s historical knowledge? Surely not the literal truth of the narrative – which is set in the reigns of imaginary emperors – but rather its historical realism in portraying court life. It was Murasaki Shikibu’s verisimilitude that distinguished her work from later imitators. “A novel is surely absurd if it isn’t realistic” as a character remarks in An Untitled Book (Mumyōzōshi, ca. 1200), a wideranging conversation about literature (Daughter of Shunzei 1984, 295; Yamagishi 1973, 55). The participants give high praise for The Tale of Genji, but find much fault in later tales that consist only of “fabrications” [itsuwari] and “falsehoods” [soragoto], and do not describe “actual events” [makoto ni arikeru koto] (Daughter of Shunzei 1984, 418; Yamagishi 1973, 96). Later readers and commentators have frequently returned to and refined these concepts. In 1485 the poet and commentator Sōgi found historical models for the tale’s first three fictional emperors and the fictional figure of Genji himself, arguing that the narrative “is a made-up work and thus a fiction, yet [it] is composed of traces of events that happened in the past” (Harper and Shirane 2015, 353). In the 1670s, Kumazawa Banzan acknowledged Genji ’s reputation as “a fictional tale” but maintained that “reading does not give that impression at all. This must be because it discusses matters that [actually] happened” (Harper and Shirane 2015, 392). Many other examples can be found in Harper and Shirane’s important compendium of early readers’ responses to Genji Monogatari. 9. The Tale of the Heike Our final example is the war tale Heike Monogatari (ca. 1220), a detailed account of the events leading up to a major historical conflict in the 1180s and its aftermath. No Urtext survives, but there are dozens of variants, some for public recitation with text spoken, chanted, and sung, and some for reading. All begin with the rise of the clan chieftain Kiyomori to power,
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but whereas some conclude with the execution of Kiyomori’s last direct male heir, others end with his daughter’s last years, or with praise for the victor, Yoritomo. In this way, the variants shape the historical material at their disposal, adding and subtracting episodes, expanding and re-ordering this historical material with a liberal admixture of fictional elements. It was the longest variant that was regarded as the key historical text by shogunal officials involved in the project to compile a massive “History of Great Japan” (Dainihonshi, 1715–1906). Their annotated version of that version of the text draws on more than one hundred historical sources and points out discrepancies and errors. From 1890 onwards, historians published attacks on the historical distortions of the major war tales. For instance, the evidence of a courtier’s diary reveals that it was Kiyomori’s son Shigemori who was the real instigator behind the attack on the regent (Heike Monogatari 2012, 36–39), while the Heike Monogatari consistently depicts the son as a virtuous paragon, a foil to his ‘evil’ father, thus oversimplifying historical reality. Factual signposting includes the precise dating of many events, but, as has been pointed out, one key date has been moved back to legitimize Yoritomo’s actions. The text’s appearance of factuality is enhanced by the citation of many letters and other documents, not all of which are genuine. Recent scholarly interest has shifted from the analysis of the refined and sometimes romanticized Kakuichi version for recitation (1371) to the earlier Engyō variant, a rougher but more factual account. The question of whether the Heike Monogatari can be called an ‘epic’ was first raised in the 1870s and since then keeps being debated from time to time. The idea has little support among specialists today, most of whom have swung back to the conviction that the Heike and works comparable to it belong to a special form of historical writing. 10. Reevaluation of fact and fiction When the first comprehensive literary histories of Japan began to appear in the 1890s, the authors used traditional terms for genres and styles, adding a few neologisms, but made no obvious borrowings from Western languages. Many struggled to define factual writing. Three literary histories of the time take different approaches to fictional and factual writing. One divides narrative writing into shōsetsu-teki monogatari (“novel-like tales”) and shi-teki monogatari (“history-like tales”), with Genji and courtly romances included in the former category and anecdotal literature and the courtly histories in the latter (Ikeda 1890, 257). The second study proposes a tripartite division of narratives between (1) works like Ise monogatari which
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are “based partly on fact” (jijitsu), (2) works like Genji monogatari that are entirely products of the “author’s imagination,” and (3) “historical records” (rekishi-teki kiroku) like the courtly history Eiga monogatari (Mikami and Takatsu 1890, 218–219). The third history divides narratives into two types: (1) tsukuri monogatari (“made-up tales”), including both Ise monogatari and Genji monogatari, and (2) rekishi monogatari (“history tales”) including the courtly histories and anecdote collections like Konjaku monogatari shū (Sasa 1898, 35). These two terms have become standard today. In linguistics, the standard term for ‘fact(uality)’ is jijitsu(sei), while historical and literary studies are more likely to refer to shijitsu (‘historical fact’), shijitsusei (‘historicity’), shinjitsu (‘truth’), or riaritī (‘reality’). In a study published in 1885–1886, the Meiji-period critic Tsubouchi Shōyō reflected on aspects of fiction. Here, for example, he compares the mix of factual truth and invention in myths and modern novels (shōsetsu): [Myths] are intrinsically different from fiction [shōsetsu] in that while the stories [monogatari] they relate are not strictly factual [jijitsu], neither are they pure invention [kyokō] […] They are semi-historical [nakaba seishi], semi-fictitious [nakaba shōsetsu] […]. (Tsubouchi 2010, 29; Twine 1981, n.p.)
Well-read in Western literature, Tsubouchi was one of the first Japanese scholars capable of discussing literary genres cross-culturally, redefining existing expressions and introducing Western terminology. Nihon kokugo daijiten cites this passage as the first example of kyokō 虚構 (“invention”) in its literary meaning. He adds the English term “mythology” in parentheses after the expression “history of the age of gods,” a reference to the mythical period described in early histories of Japan (Tsubouchi 2010, 29). The introduction of foreign theoretical terms was aided greatly by the addition of glosses like this. Tsubouchi thus pointed the way forward to analyses of Japanese fictional and factual writings in the wider context of world literature. For a prominent post-war literary historian, what the original audiences of nikki (diaries) and monogatari (tales) understood as ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’ must be distinguished from modern concepts of nonfiction and fiction. Jin’ichi Konishi argues that “medieval audiences” made distinctions between “‘truth” and “fiction” but these were “matters of narrative stance that do not correspond to the historical reality of the content” (its “truthfulness”) so that “if the narrator takes the stance that the events to be told are true, the audience must accept the monogatari as true” (Konishi 1986, 256–257). The relation between factuality and fiction(ality) continues to be widely debated in contemporary Japanese scholarship.3 3 See, for instance, several special issues in major literary journals featuring the topic (Bungaku, January-February issue, 2007; Nihon 60.1, 2012). A search of CiNii databases for academic publications (https://ci.nii.ac.jp/en) reveals recent trends in terminology.
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References Daughter of Shunzei [Shunzei-kyō musume], attrib. Mumyōzōshi [An Untitled Book, ca. 1200]. Trans. Michele Marra. “Mumyōzōshi. Introduction and Translation”; “Mumyōzōshi, Part 2”; “Mumyōzōshi, Part 3.” Monumenta Nipponica 39 (1984): 115–145, 281–305, 409– 434. Fludernik, Monika. Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology. New York: Routledge, 1996. Harper, Thomas, and Haruo Shirane. Eds. Reading the Tale of Genji: Sources from the First Millennium. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Heike monogatari [The Tale of the Heike, ca. 1220]. Trans. Royall Tyler. The Tale of the Heike. New York: Viking Press, 2012. Hérail, Francine. Notes journalières de Fujiwara no Michinaga, ministre à la cour de Hei.an (995– 1018). Traduction du Midô Kanpakuki. 3 vols. Geneva, Paris: Librairie Droz, 1987–1991. Hérail, Francine. Notes journalières de Fujiwara No Sukefusa: Traduction du “Shunki.” 2 vols. Geneva, Paris: Librairie Droz, 2001–2004. Ikeda, Hidenori. Nihon bungakushi [History of Japanese Literature]. Tokyo: Tokyo senmon gakkō, 1890. Ise monogatari [The Tales of Ise, tenth century]. Trans. with commentary Joshua S. Mostow and Royall Tyler. The Ise Stories: Ise monogatari. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i, 2010. Jien. Gukanshō [Jottings of a Fool, 1219]. Ed. and trans. Delmer M. Brown and Ichiro Ishida. The Future and the Past: A Translation and Study of the Gukanshō, an Interpretative History of Japan Written in 1219. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1979. Kenkō [Urabe no Kenkō]. Tsurezuregusa. [ca. 1330]. Trans. Donald Keene. Essays in Idleness: The Tsurezuregusa of Kenkō. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967. Kojiki [Account of Ancient Matters, 712]. Trans. Gustav Heldt. The Kojiki: An Account of Ancient Matters. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Konishi, Jin’ichi. A History of Japanese Literature. Volume Two: The Early Middle Ages. Trans. Aileen Gatten. Ed. Earl Miner. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986. Konjaku Monogatari shū [Collection of Tales Now Past, eleventh century]. Trans. Naoshi Koriyama and Bruce Allen. Japanese Tales from Times Past: Stories of Fantasy and Folklore from the Konjaku Monogatari Shu. Tokyo: Viking, 2015. Kyōkai. Nihon Ryōiki (Nihonkoku genpō zen’aku ryōiki) [Miraculous Stories of Karmic Retribution of Good and Evil in Japan, ca. 823]. Trans. Burton Watson. Record of Miraculous Events in Japan. The Nihon Ryōiki. New York: Columbia University Press, 2013. Lurie, David. Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011. Michitsuna no Haha. Kagerō nikki [The Kagerō Diary, ca. 974]. Trans. E. G. Seidensticker. The Gossamer Years: The Diary of a Noblewoman of Heian Japan. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1964. Mikami Sanji and Takatsu Kuwasaburō. Nihon bungakushi [History of Japanese Literature]. Tokyo: Kinkōdō, 1890. Murasaki, Shikibu. Murasaki Shikibu nikki [Diary, ca. 1008–1010]. Trans. Richard Bowring. The Diary of Lady Murasaki. London: Penguin Books, 1996. Murasaki, Shikibu. Genji monogatari [The Tale of Genji, ca. 1008]. Trans. Royall Tyler. The Tale of Genji. New York: Viking, 2001. Nihongi [Nihon shoki] [Chronicle of Japan, 720]. Trans. W. G. Aston. Nihongi: Chronicles of Japan from the Earliest Times to A.D. 697. [1896] Tokyo: Tuttle, 1972. Sasa Seiichi. Nihon bungaku shiyō [Outline of the history of Japanese literature]. Tokyo: Naigai shuppansha kyōkai, 1898.
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Sima Qian. Shiji [Historical Records, ca. 85 BCE]. Trans. Burton Watson. Records of the Grand Historian by Sima Qian. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Tsubouchi, Shōhō. Shōsetsu shinzui [The Essence of the Novel]. [1885–1886] Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 2010. Twine, Nanette. Trans. Tsubouchi Shōyō. The Essence of the Novel. https://archive.nyu.edu/ html/2451/14945/shoyo.htm. Brisbane: University of Queensland, 1983 (8 June 2018). Yamagishi, Tokuhei. Ed. Mumyōzōshi [Nameless Book, thirteenth century]. Tokyo: Kadokawa bunko, 1973.
HAIYAN HU-VON HINÜBER/LUITGARD SONI
Reality and Factuality of Classical Indian Narratives 1. Jainism and Advaita Vedānta Luitgard Soni The various traditions of India present a wealth of narratives. By and large these treat three themes, traditionally categorized under the headings of worldly gain, pleasure and moral conduct. These themes relate to the worldly existences within the cycle of births and rebirths (samø sāra). The fourth category and ultimate aim in life is that of liberation from the cycle of existences. Stories are often conveniently categorized under these headings, with the exception of the state of final liberation, which is beyond description and thus cannot be subject to narration. Stories thematize the search for profit and the cleverness needed to procure it; they also treat love and sensuous pleasures, good conduct and virtues, and many stories also combine these themes (compare, for instance, Haribhadra Sūri’s introduction to the Samarāicca Kahā from the eighth century, a novel about nine consecutive lives of two people in varying relationships to each other). Stories were transmitted orally and later in writing, in literary and religious genres, ultimately for didactic purposes notwithstanding their entertaining garb. They include myths, legends, exempla, folktales and semihistorical events, all interwoven in the written productions of epics, plays, poems and stories of various lengths. Therefore, the variegated factual and fictional sources of this literature lend themselves to a discussion of the issues of factuality and fictionality in classical Indian narrative. In order to address the concepts of factuality, reality and truth in the narrative literatures of the period of classical India (approximately the first millennium), two viewpoints have been chosen focusing on two diverse systems of thought, namely what could be called Realism and Illusionism. The Realist System of Jainism. The realist system of Jainism, the renunciatory religion contemporaneous with Buddhism, with its culturally influential community, has a great importance for the narrative literature of India. In https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-049
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the sixth and fifth century BCE the older contemporary of the Buddha, the ascetic Mahāvīra, preached the Jaina doctrine in the Prakrit language, treating topics of metaphysics, ontology, cosmology, bondage and liberation. These orally transmitted Jaina tenets were written down much later in the fifth century. The canon in Prakrit as well as the extensive commentaries on it in Prakrit and Sanskrit contain treatments of the doctrine, outlines of the monastic discipline as well as religious conduct rules for lay people and numerous legends and parables. The second half of the first and the beginning of the second millennium show an intense intellectual activity of Jaina philosophers, linguists, poets and narrators both in Prakrit and in Sanskrit. Throughout the second millennium the Jaina community has been vividly present in the arts, the intellectual life and in the economy and still today is a small but vibrant community in India as well as in the diaspora. We find a traditional reflection on factuality and fiction in an early Jaina text, the Vasudevahinø dø ī (see below), which recognizes the centrality of factuality in keeping with the Jaina realist worldview. Factuality, as an element of trustworthiness plays an important role in the Jaina canon of edifying tales. The Non-Dualist Advaita-Vedānta School. According to the non-dualist, illusionist Advaita-Vedānta school of Śan˙kara (eighth century) the empirical world in its plurality is an illusory manifestation of the one, absolute reality (brahman), and two levels of truth are discussed which relate to the narratives, especially in plays. 1.1 Narrative factuality versus fiction as found in an early Jaina work An explicit general distinction and short explication of narrative factuality versus fiction, as expounded in detail by Nalini Balbir (1994), is found for example in an early Jaina work in Prakrit, the Vasudevahinø dø ī (ca. fifth century). In this text, the factual and the fictive are referred to as cariya (literally: ‘lived,’ ‘done’) and kappiya (literally: ‘imagined’). The area of the factual is described as a rather wide field. It is something seen or heard or experienced, by a man or a woman, and is concerned with profit, love or morals. It includes historical, semi-historical, hagiographical and biographical themes rendered in existent as well as virtual spheres, since the Jaina worlds transcend categories of space and time. The Jaina cosmology describes an immense cosmos in several planes and with several cosmic continents. It is filled with beings that have eternal life (also called selves, souls or life-monads) and, with the exception of the liberated life-monads, these beings are all subjected to the working of karma and bound to the
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cycle of rebirths. Rebirths can take place in plant, animal, human, hellish or celestial existences. The narratives thematizing events in the so-called ‘rebirth- biographies and autobiographies’ of beings are obviously not restricted to matters of fact in actual life, but are remembered from way back in the past or foretold by special foresight into future lives. Nevertheless, such past or visionary future events are narrated as facts. Indeed, the transmigrations of beings in all possible life-forms within the immense cosmos, transcending space and time, allow for narrations which show “a world of indeterminate and fluid relationships” (Granoff 1994, 2). Standard categories of natural and supernatural realms, time, space, species, family relations and social identities are of no relevance for the beings’ passing from birth to birth under the influence of past deeds. Many narratives disclose the kaleidoscope of the relationships of living beings conditioned by karma and rebirth: thus, a father can become his own son, the killed paramour becomes the son of his murderer and the sacrificed buffalo is a reincarnation of what was previously the father. The field of the fictive is described as a composition facilitating an understanding of certain realities through analogies not founded on reality. Imaginary conversations of speaking leaves, clouds or pebbles are invented by learned people to allude to human situations in fables, parables or allegories. For example, to point out the transience of life, a withering leaf tells a green leaf bud: “just as you are now, I too was green; you will also become like I am now” (Balbir 1994, 234). In the Jaina tradition stories were already told in sermons by the first teachers 2500 years ago and continued to be collected, created and cultivated. These stories are a major device for edification by illustrating the multifarious modes of bondage to life and suggesting the paths of liberation of these beings. The themes of love, wealth and virtues are constructively interwoven. According to traditional criticism, the stories should attract the listener towards righteousness, or they should have a repulsive effect to caution against vices, they should move and startle the listener, or they should induce detachment and renunciation. Since the stories ought to persuade the listener to imitate virtue and follow the path of the model characters they have to present a truth value that is sufficiently convincing to induce the listener to live in accordance with the illustrated precepts. Given the ontological and epistemological realism of Jainism, the modalities of narrated factuality are thus almost infinite. 1.2 Two levels of reality according to the Advaita-Vedānta schools The well-known opposite stance of the Indian assessment and perception of the world in the idealist Advaita-Vedānta schools, for example, of Śan˙k-
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ara, postulate two levels of reality: the one absolute reality (pāramārthika) and the empirical level of reality, the day-to-day multiple appearances (vyāvahārika). The observation of waking from a dream and experiencing the state of being awake is used as an analogy to waking up from the level of empirical, ordinary reality to the realization of absolute reality. The absolute reality, however, is not describable in words and concepts, as is lucidly discussed by Goldman (1986). Goldman points out that there are mainly three analogies by means of which the ultimate reality is alluded to: (1) the awakening from a dream; (2) the dispelling of an optical misperception like recognizing that the terrifying snake seen in twilight is actually a rope; and (3) the play (Goldman 1986, 352). Indian theater offers a representation of different levels of reality. As a transitional device it has a prologue in which the theater director, by announcing in more or less elaborate form that there will be a play, prepares for “a second order of reality” (Goldman 1986, 356). In the prologue to Kalidāsa’s Śakuntalā, for instance, the theater director, after eagerly announcing “a new play,” asks his wife, an actress in the play, to “charm the audience with a song” (Coulson 1981, 41). With her song, which evokes gentle, sensuous feelings of summertime, she attunes the audience to the atmosphere of the first act. The director, himself swept away by the song, observes: “The audience is sitting entranced, like people in a painting” (Coulson 1981, 42). In aesthetic rapture the ordinary consciousness of the self dissolves, giving way to an altered state of consciousness at another level of reality. In Indian aesthetic theory the aesthetic delight of the appreciative reader or spectator is described as being similar to the blissful consciousness of the true self experienced in deep meditation. (For instance, the tenth-century philosopher and theorist of aesthetics Abhinavagupta links the rasāsvāda, the aesthetic bliss of the connoisseur, to brahmāsvāda, a beam of the experience of the absolute – Masson and Patwardhan 1969, 175.) Another special artistic device which produces a suggestion of different levels of reality on stage relates to the impact of a dream and the subsequent waking up to reality in the play. An example of this is Bhasa’s (ca. third–fourth century) Svapnavāsavadatta, ‘[The play about] Vāsavadattā, [who appears] in a Dream.’ Yet another dramatic device for competing perceptions of reality is the motif of becoming overwhelmed by past events that have a more powerful effect on the protagonist than the actually present situation (depicted in paintings or as a play in the play). See, for instance, scenes in the Uttararāmacarita, ‘The Later Life of Rāma.’ Such interwoven levels of reality and shifts between them affecting the audience, the author, the personae and the actors add to the impression of the illusionary character of mundane reality. In Indian literary theory there is a presupposition that “art when it
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is properly executed is more rather than less real than life” (Goldman 1986, 366). The two points of view outlined regarding factuality, reality and truth in classical India merely hint at indigenous reflections on these concepts. It is the ontologies of the Indian systems, whether realist or idealist, that decide on what is fact and what is fiction. The realist Jaina system encompasses a wide field of factuality since the cycle of existences takes place in the real cosmos with its infinite possibilities. By contrast, the idealist Vedānta declares the mundane world to be illusory and therefore any facts in the day-to-day life are regarded as conjectural and ultimately unreal. 2. Buddhist narratives Haiyan Hu-von Hinüber 2.1 Some peculiarities of Buddhist narrative literature The origin of oral Buddhist narratives starts much earlier than the written tradition which began in India with the inscriptions of King Aśoka during the third century BCE. Neither Śākyamuni, the founder of Buddhism (approx. 460–380 BCE), nor his contemporary Mahāvīra, the founder of Jainism, knew any script. The Indian tradition of oral transmission which can be traced back to Vedic literature (twelfth century BCE) strongly influenced the structure of Buddhist narratives which have been transmitted in different collections (von Hinüber 1994). As late as the beginning of the fifth century, the oral transmission of Buddhist teaching was still predominant according to the records by Chinese monks who travelled to India (Mair 2013, Hu-von Hinüber 2017), although some sacred scriptures appear to have been set down in writing shortly before the beginning of our era. Thus, Buddhist narratives are transmitted in both oral and written form. Furthermore, Buddhist narratives are deeply influenced by the Indian concept of the world as existing in endless cycles of rebirths (Kirfel 1920, Denis 1977, Dietz 1994). Independently from the quality of each rebirth, subjects as well as inhabitants in the world remain impermanent (anitya). The ultimate aim shared by all Indian religions including Buddhism is that of one’s liberation from existence within the endless samø sāra. Therefore, an essential goal of Buddhist narratives is to demonstrate the inevitability of the results of both good and bad karma. What distinguishes Buddhist narratives from other Indian narratives is their wide circulation throughout the Buddhist world in many different languages. Buddhism is not anchored in any archaic tradition; it has flexible
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and pragmatic relations with social host systems. In the course of history, the wide-ranging spread of Buddhism had brought tales, fables, myths and legends of Indian origin to almost every corner of East Asia (Chavannes 1910–34, Mair and Berezkin 2015), Central Asia (Seyfort Ruegg 1999, Roesler 2015), and to the countries of the Theravāda Buddhism in Ceylon and Southeast Asia (Skilling 2017). This Buddhist contribution to Indian belles lettres is extraordinarily extensive (van der Kuijp 2002, Hahn 2010). The extreme popularity of Buddhist narratives contributed decisively to the wide accessibility of Indian spirituality and literature wherever Buddhism succeeded in gaining ground. Another feature of Buddhist narratives is their large and widespread remedialization in the arts. At a very early stage, even before Buddhism expanded beyond India, the great popularity of many narratives inspired the earliest Buddhist art. From the second century BCE onward, creative artists elaborated on the legends relating to the life of Buddha Śākyamuni and his pious followers; scenes from various narratives are widely depicted in paintings and also in stone carvings as in those of Bhārhut and Sāñcī (Madhya Pradesh), Ajan tā (Maharastra), Kanaganahalli (Karnataka), Nāgārjunakon d a and Amarāvatī (Andhra Pradesh). When Buddhism spread to Inner and Southeast Asia, this culture of narrative fine art was kept alive from Great Gandhāra (North Pakistan and Afghanistan) via different countries in Central Asia all the way to China, Korea and Japan; from Tibet and Nepal to Ceylon and Thailand; and from Angkor (Cambodia) to Borobudur (Indonesia). An understanding of Buddhist art is crucial to research on Buddhist narratives as well as for the reconstruction of Buddhist history (Lüders 1941, Schlingloff 2013 [2000], Zin 2017). 2.2 Buddhist terminology for narrative In an Indian historical context, the teaching of Śākyamuni Buddha can be regarded as ‘innovative’ in many respects. This is also true of its terminology designating the various genres of narrative. The traditional Indian words for narrative include kathā (‘story’), ākhyāna (‘narrative’ – Alsdorf 1963/ 64), prabandha (‘literary composition’), varnø anā (‘description’), śamø sana (‘reciting’) and others. Apart from myriads of folk tales included in both major epics, the Mahābhārata (classified as Itihāsa or ‘history’) and the Rāmāyanø a (Ādikāvya or ‘first poem’), genres like the Purānø as (legends of the past) and
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the Nātøaka (dramas) belong to the treasury of Indian narrative literature in the broad sense.1 In contrast, Buddhist literature inhabited its own shifting space in the Indian tradition; for their two main genres of narrative, Buddhists introduced two new terms with specific meaning: Jātaka (stories of Buddha’s former lives) and Avadāna (stories of great deeds). These terms had not previously been used to designate literary genres. Moreover, the term Pūrvayoga, ‘connecting (stories) to (Buddha’s) former (life),’ corresponds loosely to the Jātaka category, and appears to be utilized primarily by Buddhists. Scholarship has demonstrated that manifold materials of traditional Indian literature found their way into Buddhist narratives and played a crucial role in spreading the Buddhist teachings in the world. The early Buddhists did no doubt avail themselves of the material preserved in Vedic literature, old legends as told in the epics and in Jaina narratives (Appleton 2014, Wu 2017). 2.3 Multiple languages and different corpora of Buddhist narratives Due to the wide dissemination of Buddhism in almost all Asian countries, its early narrative literature – composed originally in various Middle Indian languages (Pāli, etc.) and Sanskrit – was translated into approximately 20 different non-Indian languages such as Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese; Sinhalese, Burmese, Khmer, Thai, and Lao; Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, Newari, Nepali, Old-Turkish and others. A number of texts handed down in extinct languages (Gāndhārī, Tocharian, Khotanese, Sogdian and Tungusic) are only known from old manuscripts which have been rediscovered in the last two centuries. The rich narrative material scattered over different sections of the various Buddhist canons handed down in Pāli, Chinese, Tibetan, Sanskrit, and Gāndhārī are of utmost importance for the literary history in ancient India (Lüders 1940). After Winternitz’s still useful survey of Buddhist literature (1920, translated into English in 1933) two comprehensive studies on the Jātaka stories and the Buddhist narratives by Hikata (1961) and Iwamoto (1967) appeared in Japan. In 1978 and 1993, Grünbold and Laut in their contributions to the Enzyklopädie des Märchens collected references to the earliest studies and translations of Buddhist narratives in Europe since the nine-
1 The cycle Pañcatantra and Subhāsøita, however, which became popular in the West as ‘Indian narrative,’ were traditionally used as didactic handbooks of conduct (nītiśāstra) with particular regard to social and political skills.
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teenth century.2 An up-to-date survey of Buddhist narratives in South and Central Asia can be found in the Brill Encyclopedia of Buddhism I (Straube 2015, Salomon 2015, Roesler 2015, and more). It is by no means easy to get a comprehensive view of the vast and exuberant Buddhist narratives, which are mostly composed by anonymous authors. One way to survey this field is to divide it into several language groups in which the Buddhist canon is preserved. Traditionally, the canon is called Tripitøaka, ‘Three Baskets’: (a) Sūtrapitøaka, ‘Basket of the Teaching’; (b) Vinayapitøaka, ‘Basket of the Discipline’; and (c) Abhidharmapitøaka, ‘Basket of the Philosophical Treatises.’ 2.3.1 The collection of Jātaka stories in the Theravāda canon The most complete and perhaps also the oldest corpus of Buddhist narratives is the Jātaka collection in the canon of the Theravāda school which contains 547 surviving stories composed in the Pāli language. A former complete collection of 550 Pāli Jātakas is known to have existed in Burma, probably imported from Kāñcī in South India. When he visited the Abhayagiri monastery in Sim hadvīpa (Sri Lanka) in the year 410 CE, the Chinese monk Faxian also heard of the existence of 550 Jātakas (von Hinüber 1996, 54). Jātakas are stories of past, present and future Buddhas in their previous lives when the respective Buddha was still a Bodhisatta (Bodhisattva in Sanskrit), a Buddha-elect or person later to become the Buddha. In common acceptation, such Bodhisattas represent a past life of Śākyamuni, the Buddha of the present age. All known Buddhist schools used the Jātaka genre. The narratives found in the Jātakas are mostly fables or fairy tales. Jātakas are told in a mixture of prose and verse with the Buddha taking the part of a protagonist, for the better part in the shape of a human being (an ascetic, a merchant, or a minister), quite often also as an animal like a monkey, a lion, or a hare, and sometime even as a god. Because scenes of
2 In 1996 and 1998, von Hinüber examined all collections of Buddhist narratives in Pāli and the structure of the Jātaka collection of the Theravāda school. From 2002 to 2017, Skilling published a series of important articles concerning the Buddhist narratives in South-East Asia and the relation between the myths and reality. In 2008 and 2010, Salomon and Lenz investigated several Kharosthī manuscripts containing Gāndhārī narratives which belong to the earliest Buddhist narratives. In 2012, seven papers on Jātakas by Appleton, Strong, and others, originally read during the 16th conference of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (2011 in Taiwan), were published in Buddhist Studies Review, vol. 29.
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many Jātakas were depicted on Buddhist monuments (stūpa) in Bhārhut and Sāñcī – partly with a brief inscription mentioning the respective title of the tale – their age can be dated back to the second century BCE at the latest. The Jātaka collection forms a part of the ‘Basket of the Teaching’ (Suttapitøaka) of the Theravāda canon which was probably written down in the first century BCE. The tenth book of the fifth group (nikāya) in the collection called the Khuddakanikāya (‘The Group of Small Texts’) is the most famous Jātaka collection and has spread all over Southeast Asia. In the West, ‘Buddhist narratives’ mostly correspond to the Jātakas in Pāli since there exist translations in English and German (von Hinüber 1998). In addition to their general popularity, individual Jātakas have had great influence. The longest Jātaka, the Vessantara Jātaka with 786 verses, tells the story of the last life of the Bodhisatta on earth when he was a compassionate prince named Vessantara who gave away everything he owned including his wife and children (Alsdorf 1959, Anālayo 2016). This Jātaka, displaying the virtue of perfect generosity (dānapāramitā), enjoys an immense popularity until today, also in art and performance. 2.3.2 Narrative texts collected in the Chinese and Tibetan canons In the evolution of Buddhist literature, the early Chinese translations (from the second century CE on) are often the oldest surviving versions, because only a small part of their original Sanskrit or Gāndhārī versions are handed down (Nattier 2008, Mair and Berezkin 2015). In the Taishō edition of the Chinese Buddhist canon, one can find 67 old narrative texts (no. 152– 219) assembled, such as early texts supposedly translated by An Shigao (T167),3 Zhi Loujiachen (Lokaksema, T204), Kang Senghui (T152: LiuduJijing, “Canonical Scripture Collection of the Six Perfections,” and T206), and Zhi Qian (T153, 169, 181, 185, 198, 200, 214). Under the Chinese designation “Ben-Yuan” (Jātaka-Avadāna), these texts constitute volumes III and IV of the Taishō edition. In contrast to the Jātaka collection in Pāli, this Chinese ‘collection’ is not limited to the Jātaka genre; many texts of the Avadāna genre, the translation of the long poem Buddhacarita (Buddha’s biography) composed by Aśvaghosa (Steiner 2010, Salomon 2015) as well as a number of long text collections containing didactic parables (Piyu-Jing)
3 Throughout this essay, this conventional abbreviation is used to refer to the Taishō Sinshū Daizōkyō (Buddhist Canon in Chinese edited during the Taishō Era). See Takakusu and Watanabe (1924–1934).
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are also assembled here (Beal 1875).4 The placing of these two volumes (Ben-Yuan, parts 1–2) immediately after the ancient Āgama texts and followed by the Mahāyāna Sūtras indicates that they were considered to be an old segment during the Taishō era (1912–1926). Research on these 67 old Chinese translations, however, is rare (Höke 1984, Lo 2006, Li 2011, Radich 2011, Karashima and Marciniak 2018). The narrative texts translated by Dharmaraksa (third century CE), for instance, are very difficult and deserve much more attention (T154, 168, 170, 182, 186, 199). The Tibetan translations of certain narrative texts (from the eighth century CE on) are also united in the Tibetan canon (Roesler 2015; P1007– 1019 and P5645–5656 e.g.).5 Most of these texts are originally composed in Sanskrit, a few of them are translated from Chinese such as the influential “Sūtra of the Wise and Foolish” (P1008: Mdzangs blun zhes bya ba´i mdo) which consists of tales collected by Chinese monks in the Central Asian kingdom of Khotan in 445 CE (T202: Mair 1993). Different from other Buddhist traditions, the skyes rabs (Jātaka) section is placed into the section Tanjur (Collection of Commentaries) instead of the Kanjur (Collection of Buddha’s Teaching). This difference between the various transmissions is to a certain degree due to the complexity of Buddhist narratives, which are in fact the sum total of Buddha’s biography and hagiography, legends of the lives and qualities of his direct disciples, karmic tales, cosmographical descriptions of the Buddhist universe, didactic stories and more. 2.3.3 Other traditions In the ‘Basket of the Discipline’ (Vinayapitøaka), the rules and regulations of monastic conduct are not simply enumerated, but it is explained in great detail why a new rule had to be prescribed by the Buddha. Various stories justify why a specific rule had to be introduced. Therefore, the Vinaya section, which was redacted shortly after the Buddha’s death, contains narratives of considerable length. In particular, the ‘Basket of the Discipline’ of the Mūlasarvāstivāda school, which was completely translated into Tibetan (eighth to ninth century CE), is composed largely of narratives (Panglung 1981). This text corpus contains also one of the earliest versions
4 See for instance, T209 Baiyu-Jing, “Canonical Scripture of a Hundred Parables” attributed to the Indian monk Sam ghasena (fifth century) and translated into Chinese by his disciple Gun avrddhi who lived in southern China in 492 CE. 5 Throughout this essay, this conventional abbreviation is used to refer to the Peking edition of The Tibetan Tripitøaka (Buddhist Canon). See Suzuki (1955–61).
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of the Buddha’s biography corresponding to the Mahāparinirvānø asūtra (‘The Great Text on Buddha’s Nirvān a’). Another important Vinaya text is the Mahāvastu Avadāna (‘Great Subjects’) of the school Mahāsām ghika-Lokottaravāda (‘Proponents of the Supramundane affiliated with the Great Community’). The Mahāvastu written in Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit (second to first century BCE) grew over a long period of time until the fourth to the sixth centuries CE. As one of Buddha’s earliest biographies, which was already edited and translated in France in the nineteenth century (Senart 1882–97), this lengthy work contains only a few monastic rules but many more tales recounting Sumedha’s vow before the former Buddha Dīpam kara to become a Buddha, his last birth as prince Siddhārtha, his departure from the palace to search for enlightenment, and finally the foundation of the Buddhist order (Benedetti 2015, Marciniak 2017, Tournier 2017). Furthermore, the records written by Chinese Buddhist monks, who traveled to India from the third to the thirteenth century, play an important part as ‘historical sourcebooks’ for narratives, for they contain old tales heard during the pilgrimages across Buddhist countries. These valuable witnesses of Indian narratives documented by eminent monks like Faxian (approx. 342–423), Xuanzang (602–664) and Yijing (635–713) are preserved in the Chinese Buddhist canon (Taishō vol. 49–52). In the course of the dissemination of Buddhism, its narratives teeming with myths and legends, once translated into different languages, formed the basis of various local festivals (Laut and Röhrborn 1990, Skilling 2017).
2.4 The stereotyped structure of Jātaka stories In the Pāli tradition (2.3.1), all 547 Jātakas follow a strict formal structure. The introduction (1) is called ‘story of the present’ (paccuppanna-vatthu) which refers to some event at the time of Gotama Buddha. (2) The sage then explains – usually at the Jetavana monastery – the ultimate origin of that event by telling a ‘story of the past’ (atīta-vatthu) when he was a Boddhisatta (a Future Buddha), either as a human or an animal. A proper Jātaka contains (3) old stanzas (gāthā) which are accompanied by (4) a word for word commentary (veyyākaranø a) on grammar and vocabulary in prose. At the end of each Jātaka, there is (5) a conclusion that connects the story of the past to the present (samodhāna). The Buddha, beginning with the formula ‘And I myself was at that time …,’ identifies members of his current audience as reincarnations of the characters in the story from the past. Among these five components, only the stanzas which are frequently not connected to Buddhist thoughts enjoy canonical status, while the rest
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and thus this Jātaka collection as a whole cannot have been composed earlier than the fifth to the sixth century. As an example, the popular Hare-Jātaka will be briefly described: the story is told by the Buddha at the Jetavana monastery (1) while he returns thanks for charity. (2) In the past, the Bodhisatta was born as a young hare and lived together with an otter, a jackal and a monkey in a wood. On a holy fast-day, when the moral precepts must be kept, all animals prepared food in case a beggar should arrive. When the God Sakka (the ruler of the Heaven Tāvatim sa) finally arrives in the form of a begging Brahmin, the hare, who has nothing to offer, utters the following stanza (3): “Nor sesame, nor beans, nor rice have I as food to give, but roast with fire my flesh I yield, if thou with us wouldst live” (Cowell 1895, Vol. II, 34). Then follows the word for word commentary (4). At the end of his lesson, the Buddha reveals the connection (5): his three pupils Ānanda, Moggallāna, and Sāriputta were the otter, the jackal, and the monkey. And he himself as Boddhisatta was the hare. 2.5 Historicity and fictionality Whether the Avadāna stories, or at least some of them, contain any historical value or even a historical nucleus has been the subject of controversial discussion.6 Of course, the Jātaka stories are pure imagination and can consequently not be ‘real.’ On the other hand, however, each narrative story has somehow its own ‘history.’ To a certain degree, Buddhist narratives are often used as sources for historical studies, because they contain many reflections on historical events and thoughts (Steiner 2010, Skilling 2013b). In ancient India, historiography developed at a later date. When different early sources (texts, inscriptions, and objects of art) contain the same account, for instance of an episode in the life of Śākyamuni, scholars interested in Buddhist history normally tend to believe that this episode belongs to the old Buddhist tradition and may sometimes even be factual. Perhaps, factuality is not an especially meaningful category for Buddhist narratives, but as a historian of Buddhism, one speculates on how much reality might be found in the narratives. Nevertheless, the Buddhist world 6 Generally speaking, the Avadānas are evidently later than the kernel of Pāli Jātakas and their tales are more closely related to karmic effects. However, some Jātaka tales are also included in early Avadāna collections such as Avadānaśataka (‘A Hundred Tales of Great Deeds’). One of the main differences between Jātakas and Avadāna concerns the protagonist: the classical Jātakas deal with the Bodhisattva himself while the protagonist of an Avadāna story can be also a well-known member of the order.
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of narratives has its own timescale, technical vocabulary, principles of composition, and its own moral ideology, grounded in Buddhist ethics (Skilling 2013a). The factuality of Buddhist narratives is a hypothetical construct that has no independent existence beyond its context. In reflecting on the question of whether there are indigenous terms in the Buddhist tradition indicating the factuality of their narrative literature, one must keep in mind that the various forms of Indian narratives are fundamentally different from western narratives. As discussed in section 1, a general distinction of narrative factuality versus fiction can be found in an early Jaina work which refers to cariya and kappiya. Any type of narrative concerning the life or adventures of a human hero belongs to the group of cariya (in Prakrit and carita in Sanskrit). Fictional stories (kappiya in Prakrit and kalpita in Sanskrit), on the other hand, which concern animals or plants, are meant to help the audience to grasp abstract concepts through analogy. They include both fables and parables. In contrast to the Jainas, it seems that the Buddhists did not – consciously – use the antithetic pair of concepts cariya and kappiya. However, the term cariyā occurs in the title of a book, the Cariyāpitøaka of the Khuddakanikāya (section 2.3.1.). The Sanskrit form of the term carita was also used by Aśvaghosa in the title of his long poem Buddhacarita (section 2.3.2.). In both cases, the meaning of the Buddhist term is the same as the one used by the Jainas, that is ‘life of a human hero.’ The concept ‘truth’ (satya) belongs to the basic teaching of Buddhism. There are ‘Four Noble Truths’: suffering (duhø kha), origin of suffering (samudaya), cessation of suffering (nirodha), and path leading to the cessation (mārga). These are four facts known to be true by the noble ones (ārya) with insight into the nature of reality. Therefore, Buddhists claim all stories relating to the Buddha to be true, including such miracles as that of the sky raining flowers when the Buddha attained Nirvān a. Buddhists in ancient times did not have any other literal means of describing such an important event except by telling myths. The crucial question is who actually read Buddhist narratives and how they understood these old stories. In a critical analysis of Buddhist narratives, the following questions frequently occur: “Are myth and history mutually exclusive, locked in an irreconcilable clash of chronological imaginations? Can myth be the backdrop of history, not only of the past, but also of the future? Or does myth orient societies by giving meaning to history?” (Skilling 2013a, 71) Concerning ‘reality’ and ‘factuality,’ Buddhist narratives could be roughly divided into three categories: (a) mythological fiction: mostly Jātaka and Avadāna stories; (b) semi-real: narrative records of the life of Śākyamuni, his disciples and other persons in early Buddhist texts and art; and (c) historical facts imported from certain sources. In India, factuality is easily
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transformed into mythology. For instance, the Casøøtana-Avadāna narrates the story how the king Mahāksatrapa Castana, who ruled in the western part of India (approx. 70–120 CE), defended his kingdom as a mythological hero against various demons (Wilkens 2016). In his book The Discovery of India, Jawaharlal Nehru said: “Indian mythology is richer, vaster, very beautiful, and full of meaning. I have often wondered what manner of men and women they were who gave shape to these bright dreams and lovely fancies, and out of what gold mine and thought and imagination they dug them” (Nehru 1943, 73). This shows that even in Nehru’s mind there is hardly any trace of factuality.
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Grünbold, Günter. “Buddhistisches Erzählgut.” Enzyklopädie des Märchens. Handwörterbuch zur historischen und vergleichenden Erzählforschung. Vol. 2. Eds. Kurt Ranke et al. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1978. 998–1015. Hahn, Michael. “The Buddhist Contribution to the Indian Belles Lettres.” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 63 (2010): 455–471. Haribhadra Sūri. Samarāicca Kahā. A Jaina Prākrøta Work. Ed. Hermann Jacobi. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1926. Hikata, Ryusho. Jātaka Gaikan [A Compendium of the Jātakas]. Tokyo: Kamakura, 1961. Hinüber, Oskar von. Untersuchungen zur Mündlichkeit früher mittelindischer Texte der Buddhisten. Mainz: Franz Steiner, 1994. Hinüber, Oskar von. A Handbook of Pāli Literature. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1996. Hinüber, Oskar von. Entstehung und Aufbau der Jātaka-Sammlung. Studien zur Literatur des Theravāda-Buddhismus I. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1998. Höke, Holger. “Das P’u-sa pen-yüan ching (Frühere Leben des Bodhisattva). Eine Sammlung buddhistischer Geschichten.” Bochumer Jahrbuch zur Ostasienforschung 7 (1984): 113– 213. Hu-von Hinüber, Haiyan. Collected Papers on the Chinese Buddhist Monk Faxian (approx. 342– 423). Taiwan: Yuan Kuang Buddhist College, 2017. Iwamoto, Yukata. Bukkyō setsuwa kenkyū josetsu [An Introduction to the Study of Buddhist Narrative Literature]. Kyōto: Hōzōkan, 1967. Karashima, Seishi, and Katarzyna Marciniak. “The Question of Nālaka / Nālada in the Mahāvastu, Suttanipāda and the Fobenxingji jing.” Annual Report of The International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University 21 (2018): 147–166. Kirfel, Willibald. Die Kosmographie der Inder nach den Quellen dargestellt. Bonn and Leipzig: Georg Olms, 1920. Kuijp, Leonard van der. “Die tibetische Literatur.” Neues Handbuch der Literaturwissenschaft. Vol. 24: Süd- und zentralasiatische Literaturen. Eds. Gerhard Ehlers et al. Wiebelsheim: AULA, 2002. 115–132. Laut, Jens Peter. “Jātaka.” Enzyklopädie des Märchens. Handwörterbuch zur historischen und vergleichenden Erzählforschung. Vol. 7. Eds. Kurt Ranke et al. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1993. 500–507. Laut, Jens Peter, and Klaus Röhrborn. Eds. Buddhistische Erzählliteratur und Hagiographie in türkischer Überlieferung. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1990. Lenz, Timothy. Gandhāra Avadānas: British Library Kharosøøthī Fragments 1–3 and 21 and Supplementary Fragments A–C. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. Li, Wei. Schwanfrau und Prinz. Die chinesische Frühform einer Divyāvadāna-Legende. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011. Lo, Yuet Keung. “The Drama of Numskulls: Structure, Texture, and Functions of the Scripture of One Hundred Parables.” Early Medieval China 12 (2006): 69–90. Lüders, Heinrich. Philologica Indica. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1940. Lüders, Heinrich. Bhārhut und die buddhistische Literatur. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1941. Mair, Victor H. “The Linguistic and Textual Antecedents of the Sūtra of the Wise and the Foolish.” Sino-Platonic Papers 38 (1993): 1–95. Mair, Victor H. “Chiang-Ching Wen: Oral and Written Aspects of Chinese Sūtra Lectures.” China and Beyond. A Collection of Essays. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2013. 93–120. Mair, Victor H., and Rostislav Berezkin. “Buddhist Narrative Literature in China.” Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism. Vol. 1: Literature and Languages. Eds. Jonathan Silk, Vincent Eltschinger and Oskar von Hinüber. Leiden: Brill, 2015. 524–531.
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Marciniak, Katarzyna. “Padumāvaī-jātaka attested in the Manuscript Sa of the Mahāvastu.” Annual Report of the International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University 20 (2017): 67–102. Masson, Jeffrey Mousaieff, and Madhav Vasudeva Patwardhan. Śāntarasa and Abhinavagupta’s Philosophy of Aesthetics. Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1969. Nattier, Jan. A Guide to the Earliest Chinese Buddhist Translations. Texts from the Eastern Han and Three Kingdoms Periods. Tōkyō: The International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University, 2008. Nehru, Jawaharlal. The Discovery of India. Calcutta: The Signet Press, 1943. Panglung, Jampa Lobsang. Die Erzählstoffe des Mūlasarvāstivāda-Vinaya, analysiert auf Grund der tibetischen Übersetzung. Tokyo: Reiyukai Library, 1981. Radich, Michael. How Ajātaśatru Was Reformed: The Domestication of ‘Ajase’ and Stories in Buddhist History. Tokyo: The International Institute for Buddhist Studies, 2011. Roesler, Ulrike. “Narratives: Tibet.” Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism. Vol. 1: Literature and Languages. Eds. Jonathan Silk, Vincent Eltschinger and Oskar von Hinüber. Leiden: Brill, 2015. 515–523. Salomon, Richard. Ed. Two Gāndhārī Manuscripts of the Songs of Lake Anavatapta (Anavataptagāthā): British Library Kharosøøthī Fragment 1 and Senior Scroll 14. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Salomon, Richard. “Narratives and Long Poetry: Aśvaghosa.” Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism. Vol. 1: Literature and Languages. Eds. Jonathan Silk, Vincent Eltschinger and Oskar von Hinüber. Leiden: Brill, 2015. 507–514. Schlingloff, Dieter. Ajanta. Handbook of the Paintings. Narrative Wall-Paintings. [2000] 3 vols. New Delhi: Aryan Books International, 2013. Senart, Émile. Ed. Le Mahāvastu: Texte sanscrit publié pour la première fois et accompagné d’introductions et d’un commentaire. 3 vols. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1882–97. Seyfort Ruegg, David. “Remarks on the Place of Narratives in the Buddhist Literature of India and Tibet.” India, Tibet, China: Genesis and Aspects of Traditional Narratives. Ed. Alfredo Cadonna. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1993. 193–227. Skilling, Peter. “Did the Buddhists Believe Their Narratives? Desultory Remarks on the Very Idea of Buddhist Mythology.” Studies on Buddhist Myths: Texts, Pictures, Traditions and History. Eds. Wang Bangwei, Chen Jinhua and Cheng Ming. Shanghai: Zhongxi Shuju, 2013a. 45–76. Skilling, Peter. “The Tathāgata and the Long Tongue of Truth. The Authority of the Buddha in sūtra and Narrative Literature.” Scriptural Authority, Reason and Action: Proceedings of a Panel at the 14th World Sanskrit Conference, Kyoto, September 1th– 5th, 2009. Eds. Vincent Eltschinger and Helmut Krasser. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2013b. 1–47. Skilling, Peter. “Romance and Riddle: Buddhist Narratives of Siam.” Imagination and Narrative. Lexical and Cultural Translation in Buddhist Asia. Eds. Peter Skilling and Justin McDaniel. Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2017. 160–186. Steiner, Roland. “Truth Under the Guise of Poetry. Aśvaghosa’s ‘Life of the Buddha.’” Lives Lived, Lives Imagined. Biography in the Buddhist Traditions. Eds. Linda Covill, Ulrike Roesler, Sarah Shaw. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2010. 89–121. Straube, Martin. “Narratives: South Asia.” Brill’s Encyclopedia of Buddhism. Vol. 1: Literature and Languages. Eds. Jonathan Silk, Vincent Eltschinger and Oskar von Hinüber. Leiden: Brill, 2015. 488–506. Strong, John S. “Explicating the Buddha’s Final Illness in the Context of his Other Ailments: The Making and Unmaking of some Jātaka Tales.” Buddhist Studies Review 29.1 (2012): 17–33.
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MOHSEN ASHTIANY/BO UTAS
Narrative in Classical Persian Literature 1. Introduction This chapter discusses narratives in literary texts written in Classical Persian. Also known as New Persian in Western scholarship (in order to demarcate it from pre-Islamic Iranian languages), it came into being after the Arab invasion in the seventh century CE and the subsequent gradual conversion of most of the population of Iran to Islam. Strongly influenced by Arabic, Classical Persian adopted many loanwords from it, while preserving its direct link in both vocabulary and structure to older Iranian languages, such as Old Persian (the language of the Achaemenids; 559– 331 BCE), Avestan (the language of the holy scriptures of the Zoroastrian religion), Parthian, Sogdian and Middle Persian (or Pahlavi, the language of the Sasanians; 225–651 CE). In addition to New Persian, there exist also other New Iranian languages such as Kurdish, Balochi and Pashto, but these fall outside the scope of our essay. No substantial texts in Persian have survived from before the tenth century CE. The ‘Classical period’ of Persian literature usually refers to the six centuries from the tenth to the sixteenth centuries while at the same time implicitly acknowledging its high literary status. During this period the vocabulary and the structure of the syntax proved resilient to a series of radical changes in spite of frequent political upheavals and foreign invasions. The periodic waves of new conquerors from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, including the Saljuqs, the Mongols, and the Timurids, were quick to embrace and adopt the Persian language and existing Iranian cultural and administrative traditions. Another culturally important change came about in the early sixteenth century when the originally Turkic Safavid dynasty came to power and established twelve-imam Shia as the state
Note: * Partly based on Utas (2014). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-050
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religion. Most features of this Classical period persisted in Persian literature until the influx of foreign (especially European) influences in the late nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. Of necessity this essay is based on written texts, but we have tried as far as possible to draw conclusions that are also based on oral traditions. 2. Narrative genres The production of narrative, or the telling of stories false or true, has been a perennially central activity in Iranian-Persian culture since ancient times. The texts treated here are above all literary texts, in prose and verse, that have a distinct narrative element, but in a wider perspective a narrative mode is noticeable in most genres, not least in historical works. There is an abundance of stories in prose, but stories regularly also appear in poetry, for instance in the panegyric or satiric qaside and the epic or didactic masnavi. The last poetic form mentioned, the masnavi, has each hemistich rhyming with its counterpart, and the rhyme itself changes with each line. Freed therefore from the shackles of mono-rhyme, it is ideally suited for composing long poems on a variety of subjects. Persian historiography (see section 8 below) is also generally written in a continuous narrative mode and often with many points of contact with epic poetry. Many other prose genres have a strong presence of narrative elements, as for instance biographies of prominent writers and religious leaders, especially Sufi shaikhs. Much of what from a modern perspective is labeled ‘literature’ has an oral pedigree. The very notion of factuality is affected by the orality and aurality in the transmission of texts in prose or verse which, although often read silently and in solitude now, have a long history of communal reading and public performance. In such an arena, credibility (verisimilitude / IV.1 McKeon) and factuality are intertwined and vary from occasion to occasion in the context of their reception and performance. 3. What factuality? The topic of this section of the Handbook, ‘How Occidental is the Factual?’ might suggest a dichotomy between a timeless Occidental and a preconceived ‘Oriental’ approach to factuality. This strictly etic approach is difficult to uphold: ‘genres’ will have their range and borders defined best in a comparative emic analysis drawn from intra-cultural data, and viewed from a diachronic perspective. Moreover, when examining notions of factuality, the occidental Middle Ages have more in common with their Ori-
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ental siblings than with their own later Western progenies (/ V.2 von Contzen). In a broader global perspective, a combination of emic and etic perspectives is needed in order to account for the way the framework of genres tends to undergo mutations, not least through cultural exchanges and borrowings, with the ‘factual’ and ‘nonfactual,’ in the course of time, drifting as conjointly unstable notions across cultures and continents in east and west. Performance in an oral delivery has a direct bearing on factuality, which is also reflected more visibly in medieval texts (particularly in their proems or authorial asides within the main body of the text) in different literatures: the poet/performer often begins with an introductory citation of his sources, those hoary ancient voices from the past whose very words shore up and sanctify the validity of the performer/poet’s forthcoming account. A case in point, confirming the continuation of this approach from the spoken to the written are the many instances in the national epic, the Shāhnāme of Ferdowsi (d. around 1025), where the poet refers to his authorities. We are here thinking of truth in the widest sense of the term. One notes, too, that Ferdowsi selects his ‘authorities’ judiciously to fit the plausibility of the specific narrative that they vouch for: he designates wise men, masters of truth, as sources for narratives of high seriousness and far-reaching consequences, while he resorts to a congenial companion for an episode describing a romantic tale about a pair of lovers. In some cases, he even quotes almost verbatim from extant texts and one can set his text against others, with the added documentation further reinforcing belief in the validity of this supporting evidence. We should also note that frequently in what we now term medieval (fictional) literature, not one but at times several conflicting versions are presented to the audience for their inspection. This is done in a manner akin to that of philosophical or scientific texts, or in religious exegesis, where the philosopher, scientist, or theologian frequently presents differing opinions and arguments by earlier thinkers (/ V.8 Toral-Niehoff ) before arriving at his/her own deductions regarding the truth of the matter. These initial debates foster the notion of thoughtful sifting of the evidence, and reinforce credibility. In what follows we will first discuss narratives in prose (section 4), then didactic uses of storytelling and narratives in verse (section 6), before turning to the allegorical depictions of reality in Sufi texts (section 7) and the factual genre of historiography (section 8). 4. Storytelling in prose There is a wealth of narrative texts from 1000–1500 CE in Persian. Our far from comprehensive knowledge of their production and reception sug-
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gests that there was not much concern regarding the factuality of the events, though of course, this varied from text to text, and from genre to genre. Although storytelling in this period was almost completely oral and hence lost to us, sometimes we can glean something of it from later records, as with the Persian elements occurring in the Arabian Nights, earlier recorded in a Middle Persian collection called Hazār afsānag (‘Thousand Tales’). Later a number of cycles of stories were written down, but such popular texts were never considered to be part of what we now would call ‘fine or high literature’ (known at the time as adab) (Utas 2006, 203). Moreover, the wide array of such texts that have been passed on to modern times, in oral as well as in written form, were not consistently regarded as fictional stories; some readers might have conceived of them as tales of adventure and events that could plausibly have taken place somewhere at some time in the past. This would also apply to stories featuring demons, jinns, sorcerers, fairies and angels. Many of these stories had a strong didactic bent while others were tailored more to amuse and entertain, both intentions usually working in tandem. As in the case of the Arabian Nights, the frequent use of frames of one kind or another (dividing the narrative into days or nights of the week, or tales told to a prince by different narrators) superimposed a fictive structural scaffolding on the overall master narrative. Entertainment and didacticism were prioritized over historical verisimilitude, with the writer playing a visibly creative role, acting as architect or impresario rather than as self-effacing faithful reporter of events from a specific time. What was on offer was a series of timeless universal truths rather than factual reporting about the here and now. The stories generally described the adventures of heroes, warriors, and kings, or the trials and tribulations of a pair of lovers, all part of an allembracing legendary material integrated in what was presumably conceived as factual history by a large section of their audience at the time. These legendary heroes and kings partly originated in pre-Islamic religious traditions and partly in secular traditions and myths, but in the course of time these two strands fused so inextricably that they have become almost indistinguishable from one another. This amalgamated historical tradition was supposedly collected in written form prior to the advent of Islam (in the seventh century) in a compilation entitled Khvadāy-nāmag (‘Book of Lords’), of which only scattered traces remain (Hämeen-Anttila 2018). But at the dawn of the Classical Persian period, this dispersal, compounded by the paucity of written documents, was gradually replaced by a remarkable convergence and collocation brought about and preserved in several monumental works in prose, notably by Tabari (d. 923) in Arabic and adapted and translated into Persian prose by Bal’ami (d. ca. 992–997) and into poetry by Ferdowsi. It was most significantly displayed in the above-men-
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tioned national verse epic, the Shāh-nāme (Book of Kings). Here we meet legendary kings, belonging to the religious tradition found also in the Zoroastrian canon Avesta, and then gradually pass over to historical rulers such as Darius (r. 522–486 BCE) and Alexander (356–323). Though particularly in the latter case the narrative(s) appeared in several versions and in different languages, this fusion of legend and history was a prominent and persistent feature in the narratives about these historical rulers. In addition, the Shāh-nāme contains an abundance of marvelous warlike heroes, some also connected to a distant factual historical background, as well as many romantic stories of love that may sometimes be traced back to more than a millennium. In the Shāh-nāme the longer stories are regularly called dāstān (‘narrative’), and they became the model for numerous later epic poems, whether short, focused on one story, or more comprehensive, containing series of stories within a historical or romantic frame.1 As a retrospective chronicle of a very long span of time, a salvation history stretching from the creation of the world to the demise of the preIslamic kings of Iran, with fate playing a dominant role throughout, the Shāh-nāme does not and cannot be expected to differentiate between legendary and factual history (/ V.6 Hu-von Hinüber and Soni). This pattern repeats itself throughout the extremely rich repository of traditional stories from which tales, exempla, parables and allegories were drawn in popular as well as literary compositions in various genres during the entire Classical period. Imported stories also became part of the Iranian narrative world. Thus we meet stories from India, such as the fables known as Kalila and Dimna (two jackals that figure in the frame story),2 as well as from the Aramaic, Hebrew and Arabic traditions, and not least Biblical and Koranic stories, as well as from the integrated Greek-Near Eastern culture that is called Hellenism. To this pool, new stories both about historical figures and freely invented events were continually being added. Initially, this narrative repertoire was anonymous. Later it was drawn upon and used in works written by authors whose names, and in most cases dates, are known to us.
1 For general information on Persian works and authors that appear here and in the following, see Rypka (1968), and for an overview of the genre system of Persian literature, see Utas (2006). 2 This extremely influential collection of fables is known in the West as Fables of Bidpai or Tales of Pilpay, see Aravamudan (2011, 129–150). The fictionality of fables is, of course, beyond questioning. However, they belong to the complex of traditional wisdom literature, which uses fictional stories and anecdotes to convey its didactic messages.
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5. The didactic use of tales Persian prose generally had a strong didactic orientation, either in terms of strictly moral exhortation or as general observations on life, often slanting towards outright Machiavellian advice. The latter type is especially found in the genre specula principum (‘Mirrors for Princes’), a convenient label for manuals of advice of great variety, depending on the status and profession of the narrator and the intended audience. One of the earliest and liveliest examples of this is the Nasihat-nāme (‘Book of Counsels’), better known as Qābus-nāme (‘Book of Qābus’), after the name of the grandfather of a Ziyarid ruler who supposedly composed it for his son at the end of the eleventh century. The book itself can also be regarded as a medieval encyclopedia on a wide range of subjects including medicine, astronomy, matrimony, the game of polo, as well as a guide to household management. It can therefore be described as a compendium of assorted facts, but the notion of factuality is still subservient, functioning as a handmaiden to the main underlying theme of the entire work as a manual of survival in a turbulent world. It is a mixture of wit with a touch of chicanery, pragmatic but also humane. Moreover, there is constant exhortation to the reader in various contexts to be conscious of the welfare of others and not to inflict harm out of selfishness. The paternal counsel in the very first words of a chapter on “The Good and Bad in Speech” (Kai Kā’ūs ibn Iskandar 1951, 35) is an example of the ironic demeanor of the author. Each statement begins by first registering a strict allegiance to truth before quickly recanting such strait-laced honesty by arguing for the practical necessity of compromises and accommodation to specific circumstances: Be of ready speech, my son, yet never tell lies and do not gain the reputation of being a liar. Rather become known for veracity, so that if ever in an emergency you utter a lie it will be believed. Whatever you say must be the truth, but never utter a truth which has the appearance of a lie; for a lie which has the appearance of truth is preferable to an accurate statement which seems to be false, and this kind of lie will be believed where that kind of true statement is not. (Kai Kā’ūs ibn Iskandar 1951, 35)
The most famous collection of didactic narratives in this genre is the poet Sa’di’s Golestān (‘Rose Garden’), composed in 1258 (Sa’di 2008). A great number of stories are told by him, some allegedly autobiographical, in which the moral – and at times not so moral – points are underscored by brief and artful lines of verse. It is possibly the most popular of all Persian literary works in prose, still being widely read, with lines and phrases from it committed to memory and surfacing in everyday debates as appropriate off-the-cuff homely adages.
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6. Storytelling in verse The predilection for storytelling was also displayed in poetry. While the national epic, the Shāh-nāme, excelled in telling stories and became the model of countless later works, there was also an independent tradition of romantic verse epics. The seemingly oldest of these, from the eleventh century, is Vis and Rāmin, the names of two lovers embroiled in an illicit love affair in a story that bears great resemblance to that of Tristan and Isolde. Since there are very few or no historical traces of the main characters, both versions must be regarded as pieces of fiction, although they might very well have been read as reports from the past (Gorgani 2008). Nezāmi Ganjavi’s (d. 1209) five long poems, known collectively as his Khamse (‘The Five’), are generally regarded as the finest specimen of Persian romantic verse narratives. Apart from Leili and Majnun, among those five poems we find a version of the Alexander legend (Eskandar-nāme, ‘Book of Alexander’) and two pseudo-historical romances on the love stories of the Sasanian kings Khosrou Parviz and Bahrām Gur. Nezāmi is a masterly poet, who displays a wealth of rhetorical figures as well as complex, interwoven images. As he himself points out in the prologues to his poems, he was well aware of the fact that his romances were literary artifacts crafted by him as the creator of a fictive world with a life of its own. On the other hand, he inserted his creation into a strong narrative and poetic tradition from which he took motifs, topoi and much of his plots. He both embellished the old stories and created them anew. Reading these verse narratives, one arrives at the impression that, to borrow a phrase from art history, “the period eye” (Baxandall 1972, 29– 108) was not fixated on the contrast between what could be seen as fictive and what could be seen as factual. The tales are all detailed, vivid, imaginative and fantastic, constructing worlds outside of normal reality, and must have been experienced in that way by most readers at the time of their composition as well as in the following centuries. Although we cannot enter into the minds of these readers, or generalize on medieval ‘mindsets,’ we come away with the impression that the distinction between fictional and factual narratives was often blurred. Fiction was treated as history, and history clad in the form of fiction. As an illustrative, although much later, example one could point to the case of the initial native reception of the first Persian translations (at the end of the nineteenth century) of Le Comte de Monte-Cristo and Les Trois Mousquetaires by Dumas Père. These were read as factual political social history just as La Dame aux Camélias by Dumas Fils was interpreted as a social report (Rypka 1968, 391, 679).
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7. The mystical use of stories The first of Nezāmi’s five great poems stands apart from the tradition of romantic epics. It is an ethico-philosophical work called Makhzan al-asrār (‘Treasury of Mysteries’) that rather belongs to the homiletic tradition founded by the Ismaili propagandist Nāser-e Khosrou (d. ca. 1075) and the court poet Hakim Sanā’i (d. ca. 1135). The latter’s magnum opus, the Hadiqat al-haqiqe (‘Walled Garden of Truth’), is regarded as the inception of an exceedingly rich production of Sufi (mystical) didactic epics. Sanā’i uses a wide array of anecdotes and exemplary stories to demonstrate ethical, philosophical and mystical truths, while Nezāmi’s Treasury of Mysteries consists of twenty discourses, each presenting an exemplary story on religious and ethical topics that also allow of mystical interpretations. The Sufi impact on Persian literature became increasingly pervasive from the eleventh century onwards, so that by the end of the Classical period it had become more or less predominant. From the Sufi perspective, an allegorical or metaphoric reading of almost any kind of love story became feasible. Profane songs of love and wine were taken metaphorically to refer to Divine love and mystical ecstasy. The long narrative poems in the masnavi form came to be used as instruments of instruction of adepts as well as presentations of hidden truths. Both the traditional repertory of anecdotes and tales and the stories of romantic love were put to new uses. For instance, in his homiletic discourse Asrār-nāme (‘Book of Mysteries’), Farid od-din ‘Attār (d. ca. 1220) used anecdotes as parables and in his later epic poems he introduced long narratives as extensive allegories. In his masnavi Manteq ot-teyr (‘Language of the Birds,’ but often given the title The Conference of the Birds in the West), he tells the story of how thirty birds go on a quest for their King, the Simurgh. Finally they reach his throne hall and find themselves facing a huge mirror. Simurgh is not only the name of a mythical bird but it also means – thirty birds! For over seven centuries the Masnavi of Jalāl od-din Rumi has been the staple reading for countless Sufis all over the Muslim world. His poetry is also read among Sufis of many other orders – in its original Persian as well as in Arabic, Turkish and many other languages. In this way a specific Sufi hermeneutic tradition developed, in which parables are expounded both in written commentaries and in direct communication between master and novice. The exceptional position of Rumi’s Masnavi is shown by the fact that it has been called ‘the Persian Koran’ by later generations and that this remarkable masterpiece, composed in the masnavi form, is simply called ‘the Masnavi.’ Still, the reception of this Sufi poetry changed through the centuries; and the Sufi reading of texts was gradually aestheticized. Poetry of the kind that Rumi composed came to be read and enjoyed as
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art more than spiritual experience and Sufi instruction. Furthermore, Twelve-Imam Shi’ism was a culture that was steeped in a world-view of a Neo-Platonic type, according to which the world that we perceive with our senses is not important since it merely mirrors the truly existing world of ideas. This philosophical stance was re-enforced and made broadly popular by the Sufi view that this world, which we would like to see as factual, is nothing but a metaphor for the celestial world. What, then, would be the difference between an imagined and a metaphoric world? (Compare Indian notions of the world as māya, / V.6 Hu-von Hinüber and Soni). 8. Historiography When we come to the writing of political, literary and religious history, things appear in a different light since these are genres that are based on the assumption of their veracity. However, against the background of the Persian predilection for telling stories, they also have a strong narrative dimension. One can compare the Persian tradition with early Arabic chronicles, as found for instance in Tabari’s monumental Ta’rikh al-rosol va’l-moluk va’l-kholafā (‘History of the Prophets, the Kings, and the Caliphs’), which purports to provide a precise account of the sources. The first really comprehensive specimen of Persian historiography, Ta’rikh-e Bal’ami (963 CE), composed by a vizier of the Samanids3 and based on a somewhat free translation of Tabari, is written in a very different manner. It presents history as a narrative more than a repertory of verified facts in an annalistic format and it does away with Tabari’s procedure of replicating different sources (/ V.8 Toral-Niehoff; / V.9 Wamitila). Compared to the heroic epic, historiographic texts in Persian vary enormously in manner and matter. Here we focus on one historical work with a side-glance at the heroic epic. Two great literary figures of the Ghaznavid period, Abu’l-Fazl Beyhaqi (995–1077) and Abu’l-Qasem Ferdowsi (already mentioned), provide us with many passages in which they voice their concern not only with the ways in which one can arrive at the truth of an event but also with how to establish its significance and its connection with and relevance to other events and how to achieve an accurate report. Beyhaqi was a secretary at the court of a number of Ghaznavid rulers. The surviving volume of what perhaps was a much larger project, deals in depth with the years 1030–1041. It narrates in detail the ascent of Mah-
3 Whether Bal’ami composed the work himself or whether it was delegated to several scholars and ultimately compiled by him remains a matter of dispute.
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mud’s son Mas’ud to the throne (who had successfully put an end to his own brother’s short-lived first reign) and ends before his death at the hand of his rebellious guards. This reign of about a decade was mainly determined by the increasing attacks on the king and his troops by marauding Turkic tribes that had crossed the Oxus and finally managed to defeat them in a decisive battle in 1040. Throughout the surviving text, Beyhaqi, in his role of historian, is anxious to provide as many dates and details as possible while at the same time steadfastly refusing to be a conventional annalistic chronicler. In one of his many asides he derides such an approach and he justifies his frequently lengthy digressions into past events to his readers: These stories may appear out of place in a typical chronicle. For most historians record how a certain king sent a certain commander to a certain battle, and on such-and-such day they made peace, and this one beat that one, or that one beat this one, and they leave it at that, but I intend to perform my duty to the full. (2011 vol. I, 468).
The promise to perform his duty entails placing observed facts into their proper context, endowing his historical account with a pattern of synoptic recognition through which the readers can observe a series of overall themes: the tension between the old guard at court, left over from Mas’ud’s father’s days, the new arrivistes brought by Mas’ud himself, the perennial division in the court between the Turkish commanders and the Persian speaking bureaucracy from the Vizier downwards. All this is played out while a relentless decline sets in gradually in manifold ways, punctuated by the incremental repetition of episodes in which eminent courtiers, both Turkish and Persian speaking, the old guard and the new, fall victim to internal machinations at court by the opposed parties, cabal and the king’s own fickle and increasingly erratic and perverse willfulness. These episodes give the narrative its distinctive rhythm and the decline of Mas’ud’s rule appears as the leitmotif of the internal drama within the court; while at the same time, external threats and their final horrific outcome are depicted in symbolic descriptive episodes mirroring the calamities that have occurred or, ominously, are about to occur. All suffer, the court as well as the lowly subjects of the crown. The pace of narration is slowed by the insertion of exempla or self-contained dramatic scenes only obliquely related to the master narrative; namely the gradual defeat of the Ghaznavid king by the Saljuq brothers leading their Turkic troops. These dramatic scenes describing momentous events in the past, replete with telling details, dramatic dialogues, gestures, and symbolic objects, thick description in short, appear almost as a play within a play, acting out the main narrative on a smaller scale. The same insistence on either direct observation or reliable reporting appears in Biruni’s own preface to his magisterial work on India, Ketāb tahø qiq mā le’l-Hend (‘The Book of Enquiries on India’):
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No one will deny that in questions of historic authenticity hearsay [khabar] does not equal eye-witness [’iyān]; for in the latter the eye of the observer apprehends the substance of that which is observed, both in the time and in the place where it exists, whilst hearsay has its peculiar drawbacks. But for these, it would be even preferable to eyewitness; for the object of eye-witness can only be actual momentary existence; whilst hearsay comprehends alike the present, the past, and the future, so as to apply in a certain sense both to that which is and to that which is not (i.e. which either has ceased to exist or has not yet come into existence).4 (Sachau 1914, vol. I, 3.)
Biruni then goes on to distinguish between different “reporters” (mokhberin) and their possible ways of lying. His aim is to avoid repeating fictitious accounts and to determine who is a reliable reporter who will convey a true account. Writing about contemporary history, Beyhaqi could avoid myths altogether. Biruni cannot. But whether he is writing about Iran or India, he adopts the method of a dispassionate observer, simply recording what previous reliable historians had recounted.
9. Conclusion On a broader scale, our notions of factuality are implicit in the cultural climate of the time, and rely on the unstated consensus regarding certain eternal truths and their bearing on life in general. Fate and Predestination (qazā, qadar, sarnevasht), Fame (nām), and Reason (kherad), impose their own pattern and make their presence felt. This notion of eternal certainties – Spinoza’s sub specie aeternitatis comes to mind – if taken in the above wider sense of perennially recurring patterns, can at times reinforce factuality and at other times make it seem irrelevant. For example, the already mentioned Shāh-nāme can be summed up as a heroic attempt to preserve the nām (‘fame’; one notes the parallels with Latin fama) (Hardie 2009) of an entire land and of its people pitted against fate and defiant of malignant foes, and to do so by recording its history from creation to downfall in a book (nāme). This focus on fame does not exclude the notion of factuality. In the past few decades there has been, for example, a revival of interest in scrutinizing the final part of the Shāh-nāme which narrates the history of the Sasanid dynasty, to mine it for information on the economic history of the period, along with parallel accounts, such as Tabari’s (Rubin 2017). Taken as a whole, however, the focus remains on safeguarding nām, refracted in heroic words and actions. Factuality can only have a modest
4 For further references to the ‘iyān/khabar distinction in the context of the texts of the period see Kozah (2015, 24).
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role in the “Palace of Verse,” as Ferdowsi calls his poem, designed as it is to preserve celebrated deeds of a land and its heroes. There are also many historical works that are in essence panegyrics in prose designed to glorify a reign or dynasty through a recital of incidents, battles, and dates, which are narrated in an impersonal factual tone. There are also more richly textured accounts, such as that of Beyhaqi’s mentioned above, in which a whole panoply of rhetorical devices and techniques of narration are employed to evoke the gradual downfall of a ruler. Here factuality is conveyed by different stylistic devices and from different perspectives. There are battle scenes in which the historian himself participates as an eyewitness, an intradiegetic narrator, who induces a sense of immediacy. These scenes stand in contrast to other sections where the extradiegetic commentator embarks on a wide philosophical overview, going beyond immediate facts in search of valid and timeless observations. The frequent variations in narrative time through the use of analepsis and prolepsis (flashbacks and foretelling) as well as breaks in the narrative by insertion of appropriate exempla further complicate the relationship between the author and the reader, with the latter encouraged to adopt a more active part in interpreting the narrative and in sifting the evidence, rather than passively observing one event after another in an histoire evénémentielle. Finally there is the appeal to ‘attestable facts’ and practical common sense used almost as a rhetorical device to chisel away at the vast corpus of Persian mystical, hagiographic and romantic literature, in which, as already pointed out, factuality either plays a cameo role, or as in the case of mythical narratives, is absent altogether. The method here is the familiar one of ignoring the original intentions and conventions of a text and rejecting any parts that do not tally with the commonsensical observations of a literalminded reader, and often exploiting this discordance for comical and satirical effect. This no-nonsense approach can also, if pursued with sufficient Gradgrindian zealotry, backfire and satirize the very concept of factuality.
References Aravamudan, Srinivas. Enlightenment Orientalism. Resisting the Rise of the Novel. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2011. Bal’ami, Abu ‘Ali Mohammad b. Mohammad. Tārikh-e Bal’ami. Ed. Mohammad-Taqi Bahār. Tehran: Chāp-khāne Dāneshgāh-e Tehrān, 1962. Baxandall, Michael. Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Beyhaqi, Abu’l-Fazl. The History of Beyhaqi. Trans. C. Edmund Bosworth and rev. Mohsen Ashtiany. 3 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
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Ferdowsi, Abolghasem. Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings. Trans. Dick Davis. New York: Viking Penguin, 2006. Gorgani, Fakhraddin. Vis and Ramin. Trans. Dick Davis. Washington D.C.: Mage Publishers, 2008. Hämeen-Anttila, Jaakko. Khwadāynāmag. The Middle Persian Book of Kings. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018. Hardie, Philip. “Fame’s Narratives. Epic and Historiography.” Narratology and Interpretation: The Content of Narrative Form in Ancient Literature. Eds. J. Grethlein and A. Rengakos. Berlin: De Gruyter Publishers, 2009. 555–571. Kai Kā’ūs ibn Iskandar. A Mirror for Princes: The Qābūs nāma. Trans. Reuben Levy. London: Cresset Press, 1951. Kozah, Mario. The Birth of Indology as an Islamic Science: Al-Bīrūnī’s Treatise on Yoga Psychology. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Nezāmi Ganjavi, Nezām al-Din Eliyās. Khamse Nezāmi (based on the Moscow-Baku ed.). Tehran: Hermes Publishers, 2007. Rubin, Zeev. “The Financial Affairs of the Sasanian Empire under Khusraw Parvez.” https://www.sasanika.org/wp-content/uploads/e-sasanika18-Zeev-Rubin.pdf. e-Sasanika 17 (2017) (15 August 2018). Rypka, Jan. History of Iranian Literature. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1968. Sachau, Edward C. Alberuni’s India. Vol. I. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Co., 1914. Sa’di of Shiraz, Shaykh Mushrifuddin. The Gulistan (Rose Garden) of Sa’di. Bilingual English and Persian Edition. Trans. Wheeler M. Thackston. Bethesda, MD: Ibex Publishers, 2008. Tabari, Mohammad b. Jarir. Ta’rik al-rusul wa’l-mulūk. Trans. as The History of al-Tø abarī. Ed. Ehsan Yarshater. 40 vols. New York: SUNY Press, 1985–2007. Utas, Bo. “‘Genres’ in Persian Literature 900–1900.” Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective. Vol. 2: Literary Genres: An Intercultural Approach. Ed. G. Lindberg-Wada. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006. 199–241. Utas, Bo. “Classical Persian Literature: Fiction, Didactics or Intuitive Truth?” True Lies Worldwide. Fictionality in Global Contexts. Eds. Anders Cullhed and Lena Rydholm. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. 167–177.
ISABEL TORAL-NIEHOFF
Factual Narrative in Medieval Arabic Literature 1. Introduction: Arabic literature and factuality Arabic literature is without a doubt one of the most prolific and multifaceted world literatures and looks back to a history of nearly 1600 years. This fact is inseparable from the notable career of Arabic as a language of prestige and religion. Initially, there are several scattered epigraphic attestations of Arabic dated to the fourth century CE. After the blossoming of oral poetry in Arabia in the fifth and sixth centuries, its written and spoken manifestations gained significant momentum with the rise of Islam and the Quran in the early seventh century, and later expanded extensively in the wake of the so-called Islamic Conquests in the seventh and eighth centuries. From the tenth century onwards, Arabic has functioned as a transcultural koiné, written in a standardized form of high prestige (“Classical Arabic,” as opposed to various oral vernacular forms) and utilized by a vast variety of ethnic groups (by Arabs, but also Berbers, Iranians, Kurds, Turks, Indians and Africans) and of different religions (Muslims, but also Jews and Christians) who lived in a large belt stretching from the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa via the Middle East all the way up to Iran. The richness and diversity of textual Arabic production cannot be overemphasized. It found expression in poetry, prose literature, philology of poetic works, rhetoric, historiography, but also in scientific, philosophical, and theological genres, and that was fueled by the early use of paper since the late eighth century. Modern Standard Arabic, a slightly modified version of Classical Arabic, is still the language of prestige in the entire Arabic world, functioning as a linguistic medium of communication in the area that, roughly, stretches from Morocco to Iraq. It also serves as a second language in various regions of Africa and Asia. Most importantly, Arabic continues to be employed as the religious lingua franca for all Muslims all over the world. The extraordinary vastness of Arabic literature, overwhelming even when one restricts oneself to the Pre-Modern period and the classical https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-051
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literature written by Muslims (as I will do in this chapter), makes it almost impossible to arrive at general and verifiable statements about factuality in Arabic literature. There are, in addition, two crucial difficulties that cannot be resolved in the framework of this text. The first and most basic problem is that of translation. To establish which Arabic words and corresponding concepts could be the equivalent of the notion of factuality would require a protracted and in-depth conceptual analysis of the Arabic lexicon in a number of historical and generic contexts; the question in fact goes far beyond that of a mere linguistic problem, since it would need to take into account the complexities of cultural translation. Secondly, we must consider that the current classification schemes, for instance literary genres, are modeled in accordance with European usage (e.g., “historiography,” “fiction,” “scientific texts,” “belles-lettres”), which will need to be meticulously decolonized and historicized in order to arrive at a nuanced account. Unfortunately, there are hardly any preliminary studies that could help to establish an initial working basis. Whereas the problematic legitimacy and conventions of fictional narration in Medieval Arabic literature have already attracted the attention of scholars (Drory 1994, Leder 1998, Kennedy 2005, Toral-Niehoff 2015), the existence and characteristics of factual narratives have scarcely been discussed as such (but see the insightful section on “Historians and the Truth” in Robinson 2003, 143–145) (/ V.2 von Contzen). The issue of the reliability and truthfulness of Arabic historians has no doubt produced a wealth of scholarly discussion in modern research (Donner 2010), but the purpose of this debate has primarily been to utilize the texts as sources for the reconstruction of past realities, not to examine the status of these texts from the perspective of their factuality. However we may interpret the standard viewpoint on factuality in Arabic, it seems that the factual is to be considered the standard stance in classical Medieval Arabic literature: […] anyone well-versed in classical Arabic literature knows what a great effort it makes to persuade the reader (or listener) that it is telling us nothing but authentic facts. Having developed primarily out of religious motivations, classical Arabic prose is very much occupied with the “truth” or “falsehood” of its texts. (Drory 1994, 146)
This quotation neatly highlights the widespread scholarly consensus regarding the non-legitimacy of fictional prose, emphasizing the low status of fictional narrative which is relegated to the realm of low-prestige popular literature and story-telling (Toral-Niehoff 2015). This viewpoint also suggests that nearly all narratives in Medieval Arabic high literature claim a factual status, factuality thus being the default-case (“telling […] facts” – Drory 1994, 146). However, a closer look at the matter opens up a whole array of unanswered questions. Does Medieval Arabic literature really pretend to deal with the factual, here understood as referring to verifiable
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facts, or can we not rather detect a different (for instance, poetical, religious, incommensurable) concept of truth and reality? What would be the epistemic status of the uncertain, the exotic and the marvelous so prevalent in many of our texts? How can we explain the understanding of the concept of ‘historical fact’ deployed by the many historians who in their accounts include different and often contradictory narratives of the same event, as we will see below? What does it mean when some texts are disparaged as lies (Drory 1994, 147), a situation that could fruitfully be compared to similar reproaches expressed in European Medieval literature (Glauch 2014)? Are such recriminations meant to be interpreted as critiques of fictionality, as a moral judgment directed against the narrator or author, or as an indication of a case of failed factuality? And, finally, how should we classify the many Arabic prose works customarily labelled adab or ‘belles-lettres,’ among which we can find ‘serious’ history, but also a plethora of historical anecdotes and legends as well as poetical fragments (Toral-Niehoff 2018)? For all these reasons, the following outline of factuality in Arabic literature starts with a series of strong caveats, emphasizing the provisional nature of my analysis. In what follows, I shall only focus on Muslim Arabic texts of high literature composed in Classical Arabic (thus leaving aside Jewish, Christian Arabic texts and popular literature) and on narratives dating from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries CE, which is to say coinciding roughly with the Medieval period in Europe. The texts treated in this contribution will therefore be labelled ‘Medieval’ for merely conventional reasons, and without implying any typological or structural analogy, much less connection, with the European concept of the Middle Ages. I will moreover concentrate on those two fields of knowledge in Islamic culture where one would first and foremost expect a concern for factuality: historiography, because of its defining reference to historical facts; and fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), since, according to Islamic classical legal theory, law requires validation through the authentic prophetic tradition (hadith) and therefore fostered the development of a highly sophisticated theoretical apparatus dedicated to the assessment of authenticity. 2. Historiography The emergence of Arabic history-writing in Early Islam during the eighth century is a complex phenomenon. Historiography arose nearly concomitantly with the development of Arabic literacy tout court, and it was also synchronous with the constitution of a new religious and political community, the Islamic umma. On the one hand, Arabic historiography drew on
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the natural human impulses of remembering and commemorating the past, on the urge of narrating the self, and on the social practice of constructing and imagining a community with the help of meaningful narratives. On the other hand, these natural historiographic tendencies were culturally inflected, with history-writing in the Arabic world specifically dedicated to a concern for the life of the Prophet and of his companions and to providing guidance on moral, religious and political principles. Depending on their scope, these narratives had different points of reference – either the diverse Arab tribes, or the Pre-Islamic Empires that were considered as predecessors to the Islamic umma, or the umma itself, the Prophet and his charismatic community. From the eleventh century onwards, we also increasingly find the regional and urban perspective represented in the historical texts. In terms of textual traditions, one will have to assume a combination of autochthonous Arabic models of oral history and the influence of chronographic writing from Late Antiquity (Dūrī and Conrad 1983; Donner 1998, Robinson 2003). The intention of early Islamic historiography, broadly speaking, concentrated less on the exact reporting of how events and facts “really happened” according to the famous maxim by Leopold von Ranke, but first and foremost on the aim of providing “meaning” (Müller 2004) for the Islamic community of believers. From this perspective, this history was written in a strongly rhetorical manner and included many fictionalizing elements aimed at enhancing the significance of the community and to convince the reader (Meisami 2000; El-Hibri 1999). In this respect, Islamic historiography parallels Medieval European historiography, which also featured many characteristics of fictional narratives and has been criticized for shifting in such an irritating manner between the fictional and the factual (Hoyland 2006). European medievalists employ the term “functional fictionality” (Müller 2004) to designate a fictionality which reshapes and fictionalizes already existing historical material but does not invent a fictional world of its own (as does the autonomous fictionality associated with modern literature (Müller 2004; Glauch 2014; / V.2 von Contzen). Functional fictionality is a category which I regard also as highly suitable for the analysis of early Arabic prose, since it helps to capture its irritating ambivalence and indeterminacy between history and fiction. Despite the fictionalizing tendencies of their texts, Arabic historians themselves demonstrate a general awareness of the dangers of fabrication, exaggeration and bias; they also comment on the impossibility of certain historical knowledge in the recurring use of phrases like “as far as I can tell” or “according to what I have been told […]” (Robinson 2003, 144). One of the strategies of underpinning their accounts by strategies underlining historical factuality was the inclusion in their texts of archival
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material such as letters, treaties and lengthy speeches which were quoted verbatim. Some of these documents, however, are manifestly inauthentic (as one can see from the blatant anachronisms which one can detect), and the historicity of others is possible but remains very difficult to assess, since we lack the originals. Though the existence of official documents since early times is beyond doubt, little material has survived from before the fifteenth century. Over time, the practice of quoting archival material in historiography became more and more frequent and the authenticity of the quoted material more probable, since many of the historians were bureaucrats and judges and presumably not only had access to archives, but were also well trained in the bureaucratic routines of recording and documenting. For instance, it sounds very plausible that Imād al-Dīn alIsfahānī (d.1201), himself a bureaucrat working as secretary and record keeper, wrote his biography of Saladin “The Syrian Thunderbolt” (al-Barq al-Shāmī) based on his authentic diary and on personal memos, documents and correspondence. It is also at the times of the Crusades (eleventh to fourteenth centuries) that historians increasingly start to report on events that happened during their life-time, some of them having been eye-witnesses, which makes these accounts particularly vivid and realistic (Robinson 2003, 144–148). It needs to be emphasized, however, that in legal and ethical discourse one can detect a much stronger concern for factuality and the authenticity of the historical material as well as a more systematic approach to the question, since here the facts in question had legal consequences and binding moral character for the community. For analytical reasons, I will for the moment leave aside the legal implications and return to it again briefly in the second part of this chapter. Both aspects – the historical and the moral/legal – frequently appear entangled in the same text, especially since many history writers were also legal scholars and were very much influenced by legal thinking. This was, for instance, the case for the emblematic al-T abarī (839–923 CE), author of the “History of the Prophets and the Kings” (Ta’rīkh al-rusūl wa-l-mulūk), a world chronicle that became the master narrative of Islamic history and served as the standard model for later historians. There is also the case of the city chronicles like the “History of Damascus” (Ta’rīkh Dimashq) by Ibn Asākir (1106–1175 CE) and the “History of Baghdad” (Ta’rīkh Baghdād) by al-Khatīb al-Baghdādī (1002– 1071); these are basically inventories of scholars’ biographies of huge dimensions and functioned as vehicles of local pride and self-affirmation for the broad class of Islamic scholars, who were well trained in Islamic law and therefore accustomed to its modes of authentication. On the other hand, we also find historical works less influenced by legal discourse, such as “The Meadows of Gold” (Murūj al-dhahab) by al-Masūdī (d. 957), a
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mixture of geographical treatise, travelogue and history more entertaining in tone, and without a delineation of transmission chains. Finally, there are two noteworthy features in early chronicles (ca. eighth to tenth centuries) that deserve a closer look in the context of factual narrativity. The first of these is what I would like to call the episodic component. Historiography was usually structured into a series of brief episodes (khabar, “report”) told in a realistic style externally focalized with a swift tempo in a diegetic “showing” mode; this has come to be labeled the “hard-boiled” style of Arabic discourse in allusion to the typical style of Ernest Hemingway, which imitated journalistic discourse (Beaumont 1996). However, the impression of realism evoked by this kind of writing, probably under the impact of everyday conversational storytelling and the traditions of oral history, does not necessarily signify factuality. The texts that I am referring to are characterized by having an author or compiler of the frame, the collection of narratives, who is distinct from the separate narrators of the episodes, who are often eyewitnesses or second-hand reporters of the events they recount. In fact, the author or compiler in many cases lived several centuries after the narrators of the episodes and of the events. Another central strategy of this genre is the frequent use of personal names, exact toponymy and direct quotations. An extract from the History by al-T abarī offers an example of these strategies. The text is introduced by the delineation of the chain of transmission (isnād) (for this mode of authentication see below) and the recounting of a short episode told by an eyewitness. The narrator is an otherwise unknown soldier in the army of the protagonist, Khālid b. alWalīd, one of the most famous commanders during the Islamic Conquests in Iraq and Syria, and the episode is said to have occurred before the great and decisive battle of Yarmūk in 636, won by the Muslims against the Byzantines: [chain of transmission] Al-Sarī – Shuayb – Sayf − Amr b. Muh ammad, Ish āq b. Ibrāhīm − Z afar b. Dahī: Khālid led us to attack from Suwā [place name] to Musayyakh Bah rā [place name] in alQuswānā [place name], one of the waterholes. We took al-Musayyakh [place name] and the Namir [tribal name]1 by morning when they were unaware and when the company were drinking in the face of the morning, while their cupbearer was singing to them, saying, Should you two not rouse me in the morning before the army of Abū Bakr? Then his head was cut off and his blood was mixed with his wine. [the text continues with another report, accompanied by a different chain of transmission] (T abarī 1993, 115).
1 The Namir is the name of a Christian tribe, the place a certain waterhole in the Syrian desert.
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The historicity of this episode is dubious in part due to its use of literary topos and foreboding atmosphere; the scene functions as a harbinger of the imminent disaster that will strike the Christians. Nevertheless, despite these literary strategies, the episode is framed as an eyewitness report and contains exact topographical data that suggest a factual stance. To further complicate matters, the same episode might be quoted, reused and reshaped in different textual environments and, depending on context, will serve a number of different functions. For instance, the narrative might sometimes appear as part of a universal chronicle, at others in a collection of belles-lettres, in a legal handbook, a local history, or in a geographical work. The sheer volume of recycled material in the Arabic tradition is enormous, and we are only beginning to evaluate this vast corpus. In relation to our topic of factuality, these different contexts are crucial to an analysis of the very different audiences that will read these episodes and their generic expectations, which will differ from one context to the next. Thus, the same short narrative – perhaps with slight variations – will appear numerous times in quite different frames, resulting in a multiplicity of generic conventions and receptual attitudes brought to bear on the story, though the narrative itself will not necessarily greatly change its form. The second feature in early chronicles pertains to a very peculiar structure which I would like to call its multifocal component. This consists in the co-existence of a wide array of oppositional narratives about the same event. The resulting multivocality has a puzzling effect on the modern reader; it has also continued to hamper the reconstruction of historical events and of their proper chronological sequence. As an illustration of this problem, let us turn to Jens Scheiner’s study of the Islamic conquest of Damascus in the early seventh century. Scheiner collected over 1200 diverging reports on this event, many of them culled from the same collection, namely the aforementioned “History of Damascus” by Ibn al-Asākir. Although he was able to reconstruct clusters and transmission bundles that allowed him to gather this multiplicity of sources into a few main strands of events and themes and to establish a chronology, substantive historical insights remained meagre. Any definitive reconstruction of the historical facts, and even many key details of the historical record, continue to elude the historian (Scheiner 2010, 483–495). Faced with such an author/compiler who quotes extensively various conflicting narrative versions, how can we arrive at a concept of historical reality and of what we would consider to be facts? In the accounts of such compilers, regardless of whether or not they demonstrate a clear or indirect preference for one of the many existing versions of a historical event, they still feel obligated to list and quote all the others. Does such an author assume a multiple and ambigu-
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ous reality, does he want to display his stupendous erudition, is he presenting a comprehensive view on controversial events by giving voice to all parties, or is definitive truth or ‘fact’ for him simply incompatible with the recognition that certainty in this world is impossible because it is only available to God the Omniscient? All these questions merit a much deeper analysis in modern discussions of factuality, but cannot be undertaken here. 3. Islamic law and prophetic tradition According to classical Islamic majoritarian Sunni theory – because of the provisional character of this chapter, the also widespread Shii legal theory cannot be contemplated here –, the jurist or legal scholar (faqīh) was tasked with interpreting divinely revealed legal texts (contained in the Quran and in the sunna, i.e. the corpus of the verbally recorded prophetic teachings or utterances and deeds) and, if necessary, with extending their application by analogy (qiyās). The veracity of revelation was simply assumed by the lawyer; it was the theologian’s business to formulate and demonstrate the principles of divine truth. Rather, the main methodological challenge for the legal scholar was the problem that, whereas the Quran was considered as an identifiable whole of absolutely authenticity, the authenticity of the transmitted pieces of the sunna, the so-called hadith, first had to be verified one by one in order to be validated for legal purposes (Zysow 2013, 7– 48). For this reason, questions concerning the authentication of transmitted material occupy considerable space in Muslim thinking: “Sunni Islam is at heart a cult of authenticity, with the science of h adīth criticism functioning as a centerpiece designed to distinguish authentic attributions to the Prophet from forgeries” (Brown 2011, 1). Although hadith was also used in other contexts, for instance in theology, history (compare above on the episodical component) and mysticism, and of course also by Shiis, I will here focus solely on its use in Sunni law. Formed as a report or short narrative, hadith offers accounts by a number of different people to one another of sayings or actions by the Prophet. At the beginning of the chain stands the original transmitter, a reporter who, ideally, is an eye-witness and a contemporary of the Prophet, for instance a companion; the subsequent transmitters (isnād) together with the text itself (the matn) form the whole hadith or transmission unit. Here is an example from the hadith collection by Abū Dāwūd al-Sijistānī (d. 889): [isnād] Abū Dāwūd writes: it was narrated to us by Muh ammad b. Dāwūd b. Sufyān: it was narrated to us by Yah yā b. H assān: it was narrated to us by Sulaymān b. Mūsā:
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it was narrated to us by Jafar b. Sad: it was narrated to me by Khubayb b. Sulaymān, from his father, from the Companion Samura b. Jundub, who said: [matn] Indeed the Messenger of God, may the peace and blessings of God be upon him, would order us to pay the charity task on things that we were preparing for sale. (quoted in Brown 2009, 7–8)
Two criteria were crucial in establishing the legal validity of a given hadith: first, it was important to secure the integrity of the chain of transmission or isnād (e.g. by investigating the biographical data and reliability of the transmitters) in order to establish its authenticity. Secondly, it was necessary to classify the hadith as either a “concurrent and widespread report” (khabar mutawātir and mashhūr) or as “unit-reports” (khabar wāhø id) (Zysow 2013, 9). This was the task of the traditional hadith scholars, who developed a highly sophisticated system of hadith authentication and established a scale of decreasing reliability (Brown 2009, 67–122). In legal thinking, the first type of hadith – the more prevalent variant – was usually accepted as the more valid legal source. The precise number of transmissions that constituted a ‘widespread’ report was a matter of debate but was of little importance; what was crucial, however, was that the standard definition of the so-called “widespread report” was “a report of something sensible by a group of people whom experience precludes from acting (and thus lying) in concert” (Zysow 2013, 9). Put differently, the assessment of the veracity of the knowledge transmitted via the hadith ultimately depended on criteria grounded in human experience (and not on theological, absolute truth), and as a consequence of this the resulting knowledge could only be classified according to a scale of probability. According to Aron Zysow, these circumstances led to a development that privileged legal formalism in most legal schools, thus ensuring the validity of legal practice merely through the legitimacy of its framework (legitimacy being conferred on the basis of information having been classified as valid by hadith criticism). As Zysow notes, this approach thus represented a quite skeptical attitude towards the human ability of obtaining certainty regarding historical truth and factuality (3). In contrast to Zysow’s view, Jonathan Brown maintains that at least early scholars believed that they could establish the historical truth of a hadith’s narrative through the authentication of its transmission chain (Brown 2011). It would go far beyond the scope of this brief chapter to discuss the intricate details of Islamic legal theory and hadith criticism, whose sophistication cannot be underestimated and which exists in various, quite diverse schools. My purpose in this chapter has been to demonstrate how these legal arguments might be relevant to the conception and reflection on factuality in the Arabic Medieval textual tradition, given their patent concern with issues of probability, certainty, authenticity, plausibility, veracity
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as well as historical and literal truth. While Arabic literary criticism has focused primarily on poetry and not on narrative texts, it is scholars of Islamic law and hadith criticism who have dedicated their efforts to the testing and establishment of factuality in the short narratives which are their focus of study, namely the transmission units of the sunna, the hadith. The relevance of these debates also extends into many fields of knowledge outside hadith and jurisprudence. As has been explained above, hadith reports and historical episodes share a very similar structure and are often framed in a comparable way. Furthermore, literary anthologies, geographical dictionaries and encyclopedic works contained historical anecdotes that were often authenticated by a transmission chain, e.g. the “Great Book of Songs” (Kitāb al-Aghānī) by Abū l-Faraj al-Isfahānī (d. 967) and the various writings by Abū Bakr al-S ūlī (d. 845). Another example to mention is the extraordinarily rich biographical literature in Arabic (Young 1990), which also concerns itself with the assessment of authenticity. Michael Cooperson has formulated the thesis that for biographical reports it was less the establishment of what actually occurred that determined the authenticity of the text but its soundness in terms of the transmission chain (as in the case of hadith validation). A biography was thus classified on the formal criterion of the transmission chain and therefore in accordance with a scale of plausibility, leaving the ordinary reader “blessedly exempt from the obligation of assessing (its veracity)” (Cooperson 2005, 77). 4. Conclusion As I have argued, the core of the debate about authenticity, historical truth and probability in Islamic culture can be found in the context of the validation of prophetical tradition (hadith), which was deemed significant because of its manifold functions in theology, ethics and law. This led to sophisticated techniques – in particular, by means of the evaluation of the transmission chain – to establish a scale of reliability. The hadith tradition seems to have influenced many areas of knowledge such as history, philology and law, and it has produced interesting theoretical speculations as well as a strong skepticism concerning human unreliability and inability to reach absolute truth or certainty. The factual status of texts is often linked to an episodic narrative structure, that of the short report, often narrated by an eyewitness and displaying a plethora of referential proper names. Other strategies for establishing factuality, for instance quotations from archival material, were more common only in historiography and biography. It is hoped that the comparative analysis of the Islamic concern with authenticity can contribute to the study of factuality in its European context.
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References Beaumont, Daniel. “Hard-Boiled: Narrative Discourse in Early Muslim Tradition.” Studia Islamica 83 (1996): 5–31. Brown, Jonathan A.C. Hadith: Muhammad’s Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World. New York: Oneworld Publications, 2009. Brown, Jonathan A.C. “Even If it is Not True It is True: Using Unreliable Hadīths in Sunni Islam.” Islamic Law and Society 18.1 (2011): 1–52. Cooperson, Michael. “Probability, Plausibility and ‘Spiritual Communication’ in Classical Arabic Biography.” On Fiction and “adab” in Medieval Arabic Literature. Ed. Philip F. Kennedy. Studies in Arabic Language and Literature, 6. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005. 69–84. Donner, Fred M. Narratives of Islamic Origins: The Beginnings of Islamic Historical Writing. Princeton: Darwin Press, 1998. Donner, Fred M. “Modern Approaches to Early Islamic History.” Volume 1: The Formation of the Islamic World Sixth to Eleventh Centuries. Ed. Chase F. Robinson. The New Cambridge History of Islam. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 625–644. El-Hibri, Tayeb. Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography: Hārūn Al-Rashīd and the Narrative of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Glauch, Sonja. “Fiktionalität im Mittelalter.” Fiktionalität: Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Eds. Tobias Klauk and Tilmann Köppe. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2014. 385–418. Hoyland, Robert G. “History, Fiction and Authorship in the First Centuries of Islam.” Writing and Representation in Medieval Islam: Muslim Horizons. Ed. Julia Bray. London: Routledge, 2006. 16–46. Kennedy, Philip F. Ed. On Fiction and “adab” in Medieval Arabic Literature. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005. Leder, Stefan. Ed. Story-Telling in the Framework of Non-Fictional Arabic Literature. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998. Meisami, Julie Scott. “History as Literature.” Iranian Studies 33.1–2 (2000): 15–30. Müller, Jan-Dirk. “Literarische und andere Spiele: Zum Fiktionalitätsprinzip in vormoderner Literatur.” Poetica: Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft 36 (2004): 281–312. Robinson, Chase F. Islamic Historiography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Scheiner, Jens J. Die Eroberung von Damaskus: Quellenkritische Untersuchung zur Historiographie in klassisch-islamischer Zeit. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010. T abarī. The Challenge to the Empires. Trans. and Ed. Khalid Yahya Blankinship. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1993. Toral-Niehoff, Isabel. “‘Fact and Fiction’ in der mittelalterlichen arabischen Literatur. Anmerkungen zu einer Debatte.” Faktuales und Fiktionales Erzählen: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven. Eds. Monika Fludernik et al. Würzburg: Ergon, 2015. 59–75. Toral-Niehoff, Isabel. “Erzählen im arabischen adab. Zwischen Fiktionalität und Faktualität.” Geschichte der Fiktionalität: Diachrone Perspektiven auf ein kulturelles Konzept. Eds. Johannes Franzen, Patrick Galke, Frauke Janzen, and Marc Wurich. Baden-Baden: Ergon, 2018. 117–132. Young, M. J. L. “Arabic Biographical Writing.” Religion, Learning, and Science in the ʿAbbasid Period. Eds. M. J. L. Young, John D. Latham, and Robert B. Serjeant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 168–187. Zysow, Aron. The Economy of Certainty: An Introduction to the Typology of Islamic Legal Theory. Atlanta: Lockwood Press, 2013.
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Factual and Fictional Narratives in East African Literatures 1. Introduction The role of factual narratives as narratives that hinge on referential and truthful representation is important and occupies a special place in most societies. These narratives are crucial cultural repositories or records of a society’s past. This is also true in the case of East African literatures. East Africa is a large area, and so, to cover the literatures of such an expansive area would be a monumental, maybe even impossible, undertaking. Multiple literatures exist in the East African region; they include European languages like English as well as a myriad of local languages. The focus of this chapter will be on Kiswahili literature. Kiswahili (sometimes referred to as Swahili – a term that is far more appropriate for the society rather than the language) is a lingua franca for East African countries, viz. Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, Burundi, Rwanda as well as parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and South Africa. In Kenya, Kiswahili is one of the two official languages (the other being English) while in Tanzania, Kiswahili is the national language and, for all purposes and intents, it is also the de facto official language. Kiswahili belongs to the Bantu group of languages but unlike most of the other Bantu languages in the East African region, it displays heavy lexical borrowing from Arabic. This is attributable to the fact that the language was initially localized in the coastal regions where Islam, and as a consequence the Arabic language, became (and continue to be) dominant. It is instructive to note that most of the classical Kiswahili manuscripts in the nineteenth century (circa 1840 onwards), the majority of which were poetic texts, were preserved in the Arabic script. The link between Islam and early Kiswahili literature is so dominant that nearly all the texts available from the nineteenth century are either unequivocally religious in their thematic content or have religious subtexts. The only work that seems to avoid religion is Utendi wa Mwana https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-052
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Manga (‘The Ode to Lady Manga’), a poem dated 1517 (Mulokozi and Sengo 1995), which makes it the earliest available written Kiswahili text. 2. A broad overview of genres There are several genres of factual narratives that can be discerned in the period from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. They include histories, chronicles, anecdotes, travelogues, biographies and autobiographies. One of the foremost genres of history is what can be identified as the habari genre. This term could be argued to be a hypernym or cover concept that comprises a broad range of forms which may be referred to by other terms such as historiography, autobiography, biography, ethnography and even travelogue writing. The word habari is a borrowing from Arabic khabar (plural akhbar) and means ‘historiography.’ 2.1 Historiography History is the most dominant form of factual narrative. The prevalence of this genre is not without historical antecedents. Some of the earliest recorded literary texts in Kiswahili were factual texts on historical events in the Arabian sub-continent especially touching on the spread of Islam and forming part of what has been referred to as Maghaz Literature, most of which recounts the wars of the Prophet Muhammad against unbelievers. Another set of texts belongs to the Arabic Sirah literature (on the life or biography of Prophet Muhammad). This distinction is quite apparent in the form of the chronicles, historical as well as personal narratives. Indeed, one can argue that in Kiswahili literature, the chronicle remains the foremost sub-genre of historiography. A chronicle is essentially a recording of events or the depiction of a series of events in a detailed and factual manner. It is essentially a recounting or narration of such events in their chronological order. 2.1.1 Khabari Lamu / The Lamu Chronicle One of the earliest chronicles available in Kiswahili literature is Khabari Lamu / Habari za Lamu (‘The Lamu Chronicle’), a chronicle of the citystate of Lamu1 on the upper coastal part of Kenya which was written by 1 At one time Lamu was ruled by the Zanzibar Sultanate. It fell under British rule (together with the rest of Kenya) in 1890 by the terms spelt out in the HeligolandZanzibar Treaty.
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Shaibu bin Hamed al Busaidy al Lamuy in 1897 upon the request of the governor of Lamu (Bertoncini Zúbková et al. 2009, 23). The Khabari Lamu, very much like the Khabari ya Pate (‘The Pate Chronicle’), which we will treat below, is based on oral traditions. Pate Island was once an economically powerful center, acting as a link between the Arabic world and beyond before it lost the position to Mombasa. Khabari al Lamu has manifest signposts of factuality at the paratextual level. In the introduction, the chronicler notes that the word habari used in the title of these chronicles, which in current use in Kiswahili means ‘information’ or ‘news,’ carries with it the meaning of ‘narrative’ from its Arabic etymology. In earlier publications, including language dictionaries, the word habari, borrowed from Arabic khabar usually means ‘news or latest information.’ In this context, it is however used to refer to a chronicle. In Kiswahili, as Rollins (1983, 34) notes, chronicles seem to subsume three different narrative prose categories in Arabic: tarikh (an account of events that follows a chronological pattern), ansab (an account of the genealogy of rulers) and khabari (a short narrative of any event). The Lamu Chronicle narrates the founding of Lamu in the eighth century and is marked by a narrative gap for subsequent centuries; it jumps forward to recount the events of the eighteenth century. The narration is interspersed by ngonjera-dialogues, i.e. dialogic poems in which different poets offer their views on the dispute over economic and political power between Lamu and Mombasa. Another chronicle that follows a similar pattern is The Pate Chronicle authored by Bwana Kitini. Its composition was also requested by the Lamu governor. It recounts the events of the citystate of Pate from circa 1203 to the nineteenth century. The narrative presentation in Khabari Lamu is made of instances of report-like features or weak narrativity alternating with instances of strong narrativity. The former dominates in contrast to Habari za Wakilindi, which is characterized by strong narrativity throughout. Khabari Lamu does not provide or give accounts of history in a manner that can be said to be chronological but rather opts for an episodic narration interspersed with family history, anecdotes and genealogy. 2.1.2 Khabari ya Pate / Tarekhe ya Pate / The Pate Chronicle The Pate Chronicle is not dissimilar to Khabari Lamu in terms of its presentation. Just like The Lamu Chronicle, it is based on oral tradition. One of the markers of its oral origins is the prevalence of several versions and recensions of the ‘chronicle’ to the extent that one can talk of the plural: ‘chronicles’ (Tomalcheva 1993, 1996; Pouwels 1996). There seems to be an agree-
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ment that the ‘main’ author of the chronicle is Muhammad bin Fumo Omar Al Nabhani, who is variously referred to as Bwana Kitini, Mwalimu Kitini or Sheikh Kitini. Pouwels notes that Bwana Kitini and Mshamu binti Kombo (an assumed relative of Kitini’s) were the main informants of the Pate Chronicles. A comparative study of these chronicles shows that they agree on the names and the relative chronology of the rulers of Pate Island. However, significant differences between them also occur, pointing to the presence of fictional elements. Pouwels argues that there is an artful play on the names of the rulers of Pate whose main purpose seems to create an impression of an extensive rule of the Nabahani dynasty. This has led to an accusation against the author of one of the versions, Bwana Kitini, who is faulted for betraying historical fidelity; he is charged with having perpetrated instances of historical revisionism. In other words, the ontological status of some of the entities or materials represented may appear indeterminate. The chronicle tradition in Kiswahili is continued in Habari za Wakilindi, authored by Abdallah bin Hemed Ajjemy in 1895 (also see section 5). In a style that is typical of oral tales, Habari za Wakilindi narrates the genealogy of the rulers of Kilindi, a part of the Tanga region in Tanzania. The chronicle starts with the life of Mbega, the founder, and recounts his prowess as a hunter, his role as a headman or ruler (zumbe), the birth of his children, his life and death. It proceeds to the history of his genealogy including the succession to the Kibangu kingdom as well as the onset of German rule in Tanganyika in 1880. As a complexly-plotted chronicle that combines elements of biography, autobiography, history and anecdotes, it is marked by strong narrativity. The classification of Habari za Wakilindi as a chronicle is not without its critics. Rajmund Ohly (1981, 13) sees this text as a novel that he compares with the historical novels by Walter Scott.
2.2 Narrative factuality in poetry: The historiographic tenzi/tendi tradition Poetry is one of the oldest genres in Kiswahili literature and possibly the most definitive genre in its literature. In classical Kiswahili poetry before the nineteenth century, a great number of the texts (usually referred to as tendi/tenzi, ‘[long narrative] texts’) are manifestly historical narratives. They are poetic translations or renderings from Arabic literature and especially from the maghaz tradition associated with raids on non-Muslim societies during the life time of Prophet Muhammad. These tendi texts include, inter alia, the extensive Utendi wa Herekali/Tambuka (‘The Story of Heraclius /
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The Battle of Tambuka’),2 and Utenzi wa Rasi’lGhuli (‘The Epic of Rasi’lGhuli’), Utenzi wa Badri (‘The Epic of the Battle of Badr’), and Utenzi wa Vita vya Uhud (‘The Epic of the Battle of Uhud’), all recounting events that happened in the Arabic world during the early years of the spread of Islam which are retold in Kiswahili. These types of texts may not be exclusive to Kiswahili literature. Some critics contend that “all over Africa the areas deeply influenced by Arabic culture exhibit strong historical traditions; in these areas historical narrative seems to emerge most clearly as a distinctive art form” (Bertoncini Zúbková et al. 2009, 22). This historiographic narrative tradition that took root in the early parts of the development of Kiswahili literature, has been continued during the colonial and postcolonial period. There is a preponderance of poetic historical epics that recount pre-independence struggles, like Shaaban Robert’s Utenzi wa Uhuru (‘The Epic of the Liberation War,’ 1968), which treats the Second World War and how liberation was achieved through allied forces in Tanganyika’s fight for independence. Another example is Hemed bin Abdallah el Buhriy’s Utenzi wa Wadachi Kutamalaki Mrima (‘The Epic of the German Conquest of Tanganyika,’ 1960). In the introduction to Utenzi wa Wadachi, Allen observes, [...] historically it is a remarkable work; no one would expect a poetic dramatization of history only five years old to be strictly accurate in detail; but except for some poetic licence [sic] the poem is a plain record of fact and genuine autobiography. (1960, 5)
Other poetic texts that narrativize pre-independence struggles are Salim Kibao’s Utenzi wa Uhuru (‘The Epic of Freedom,’ 1972) on Kenya’s struggle for independence as well as Muhammed Khatib’s Utenzi wa Ukombozi wa Zanzibar (‘The Epic of Zanzibar’s Liberation’), and Mwaruka’s Utenzi wa Jamhuri ya Tanzania (‘The Epic of The Republic of Tanzania,’ 1968). Among postcolonial poetic texts, one can mention the case of Henry Muhanika’s Utenzi wa Vita vya Kagera na Anguko la Idi Amin Dada (‘The Epic of Battle at Kagera and the Fall of Idi Amin Dada,’ 1981). Muhanika’s Utenzi wa Vita vya Kagera remains the only poetic narrative to-date on the conflict between the Tanzanian army and Ugandan forces at Kagera in 1979 which eventually led to the downfall of the megalomaniac dictator, Idi Amin Dada. Muhanika builds on the long tradition of historiographic tenzi poetic texts in the Kiswahili repertoire that contextualize themselves on historical events like the ones mentioned earlier.
2 The epic recounts the battle between Arabs and Byzantine Romans during the reign of the Roman emperor Heraclius (Flavius Heracles Augustus, 575–641).
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3. Generic diversification and factuality: Travelogue, autobiography, biography and memoir One of the very first texts that engages with literary history in Kiswahili literature, outside the habari genre, is Maisha ya Hemed bin Muhammed el Murjeebi, yaani Tippu Tip (‘The Life of Hemed bin Muhammed el Murjeebi, or Tippu Tip’).3 The composition of this text is somewhat unusual as the author did not actually write it down but dictated it (Whitely 1966, ii). This places this text somewhere in between an oral and written text. Whitely, the text’s translator, notes that there are other manuscripts of the autobiography (1966, i). The text recounts expeditions that Tippu Tip (circa 1840– 1905), famous slave and ivory trader, made (from the age of twelve years) (Whitely 1966, 13) over a period that spans fifty years up to his final trip to Zanzibar, the place of his death in 1905 at the age of sixty-eight. Among the many people Tippu Tip encountered in his expeditions into the interior of Tanganyika and the Congo were the European explorers David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley. The life story is narrated in a discernible chronological manner. It has been described as “a document of considerable historical value” (Bertoncini Zúbková et al 2009, 26). At the end of the story, the narrator notes: I have written everything; I have neither added anything nor have I omitted much. I have written an abridgment; some earlier material I have written later, because you will appreciate a long time has passed. But everything is here; nothing is lacking. Everything is straightforward [true] there are no doubts. (Whitely 1966, 142–143; Whitely’s translation with my alterations in brackets)
The classification of this particular text as an autobiography is itself not unproblematic. Rollins (1983, 47) considers it as a memoir. Bertoncini Zúbková classifies it as an autobiography, while Mbatiah (2016, 74) suggests that it ought to be seen as a travelogue. The preponderance of travel or journey motifs in the narrative cannot be gainsaid. However, the text seems to move more towards the form of a memoir than that of an autobiography in its traditional format. Kayamba’s short novella Tulivyoona na Tulivyofanya Ingereza (‘What we saw and did in England,’ 1932) is, incontestably, a travelogue. It tells the story of the author-narrator’s journey from Tanganyika to England in 1931. He was among the representatives taken from the three British colonies of Kenya, Tanganyika and Uganda who were chosen to travel to
3 Hemed bin Muhammed el Murjebi, better known by his nickname Tippu Tip, a native of Unguja (Zanzibar) born in 1837, was a famous trader of ivory and slaves in Tanganyika and parts of Eastern Congo in the nineteenth century.
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England to give their views on the East African Community. It was during this trip that the colonial government decided to conduct the group on a tour of the city of London. There is a paratextual note in the introduction, where the author-narrator insists that what follows is “the truth and that there is no ounce of exaggeration” (Kayamba 1932, i; my translation). The author-narrator’s description of London, its market (which he describes “as the biggest in the world,” 30; my translation), the infrastructure and the orderliness he sees shows in what awe he holds the British (the then colonial masters in East Africa).4 At one time the author-narrator addresses the reader by appealing to his fellow East Africans to unite and open their eyes (60). Kayamba’s short novella falls within the genre of travel literature that in Kiswahili literature was initiated by the collections of stories compiled by the German linguist, Carl Velten (1862–1935), entitled Safari za Wasuaheli (‘The Travels of the Swahili’), which were published in 1901. This is a sub-genre that has largely remained un(der)developed. In the 1970s, it resurfaced with D. B. Maradufu’s Shamba la Ushirika, a work that narrates his experiences in the Soviet Union (Ohly 1981, 15). The journey or quest motif re-appears later in Adam Shafi’s memoir Mbali na Nyumbani (‘Away from Home,’ 2014). In spite of its year of publication, Shafi’s memoir narrates the joys and vicissitudes of his journey from his native Zanzibar, through Kenya, Uganda and Sudan to Egypt, and later to Germany, in the early 1960s. One of the earliest autobiographical texts in Kiswahili literature is the Kenyan James Juma Mbotela’s semi-historical narrative: Uhuru wa Watumwa (‘Freedom for Slaves,’ 1934). Joe Khamisi notes that Mbotela’s work is “considered a historical masterpiece of literature on East African slavery” (2016, 52). It was composed around the same time as Kayamba’s story (Mbatiah 2016, 78). The author was born in Freretown,5 one of the centers founded in Mombasa (the other was Rabai) by the British for freed, i.e. emancipated slaves from Nyasaland (present day Malawi). The author’s father, Mzee Mbotela, himself a freed slave, was a descendant of the Yao of Malawi. The first part of the book depicts the Yao cultural practices before the onset of slavery.6 Later it narrates the invasion, plunder and suffering meted out to the people with the onset of slavery until the com-
4 This is reinforced by repeated use of the exclamation mark while describing the various sights that they visited. 5 Freretown was named after Sir Henry Bartle Frere, a British colonial governor in India who played a major role in the abolition of slavery. 6 The author’s father, a Yao, was himself a slave after having been captured around Lake Nyasa in Malawi by Arab slave traders.
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ing of the British who rescued the slaves from their Arabic masters. Mbotela’s text is often criticized for being more of an apologia for British colonization and suppression of the local population than an indictment of slavery. The autobiography is marked by strong narrativity. Another autobiographical text is Shaaban Robert’s Maisha Yangu na Baada ya Miaka Hamsini (‘My Life and After Fifty Years,’ 1966). The first part of this book Maisha Yangu (‘My Life’) recounts the author’s life and was written in 1935. It tells of the author’s childhood, youth and young adulthood up to the age of 26 years. The book was written as an entry for a competition on creative writing, which it won. Unfortunately, the script recounting the author’s early life got lost. Later Shaaban Robert continued the story of his life after reaching the age of fifty years. The author’s life story in Maisha Yangu na Baada ya Miaka Hamsini (1966), however, starts from the age of 27, in medias res. One of the main challenges of Shaaban Robert’s autobiography, and one that has implications regarding its factuality, is that the writer rarely ties (life) events to years. The text seems to be dominated by an oral-narrative style where dates are of little, or indeed no, significance at all. Shaaban Robert also laid the foundation for Kiswahili biographical writing with his Wasifu wa Siti binti Saad (‘The Biography of Siti Binti Saad,’ 1967) that recounts the life of a female taarab7 music singer from Zanzibar. In the text, the author eschews references to historical dates which could have served as the easiest and clearest markers of historicity. Shaaban Robert’s artistic representation of Siti binti Saad in his biographical novel has been supplemented by a recent biographical publication, Mohamed Hilal’s Mfinyanzi Aingia Kasri: Siti binti Saad Malkia wa Taarab (‘A Porter enters the palace: Siti Binti Saad, the Queen of Taarab,’ 2007). Another biographical text is J. P. Mbonde’s Seti Benjamin Mpinga (1974), an eponymous story of a young man, Seti Benjamin Mpinga, who together with several others walked all the way from Arusha, a town located in north eastern Tanzania not far from Mount Meru, to Dar es Salaam, a distance of over 600 kilometers, to express their support for the Arusha Declaration in 1967. They undertook the perilous journey through forests, rivers and parks and were beset with all kinds of risks. The Arusha Declaration marked the beginning of Nyerere’s brand of socialism. The text is essentially a biographical travelogue. The story of Seti Benjamin Mpinga,
7 Taarab is a popular genre of sung poetry in Kiswahili that is usually accompanied by zither and is common in many social and cultural as well as political settings. It traces its etymology to an Arabic word (‘tarab’) which means jubilation, amusement or musical performance. Siti binti Saad played a very important role in popularizing this genre.
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which is still narrated orally in many parts of Tanzania, ended tragically with the death of a number of the young men (including Seti Benjamin himself ). 4. The fictionalization of history and the Kiswahili novel and drama The historical novel in Kiswahili, although not as extensive (and certainly not as developed) as the tenzi factual narratives, also provides an interesting case study in examining the theme of factuality. One of the most powerful historical novels is Shafi Adam Shafi’s Kuli (‘The Coolie,’ 1977). This is a moving narrative based on historical events in colonial Zanzibar in 1948. It tells of a strike by port workers that eventually formed part of the wider struggle for the independence of Tanganyika (the old name for rural Tanzania) and Zanzibar. Kezilahabi’s Dunia Uwanja wa Fujo (‘The World is a Battleground,’ 1976), although not a historical novel per se, examines the political changes that took place in Tanzania in the 1970s, especially following the Arusha Declaration of 1967. The Arusha Declaration was the basis of Nyerere’s efforts to establish a more egalitarian society while at the same time fighting the ills associated with capitalism. The novel emplots a historical event, namely the murder of Dr. Wilbert Kleruu, the Regional Commissioner of Iringa, by a farmer named Saidi Mwamwindi in 1971 in connection with the establishment of Nyerere’s Ujamaa8 (lit. ‘communalism’) mode of socialism. Mwamwindi was a farmer (just like Kezilahabi’s character Tumaini) who owned a large piece of land which was targeted for subdivision and distribution. However, this part of the text may be the only historical strand in a novel that is almost wholly fictional. It is worth noting that in Kezilahabi’s novel, the person killed is a mkuu wa wilaya (‘district commissioner’) while in the actual case it was a mkuu wa mkoa (‘regional commissioner’). This is, for lack of a better word, a ‘factual dislocation’ which defamiliarizes the historical event and marks the novel’s ‘fictionality’ to an extent that will result in few readers seeing its factuality, notwithstanding the reference to Nyerere, Tanzania’s first president, in the novel. In his subsequent novel, Gamba la Nyoka (‘The Slough of a Snake,’ 1977), Kezilahabi extends his historical engagement. The novel recounts the cruel man-
8 A Kiswahili word that means ‘brotherhood,’ ‘communalism’ or even ‘socialism,’ Ujamaa was a political rallying call or concept that formed the basis of Julius Kambarage Nyerere’s model of development that sought to realize and foster love, unity, cohesion and service by bringing units of families together.
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ner in which Julius Nyerere’s policy of villagization was implemented. This is a political critique which is shared by two other novels, especially the journalist Henry Muhanika’s Nyota ya Huzuni (‘The Star of Melancholy,’ 1981) and Claude G. Mung’ong’o’s artistically superior Njozi Iliyopotea (‘The Lost Dream,’ 1980). Both novels point to the perceived failure of the villagization policy in Tanzania’s Ujamaa brand of socialism. Another historical novel that stands out in Kiswahili literature is Gabriel Ruhumbika’s Miradi Bubu ya Wazalendo (‘The Invisible Enterprises of the Patriots,’ 1992), a historical and epic novel that looks at the history of independent Tanzania (Bertoncini Zúbková et al. 2009, 118). The author juxtaposes the poor Saidi, a hardworking and upright messenger and his rapacious party official and boss, Nzoka. As the stories of their lives unfold, the readers are exposed to the contrasted lives and fates of the haves and the have-nots. The novel is an acerbic indictment of the society that Nyerere, the first president of Tanzania (who also features as a character), sought to entrench with his Ujamaa brand of socialism. So far I have focused on narrative prose. There are, however, also one or two examples of factual narratives in Kiswahili drama, the most obvious example being Ebrahim Hussein’s Kinjeketile (1971). Hussein’s play alludes to the Majimaji rebellion that took place in southern Tanganyika in 1904– 1907 against German rule and that was led by Kinjeketile Ngwale. 5. Signposts of factuality In some of the texts factuality is marked in an explicit manner at the paratextual level. In Habari za Wakilindi, we see this in the editor’s preface where it is stated that: The purpose of ‘Habari za Wakilindi’ is to narrate the history of the people of Lindi, right from their origin to the period just before the onset of German colonization [of Tanganyika]. It is written by a person who witnessed what happened as well as even taking part in some of the events narrated, especially in the last half of the book. (Allen 1962, 5; my translation)
The editor, in the preface, goes on to appeal to the readers who read the text to provide the details of the history of the Lindi so that a more comprehensive account may be written in the future. He notes that much effort will need to be expended in order to ascertain what is factual and what is fictive in the narrative. On his part, the author observes: I, Abdalla bin Hemed bin Ali ‘Ajjemy, have this history so that it may be known to other people, so that I am not the only one who is aware of it. I have received it from Sambaa elders who spoke/narrated the truth and I chose to write it down in the Kiswahili language. (‘Ajjemy 1962, 12; my translation)
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One of the arguments that may be advanced is that the oral style of narration in Habari za Wakilindi may partially explain its fictionality; one can observe its adoption of the ‘fictional’ tendencies seen in oral tales. The narrative starts thus: “A long time ago in Uzigua in a place called Nguu, there lived a man by the name Mbega, who tussled with brothers about inheritance” (‘Ajjemy 1962, 13; my translation). In the case of the chronicles, one of the discernible markers or indices of factuality is the referential use of proper names. This is, for example, quite apparent in Khabari / Tarihi ya Pate. In his analysis of the Pate Chronicles Randall L. Pouwels “confirmed a fair degree of chronological credibility of Swahili texts overlapping with Portuguese sources” (quoted in Tomalcheva 1996, 174). 6. Some areas of future studies on factuality Most of the poems mentioned above are epic poems and as such their ‘narrativity’ may not be contestable since they can be said to be presented in a clearly narrative genre. There is, however, the interesting case of the poem Al-Inkishafi (variously translated The Soul’s Awakening [Hichens 1972] and A Catechism of the Soul [Allen 1977]). This is an artistically powerful text in which the poet admonishes his heart (and through it all humanity) against falling prey to the whims and pranks of a capricious world. The poem is assumed to have been composed in the 1850s by a Pate Island scribe, Sayyid Nassir. Although Al-Inkishafi is essentially a lyrical, interior monologue text, it has unmistakable factual elements that historicize the history of Pate by mentioning the estates and lives of the rich, opulent lords of Pate who ought to serve as examples to the reader’s sympathy regarding the transient nature of life. In his edition, Hichens notes: […] the Inkishafi offers in its accounts of the culture and fall of Pate an important contribution to Swahili historical record, and in connotation with other sources in Swahili literary record affords us material from which may be reconstructed what are virtually eye-witness accounts of the ancient sultanates of the coast, of the lives and manner of their people and of the departed fame […]. (1972, 37)
The recurring motif of this poetic gem is the need to observe religious edicts and to eschew the wily temptations of an ephemeral existence. The poet, Sayyid Nassir, is thought to have lived between 1718–1815 (Mulokozi and Sengo 1995, 31) and most likely witnessed Pate Island both during its economic ascendancy and power and the subsequent fall from grace. Pate’s economic power emanated from its control of “the India trade, which it was able to largely monopolize” (Allen 1977, 17). This power, however,
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later shifted to the Mazrui dynasty in Mombasa and Pate’s fame declined. The story of the rise and fall of Pate provides an apt allegorical frame for the poet to warn his readers of what awaits sinners in hell who wallowed in bon vivant lifestyles. 7. Conclusion This essay has established that narrative factuality is manifest in Kiswahili literature in multiple genres. It has been observed that the chronicle and historiographic poetic texts are the primary factual narratives in Kiswahili literature. As noted, the Swahili link with Arabic laid a crucial foundation for the rise and development of literate genres both factual and fictional. The dominant genre of historiography is what has been referred to as the habari. It is, however, worth noting that this particular genre subsumes qualities that are associated with what may elsewhere be seen as distinct categories. It has been suggested that the habari texts, besides their apparent factual signposting, display discernible fictional ‘indices’ so that the narrative can be said to be both factual and fictional. In addition to historiography, other genres like travel literature, memoir and autobiography are also available in Kiswahili literature. It can likewise be observed that in these other genres factuality and fictionality also seem to co-exist. Finally, it has been pointed out that there are other genres like lyrical poetry that also exhibit elements of factuality, an area that may require further investigation. References ’Ajjemy, Abdallah bin Hemed bin Ali. Habari za Wakilindi. Eds. J. W. T. Allen and William Mbago. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1962. Allen, James de Vere. Ed. Al-Inkishafi: A Catechism of the Soul. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1977. Allen, J. W. T. “Introduction.” Utenzi wa Vita Wadachi Kutamalaki Mrima. Dar es Salaam and Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1960. 5–8. Allen, J. W. T. “Dibaji [Editor’s Preface].” Habari za Wakilindi. Nairobi: Kenya Literature Bureau, 1962. 5–8. Bertoncini Zúbková, Elena, Mikhail D. Gromov, Said A. M. Khamis, and Kyallo Wadi Wamitila. Outline of Kiswahili Literature. 2nd ed. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2009. El Buhriy, Hemed bin Abdallah. Utenzi wa Vita Wadachi Kutamalaki Mrima. Dar es Salaam and Nairobi: East Africa Literature Bureau, 1960. Hichens, Williams. Ed. Al-Inkishafi: The Soul’s Awakening. London: Oxford University Press, 1972. Hilal, Nasra Mohamed. Mfinyanzi Aingia Kasri: Siti Binti Saad Malkia wa Taarab. Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota Publishers Ltd., 2007.
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Hussein, Ebrahim N. Kinjeketile. Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1971. Kayamba, H. M. T. Tulivyoona na Tulivyofanya Ingereza. London: The Sheldon Press, 1932. Kezilahabi, Euphrase. Dunia Uwanja wa Fujo. Nairobi and Dar es Salaam: East Africa Literature Bureau, 1976. Kezilahabi, Euphrase. Gamba la Nyoka. Arusha: Eastern Africa Publications, 1977. Khamisi, Joe. The Wretched Africans. A Study of Rabai and Freretown Slave Settlements. Texas: Jodey Book Publishers, 2016. Mbatiah, Mwenda. Riwaya ya Kiswahili. Chimbuko na Maendeleo Yake. Nairobi: Jomo Kenyatta Foundation, 2016. Muhanika, Henry. Utenzi wa Vita vya Kagera na Anguko la Idi Amin Dada. Dar es Salaam: Dar es Salaam University Press, 1981. Mulokozi, Mugyabuso M., and Tigiti S. Y. Sengo. History of Kiswahili Poetry, AD 1000–2000. Dar es Salaam: Institute of Kiswahili Research, 1995. Mung’ong’o, Claude G. Njozi iliyopotea. Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1980. Ohly, Rajmund. Aggressive Prose. Dar es Salaam: Institute of Kiswahili Research, 1981. Pouwels, Randall L. “The Pate Chronicles Revisited: Nineteenth Century History and Historiography.” History in Africa 23 (1996): 301–318. Robert, Shaaban bin. Maisha Yangu na Baada ya Miaka Hamsini. Middlesex: Thomas & Nelson Sons Ltd, 1966. Rollins, Jack D. A History of Swahili Prose. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1983. Ruhumbika, Gabriel. Miradi Bubu ya Wazalendo. Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1992. Shafi, Adam Shafi. Kuli. Dar es Salaam: Tanzania Publishing House, 1977. Tomalcheva, Marina. The Pate Chronicle. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1993. Tomalcheva, Marina. “Essays in Swahili Geographical Thought.” Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere AAP 47 (1996): 173–196. Whitely, W. T. Trans. Maisha ya Hamed bin Muhammed El Murjebi Yaani Tippu Tip. Nairobi: East African Literature Bureau, 1966.
Contributors Mohsen Ashtiany is a research scholar at the Center for Iranian Studies, Columbia University, New York, and associate editor of the Encylopædia Iranica. He is also on the editorial board of the A History of Persian Literature series. Jointly with C. E. Bosworth he translated Abu’l-Faz˙ l Beyhaqi’s The History of Beyhaqi, with a commentary (3 vols., 2011) and has contributed to Mughal Paintings, Art and Stories (edited by Sonya Rhie Quintanilla et al., 2016) and to the online Festschrift for Olga M. Davidson (2018). He is also the editor of Persian Narrative Poetry in the Classical Era, 800–1500, Vol. III in A History of Persian Literature Series (forthcoming 2019). Marius Bartmann is a postdoctoral researcher in Philosophy at the University of Bonn, Germany. His major research interests include philosophy of language, (meta-)metaphysics, (meta)ontology and epistemology. He earned his PhD at the University of Bonn with a dissertation entitled Beyond Realism and Idealism. On a Leitmotif in Early and Late Wittgenstein. Articles have appeared in, among others, Rivista di Estetica, Sophist, and Juventas. Dorothee Birke habilitated at the University of Freiburg, Germany, and until recently was a Marie Curie research fellow at the Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies, Denmark. She currently holds a temporary post at the English Department, University of Innsbruck, Austria. From March 2020 she will be Associate Professor of English at the University of Trondheim. Birke’s research interests include narrative theory, studies of reception and reading culture, the history of the British novel, digitalization and contemporary drama. She is the author of Memory’s Fragile Power: Crises of Memory, Identity and Narrative in Contemporary British Novels (2008) and Writing the Reader: Configurations of a Cultural Practice in the English Novel (2016). Edited volumes include Realisms in Contemporary Culture (2013, with Stella Butter) and Author and Narrator (2015, with Tilmann Köppe). Articles have appeared in Narrative, Style and Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture. Arianna Borrelli is a historian and philosopher of premodern and modern science currently working at the Centre for Advanced Study on Media https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-053
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Cultures of Computer Simulation (DFG KFG 1927) at Leuphana University, Lüneburg. The focus of her research is on the relationship between scientific knowledge and the strategies employed to mediate it, such as symbolic notation, verbal statements, computer code or images. She has been Principal Investigator in a project on concept formation in early particle physics (DFG-Pr. BO 4062/2–1) and participates in interdisciplinary cooperations with scholars from natural sciences, narratology and religious, cultural and media studies. Beside numerous research articles, her publications include the monograph Aspects of the Astrolabe: ‘Architectonica ratio’ in Tenth- and Eleventh-Century Europe (2008) and co-edited volumes on The ‘Beauty Fallacy’: Religion, Science and the Aesthetics of Knowledge (special issue of Approaching Religion 7.2, 2017) and on the impact of computer simulations in science and technology (special issue of NTM: International Journal of History & Ethics of Natural Sciences Technology & Medicine, forthcoming). Marco Caracciolo is Associate Professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University in Belgium, where he leads the ERC Starting Grant project “Narrating the Mesh” (NARMESH). Caracciolo’s work explores the phenomenology of narrative, or the structure of the experiences afforded by literary fiction and other narrative media. His current project investigates the relationship between narrative and scientific models, particularly models that challenge the human-scale world of bodily experience. He is the author of three books: The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (2014); Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction: Explorations in Readers’ Engagement with Characters (2016); and A Passion for Specificity: Confronting Inner Experience in Literature and Science (co-authored with psychologist Russell Hurlburt, 2016). Eva von Contzen is Junior Professor of English literature at the University of Freiburg and Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project “Lists in Literature and Culture.” She is the author of The Scottish Legendary: Towards a Poetics of Hagiographic Narration (2016). Her research is located at the intersections of medieval literature, narrative theory, critical theory, and cognitive literary studies. Her publications have appeared in Narrative, Style, Partial Answers, and the Journal of Literary Theory. Currently she is co-editing (with Stefan Tilg) a handbook of historical narratology and working on a monograph on the epic catalogue from Homer to Walcott’s Omeros. Nicolas Detering is Junior Professor of German Literature at the University of Berne. His research interests include early modern literature, nineteenth-century literature, narratology, and discourses of Europe. He is the author of the award-winning Krise und Kontinent. Die Entstehung der deutschen Europa-Literatur in der Frühen Neuzeit (2017) as well as the editor of the volumes Populäre Kriegslyrik im Ersten Weltkrieg (2013, with Michael Fischer
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and Aibe-Marlene Gerdes), and Contesting Europe: Comparative Perspectives on Early Modern Discourses of Europe (15th–18th Century) (forthcoming, with Clementina Marsico and Isabella Walser). Articles have appeared in, among others, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, Euphorion and Die Musikforschung. Hella Dietz earned her PhD from Max-Weber-Kolleg at the University of Erfurt in 2007, was visiting scholar at the University of Chicago in 2008 and worked as a postdoctteoral fellow (‘wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin’) at the Institute of Sociology at Georg-August University, Göttingen, until 2017. She currently works as an independent scholar, writer, and therapist. Her research focusses on the role of narrative in social theory and psychotherapy. In her monograph published by Campus 2015, she offers a pragmatist explanation for the emergence of Polish protest movements during the 1970s (Polnischer Protest. Zur pragmatischen Fundierung von Theorien sozialen Wandels). She co-edited volumes on social movement theory (with Jochen Roose 2016), on pragmatism and practice theory (Pragmatismus und Theorien sozialer Praktiken. Vom Nutzen einer Theoriedifferenz, with Frithjof Nungesser and Andreas Pettenkofer 2017), and on Socialism and Human rights for East Central Europe (with Ned Richardson-Little and James Mark, forthcoming). A selection of her articles focus on narrative: on Dewey and narrative (2013), on narrating theory (2014), on how to narrate social processes (2015), and on comparing realities constructed by narratives in pragmatism and in practice theory (2017). Gregor Dobler is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Freiburg, Germany, having earlier taught at the Universities of Bayreuth and Basle (Switzerland). His research includes a focus on France, Namibia, Zambia and the Comoros, and he has written extensively on economic and political anthropology. Besides two monographs and a number of edited volumes, his work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Journal of Modern African Studies, China Quarterly and Africa. Dobler co-founded the African Borderlands Research Network and is currently co-chair of the Collaborative Research Centre “Otium” (SFB 1015) in Freiburg. Margalit Finkelberg is Professor Emerita of Classics at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of The Birth of Literary Fiction in Ancient Greece (1998); Greeks and Pre-Greeks. Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition (2005); Homer (2014, Hebrew); The Gatekeeper. Narrative Voice in Plato’s Dialogues (2019), and of about one hundred scholarly articles. She is a co-editor of Homer, the Bible, and Beyond: Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World (with Guy Stroumsa, 2003), and the editor of The Homer Encyclopedia (3
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vols., 2011). She was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Jerusalem (1999); All Souls College, Oxford (2000); the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton (2007); the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, the University of British Columbia (2014). She is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and recipient of the Rothschild Prize in the Humanities for 2012. Monika Fludernik is Professor of English Literature at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She is also the director of the graduate school “Factual and Fictional Narration” (GRK 1767). Her major research interests include narratology, linguistic approaches to literature, especially metaphor studies, ‘Law and Literature,’ postcolonial studies and eighteenth-century aesthetics. She is the author of The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction (1993), the award-winning Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996), Echoes and Mirrorings: Gabriel Josipovici’s Creative Oeuvre (2000) and Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction and Fantasy (2019). Among her several (co-) edited volumes are Hybridity and Postcolonialism (1998), In the Grip of the Law (with Greta Olson, 2004), Beyond Cognitive Metaphor Theory (2011) and Idleness, Indolence and Leisure in English Literature (with Miriam Nandi, 2015). Articles have appeared in, among others, Text, Semiotica, The Journal of Historical Pragmatics, English Literary History, New Literary History, Textual Practice, ARIEL, Diacritics, and The James Joyce Quarterly. Johannes Franzen, a former member of the Freiburg GRK 1767, is a postdoctoral fellow at the Graduate School “Gegenwart/Literatur” (‘The Contemporary/Literature’; GRK 2291) in Bonn, Germany. His major research interests include the intersection of fictionality and ethics, literature and politics, and the contemporary German novel. He is the author of Indiskrete Fiktionen: Theorie und Praxis des Schlüsselromans 1960–2015 (2018) and has co-edited two volumes, one on representations of and discourses about the last German emperor, William the Second (Herrschaftserzählungen. Wilhelm II. in der Kulturgeschichte, 1888–1933 – 2016, with Nicolas Detering and Christopher Meid) and the second on diachronic approaches to the phenomenon of fictionality (Geschichte der Fiktionalität. Diachrone Perspektiven auf ein kulturelles Konzept – 2018, with Frauke Janzen and Marc Wurich). Mark Freeman is Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Society in the Department of Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. His research interests include narrative psychology, life writing, the psychology of memory and identity, aesthetic and religious experience, and the place of the Other in the fashioning of the self. He is the author of Rewriting the Self: History, Memory, Narrative (1993); Finding the Muse: A Sociopsychological Inquiry into the Conditions of Artistic Creativity (1994);
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Hindsight: The Promise and Peril of Looking Backward (2010); and The Priority of the Other: Thinking and Living Beyond the Self (2014). With David Goodman, he has also edited Psychology and the Other (2015), and his articles have appeared in such journals as the Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, Narrative Inquiry, Narrative Works, Psychoanalytic Inquiry, Storyworlds, and Theory & Psychology. Wolfgang Freitag is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Mannheim, Germany. His major research interests include philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, and confirmation theory. He is the author of Form and Philosophy. A Topology of Possibility and Representation (2009), I Know. Modal Epistemology and Scepticism (2013), and co-editor of Von Rang und Namen (with Hans Rott, 2016). Articles have appeared in, among others, Acta Analytica, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Dialectica, Logic and Logical Philosophy, Philosophical Quarterly, and Theoria. Elsa Simões Lucas Freitas is Associate Professor of Business Sciences and Communication Sciences at the Universidade Fernando Pessoa, Portugal. Her major research interests include discourse analysis (media discourse), applied linguistics, pragmatics, English Studies, British and American literature, intersemiotic translation (mainly in advertising) and media literary arts. She is the author of Taboo in Advertising (2008) and of several book chapters: “Similar Concepts, Different Channels: Intersemiotic Translation in Thee Portuguese Advertising Campaigns” (2004), “Advertising the Medium” (2010), “Advertising and Discourse Analysis” (2011), “Language of Advertising” (2014), and “Crude and Taboo Humour in Television Advertising: An Analysis of Commercials for Consumer Goods” (2016). She co-edited Dossiers of Media Studies (2008–2012), as well as Shaping Reality in News Reporting From Early Modern English to the Dawn of the Twentieth Century (with Nicholas Brownlees, Sandra Gonçalves Tuna and Jorge Pedro Sousa, 2018). Janelle Gagnon is entering her fifth year as a graduate student at Stony Brook University in the United States. With her mentor, Richard Gerrig, her research explores topics such as the acquisition of information from fictional narratives and the influence of narrative perspective on cognitive processes during reading. Richard Gerrig is Professor of psychology at Stony Brook University in the United States. His research focuses on audience design in language use as well as people’s experiences of narrative worlds. He is the author of Experiencing Narrative Worlds (1993), which drew upon several disciplinary traditions to explore the processes by which people become transported to narrative worlds as well as the consequences of that transportation. His
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research has been published widely in journals including Memory & Cognition, Journal of Memory and Language, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. He has served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Memory and Language. Haiyan Hu-von Hinüber is Professor-at-large of Buddhist Studies at the Shandong University, China. Since 2018, she has also been Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies in Erfurt, Germany. Her major research interests include the history and language of the early Buddhism, monastic discipline and comparative studies of Buddhism with Jainism, art and classical literature of India and China. She is the author of Das Posadhavastu. Vorschriften für die buddhistische Beichtfeier (1994), Samø bhoga. The Affiliation with a Religious Order in Early Jainism and Buddhism (2016), and Collected Papers on the Chinese Buddhist Monk Faxian (2017). Among her several (co-)edited volumes are Der Weise geht leise. Im Gedenken an den Begründer der Freiburger Sinologie Peter Greiner (with Harro von Senger, 2016) and Oskar von Hinübers Kleine Schriften Teil III (with Harry Falk and Walter Slaje 2019). Articles have appeared in, among others, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde Südasiens, Indica et Tibetica, Annual Report of The International Research Institute for Advanced Buddhology at Soka University (Japan), and Yuan Kuang Journal of Buddhist Studies (Taiwan). Stefan Iversen is Associate Professor at Aarhus University, Denmark. He has published on narrative rhetoric, unnatural narratives, digital rhetoric, early modernism, autofiction, and fictionality in journals such as Narrative, Storyworlds, Style, Poetics Today and EJES. His recent book-length publication is The Uncanny Narrative in the Early Works of Johannes V. Jensen (2018); recent co-edited works are the special issue of Poetics Today “Unnatural and Cognitive Perspectives on Narrative: A Theory Crossover” (2018), the anthology Fictionality and Literature: Core Concepts Revisited (forthcoming), a special issue of Rhetorica Scandinavica on affect and feelings in rhetoric (2018), and a special issue of Frontiers of Narrative Studies (2018). Iversen is the initiator and organizer of the international PhD-course “Summer Course in Narrative Studies” (SINS), held annually in Denmark since 2013. Daniel Jacob is Professor of Romance Linguistics (mainly French and Spanish) at the University of Freiburg, Germany. He is co-editor of several book series and of the review Romanistisches Jahrbuch. His main research areas are Spanish language history, syntax theory, information structure, and Spanish and French morpho-syntax in a usage-based framework (which includes a strong perspective on the interface to semantics, pragmatics and interaction). More recently, he has also focused on the relations between linguistics and literary studies. In this context, he has, among
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others, co-edited (with Monika Fludernik) Linguistics and Literary Studies (2014) and (with Thomas Klinkert) a special issue of KODIKAS/Code – Ars Semeiotica, An International Journal of Semiotics 37 (2014) entitled Imagination: Funktionen des virtuellen Erlebens. Stephan Jaeger is Professor of German Studies and Head of the Department of German and Slavic Studies at the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. He has published extensively on historiographical narratology, history and literature, documentary history in literature, historiography, film, and the museum, on representations and memory of war (especially the two world wars), and on romantic and modern poetry. He has published two monographs – Theorie lyrischen Ausdrucks: Das “unmarkierte Zwischen” in Gedichten von Brentano, Eichendorff, Trakl und Rilke (2001) and Performative Geschichtsschreibung: Forster, Herder, Schiller, Archenholz und die Brüder Schlegel (2011) – and co-edited seven books, including Fighting Words and Images: Representing War across the Disciplines (with Elena V. Baraban and Adam Muller, 2012) and Views of Violence: Representing the Second World War in German and European Museums and Memorials (with Jörg Echternkamp, 2019). He has just completed a monograph on twenty-first century museum representations of the Second World War in Europe and North America (expected 2020). Tobias Klauk is a postdoctoral researcher in the research project “The Normative Relations between Fiction, Imagination, and Appreciation” at the University of Göttingen, Germany. His major research interests include aesthetics, narratology and the theory of fiction. He is a member of the network “Foundational Concepts of Narratology.” Klauk is the co-editor of Fiktionalität. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch (with Tilmann Köppe, 2014), and the author of “Is There Such a Thing as Narrative Explanation?” in the Journal of Literary Theory (2016), “Serious Speech Acts in Fictional Worlds” in Dorothee Birke’s and Tilmann Köppe’s Author and Narrator (2015), and “Fiktion, Behauptung, Zeugnis” in Ingrid Vendrell Ferran’s and Christoph Demmerling’s Wahrheit, Wissen und Erkenntnis in der Literatur (2014). Bernhard Kleeberg is Professor for the History of Science at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany. His research currently focuses on the history of social psychology, and the historical epistemology and praxeology of truth. He is editor-in-chief of the book series Studies in the History of Knowledge (HWF) and co-editor of NTM – Journal of the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. He recently finished a book on the history of the concept of “Standard of Living.” Among his most important publications are: Ernst Mach und das
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Gedankenexperiment um 1900, special issue of Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte (2015); Wahrheit, special issue of Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie (2014, with Robert Suter); Schlechte Angewohnheiten. Eine Anthologie, 1750–1900 (2012); Knowing God, Believing Nature, special issue of Science in Context (2007/2008, with Fernando Vidal); Theophysis. Ernst Haeckels monistische Philosophie des Naturganzen (2005). Tilmann Köppe is Professor of Literary Theory at the German Literature Department at Göttingen University, Germany. His research interests include narrative theory, theory of fiction and philosophical aesthetics. Recent publications include Fiktionalität (edited together with Tobias Klauk, 2014), Erzähltheorie (with Tom Kindt, 2014), Author and Narrator: Transdiciplinary Contributions to a Narratological Debate (edited together with Dorothee Birke, 2015), and the monograph Erzählte Selbstrepräsentation im modernen Roman (2016). Liesbeth Korthals Altes is Emeritus Professor of General Literature at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. Her major research interests include narrative theory, interpretation, ethical criticism, and in particular issues of value and ethos attribution, irony and (un)reliability. She is the author of the monographs Sens, valeurs et narrativité (1999) and the awardwinning Ethos and Narrative Interpretation (2014). Among her co-edited volumes are Authorship Revisited: Conceptions of Authorship around 1900 and 2000 (with Gillis J. Dorleijn and Ralf Grüttemeier, 2010), The Autonomy of Literature at the Fins de Siècles (1900 and 2000): A Critical Assessment (with Gillis J. Dorleijn and Ralf Grüttemeier, 2007), and Aesthetic Autonomy: Problems and Perspectives (with Barend van Heusden, 2004). She has contributed chapters to various volumes on narrative theory and on narrative and ethics. Her articles and reviews have appeared, among others, in Yale French Studies, Revue des Sciences Humaines, and Poetics Today. Françoise Lavocat is Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3. She is a former fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2014–2015) and currently a member of the Institut Universitaire de France (2015–2020). She specializes in theories of fiction (fact and fiction, possible worlds, characters), early modern literature, and narrative of catastrophes. Her publications include Arcadies malheureuses, aux origines du roman moderne (1997), La Syrinx au bûcher, Pan et les satyres à la renaissance et à l’âge baroque (2005), Usages et théories de la fiction, la théorie contemporaine à l’épreuve des textes anciens (ed., 2004), and La théorie littéraire des mondes possibles (ed., 2010). Most recently, she has published Fait et fiction: pour une frontière (2016). Ashley Liu is lecturer at the University of Maryland and a narrative theorist and digital humanist. Her Ph.D. dissertation, A New History of Pre-
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Modern Chinese Fiction: Reconceptualizing Fictionality Through Narrative Theories and Digital Corpus Analysis, studies fictionality in pre-modern China through two approaches: narrative theories and digital corpus analysis. In it, she develops a framework to study fictionality based on the works of theorists such as John Searle and Richard Walsh and challenges existing scholarship’s understanding of the term xiaoshuo, which is the closest pre-modern Chinese equivalent to the Western notion of fiction, by demonstrating how computational methods can correct biases from traditional scholarship. Her research on theories of fiction encompasses both pre-modern and modern Chinese literature. She also specializes in pre-Heian Japanese literature. Victor H. Mair is Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has taught since 1979. He received his PhD from Harvard University and holds an M.Phil. degree from the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London). Mair specializes in Buddhist popular literature and the vernacular tradition of Chinese fiction and the performing arts. Among his chief works in these fields are Tun-huang Popular Narratives (1983), Painting and Performance: Chinese Picture Recitation and Its Indian Genesis (1988), and T’ang Transformation Texts: A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in China (1989). He is also the editor of The Columbia Anthology of Traditional Chinese Literature (1994) and The Columbia History of Chinese Literature (2001). Matías Martínez is Professor of German Literature at the University of Wuppertal, Germany. He is also the founding director of the Center of Narratological Research/Zentrum für Erzählforschung (ZEF), co-editor of the interdisciplinary e-journal for narrative research Diegesis, and co-editor of the series Narratologia. Contributions to Narrative Theory (de Gruyter). Among his research interests are narratology, non-literary narratives, literary theory, Romanticism, and modern poetry. His narratological publications include Doppelte Welten. Formen und Funktionen zweideutigen Erzählens (1996) and Einführung in die Erzähltheorie (co-author with Michael Scheffel, 11th ed. 2019). He has (co-)edited several important collections: Wirklichkeitserzählungen. Felder, Formen und Funktionen nichtliterarischen Erzählens (with Christian Klein, 2010), Klassiker der modernen Literaturtheorie (with Michael Scheffel, 2010), Handbuch Erzählliteratur (2011), Fiktionalität und Non-Fiktionalität (2016), and Handbuch Erzählen (2017). Andreas Mauz studied Protestant Theology and Literary Studies. He works as a Senior Assistant at the Institute of Hermeneutics and Philosophy of Religion (IHR) at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He is also the coordinator of the Network “Hermeneutics Theory of Interpretation”
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(NHI). His major research interests include hermeneutics, narratology (esp. in religion), and the interdisciplinary relations between literary and religious studies. He is the author of Machtworte. Studien zur Poetik des ‘heiligen Textes’ (2016). Among the latest volumes and literary texts he has (co-)edited are Sterbenarrative. Hermeneutische Erkundungen des Erzählens am und vom Lebensende (with Simon Peng-Keller, 2018), Verstehen und Interpretieren. Zum Basisvokabular von Hermeneutik und Interpretationstheorie (with Christiane Tietz, 2019), Kurt Marti: wo chiemte mer hi? sämtlechi gedicht ir bärner umgangsschprach (2018), Peter Bichsel: Über Gott und die Welt. Texte zur Religion (2009, 62012). His articles have appeared in, among others, Diegesis, Hermeneutische Blätter, Psychosozial, and Quarto. Michael McKeon is Board of Governors Distinguished Professor of Literature at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, USA. He specializes in the history of literary and cultural forms. His approach to history takes in both the chronological or diachronic dimension of forms and their structural or synchronic relations to other formations – political, social, economic, cultural – with which they coexist at their respective chronological moments. Within this broad methodological field, McKeon concentrates on England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He is the author of, among other publications, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (1987) and The Secret History of Domesticity (2005), and the editor of Theory of the Novel. McKeon has taught and written on a range of topics, among them the aesthetic, realism, genre theory, parody, allegory and typology, romance and the novel, family romance, pastoral, sensibility, travel narratives, status and class, sex and gender, domestication and domesticity, pornography, patriarchalism, secularization, from feudalism to capitalism, periodization, the division of knowledge, science and literature, civil and religious liberty, the public and the private, the public sphere, Marxism and literature, dialectical method, politics and poetry, tradition, print culture, and virtual reality. Christian Meierhofer is Heisenberg Fellow at the University of Bonn, Germany, and the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. He is also a member of the graduate school “Gegenwart/Literatur. Geschichte, Theorie und Praxeologie eines Verhältnisses” (GRK 2291). His major research interests include the history of German literature since 1500, ‘Literature and Knowledge,’ nonfiction, media, and book culture. He is author of Nihil ex nihilo. Zum Verhältnis von Konstruktivismus und Dekonstruktion (2006), Alles neu unter der Sonne. Das Sammelschrifttum der Frühen Neuzeit und die Entstehung der Nachricht (2010), Georg Philipp Harsdörffer (2014), and Formen der Evidenz. Populäre Wissenschaftsprosa zwischen Liebig und Haeckel (forthcoming). Among his co-edited volumes is Ehestand und Ehesachen. Literarische Aneig-
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nungen einer frühneuzeitlichen Institution (with Joachim Harst, 2018). Articles have appeared in, among others, Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte, Zeitschrift für Germanistik, Simpliciana, Daphnis, and Weimarer Beiträge. Jukka Mikkonen is Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at the Tampere University, Finland. He focuses on the philosophy of literature and has studied issues related to fictionality, imagination, narrative, and cognition. His publications include The Cognitive Value of Philosophical Fiction (2013) and articles in journals such as The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Philosophy and Literature, and Theoria. Catherine Milne is Professor in Science Education and Chair of the Department of Teaching and Learning at New York University. Her research interests include material culture in the teaching and learning of science, socio-cultural elements of teaching and learning science, the role of the history of science in learning science and models of teacher education. She is the author of The Invention of Science: Why History of Science Matters for the Classroom (2011). Among her (co-)edited volumes are Sociocultural Studies and Implications for Science Education: The Experiential and the Virtual (with Kenneth Tobin and Donna DeGennaro, 2015) and Material Practice and Materiality: Too Long Ignored in Science Education (with Kathryn Scantlebury, 2019). She is co-Editor-in-Chief for the journal Cultural Studies of Science Education and co-editor of two book series for Springer Nature and for Brill Sense Publishers. Florian Mundhenke, M.A., Dr. phil. habil. is Temporary Professor (W3) for Media Studies and Media Culture at University of Leipzig. Before that he was Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Media and Communication (IMK) at University of Hamburg, Associate Professor for Media Hybridity (Juniorprofessor für Mediale Hybride) at the University of Leipzig, and Research Assistant at the University of Marburg. He was director of the DFG-research network “Cinema as an experience space”: www.erfahrungs raum-kino.de. His PhD dissertation was on the phenomenon of chance in film (Zufall und Schicksal, Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit – Erscheinungsweisen des Zufälligen im zeitgenössischen Film, 2008), his habilitation (faculty thesis) focused on hybrid forms between documentary and fictional film (Zwischen Dokumentar- und Spielfilm. Zur Repräsentation und Rezeption von Hybrid-Formen, 2017). His fields of research include genre theory, interactive factuality, cultural and social questions of media, contemporary media theories, narration and aesthetics of contemporary world cinema, and media art. Andreas Musolff is Professor of Intercultural Communication at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. His research interests focus on Meta-
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phor Theory, Intercultural and Multicultural Communication Studies, and Public Discourse Analysis. He has published widely on figurative language use in the media and in the public sphere in general; his publications include the monographs Political Metaphor Analysis – Discourse and Scenarios (2016), Metaphor, Nation and the Holocaust (2010), Metaphor and Political Discourse (2004/2015), and the co-edited volumes Metaphor and Intercultural Communication (with Fiona MacArthur and Giulio Pagani, 2014), and Cognition and Culture. The Role of Metaphor and Metonymy (with Sonja Kleinke, Zoltán Kövecses and Veronika Szelid, 2012). Stephan Packard is Professor for Popular Culture and Its Theories at Cologne University as well as President of the German Society for Comics Studies (ComFor). Research interests include semiotics; comics studies; censorship and other forms of media control; transmediality; narratology; as well as concepts of fiction and virtuality. Packard is editor-in-chief of the open access journal Mediale Kontrolle unter Beobachtung and co-editor of the journal Medienobservationen. He is the author of Anatomie des Comics (2004) and has (co-)edited volumes on Thinking – Resisting – Reading the Political (with Anneka Esch-Van Kan and and Philipp Schulte, 2013); Abschied von 9/11 (with Ursula Hennigfeld, 2013); Comics & Politics (2014); and Charlie Hebdo: Nicht nur am 7. Januar 2015! (with Lukas R. A. Wilde, 2018). Nicholas Paige chairs the Department of French at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the rank of Professor. His current research involves quantitative solutions to problems of literary history, especially relating to the novel and aesthetic discourse. He is currently completing Technologies of the Novel: Quantitative Data and the Evolution of Literary Systems; he is also the author of Before Fiction: The Ancien Régime of the Novel (2011), awarded the 2013 ASECS Gottschalk prize, and Being Interior: Autobiography and the Contradictions of Modernity (2001). His articles have appeared in journals such as Representations, Poétique, Modern Language Quarterly, PMLA, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, New Literary History, and Poetics Today. Anders Pettersson is Emeritus Professor of Swedish and Comparative Literature at Umeå University, Sweden. His main research interests are fundamental literary theory and transcultural literary history. He is the author of six monographs, including Verbal Art: A Philosophy of Literature and Literary Experience (2000), The Concept of Literary Application: Readers’ Analogies from Text to Life (2012), and The Idea of a Text and the Nature of Textual Meaning (2017). Among his six edited or co-edited collections are Types of Interpretation in the Aesthetic Disciplines (2003, with Staffan Carlshamre) and
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Notions of Literature across Times and Cultures (2006). He has published articles in, among others, Diogène, Neohelicon, New Literary History, Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Organon F, Philosophy and Literature, Revista Brasileira de Literatura Comparada, Theoria, and Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature. James Phelan is Distinguished University Professor of English at Ohio State University and a founding member of Project Narrative. He is the author of numerous books and essays that develop a rhetorical theory of narrative. His books include Worlds from Words: A Theory of Language in Fiction (1981), Reading People, Reading Plots (1989); Narrative as Rhetoric (1996); Living to Tell about It: A Rhetoric and Ethics of Character Narration (2005); Experiencing Fiction: Judgments, Progressions, and the Rhetorical Theory of Narrative (2007); Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (2012, co-authored with David Herman, Peter J. Rabinowitz, Brian Richardson, and Robyn Warhol); Reading the American Novel, 1920–2010 (2013); and Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative (2017). Since 1993, he has been editor of Narrative and since 1994, co-editor of the Theory and Interpretation of Narrative book series at the Ohio State University Press. Irina Rajewsky is ‘Privatdozentin’ (post-habilitation fellow) at the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures of the Free University of Berlin as well as Principal Investigator of the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies (FSGS). Since 2016, she has also held several positions as Visiting or Interim Professor for French and Italian Literature and Media Studies, both nationally (Humboldt-University Berlin; RuhrUniversity Bochum) and internationally (University of Graz, Austria; University of L’Aquila, Italy). Her major research interests include transmedial narratology, intermediality, fictionality, meta-phenomena across media, performativity; Italian and French literature of the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She has recently concluded a research project on “Mediality – Transmediality – Narration: Perspectives of a Transgeneric and Transmedial Narratology (Film, Theatre, Literature).” Her most important publications include Intermedialität (2002) and Intermediales Erzählen in der italienischen Literatur der Postmoderne (2003). She is also co-editor of Im Zeichen der Fiktion. Aspekte fiktionaler Rede aus historischer und systematischer Sicht (with Ulrike Schneider, 2008) and Fiktion im Vergleich der Künste und Medien (with Anne Enderwitz, 2016). Karl Nikolaus Renner is Professor emeritus at the Department of Communications Research of the University of Mainz, Germany, and was the spokesperson of the Transmedial Narration Working Group at the Research Unit Media Convergence in Mainz. He studied Literature and Film Studies, Linguistics and Formal Logic at the University of Munich and in
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his doctoral thesis submitted a formal reconstruction of Lotman’s plot concept. Thereafter he worked as TV-journalist and documentary filmmaker and was appointed as Professor of TV-Journalism in 1995. His research interests include narratology, lingual and visual communication, media semiotics and media organization. He is the author of Fernsehjournalismus (2007) and Fernsehen (2012) and co-editor of Medien, Erzählen, Gesellschaft (with Dagmar Hoff and Matthias Krings, 2013). Articles have appeared in Diegesis, Studies in Communications Sciences, Kodikas/Code, Handbuch Text- und Gesprächslinguistik (2000), Interdisziplinäres Handbuch Erzählen (2017) and Staatslexikon (2018). Marie-Laure Ryan, a native of Geneva, Switzerland, is an independent scholar based in Colorado, working in the areas of narrative theory, media theory, and representations of space. She is the author of Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory (1991), Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (2001, 2nd edition 2015), Avatars of Story (2006) and Narrating Space/Spatializing Narrative (2016, with Kenneth Foote and Maoz Azaryahu). She has also edited or co-edited several collections, including Narrative Across Media (2004); The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative, with David Herman and Manfred Jahn (2005); Storyworlds Across Media, with Jan-Noël Thon (2014); and The Johns Hopkins Guidebook to Digital Humanities, with Lori Emerson and Ben Robertson (2014). She has been Scholar in Residence at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Johannes Gutenberg Fellow at the University of Mainz, Germany, and she is also the recipient of the 2017 lifetime achievement award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Her website is at www.marilaur.info and she can be reached at [email protected]. Carl E. Scheidt, M.D., is Professor for Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy at the Medical Faculty of the University of Freiburg, Germany. He is a psychoanalyst and member of the German Psychoanalytic Association and IPA and head of the section for psychoanalytic psychosomatics. He is also a member of the graduate school “Factual and Fictional Narration” (GRK 1767). His major research interests include the developmental psychopathology of somatoform disorders and functional pain syndromes, attachment and psychotherapy research and the clinical narratology of trauma and loss. He is co-editor (with Gabriele Lucius-Hoene, Anja Stukenbrock and Elisabeth Waller) of the book Narrative Bewältigung von Trauma und Verlust (‘Narrative Coping with Trauma and Loss,’ 2015) and co-editor of the journal Trauma and of the International Journal of Body, Mind & Culture. Articles have appeared in Psychotherapy Research, Psychosomatic Medicine, Neurology, International Review of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, General Hospital Psychiatry, Nordic Journal of Psychiatry and elsewhere. In 2017–2018
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he was an Internal Senior Fellow at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies. Michael Sinding is a Research Fellow at the Erlangen Centre for Literature and Natural Science (ELINAS) at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg. He has held fellowships in Canada, Germany, and The Netherlands. He researches cognitive approaches to literary and cultural forms, particularly genre, metaphor and narrative, and particularly in eighteenth-century culture. He is the author of Body of Vision: Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Mind (2014) and has published articles in journals such as Narrative, Poetics Today, SubStance, New Literary History, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Semiotica, Style and Genre, and chapters in collections such as What is a Letter? (2018); Genre in Language, Discourse and Cognition (2016); Cognition, Literature, and History (2013); Warring With Words: Narrative and Metaphor in Politics (2014); Northrop Frye 100: A Danubian Perspective (2014); Blending and the Study of Narrative (2012); Cognitive Literary Studies (2012); Northrop Frye: New Directions from Old (2009); and Beyond Cognitive Metaphor Theory: Perspectives on Literary Metaphor (2011). Luitgard Soni has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Salzburg, Austria, and studied Sanskrit, Indian Philosophy and Hindi at the Banaras Hindu University. From 1992 to 2012 she was affiliated to the Department of Indology at the University of Marburg, Germany. She is now retired and lives in Innsbruck, Austria, continuing her research mainly on Jaina literature. She has (co-)edited several books: Alice Boner, Diaries India 1934– 1967 (1993, with G. Boner and J. Soni); Alice Boner on Kathakali (1996, with G. Boner and J. Soni); and Charlotte Krause, Life and Literature (1999, with H. Banthia). Soni has translated Diana Eck’s Banaras, Stadt des Lichts (1989, from English into German with B. Bäumer); Georgette Boner’s and Eberhard Fischer’s Alice Boner, Artist and Scholar (1989, from German into English with J. Soni); and Die Heiligenhetäre. Eine indische Yoga-Komödie (2006, from Sanskrit/Prakrit into German with U. Roesler, J. Soni, R. Steiner, and M. Straube). Her essays include “Biogramme und Werkbeschreibungen von Jaina-Texten” in Kindlers Literatur Lexikon (2009); “She of whom one speaks in Jaina Exemplary Literature” in Aspects of the Female in Indian Culture (2004); and “Concealing and Protecting. Stories on Upagūhana” in Essays in Jaina Philosophy and Religion (2003). Simon Stern is Professor of Law and English at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the evolution of legal doctrines and methods in relation to literary and intellectual history. Current research topics include the development of the “reasonable man” standard (and its precursors and analogues) since the eighteenth century; the history of the case
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method and the form of the case; and the history and theory of legal fictions in the common law since the early modern period. His recent publications include articles and book chapters on British obscenity law in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the place of narrative in legal opinions, and the law of criminal procedure. He is co-editor (with Nan Goodman) of The Routledge Research Companion to Law and Humanities in Nineteenth-Century America (2017), and co-editor (with Bernadette Meyler and Maks Del Mar) of The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities (2019). Anja Stukenbrock is Professor of German Linguistics at the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. She previously held professorships at the universities of Duisburg-Essen and Jena and conducted several projects at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). Her major research areas include multimodal conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, deixis, mobile eye tracking, linguistic narratology, language and trauma, linguistic nationalism, and historical discourse analysis. Currently, she is principal investigator of an SNF project on “Deixis and Joint Attention” (DeJAVI). She is the author of Sprachnationalismus. Sprachreflexion als Medium und Gegenstand kollektiver Identitätsstiftung in Deutschland 1617–1945 (2005) and Deixis in der face-to-face-Interaktion (2015), co-editor of Space in Language and Linguistics. Geographical, Interactional, and Cognitive Perspectives (2013, with Peter Auer, Martin Hilpert and Benedikt Szmrecsanyi) and Narrative Bewältigung von Trauma und Verlust (2015, with Carl Eduard Scheidt, Gabriele LuciusHoene and Elisabeth Waller). She has published in, among others, the Journal of Pragmatics, Open Linguistics, Deutsche Sprache, and Gesprächsforschung – Online-Zeitschrift zur verbalen Interaktion. Isabel Toral-Niehoff is senior researcher at the Free University of Berlin and deputy PI of the ERC "AnonymClassic". She has also held various research positions and fellowships in Freiburg, Berlin, London (Marie Curie Fellowship) and Göttingen. Her main publishing and research fields are: Arabia and the Near East in Late Antiquity; cultural identity and cultural contact/translation; Arabic occult sciences; adab, fiction and encycloˇ iranīs. Die arabische paedias; and Al-Andalus. She is the author of Kitāb G Übersetzung der ersten Kyranis des Hermes Trismegistos und die griechischen Parallelen (2004) and Al-H ø īra. Eine arabische Kulturmetropole im spätantiken Kontext (2014, Iran Book Award 2016) and has co-edited Religious Culture in Late Antique Arabia. Selected Studies on the Late Antique Religious Mind (2017, with Kirill Dmitriev) and Genealogie und Migrationsmythen im antiken Mittelmeerraum und der Arabischen Halbinsel (2014, with Almut Barbara Renger). Articles have appeared in Journal of Abbasid Studies, Journal of Persianate Studies, Die Welt des Orients and elsewhere.
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Bo Utas is Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. He got his PhD in Iranian languages from Uppsala University in 1973 and was appointed Professor there in 1988. His research covers many aspects of Middle and New Iranian languages, especially varieties of Persian, and literary, religious and historical topics connected with the use of those languages. He specializes in Persian manuscripts, Sufi texts and Persian metrics. Publications range from his dissertation Tarîq ut-tahqîq. A Critical Edition, With a History of the Text and Commentary (1973) to the book The Virgin and Her Lover. Fragments of an Ancient Greek Novel and a Persian Epic Poem (2003). Recently his papers on Persian literature were reprinted in a volume entitled Manuscript, Text and Literature. Collected Essays on Middle and New Persian Texts (2008), and his linguistic papers in From Old to New Persian (2013). Richard Walsh is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of York, UK, and Director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Narrative Studies. His work ranges over literary and cultural topics in narrative theory, including reflexiveness and ideology in fiction, fictionality within and beyond fiction, emergent and interactive narrative, and the relation between narrative and selfhood. More fundamentally, he is interested in the scope and (especially) the limits of narrative as a mode of cognition. He is the author of The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction (2007), and the co-editor of Narratology and Ideology: Negotiating Context, Form and Theory in Postcolonial Narratives (2018, with Divya Dwivedi and Henrik Skov Nielsen), and of Narrating Complexity (2018, with Susan Stepney). He has published articles in, among others, Style, Narrative, Storyworlds, Modern Fiction Studies, Poetics Today, Studies in the Novel, and Journal of American Studies. Kyallo Wadi Wamitila is Associate Professor of Kiswahili Literature and Language at the University of Nairobi, Kenya. He is the author of several Kiswahili plays and novels, including the prize-winning novels Nguvu ya Sala (The Power of Prayer, 1999), Musaleo! (Moses of Today, 2004), Msimu wa Vipepeo (The Season of Butterflies, 2006), and Unaitwa Nani (What’s your Name?, 2008), which received the Jomo Kenyatta Prize for Literature, Kenya. He has written theoretical books in Kiswahili, Uhakiki wa Fasihi (Literary Criticism, 2001), a Kiswahili literary dictionary, Kamusi ya Fasihi (Literary Dictionary, 2003), and Kanzi ya Fasihi 1 (A Treasure of Literature, 2008). He has also authored Archetypal Criticism of Kiswahili Poetry (2001) as well as co-authored the volume Outline of Swahili Literature (2009, with Elena Bertoncini-Zúbkovà, S. A. M. Khamis and Mikhail Gromov). He has recently published a Kiswahili Dictionary, Kamusi Pevu ya Kiswahili (Advanced
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Kiswahili Dictionary, 2017) an English novel, Marina’s Voice (2018), and a play, The Roses of Sir Kenyapesacus (2018). Robyn Warhol is Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor and Chair of English at the Ohio State University. A feminist narratologist specializing in Victorian novels and television serials, she has most recently published The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories (2018, co-edited with Zara Dinnen); Narrative Theory Unbound: Queer and Feminist Interventions (2015, co-edited with Susan S. Lanser), which received an Honorable Mention for the Perkins Prize in Narrative Studies; and Love Among the Archives: Writing the Lives of Sir George Scharf, Victorian Bachelor (2015, co-authored with Helena Michie), which was named Best Book of the Year in 2015 by the North American Victorian Studies Association. Her current project is “Reading like a Victorian,” a website facilitating synchronic reading of nineteenth-century British serial novels, at victorianserialnovels.org. Michael Geoffrey Watson is a Professor in the Faculty of International Studies at Meiji Gakuin University, Japan, specializing in premodern Japanese literature and noh drama. Originally trained in medieval European literature at Cambridge and Manchester, he received his D.Phil. from Oxford (2003) for a study of the narratology of the medieval Japanese war tale Heike monogatari (‘The Tale of the Heike’). He is the co-editor of Like Clouds or Mists: Studies and Translations of Nō Plays of the Genpei War (2013, with Elizabeth Oyler) and a contributor to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Publications in English and Japanese include articles and book chapters on medieval war tales, noh drama, translation studies, and reception history. He is currently working with Machiko Midorikawa on a handbook of the narratology of the fictional Tale of Genji, the semi-factual Tale of the Heike, and other classical Japanese monogatari. Mark J. P. Wolf is a Professor in the Communication Department at Concordia University Wisconsin. His major research interests include imaginary worlds, cinema, television, video games, analog and digital technology, media studies, computer graphics, narratology, and board games. His books include Abstracting Reality: Art, Communication, and Cognition in the Digital Age (2000), The Medium of the Video Game (2001), Virtual Morality: Morals, Ethics, and New Media (2003), The Video Game Theory Reader (2003), The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to PlayStation and Beyond (2007), The Video Game Theory Reader 2 (2008), Myst and Riven: The World of the D’ni (2011), Before the Crash: Early Video Game History (2012), the two-volume Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming (2012), Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (2012), The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies (2014), LEGO Studies: Examining
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the Building Blocks of a Transmedial Phenomenon (2014), Video Games Around the World (2015), the four-volume Video Games and Gaming Cultures (2016), Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology (2017), Video Games FAQ (2017), The World of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (2017), The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds (2017), and The Routledge Companion to Media History and Obsolescence (2018). Frank Zipfel is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Mainz, Germany. His major research interests include literary theory, narratology, transmedial theory of fiction, comic theory, history of tragedy, interculturality, eighteenth-century literature in Europe, modern drama. He is the author of Fiktion, Fiktivität, Fiktionalität. Analysen zur Fiktion in der Literatur und zum Fiktionsbegriff in der Literaturwissenschaft (2001), Was sollen Komparatisten lesen? (with D. Lamping, 2005), and Tragikomödien. Kombinationsformen von Tragik und Komik im europäischen Drama des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (2017). He has (co-)edited Literatur@Internet (2006, with Axel Dunker), Ecriture Migrante/Migrant Writing (2008, with Danielle Dumontet), and Fremde Ähnlichkeiten: Die ‘Große Wanderung’ als Herausforderung der Komparatistik (2017). Zipfel has published articles in German, English and French on the concepts of mimesis, narratorless narration, imagination, emotional response to fiction, play within the play and on several authors, for instance Laclos, Diderot, Mme de Staël, Goethe, von Hofmannsthal, and Rilke. Rüdiger Zymner is Professor of Comparative and General Literature at the University of Wuppertal, Germany. His major research interests include lyricology, theory of genre, theory of literature and history of literature. He is the author of Manierismus. Zur poetischen Artistik bei Johann Fischart, Jean Paul und Arno Schmidt (1995), Lyrik. Umriss und Begriff (2009) and Funktionen der Lyrik (2013). Among his several (co-)edited volumes are Handbuch Gattungstheorie (2010), Handbuch Komparatistik (2013, with Achim Hölter), Handbuch Literarische Rhetorik (2015), and Theories of the Lyric (2017).
Name Index Abbott, Andrew 371 f. Abbott, H. Porter 59 Abelard, Peter 211 Abraham, Anna 586–588 Abū Dāwūd 716 Achebe, Chinua 333 Addison, Joseph 498 f., 501 f., 506, 644 Agathon 622 Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 289, 291 Ajjemy, Abdallah bin Hemed 724, 730 al Lamuy, Shaibu bin Hamed al Busaidy 723 Al Nabhani, Muhammad bin Fumo Omar 724 al-Asākir, Ibn 713, 715 Alexander, Amir 435 Alexander the Great 444, 627, 699, 701 Alexievich, Svetlana 602, 605–610 Alighieri, Dante 174, 603 al-Isfahānī, Imād al-Dīn 713 Allen, J. W. T. 725 al-T abarī, Abū Jafar Muh ammad ibn Jarīr 713 f. Amossy, Ruth 570 Andersch, Alfred 523 Angot, Christine 555, 574 Antiphon 622 Apollodorus 620, 622 Appel, Markus 143 Aquinas, Thomas 104 Aristodemus 622 Aristotle 30, 99, 101, 209–211, 218, 245, 247 f., 251, 262, 267, 271, 354, 444 f., 487–489, 491–494, 496 f., 499–503, 505, 533, 570, 619, 621, 623, 629 Arnaud, Andreas von 60, 62 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-054
Ashland, Anna 139 Aśoka (King) 681 ’Attār, Farid od-din 702 Augustine of Hippo 104, 412 Austen, Jane 120, 238, 501, 514 f., 518 Austin, John Langshaw 191 Azzouni, Safia 432 Bacon, Francis 445 f., 449, 495 f., 639 Bakalar, Nicholas 135 f. Baker, John 392 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich 503 Bal’ami 698, 703 Bally, Charles 10 Balzac, Honoré de 569, 594, 603 Banzan, Kumazawa 671 Bar, Varda 449 Bareis, J. Alexander 32, 36 f., 158 Barsalou, Lawrence 283 Barth, Karl 411 Barthes, Roland 10, 84, 129, 503 f., 511 f., 525, 578 Baudrillard, Jean 131 Bayle, Pierre 492, 637 Bazin, André 455 Bechdel, Alison 88 f. Becker, Gary 386 Beck-Nielsen, Claus 562 Beer, Gillian 433, 436 Behn, Aphra 495 Beni, Paolo 488 Bergson, Henri 117, 605 Berkeley, George 213 f., 216, 605 Berkhofer, Robert F. 12 Bertoncini Zúbková, Elena 726 Beyhaqi, Abu’l-Fazl 703–706, 735
756
Name Index
Bhasa 680 Biruni 704 f. Blair, Tony 353 Blank, Andreas 269 Boghossian, Paul 215, 222–225 Bohr, Niels 63, 115, 438 Boileau, Nicolas 643 Boltanski, Luc 559, 573 Bonaparte, Napoleon 78, 262 Bonciani, Francesco 489 Booth, Wayne C. 547 Bordwell, David 453 f., 458 Borges, Jorge Luis 234, 558, 561 Borrelli, Arianna 438 Böschen, Stefan 432, 435 Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne Lignel 603 Boyle, Robert 433, 449 Bracciolini, Poggio 636 Brandom, Robert 192 f. Brandt, Christina 431, 434 Brassier, Ray 222 Brock, Timothy C. 143 f. Brokken, Jan 340, 344 f. Brontë, Anne 513 Brontë, Charlotte 514 Brontë, Emily 513, 516 Brontës, the 515 Brosh, Yaffa 449 Brown, Jonathan 717 Brutus 636 Bryant, David J. 151 Bühler, Karl 277 Bulgarini, Bellisario 489 Bultmann, Rudolf 409 Buonamici, Francesco 488 Burckhardt, Jacob 178 Burke, Edmund 499, 603, 605 Burney, Frances 501 Burniston Brown, C. 3 Byron, George Gordon 577, 585
Carlson, Lauri 281 Carr, David 12 Carrère, Emmanuel 587 Carroll, Noël 233, 238 Carson, Candy 139 Castaneda, Carlos 329, 333 Castelli, Benedetto 105 Castelvetro, Lodovico 488 f. Cavendish, Henry 448 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 234 Cephalus of Clazomenae 622 Cervantes, Miguel de 160, 490, 621 Chang, Hasok 448 Charon, Rita 14 Chatman, Seymour 10 Chaucer, Geoffrey 623, 629 Cheng (King) 648 Churchill, Caryl 605 Churchill, Charles 605 Churchill, Winston 248, 252, 254 f., 602, 605, 607–610 Cicero, Marcus Tullius 248, 287, 603, 639 Cleopatra VII 91 Clifford, James 327 Cohen, Jack 104 Cohn, Dorrit 12, 339 f., 533, 549, 577, 579, 585 f. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 45 f., 121, 502, 534, 546, 585, 598 Collins, Michael 82, 551 f. Columbus, Christopher 435, 491 Comey, James 473 Confucius 647, 650, 652 Constantine (Emperor) 636 Cooperson, Michael 718 Corday, Charlotte 511 Corneille, Pierre 493–495, 498, 504, 640 Coulmas, Florian 523 Currie, Gregory 53, 91, 232, 237, 241
Caesar, Julius 59, 603 Cameron, David 359 Cameron, James 115 Cameron, Julia Margaret 84 Capa, Robert 346 Capote, Truman 42, 83, 539, 599 Capps, Lisa 524, 526
Dada, Idi Amin 725 Daisey, Mike 538 f. Dali, Salvador 91 Dam, Beatrix van 337, 340 Dannenberg, Hilary 515, 519 Danto, Arthur C. 12 Dardenne, Robert 60
Name Index Dares the Phrygian 615 f., 619 f., 623, 627 Darrieussecq, Marie 558 Darville, Helen 524 Darwin, Charles 432 f., 436 Davidson, Donald 204 f., 271 Davies, John 490 Davis, Lennard J. 593 Dawson, Paul 166 De Luc, Jean-André 448 De Man, Paul 130, 173 de’ Medici, Cosimo II 447 de Thou, Jacques-Auguste 636 de Vigan, Delphine 555 Dear, Peter 433 Defoe, Daniel 65, 381, 495, 513, 597, 643 Deleuze, Gilles 117 Demidenko, Helen 523 f. Denores, Giason 488 Derrida, Jacques 129, 178, 437 Descartes, René 216, 637 f. Dewdney, A. K. 123 Dewey, John 368–370, 373 Dickens, Charles 514 f., 518 f. Dictys of Crete 615 f., 619 f., 623, 627 Didion, Joan 538 Dilthey, Wilhelm 367 DiMatteo, Larry 393 f. Dio of Prusa 615, 618 f. Dīpam kara, Buddha 687 Doležel, Lubomír 53, 260, 339, 346, 527, 567 Donne, John 241 Doubrovsky, Serge 42, 556–561 Downie, J. A. 174 Dreyfus, Hubert 221 Dryden, John 498 f. Du Bos, Jean-Baptiste 495, 502 Duke of Wellington 91 f. Duke of Zhou 649 Dulong, Renauld 580, 588 Dumas Fils, Alexandre 701 Dumas Père, Alexandre 701 Dummett, Michael 204 f., 220 f. Eagleton, Terry 604 Eco, Umberto 53, 534
757
Eggers, Dave 550, 574 Ehrenpreis, Irvin 174 Einstein, Albert 421–423 el Buhriy, Hemed bin Abdallah 725 Elgin, Catherine Z. 238–240, 242 Eliot, George 514 f. Ellis, Bret Easton 558 Ellis, John M. 263 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 603 Emmott, Catherine 151 Empiricus, Sextus 637 Engels, Friedrich 371 Erasmus of Rotterdam 636, 638 Eucken, Rudolf 605 Euclides 622 Fauconnier, Gilles 168, 282 f. Faxian 684, 687 Fazio, Lisa K. 141 f. Fenton, George 460 Ferdowsi, Abu’l-Qasem 697 f., 703, 706 Ferraris, Maurizio 222, 224 Fielding, Henry 495, 499–502, 513, 621, 643 Fischer-Lichte, Erika 560 Fish, Stanley 129 Flaubert, Gustave 160, 511 f., 525 Fleck, Ludwik 431, 434 Fludernik, Monika 149 f., 152, 341, 450, 626 f., 629, 665 Fogel, Robert 386 Foley, Barbara 593 f., 597 Fontenelle, Bernard le Bovier de 639 Foucault, Michel 97, 101, 203 Frayn, Michael 115 Frege, Gottlob 216–219, 246 f., 251–253, 268, 271 Freud, Sigmund 13, 140, 178, 230, 297 f., 301, 308, 529 Frey, James 538, 544, 566–573 Fulda, Daniel 60, 340 Gabriel, Markus 212, 215 f., 222, 224 f. Gagnon, Janelle 149 Gainsborough, Thomas 91 Galilei, Galileo 105–108, 433, 447, 639 Galili, Igal 449 Gallagher, Catherine 6, 505–507, 514, 593, 595
758
Name Index
Galsworthy, John 241 Gaskell, Elizabeth 515 f. Gasparini, Philippe 558 Gasset, José Ortega y 503 Geach, Peter Thomas 278 Geertz, Clifford 327, 330 Gellner, Ernest 327 f. Genette, Gérard 10, 29–32, 37, 40, 51, 54–61, 339 f., 503, 536, 546, 557–559, 579 Geoffrey of Monmouth 629 George I 170 f., 176 Gerrig, Richard 149 f., 152, 154 Ghosh, Amitav 7 Gibbard, Allan 386 Gibbon, Edward 513, 605 Gibson, John 129, 242 Gilmore, Grant 393 Gläser, Jochen 435 f. Glass, Philip 460 Glass, Stephen 534–536, 538 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 585 Goffman, Erving 152, 567 f. Goodman, Nelson 112, 129, 238 f., 241 f. Gordon, Ruthanna 139 Gotama, Buddha 687 Gove, Michael 359 Goya, Francisco de 92 Grant, Ian Hamilton 222 Green, Melanie C. 143 f., 153 f. Greene, Theodore M. 231, 240 Grice, H. Paul 62, 272 f., 306 Grierson, John 460 Grosjean, Bruno 528 Grover, Dorothy 192 Gu, Ban 653 Gu, Ming Dong 655 f. Gudjonsson, Gisli 307 Guignon, Charles 321 f. Guy, John 161 Haarder, Jon Helt 560 Habermas, Jürgen 203 Hamburger, Käte 11, 577, 579 Hansberry, Lorraine 238 Happel, Eberhard Werner 639 Hardy, Thomas 515
Harman, Graham 222, 224 Harris, Michael 437 Harrison, Bernard 240 Hartmann, Stephan 432 Hattendorf, Manfred 458 Haugtvedt, Erica 162 Hediger, Vinzenz 455, 460 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 598 Heidegger, Martin 189, 322 Heisenberg, Werner 115 Hemingway, Ernest 714 Hempfer, Klaus W. 32 f., 39 f. Henry, John 114 Herman, David 10, 60, 152 Herman, Jan 593 Herodotus 617, 620 Hilal, Mohamed 728 Hildesheimer, Wolfgang 40 f., 577, 585 f. Hintikka, Jaako 281 Hißnauer, Christian 458 f. Hitler, Adolf 343 Hobbes, Thomas 178 Hoffmann, Roald 449–451 Holmes, Frederic 433 Holtorf, Christian 437 Homer 114, 288, 503, 603, 615–619, 627 Hood, Robin 114 Hooke, Robert 446 f. Horwich, Paul 196 f., 205 Hospers, John 233 Houellebecq, Michel 84, 555, 570 Huet, Pierre-Daniel 638, 641 Hughes, Alex 558 Hühn, Peter 14, 52, 58–61 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 269 Hume, David 216 Hunold, Christian Friedrich 643 Hussein, Ebrahim 730 Hussein, Saddam 353 Ichijo (Emperor) 671 Ilkevich, Valentina Mikhailovna 610 Ilych, Ivan 313 f., 317 f., 321 f. Isidore of Seville 628 Jaeger, Stephan 57 Jakobson, Roman 166, 288 James, Henry 11, 264, 512 f., 518
Name Index James, William 322 f. Jien 663 Joas, Hans 373 f. John, Eileen 239 Johnson, Boris 358–362 Johnson, Mark 171 f. Johnson, Samuel 499 Johnson, Uwe 332 Jonson, Ben 637 Kablitz, Andreas 34, 38 f. Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry 91 f. Kakuichi, Akashi 672 Kalidāsa 680 Kanada 444 Kant, Immanuel 127, 223, 598 Karenina, Anna 7 Katz, Jack 369 Kaufman, Moisés 87 Kayamba, H. M. T. 726 f. Keats, John 603 Keller, Helen 316–318 Kellner, Hans 12 Kenkō, Yoshida 663 Kennedy, John F. 79 Kerwin, Joseph 551 Kessler, Frank 455 f. Kezilahabi, Euphrase 729 Khamisi, Joe 727 Khatib, Muhammed 725 Kibao, Salim 725 King, Martin Luther 165 King, Rodney 457 Kitini, Bwana 723 f. Kiyomori, Taira no 671 f. Klauk, Tobias 1, 54 Klein, Christian 14, 51 f., 54, 56–61 Klein, Melanie 299 Kleruu, Dr. Wilbert 729 Knausgård, Karl Ove 555, 561 f. Knorr-Cetina, Karin 431 Koch, Anton Friedrich 212, 222 Koehler, Jonathan J. 137 Kombo, Mshamu binti 724 Konishi, Jin’ichi 673 Konrad, Eva Marie 128 f. Köppe, Tilmann 1, 54 Korte, Barbara 59
759
Korthals Altes, Liesbeth 559 f. Koschorke, Albrecht 373 Kracauer, Siegfried 455 Kripke, Saul 247–251, 280 Kuhn, Thomas 370 f., 431 Künne, Wolfgang 189, 198, 202, 205 Kyōkai 667 f. La Peyrère, Isaac 638 Labov, William 12, 149 Lacan, Jacques 300 f. Lactantius 628 Lagoni, Frederike 14, 53 Lakoff, George 171 f. Lamarque, Peter 53, 232, 236, 241, 260, 263, 588 Langevin, Paul 421 Lanser, Susan 10 Latour, Bruno 431 Lavocat, Françoise 54 Le Vayer, François de La Mothe 637 f. Lecarme, Jacques 557 Lecarme-Tabone, Eliane 557 Lee, Harper 261 Lejeune, Philippe 62, 546, 556 f. Leonhard, Jörn 342 f. Leopardi, Giacomo 585 Lewens, Tim 432 Lewis, David 253 Licoppe, Christian 434 Lindener, Michael 642 Livingstone, David 726 Livy 640 Locke, John 216 f., 496 Lord, Charles G. 136 Löschnigg, Martin 58 Lotman, Jurij M. 472 f. Louis C. K. 538 Lu, Sheldon 654 f., 657, 659 Lucan 629, 640 Lucian of Samosata 595, 615, 642 Lucretius, Titus 636 Lukács, György 503 Lumière, Auguste and Louis 453 Luther, Martin 407 f., 410, 642 Lycurgus of Sparta 114 Lyotard, Jean-François 419 f., 431, 434 f.
760
Name Index
Macaulay, Thomas Babington 513, 603 Mach, Ernst 328 Magellan, Ferdinand 435 Maggi, Vincenzo 489 Mahāvīra 678, 681 Mahmud of Ghazni 703 f. Maingueneau, Dominique 568 f. Mair, Victor 654 Malinowski, Bronislaw 328, 331 Manley, Delarivier 643 Mantel, Hilary 161 Manuwald, Henrike 625 f., 631 Maradufu, D. B. 727 Marcus, George 327 Marie of Oignies 631 Marlowe, Christopher 642 Márquez, Gabriel García 514 Marsh, Elizabeth J. 134, 141 f. Martínez, Matías 14, 38, 51, 56–61 Martínez-Bonati, Félix 527 Marx, Karl 63, 178, 370 f., 379 Mas’ud I of Ghazni 704 Matuschek, Stefan 340 Mauvignier, Laurent 587 Mazur, Barry 435 Mbatiah, Mwenda 726 Mbonde, J. P. 728 Mbotela, James Juma 727 f. Mbotela, Mzee 727 McCloskey, Deirdre 386 f. McCourt, Frank 550 McDowell, John 221 McKeon, Michael 593 Mechthild of Magdeburg 631 Mecke, Klaus 438 Meillassoux, Quentin 222–224 Meinong, Alexius 200, 253 f. Meizoz, Jérôme 569 Méliès, Georges 453 Michelet, Jules 511 f., 525 Michie, Helena 519 Michinaga, Fujiwara no 665 Mill, John Stuart 230, 245 f., 248 Millais, John Everett 91 Miller, Andrew 519 Miller, D. A. 516 f. Miller, Nancy K. 515 Millet, Catherine 555 Milsom, S. F. C. 392
Mommsen, Theodor 605 Montaigne, Michel de 603, 605 Moore, Michael 460 More, Thomas 161 Morgan, Mary S. 387, 438, 449 f. Morrison, Toni 239, 514 Morse, Ruth 629 Mortimer, Raymond 583 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 169 Mpinga, Seti Benjamin 728 Muhanika, Henry 725, 730 Mung’ong’o, Claude G. 730 Munslow, Alun 12, 341 Mwaruka, Ramadhani 725 Nabokov, Vladimir 596 Narihira, Ariwara no 669 f. Nassir, Sayyid 731 Nehru, Jawaharlal 690 Nepos, Cornelius 615 Newton, Isaac 496, 639 Nezāmi, Ganjavi 701 f. Ngwale, Kinjeketile 730 Nichols, Bill 457, 459 Nielsen, Henrik Skov 15, 54, 165, 558 Nietzsche, Friedrich 203, 241, 321 Nobel, Alfred 605 Novitz, David 238 f. Nünning, Ansgar 14, 51, 58–60, 340, 579 f. Nünning, Vera 14, 51, 58–60 Nussbaum, Martha 235 f. Nyerere, Julius 728–730 Obama, Barack 165 Ochs, Elinor 524, 526 Oddi, Nicolò Degli 489 Ogden, Charles 267, 270 Olsen, Stein Haugom 233, 236, 260, 263, 588 Opitz, Martin 640 Orwell, George 177 Ovid 584 Paige, Nicholas 505, 577, 594 Paley, Grace 239 Parker, Robert Dale 604 Parmenides 617, 622
Name Index Pascal, Blaise 605 Patey, Douglas Lane 488 Pedri, Nancy 89 Peirce, C.S. 76, 90 Peters, Ursula 631 Pettersson, Anders 233 Phelan, James 14 f., 52, 54, 58–60 Phillips, D. Z. 234 Philostratus 615 Picasso, Pablo 91 f. Pierce, Charles Sanders 202 f. Plaks, Andrew 654 Plantinga, Carl 85 Plato 30, 99, 127, 178, 209–211, 218, 245–251, 262, 267, 444, 503, 618, 620, 623, 703 Plotinus 211 Plotnisky, Arkady 434, 438 Pollock, Jackson 313 f., 317 Polybius 617 Popper, Karl 370, 417 Porphyry 211 Posner, Richard 236 f., 241 Potocki, Jan 623 Pouivet, Roger 241 Pouwels, Randall L. 724, 731 Pratchett, Terry 104 Price, Richard 60 Prince Arima 667 Proust, Marcel 599 Prusiner, Stanley 450 Pulitzer, Joseph 466 Putnam, Hilary 204 f., 214 f., 234, 240 Pythagoras 114 Pytheas of Massalia 617, 620 Pythodorus 622 Qian, Sima 650, 652, 656, 658, 664 Quine, Willard van Orman 194–196, 273 Rabinowitz, Peter J. 14, 52, 58–60 Radcliffe, Ann 502 Radvansky, Gabriel A. 151 Ramsey, Frank P. 191 Ranke, Leopold von 340, 712 Rapin, René 493 Rapp, David N. 142 Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg 437
761
Riccoboni, Antonio 489, 493 Richards, Ivor A. 267 f., 270 Richardson, Samuel 495, 500, 502, 513, 597, 643 Richter, David 61, 178 Richter, Tobias 143 Rickman, Allan 87 Ricœur, Paul 12, 337, 347, 369, 584 Rigney, Ann 12, 337 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith 10 Robert, Shaaban bin 725, 728 Robinson, Jenefer 235 Rogachev, Andrey Y. 451 Rollins, Jack D. 723, 726 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 608 Rorty, Richard 129, 203 Rosenthal, Gabriele 373 Roth, Philip 555 Rouse, Joseph 435 f. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 92, 569, 585, 597 Ruhumbika, Gabriel 730 Rumei, Wang 655 Rumi, Jalāl od-din 702 Rüsen, Jörn 12 Russell, Bertrand 194, 201, 212 f., 216, 218 f., 246–248, 252 f., 273, 280, 605 Rüth, Axel 60 Ruti, Mari 318 f. Ryan, Marie-Laure 8, 10, 45, 64, 92, 120, 131, 155, 423, 455 Ryle, Gilbert 234 Saad, Siti binti 728 Sa’di 700 Śākyamuni, Buddha 681 f., 684, 688 f. Samuelson, Paul 386 Sanā’i, Hakim 702 Sanford, Anthony J. 151 Sapir, Edward 269 Sarde, Michel 59 Sartre, Jean-Paul 596 Sassetti, Filippo 489 Satrapi, Marjane 88 Saussure, Ferdinand de 128 f., 269 f. Saviano, Roberto 41 Scaliger, Julius Caesar 640 Schacter, Daniel L. 307 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie 32 f., 36 f., 39, 157, 336, 577 f., 586
762
Name Index
Scheiner, Jens 715 Schepsmeier, Christian 432 Schirra, Wally 551 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 408 Schmidt, Siegfried J. 129 Schmitt, Arnaud 131, 558 Schneider, Christian 626, 631 Schrödinger, Erwin 421, 423 f. Schütze, Fritz 373 Schwalm, Helga 59 Schweickart, Russell 551 Scott, C. P. 467 Scott, Sir Walter 176, 232, 724 Scotus, Johannes Duns 211 Scudéry, Madeleine de 490 Seamon, John G. 140 Searle, John 3, 271 f., 283, 535–539, 577 f., 588 Sedaris, David 538 f. Shafi, Adam 727 Shafi, Shafi Adam 729 Shakespeare, William 120, 230, 603, 640 Shapin, Steven 433 Shapiro, Barbara 445 Shell, Marc 386 Shelley, Mary 513 Shields, David 586 Shigemori, Taira no 672 Shikibu, Murasaki 663–665, 671 Shōyō, Tsubouchi 673 Sidney, Sir Philip 98 f., 101, 536, 640 f. Silvestris, Bernard 178 Simon, Richard 638 Smith, Adam 385 Smith, Sidonie 58 Snell, Bruno 616 Socrates 99, 199–201, 229, 245, 251, 618, 620, 622 f. Solow, Robert 386 Sontheimer, Michael 343 Sophocles 230, 620 Sorel, Charles 490–492, 494, 507 Souriau, Étienne 456 Spence, Donald 525 Spiegelman, Art 5, 82, 88, 90, 165, 179 Spielhagen, Friedrich 11 Spinoza, Baruch de 638, 705 Sprat, Thomas 446 Spurlock, Morgan 460
Stace, W. T. 231, 240 Stanley, Henry Morton 726 Stanzel, Franz Karl 10, 65 Steele, Richard 597, 644 Stendhal 241 Stern, Daniel 301 f. Sternberg, Meir 61, 628 Sterne, Laurence 501 Stewart, Ian 104 Stewart, Jon 177 Stieler, Kaspar 644 f. Stocker, Ferry 384 Stoker, Bram 513 Strabo 617 Strawson, Peter F. 191 f., 201, 247, 273 f. Stuart, Gisela 359 Sukefusa, Fujiwara 665 Sullivan, Anne 316 f. Sumedha, Buddha 687 Sūri, Haribhadra 677 Süssmann, Johannes 12 Svevo, Italo 596 Swift, Jonathan 165, 170, 172, 174–176, 180, 233 Tabari, Mohammad b. Jarir 698, 703, 705 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius 636 Talmy, Leonard 167 Tarski, Alfred 204, 273 Tasso, Torquato 488 f., 493 Taylor, Charles 221, 320–322 Teissier, Bernard 438 Tenmu (Emperor) 666 Terpsion 622 Teskey, Gordon 178 Theaetetus 622 Thévenot, Laurent 559, 573 Thomasius, Christian 643 Thompson, Kristin 453 Thucydides 618 Thüring von Ringoltingen 642 Tinbergen, Jan 382 Tip, Tippu 726 Todorov, Tzvetan 10, 149 Tolkien, J. R. R. 121, 159 Tolstoy, Leo 230, 262, 313 f., 322 Tretyakov, Sergei 15, 53
763
Name Index Trilling, Lionel 313, 317, 319, 521 Trollope, Anthony 512 f., 515–517 Troyes, Chrétien de 595 Trudeau, Garry 179 Trump, Donald 179, 351, 354–357, 360, 362, 473 Turner, Mark 282 f. Ulmer, Bernd
412
Vairasse d’Allais, Denis 491 Valla, Lorenzo 636 Varian, H. R. 386 Velleman, David 426 Velten, Carl 727 Vermeer, Johannes 92 Vesalius, Andreas 639 Veyne, Paul 618 Viehöver, Willy 435 Vincent of Beauvais 628 Viner, Katherine 87 Viperano, Giovanni Antonio 489 Virgil 288, 619 Virgil, Polydore 636 Vives, Juan Luis 636 Vogelsang, Kai 652 Wace 629 Waletzky, Joshua 12 Wallace, David Foster 538 Walpole, Sir Robert 170–173, 176 Walsh, Dorothy 231 Walsh, Richard 15, 53 f., 152 Walton, Kendall L. 34, 36, 46, 80, 120, 161 Warburton, William 597 Warhol, Robyn 519 Waswo, R. 619 Watson, Julia 58 Watt, Ian 513 f., 516, 519, 593 Weidacher, Georg 461 Weinberg, Bernard 488 Weixler, Antonius 526 Wellek, René 603, 605
Wen (King) 648 Wen, Xiao-Deng 451 Wharton, Edith 234 White, Hayden 9, 11 f., 60, 129 f., 177 f., 336 f., 347, 419 f., 435 Whitman, Jon 178 f. Whorf, Benjamin Lee 269 Wieseltier, Leon 536 Wilhelm II 15, 53 Wilkomirski, Binjamin 527–530, 587 Winfrey, Oprah 566, 568, 572 f. Winnicott, Donald W. 298 f., 302, 311 Wise, M. Norton 438, 449 f. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 199–201, 230, 250 Wolfe, Tom 177, 543 f., 547–553 Wolff, Tobias 544, 547 f. Woloch, Alex 519 Wolterstorff, Nicholas 606 Woolf, Virginia 159 Woolgar, Steve 431 Wordsworth, William 230 Worth, Sol 91 Wu (King) 648 f. Wyschogrod, Edith 631 Xuanzang 657, 687 Xueqin, Cao 656 Yeager, Chuck 551 Yijing 687 Yocaris, Ilias 438 Yourcenar, Marguerite Yu, Zhang 655
59
Zeno 622 Zesen, Philipp von 642 Zhuangzi 659 Zhupo, Zhang 657 Zinano, Gabriele 488 Zipfel, Frank 38, 157, 159, 460 f., 558 Zola, Émile 569 f. Zwaan, Rolf A. 151–154 Zysow, Aron 727
Subject Index produced by Hanna-Myriam Häger and Jacob Langeloh
accuracy, factual 325, 332, 392, 570 adab 698, 711 advertisement, advertising 179, 469, 479– 483, 642 aesthetics 457 f., 584 – aesthetics, analytic 230 – aesthetic concerns 566 – aesthetic conventions 458, 598 – aesthetic effect 538, 599 – aesthetics of factual texts 538, 659 – aesthetic illusion 45 f. – aesthetic presentation 561 agency 310, 341 ahistorical 650 allegory 165, 167, 169 f., 173–175, 178, 180, 230, 507, 630, 642, 670, 679, 699, 702 – allegory, factual 179 alternative facts 351 ambiguity, ambiguous 397, 457, 460, 462, 479, 566, 574, 585, 628, 642 ambivalence 511, 516, 585 f., 642, 712 anachrony (Genette) 54, 60 f., 713 analogy 150, 593, 679 f., 689, 716 anaphora, anaphoric 264, 276 f. – anaphora, pronominal 280 anecdotes 64, 537, 654, 665, 667–669, 673, 702, 711, 718, 724 anthropocentrism 420 f. anthropology 325–327, 583 anticipation 481 anticognitivism 231, 241 architecture 90 f., 93 archival material 712 f., 718 argumentum 621, 627 f., 640 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486278-055
art – art as an epistemic enterprise 238 – art, ethical value of 231 article, definite vs. indefinite 274 artifact theory 255 as-if-narratives 382 assertions 4, 232 f., 272, 615, 636, 642 auctores, auctoritates 595, 627 audience(s) 313, 317, 546 f., 549, 552 aurality 696 authentication 573, 581, 620, 627, 630 f., 716 f. – authentication, strategies of 59–61, 475, 513 – authenticity, authentic 313–323, 392, 454, 457, 460, 521–525, 527–529, 570– 573, 581, 583, 587, 622, 625, 635, 644, 666, 713, 716–718 – authenticity, concepts of 530 – authenticity, intra-personal dimension of 315 – authenticity, referential 524, 530 – authenticity, self-reflexive 526 – authenticity, stylistic 529 – authenticity, testimonial 526 author, authorial 470, 522 f., 557, 560, 565, 569 f., 572, 587 – authors of factual narratives 540, 544 – author, historical 59 – authors in journalism 471 – authorial narrative situation 383 – author vs. narrator 546 f., 549 f., 552, 558, 587, 589 – authorial posture and ethos 565, 567, 569–574
Subject Index authority, authoritative 51, 434, 522 f., 527, 569–572, 616–620, 627, 697 – authority, ethnographic 328–331 – authority of scripture 407 f., 410 authorship 625, 653 – authorship, multiple 471 autobiography, autobiographical 13, 57– 59, 309, 524, 555, 557, 559, 572–574, 582, 593, 599, 643, 700, 722, 724, 726–728, 732 – autobiography, fake 587 – autobiography, second-person 59 – autobiography, third-person 59 autofiction, autofictive 13, 42 f., 83, 131, 555–562, 574, 611 – autofictive practices 555 autonomy 533 Avadāna 683, 685 f., 688 f. belles-lettres 605, 682, 710 f., 715 beliefs 589 – beliefs, factive 167 – belief polarization 136 f. – belief, true 188, 219 believability 306 see also trust(worthiness) bias 139 Bible 407 f., 410, 635, 638, 642 – biblical narrative 52, 61, 405, 411 – biblical stories 627, 630, 699 – biblical studies 402–403, 409 – Old Testament 403 – New Testament 404–407 biography, biographical 304 f., 405 f., 585, 587, 669 f., 678, 686 f., 696, 713, 717 f., 722, 724, 728 – biography, fake 585 – biography, historical 577 biology, molecular 435 boundary, boundaries see transgression Buddhism 681–683, 687–689 camera 453–458, 462 – camera, hand-held 457–459 cartoon 91, 179 case histories 382 f. case simulations 380–382 causality 211 – causal explanation, causal inference 222, 425 f.
765
– causal-historical chain 249 – causal relationship 153, 372 characterization 275 characters – character-narrator(s) 517 – character types 518, 583 chemistry 437 child, children 299 f. children’s books 104 Christianity 401–403, 409 chronicle, chronographic writing 60, 288, 642, 644, 664, 667, 699, 703 f., 712– 715, 722–724, 731 f. chronology, chronological 380, 648, 668, 715, 722, 726, 731 certainty 637, 654, 716 f. civil law see law, civil closure 426 cognition 8 – cognitive biases 134 – cognitive narrativity 420 – cognitive narratology 149 – cognitive processes 133 f., 144, 282, 308, 607, 610 – cognitive psychology 14, 133 – cognitive research, science, or studies 165, 180, 419, 437, 586, 590 – cognitive semantics 361 cognitivism 230 f., 233 f., 236, 241 f. – neocognitivism 238, 240 coherence 588 collective, collectives 340–344, 357, 468, 535, 551, 587 – collective storytelling 12, 64 comics 88 comment, commentary 653 commitment(s) 315 common law see law, common communication 579 computer games 87 f. conceptual relativity 215 conceptual schemes 215 confession, confessional 58, 140, 513, 569, 573 Confucianism, Confucian 649 f., 652 f. context 160, 540, 585, 611 – context of publication 537, 540 contingency 402 – contingency, social 367, 374
766
Subject Index
contract – contract, author-reader 534, 558 – contract of fiction 536 conventions 17, 462, 533 f., 537, 540, 543, 555, 560, 565 f., 571–573, 582, 715 see also genre conventions – conventions, factual 42, 45 – conventions of factuality 491, 535 f. – conventions of fictionality 39, 42, 45, 116, 122, 535 f., 582, 710 – conventions, journalistic 551 – conventions of realism 480, 511, 513– 516, 519 f. – conventions, social 321 conviction sciences 386 cooperative principle (communication) 62 corporate storytelling 14, 60 co-text 276 f. counterfactuality, counterfactual 32, 81, 93, 112, 168 f., 187, 253, 281, 380–382, 388, 519, 545, 616, 618–621 creationism (theory of fictional entities) 254 f. credibility 353, 696 f., 731 see also believability and trust(worthiness) – credibility, degrees of 5, 581 cubism 91 cultural studies 11 deception, deceit 4 definite descriptions 246–249, 260, 270, 273 f., 283 definition, empirically-based or operational 449 deflationism see truth − philosophical truth theory − deflationism deictics, deixis 276 f. democratic formation of opinion 469 denarrativation 434 denotation 259 description 54, 64 f., 102, 503, 525, 629 f., 682 – description, literary 235 f. – description, spatial 151 description theory (Russell) 248, 252 descriptivism 248 f., 252 dialogue 65, 622 f., 631, 667 f., 704
diary, diaries 513, 582, 643, 664 f., 669– 673, 713 dictionaries 582 didactics, didacticism 602 f., 625 f., 628, 630, 650, 652, 657, 677, 685, 697 f., 700 – didactic texts/epics 625, 685 f., 700, 702 diegesis 31, 714 – diegesis vs. mimesis 30, 503 f. direct speech 310 discours 340 discourse – discourse analysis 12 f., 95, 387, 435 – discourse comprehension 150 – discourse, factual 4, 32, 169, 545, 601 f., 605–607, 610 f., 621 – licenses of factual discourse 540 – discourse, fictional 169, 580, 606, 621 – discourse, fictive 526 – discourse, free indirect 398, 501 f., 518 – discourse, historical 580 – discourse, narrative 568 – Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) 281 f. disembodiment 506 disnarration 519 disquotationalism see truth − philosophical truth theory − disquotationalism distance between narration and story 57 documentation, documentary 45, 587, 606, 636 – documentary apparatus 585, 637 document(s) 523, 530, 598, 636, 638, 653 f., 666, 672, 698 dogmatics (part of theology) 402, 407, 409, 411 drama, dramatic 487, 493, 499, 603–605, 607, 620–622, 683, 704, 729 f. – drama narratology 65 – drama, Platonic-Aristotelian definition of 30, 500, 503 dream, dream(time) narratives 289 f., 310, 630, 656, 659 f., 666, 669, 680, 690 eccentricity 319 ecology 435
Subject Index economics 379–388 see also narrative, economic editorial 467, 472 effect of complexity 516 ego (psychoanalysis) 297, 300 f. ego-documents 62 ekphrasis 288 elocutio 88, 525, 640 emotion, emotional 571 f., 586–589, 598, 607, 610 empathy 154, 235–237, 583, 586–588 empiricism, empirical 113 f., 121, 124, 154, 418, 443 f., 446–448, 450, 498, 500, 593, 606, 620, 638, 664 – empiricism, classical 450 – empirical epistemology 496, 499, 635 – empiricism, history of 443 – empirical observations 370, 382, 443– 445, 639 – empirical research 370, 635 – empirical truth 507, 604, 621 – empirical world 379, 419 emplotment 129, 177 encyclopedia 644 Enlightenment 405, 408, 638, 645 epic 507, 620 f. see also epic poetry – epic, Platonic-Aristotelian definition 30 episodic narrative 309 f., 669, 718, 723 – episodic component 714, 716 epistemic justification 103 epistemology 3, 601, 635, 638, 711 – epistemology of art 231 – epistemic status of the economic sciences 386 esse est percipi 213 eternal certanities, eternal truths see truth, absolute, divine, eternal, higher, spiritual, or universal ethics, ethical 540, 547 f., 550–553, 689 – ethical discourse 713 – ethics of factual narratives 543 f. – ethics, rhetorical 544, 553 ethnography 327–332, 636, 722 evaluation 291, 304, 467, 475, 552, 572, 583 – evaluation of a narrative 39, 65, 106, 155, 354, 356, 361 f., 472, 589 f.
767
event 373 f., 687 – event, historical 370, 409, 616 f., 629, 650, 657, 680, 688, 715, 722, 725, 729 – event, real 571 – event structures 354, 356, 361 – event, theoretical 115 everyday life 325 f., 341, 618 evidence, evidentia 114 f., 220 f., 233, 287 f., 391, 393–396, 399, 413, 433, 444, 525 f., 580 f., 617, 626 f., 636–639, 656, 669, 672, 697, 706 evidentiality 150, 288–290 – evidentiality strategies 290 f. – evidentiality systems 291–293 evidential (morpheme) 287, 289 f., 292 f. exemplification 259, 421 exemplum, exempla 64, 630, 652, 677 existence see definite descriptions expectations/value attribution 555 experience 80, 235 f., 326, 332 f., 433, 446, 497, 499, 555, 558, 565–567, 571, 574, 584 – experience, common/collective 275 f., 346, 404 – experience, factuality of 310, 328 – experience, human 301 – experience, instrument-aided 433 – experience, lived (Erlebnis) 332 – experience, perceptual 176 – experience, personal 62, 82, 149, 152, 155, 325, 373, 496 – experience, predicated (Erfahrung) 332 – experience, real 297–299 experience-inviting discourse, concept of 606 f., 610 experientiality 9, 152, 172, 343–347, 526, 626 f., 629 f., 665 – experientiality, human 352, 421 experiment (scientific) 57, 433, 446, 449, 495–498, 500, 638 f. explanation 64, 372, 383 f., 424 – explanation, narrative 418 f., 421, 426 see also narrative in scientific explanation exteriority 106 f. fable 594, 679, 682, 684, 689, 699 fabrication, fabricated 654 f., 657, 659, 663, 665, 671, 712
768
Subject Index
fabula 397, 621, 627 f., 639 fact(s) 2 f., 37, 79 f., 216, 225, 315, 353 f., 356, 362, 417, 445, 449, 606, 644, 679 – facts, accepted 637 – facts, alleged 361 – facts, autobiographical 568 – facts, empirically-defined 448 – fact, historical 336, 568, 626, 652, 689, 711, 715 – facts, inner 318 – facts as referents to true propositions 79 f., 635 – fact, scientific 417, 426, 429 – facts, verifiable or falsifiable 357 – facts, verified 703 facticity 36–38, 41, 100, 102 f., 625 f., 629, 631 – facticity, diffraction of 103 – facticity, standard of 105 faction (nonfiction novel) 11, 83, 611 factive 7, 167 factual 7, 37, 64, 111, 118, 123, 150, 588 – factual accuracy see accuracy, factual – factual dislocation 729 – factual response by readers 134 – factual status 630, 710, 718 – factual value 610, 628 factuality 10, 32 f., 35–37, 95, 98, 100, 107 f., 149 f., 352, 418, 638 f., 642, 644, 710, 729, 732 – factuality, concept of 533, 536, 578, 601, 610, 625, 631, 660, 673, 677, 681, 689, 706, 717 – factuality, definition of 3, 31, 39, 44, 63, 103, 535, 616, 626, 631, 672, 689 f., 710 – factuality, ethical dimension of 327 – factuality of events 698 – factuality of experience 149, 329–331 – factuality, failures of 95 f., 102, 105, 152 – factuality in film 460 – factuality, global and local level of 4 – factuality, historical 345, 712 – factuality, historical perspective on 107 – factuality of interpretation 329, 331 – factuality, misattributions of 160 – factuality as a normative claim 100
– factuality, norms or standards of 82, 535 f., 574 – factuality, notion of 601, 673, 700, 705 – factuality, pseudo- 577 f., 581, 588– 590, 593–599 – factuality, scientific 424 – factuality, signposts of see signposts of factuality – factuality, style of 582 – factuality, the ‘other’ of 100, 103, 105, 118, 152 see also fictionality, the ‘other’ of – factuality, theory of 95 f., 101 – factuality, weak 83, 87, 89, 90 factualization strategies 42, 580 fairy tales 77, 289, 380, 684 faith 408 f. fake news 2, 12, 82, 101, 160, 351 f., 469, 589, 645 falsehood 589, 618, 637, 663, 666, 670 falsifiability, falsification 112, 370 f., 386, 417 fantasy, fantastic 631, 654, 656, 659, 665, 670, 701 fiction, fictional 4, 6 f., 34, 64, 77 f., 95– 108, 118 f., 232, 603, 607, 621, 628, 640, 655 f., 672 – fictions, autobiographical 555 – fiction, cognitive value of see literature, cognitive value of – fiction, concept of 562 – fiction, contract of see contract, of fiction – fiction, definition of 77 – fictional entities 253–256 – fiction, epistolary 59 – fiction, experimental 556 – fictional and factual writing 33, 41 – fiction, generic 546 f. – fiction, game of 45 – fiction(ality), institutional theory of 533 f., 536 – fiction, historical 664 – fictional narration, narrative fiction 97, 664, 678 – fictional pact 596 – fictional, pseudo- 578 – fiction, realistic 665 – fiction, scientific 380
Subject Index – fictional, signposts of see signposts of fictionality – fiction, social practice of 461 fictionality 6, 29, 34–37, 43, 46, 53, 65, 78, 99, 151, 157, 165, 626, 631, 637, 654, 673, 729, 732 – fictionality, definition of 31, 44 f., 260 f., 611, 626 – fictionality, embedded 548 – fictionality, (epistemological) licenses of 536–538 – fictionality in film 85, 115, 460 – fictionality freedom(s) of 533 f. – fictionality, functional 712 – fictionality, global and local level of 4 – fictionality, signpost or signal of see signposts of fictionality – fictionality, suspicion of 181 – fictionality, the ‘other’ of 29, 31, 37, 43, 63, 118, 152 – fictionality, theories of 527 – fictionality, weak 83, 90 fictionality and factuality 180 – fictionality and factuality, borderline cases of 40, 58, 567, 599 – fictionality and factuality, conventions of 535 f. – fictionality and factuality, difference or distinction between 31–33, 41, 43, 53, 64, 99, 168, 173, 259, 283, 336, 413, 450, 588, 630, 654, 673, 678 – fictionality and factuality in film 460 – fictionality and factuality, mixture or hybridization of 14, 42, 53, 585, 643, 664, 669 f., 701, 712, 732 – fictionality and factuality, terminology of 33 f. – fictionality and factuality, transmedial perspectives on 43, 45 f. fictionalization, fictionalizer, fictionalizing 165, 712 fictiveness, fictive, fictivity 6 f., 34 f., 37 f., 41, 78, 119 f., 167, 512, 626, 631 fieldwork 326, 329 film, movie 42, 84 f., 453–456, 459 f., 462, 585 – film, documentary 12, 65, 85, 114, 457–459 – film, fiction 86, 120, 124
769
– film, fictional 453, 457, 459–461 – film music, non-diegetic 458 f. – film, nonfictional 453, 455 fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence) 711 first-hand – first-hand experience 569, 571 f. – first-hand knowledge 616 f., 620 – first-hand reports 620, 652 first-person narrator or narrative 57–59, 89, 161, 309, 344, 406, 595 f., 652, 665 focalization 57, 472, 501, 549 – focalization, external 54, 57 – focalization, internal 60 – focalization, zero 57 folklore, folktales 654, 677, 682 forensics 307 forgeries 534–536, 539, 595, 616, 620, 623, 629, 636 frame, framing 152 f., 154, 275, 279, 282, 358, 559, 567, 569–571, 573 – framing acts 565, 567, 574 – framing, autobiographic 571 – frame of a credible narrative 481 – framing keys 568, 571 f. – frame, metacognitive 310 freedom of the press 466 freedom, an author’s or narrator’s 83, 533, 540, 579 see also licenses frequency (Genette) 57 games see also computer games gender 289, 584 genre, generic 103, 124, 168, 559 f., 653 – genre conventions 44, 124, 568, 582 f. – genre, generic classification 568, 571 gnomic sentences 55, 65 grammar 166 f. graphic memoir 89 f. – graphic memoir, factuality of 89 graphic novel 88, 179 GRK 1767 53 habari (genre) 722–724, 726, 732 hadith 711, 716–718 hagiography, hagiographical 631, 678, 686, 706 hallucinations, shamanic 290 hedge, modal 279, 281
770
Subject Index
heliocentric theory of the solar system 447 Herausgeberfiktion 585, 596 hermeneutics 11, 327, 504, 629, 702 – hermeneutic analysis 373 – hermeneutic circle 420 – hermeneutics, objective 371 – hermeneutics, theological 403 – metahermeneutic(s) 559, 566, 574 histoire 339 f. historia 621, 627 f., 640, 644 – historia rerum gestarum 335 history, historical 188, 369, 488, 602 f., 605, 619, 628, 647–650, 652 f., 655– 659, 663, 669 f., 672 f., 682, 696, 703 f., 706, 724 – history, cyclical 650 f. – history, factual 664, 698 f. – history, factuality of 491 – history, legendary 699 – history-like 658 f., 672 – history, narratives in 60, 656 f., 663 – historical, pseudo- 701 – historical reality, concept of 652, 655, 657, 672, 715 – historical, semi- 677 f. – historical tradition 627 – historical value 688 – history-writing 664, 711 f. see also historiography historicity 492, 587, 618, 620, 625, 636, 713, 715 – historicity, claim to 495 f., 500, 504 – historicity, markers of 728 f. historicization, historicize 710, 731 historiography, historiographic 11 f., 60, 129, 335–347, 406 f., 419, 537, 540, 585, 617, 636 f., 639 f., 642, 647, 649 f., 652, 654–659, 663, 666, 688, 696 f., 703, 709–714, 718, 722, 725, 732 – historiography, experimental 336, 341, 343–344 – historiography, narrative 335 – historiography, popular 336, 341, 343 hoax, hoaxes 58, 577–579, 582–589, 595, 597 Holocaust, Holocaust literature 130, 179, 373, 523 f., 527–530
homodiegesis 55, 58, 471 see also firstperson narrator homo oeconomicus 383–385 honesty 560, 573 humanism, humanistic 230, 636, 638 f. – humanism, Arnoldian 230 – humanistic learning 603 humanities 437, 603 f. hyperbole 166 icon 80 idea(s) 217 identification 275, 481 identity 555, 561 f. – identity, biographical 557 f. – identity, collective 523 ideology 338, 340, 689 illusion 512, 680 – illusion of prior knowledge 141 – illusion, referential 512 illusionism 677 illustration 64 images, man-made see pictures, man-made imagination, imagining 78 f., 298, 490, 498, 635, 640, 669, 688, 703 – Primary Imagination 121 – Secondary Imagination 121 imitation 321, 491, 498, 503 see also mimesis immediacy 396, 493, 706 immersion 46, 142, 525, 581, 590, 626 see also transportation implausibility 581, 642 impossibility 588 f. inauthenticity 314, 713 indeterminacy 93, 369, 373, 641 f., 712 index 80 indexicals 270 indexicality of the cinematic 456 individualism 322 individualized characterization 516 induction, inductivism 444, 448 f., 639 informants 82, 325, 330, 471 information 141 f., 585, 607 f., 611 – information, true and false 2 f., 5 inspiration 408 institutional context 605, 610 instruments, scientific 434
Subject Index integumentum 628 interpretation, interpret, interpretive 565, 572, 574 intertextuality 629 – intertextuality, poststructuralist 260, 264 interview 17, 57, 61, 301, 326, 344, 370 f., 373, 459, 609 invention, invented, inventedness, inventiveness 35 f., 533, 546, 555, 561, 573, 619 f., 625, 635, 640, 643 f., 653, 664, 667, 673 – invented stories 384 irony 165 f., 175, 177–180, 552, 593 f. iterative tense 57, 65 Islam 695, 698 f., 709–718, 721 f., 725 Jainism 677, 679 Jātaka 683–685, 687–689 journalism 17, 465–471, 473–476, 540, 643 – journalism, factuality of 465 – journalism, fictional techniques in 60 – journalism, literary 469, 599 – new journalism 40, 177, 539, 543 f., 555 f. – journalism, partisan 466 Just-so-stories 383 jurisprudence see law justification of a belief 188 justificationist theory of meaning 221 Kiswahili 721–732 knowledge 238 – knowledge, experiential or phenomenal 234 – knowledge-how and knowledge-that 234 – knowledge, literary 232, 240 – knowledge, modal 235 – knowledge, scientific 430 – knowledge, tacit 204, 326 labeling 154 Latin (classical, humanistic, scholastic) 445, 603, 616, 636, 644 law, legal – law, civil 391 – law, common 391–393
771
– law, narrative in 60, 392, 395 – legal discourse 391, 713 – legal doctrines 99 – legal texts 60, 716 – legal theory 716 f. legend, legendary material 60, 618, 636, 663, 677, 682, 686 f., 698 – legend and history, fusion of 699, 711 legitimacy 105, 664, 710, 717 legitimation, legitimization 383, 386, 569, 625, 627–629, 631, 635 letter(s) 582 f., 593, 595 f., 672, 713 liar(s), lie(s), lying 4, 16, 62, 95–102, 104, 106–108, 203, 352 f., 359, 479, 492, 538, 544 f., 557, 589, 615, 617, 619 f., 628, 637, 645, 663, 666, 700, 705, 711 licenses – aesthetic licenses 539, 574 – authorial licenses 534 – epistemological licenses 537, 539 – ethical licenses 539 lifeworld 328, 333 linguistics 12 linguistic turn 129, 370, 412 literality 113 literariness 572, 601 f., 605 f., 610 f. literature 232 – literary claims 567 – literature, cognitive value of 229–231, 237, 241, 262 – literature, concept of 602–605, 607, 610 f. – literary conventions 102, 505, 623, 625 – literary inventions 534, 539, 628 – literature, popular 11 – literary strategies 715 – literary studies 1, 6, 11, 33 f., 44, 204, 259 f., 263, 521 f. – literary techniques 572 – literary value/status 574, 593, 601 f., 604 f., 607, 611, 647, 652 f., 655 f., 665, 695 – literature, Victorian 436 macro-stories 474 f. mainstream 354 mainstream media/public sphere 550–553
354,
772
Subject Index
make-believe, game of make-believe (Walton) 34, 78, 86, 88, 337, 461 makoto (truth) 663 master narrative 355, 357, 360, 362, 472, 698, 704 mathematics 434, 437 – mathematics, history of 435 matter of fact, empirical 433, 444, 635, 648, 659 maxim of quality (Grice) 62 meaning of an expression 268 f. meanings vs. concepts 269 meaning-making 368 mechanical recording see media based on mechanical capture media 12, 75 f., 80, 169, 480, 635 – media based on mechanical capture 83, 93 – media, cultural component of 77 – media, delivery channels of 76 – media, distribution platforms of 76 – media, fictional 86, 90 – media, language-based 81 f. – media, material component of 77 mediality 44 mediation (by narrator) see narrator, mediation of a medicine – medicine, empiricism in 444 – medicine, narratives in 11, 14, 437 Meinongianism, Meinongian realism 253 f. memoir 538, 544, 567–571, 573, 595 f., 665, 713, 726, 732 see also graphic memoir – memoir, authentic 566 memory, memories 133 f., 136, 138–140, 143, 528–530, 586 – memory, autobiographical 88, 302, 308 – memory confidence 137 – memory, contamination of 138 – false memory syndrom 307 – memory, seven sins of (Schacter) 307 mereology 214 metafactuality 620 metafiction, metafictional 131, 254, 256, 527, 568, 574 metalepsis 54, 65, 626 metamemory 136, 139 f., 144
metanarratives 65, 100, 102, 357, 419, 431 metaphor, metaphorical 16, 60, 77, 103, 112, 165 f., 169–172, 177, 180, 386, 702 f. – conceptual metaphor theory 171 f., 362 – metaphor, extended 173, 178 – metaphor, factual 103 – metaphor, narrativized 176, 179 microplots 374 micro-stories 474 mimesis 30, 40, 321, 395, 487, 489, 491– 493, 497–499, 503–505, 621–623, 643 see also imitation mind, mental 144, 151, 297, 516, 526 – mental disorder 298 – mental entities 269 – mental imagery 143 – mental representation 8 f., 33 – mental, simulation 482 – mental spaces 167 f., 282 miracle(s) 630 f., 642, 668, 689 mise-en-abîme 482 mode (Genette) 30, 57 model narrative 380 f., 384 modernity 370, 374, 639, 644 monologue 667 mood 54 morality, moral 587 f., 630, 648–650, 652–654, 664, 666, 689, 700, 713 – moral values 544 morphemes of Tense, Mood and Aspect (TMA) 271 f. multifocal component 715 multimediality, multimedial 346 music 90, 93 myth(s), mythical, mythology 289, 436, 616, 618–622, 636, 663, 667, 673, 677, 682, 687, 689 f., 706 – myth, historical 619, 666 names 245 naming, non-referential 505 naming, referential 89, 505 see also imitation, mimesis narratee 546 narratio 639
Subject Index narration – narration, factual 51, 96, 555, 678 – narration in journalism 469 – narration, non-literary 51, 567, 601 – narration of scientific facts 421 – narration, unreliable 547 – Western narration practices 293 narrative (adjective) 30, 33 – narrative cognition 419, 421 – narrative communication 180, 418, 421, 426 – narrative comprehension 150 – narrative form 420, 425 – narrative form, sequential 425 – narrative format 301 f., 482 – narrative knowing, knowledge 419, 436 f. – narrative present 59 – narrative strategies 328, 385, 387, 434 – narrative studies, factuality in 10 – narrative techniques 543 – narrative turn 12, 367 f. – narrative understanding 420, 437 – narrative voice 571 narrative (noun) – narrative, in a broader sense 470 – narrative, classical understanding of 31 – narrative, conversational 11–13, 61, 149 – narrative, definition of 7 f., 62 – narrative, economic 379 f., 383, 385– 387 – narrative, elements of 696 – narrative, experiential 526 – narrative, factual 1, 9, 14, 29–31, 51, 53, 63, 153 f., 178, 262, 361, 385, 476, 528, 565, 598, 636, 639, 710, 721 f., 729 f., 732 – narrative, factual, in drama and film 65 – narrative, factual historical 622, 696 – narrative, factual, narratology of 46, 52 – narrative, fictional 140, 170 – narrative, fictional and nonfictional, features shared by 64 – narrative, first-person see first-person narrative – narrative, function of 64, 627 – narrative, grand 434, 439 – narrative, graphic 88
773
– narrative, historical/historiographic 343–345, 714, 722, 724 f. – narrative, “intercalated” 59 – narrative, large 432 – narrative, literary 487, 538 – narrative, in a narrow sense 470 – narrative of nobodies 595 – narrative, patients’ 302 f. – narrative, political 354, 362, 555 – narratives, pragmatic approaches to fictional 39 f., 45 – narrative in science 60 – narrative in scientific explanation 429– 430, 450 – narrative as a sequence of events 369, 373 – narrative, short 716, 718 – narrative, small 432 – narrative, terminology of 682 – narrative, third person see third-person narrative – narrative, true 407 – narrative, we 64 – narrative, witness 15, 54 narrativity 7 f., 346, 481, 626, 731 – narrativity, dimensions of 8 – narrativity, high degree of 626 – narrativity of historical scholarship / historical discourse 336 – narrativity in musicology 90 – narrativity, strong 9 f., 12, 701, 703, 723 f., 727 f. – narrativity, weak 9 f., 64, 341, 665, 723 narrativization 130 narratology 96 – narratology, factual narration in 51, 61 narrator 470 f., 523, 552, 557 f., 586 f., 659 – narrator, biased 338 – narrator, extradiegetic 517, 548 – narrator, first-person 55, 59, 527, 595 f., 622 – narrator, heterodiegetic 55, 385, 406, 527, 595 – narrator, invented 471 – narrator, mediation of a 503 – narrator, third-person 527, 595 – narrator, unreliable 550, 580, 588 f. naturalism 599
774
Subject Index
natural sciences 60, 430, 436 f., 439, 635, 639 nature 449 – nature, investigation of 430, 432 neuroscience 586 f. neurosis 298 neutrality 635 news features, news reports, news media 168, 425, 470 f., 474, 582, 593, 644 newspapers 351, 358–360, 469, 635, 644 f. nominalism 211 nonfactuality, nonfactual 1, 64, 111 f., 123 f., 159, 480, 621 nonfiction, nonfictional, nonfictionality 32, 35–39, 63 f., 98, 118 f., 538, 549, 573 see also factuality – creative nonfiction 599 – nonfictionality, misattributions of 160 f. – nonfiction narratives 14, 36, 550 non-lying 641 non-real 111 novel (genre) 513, 555, 559, 583, 593, 599, 641, 643 – novel, Aristotelian 595 – novel, Baroque 643 – novel, eighteenth-century British 514 – novel, first person 517 – novel, historical 161, 611, 724, 729 f. – novel, nineteenth-century European 511 – novel, nonfictional 599 – novel, pseudofactual 641, 643 see also factuality, pseudo-novelistic conventions 584, 657 objectivity 398 f., 418, 648 objects 245 – objects, abstract 211 – objects, external vs. internal 299 – objects, social 224 – objects, theoretical 114 f. observation(s) 706 ontology, ontological 119, 127, 157 f., 160 f., 568, 588, 601, 681 – ontology, realist vs. idealist 681 – ontological status 122, 157, 724 op-ed 467, 472, 475
oral (tales, text, tradition, style) 61, 604, 617, 663, 667–669, 696–698, 709, 723 f., 726, 731 – oral history 344 f., 647, 712, 714 – oral narrative 54, 82, 309, 411, 658, 681, 696, 728 – oral transmission 666, 678, 681 oratory 602 f., 605 original, originality 314, 316 f., 320 f. pact 460 – pact, autobiographical 62, 557 – pacts, double 559 – pact, factual 62 f., 83 – pact of trustworthiness 338 f., 343 paintings 77, 91 f., 117 f., 313, 346, 670 panfictionalism, panfictionality 16, 63, 127–131, 263 – panfictionalism, narratological 130 – panfictionalism, ontological 127, 130 – panfictionalism, textual 127–131 parable(s) 64, 78, 81, 230, 421–424, 671, 678 f., 685, 689, 699, 702 paradigm shift 371 paradox 197, 423 see also twin paradox paranarrative 179 paratext, paratextual 42, 454, 495, 560, 571, 573, 578 f., 582, 595 f., 723, 727, 730 parody 175, 491, 630 participant observation 326 particulars or objects of ordinary experience 210 perception, perceptibility 213 f., 222, 299, 303 f., 308 f., 639 – perception of reality 300, 304, 308, 680 performance 86, 369, 696 f. – performance, dramatic 87 performativity 58, 60 f. performer 87, 697 perlocutionary effect 470, 483 see also speech act theory person (Genette) 58 personhood, disembodied vs. embodied 505 persuasion 135, 153, 393 f., 493, 581 persuasiveness 480
Subject Index philosophy 602 f., 605 see also truth − philosophical truth theory – philosophy of history 437 – philosophy, natural 446, 507 photography 77, 84 f., 92, 117, 455, 476 physics 434, 437 f. picture drawn by human hands, man-made images 91–93 Platonism 127, 211 plausibility 329 f., 581, 638, 697, 717 f. pleasure principle (Freud) 297 f. plot – plot functions 518 – marriage plot 515 pluralism, ontological 79, 216 poesis 602 poet 697 poetry, poetic 487, 489, 617, 628, 631, 639–641, 696, 701 f., 711, 721, 725, 731 f. – poetry, epic 620, 640, 699, 731 – poetry (genre) 53, 93, 98 f., 171, 178, 403, 407, 488, 533, 602–605, 607, 615, 617, 619–621, 628, 640, 648, 669, 696, 698, 701, 709, 718, 724, 728 – poetry, lyrical 620, 652 point of view – point of view, external 472 – point of view, omniscient 472, 658 points of diffraction 97 political discourse 356, 360 possibilism 253 possibility 588 f. possible worlds (theory) see world(s), possible postfactuality 12 postmodernity, postmodernism, postmodern 434, 561 post-structuralism, poststructuralist 264, 561 post-truth 1, 157, 351 f. potential space 299 f. pragmatism 578–580, 582 prediction 81, 88, 379, 382 prejudice 332, 338 pretense 87, 115, 187, 322, 455, 513 f., 596, 598, 658 – pretend events 116 – pretend objects 116
775
Primary Imagination see imagination principle of minimal departure (Ryan) 120, 155, 281 print communication, standards of truth in 82 printing press 636, 642 probabile or verisimile 488 f. probability 487, 490, 495, 497, 500 f., 587 f., 628, 717 procedures of raréfaction 101 processes of differentiation 374 proof 107 f., 111, 333, 394–396 – proof, mathematical 437 propaganda 187, 553, 589, 629 proper names 246 f., 249, 262, 270 propositions 7, 79–81, 86 f., 92 f., 193– 196, 216, 218 f., 233, 271, 496, 523, 527, 636 prose 603, 605, 626, 638, 641, 643, 648, 658, 684, 687, 696–698, 700, 706, 709, 730 prosententialism see truth − philosophical truth theory − prosententialism protofictionality 597 psycho-narration 398 psychoanalysis 13, 297 f., 302, 305, 308, 311, 581 psycholinguistics 151 psychology 133, 135, 144 – psychology, forensic 306 psychopathology 300, 302 psychotherapy 14 f., 17, 51, 53, 55, 58, 61, 303, 306 f., 309, 311, 528 public, publics – public discourse 429, 467 – public opinion 468 – sub-publics 353 f. quantum theory 438 Quattrocento 635 radio 76, 465, 474 f., 480 rationalism 443 reading competency 339 reading modes / modes of reading 157, 579 – reading, double 558 – reading experiences 558 – reading, factual vs. nonfactual 158 f.
776
Subject Index
realism 212, 214, 221, 225, 256, 429, 497, 502 f., 512, 629, 659, 677 see also truth − philosophical theories of − realism – realism, epistemological 679 – realism about the external world 212 f. – realism, formal 513 f., 516, 643 – realism, hermeneutic 222 – realism, literary 502, 511, 670 – realism, modern 504 – realism, neutral 216, 224 – realism, ontological 3, 679, 681 reality, real 111, 383, 300, 588, 652, 679 – reality, absolute 680 – reality, concept of 660, 669, 677, 681, 689, 711 – reality, construction of 303 – reality effect/effet de réel 330, 511, 525 – reality, empirical 680 – reality, experience of 301 – reality, indicators of 580 – reality, internal vs. external 299 f. – reality monitoring 140 – reality, multiple and ambiguous 716 – reality principle (Freud) 120, 297 f. – reality, reductions of 379 – reality, reference to see reference to reality – reality TV 12, 75, 85 f. – reality, virtual 117, 122, 131 re-centering 455 reception of fictional works 582 f., 626, 696 re-enactment 345, 407 reference, referential, referentiality 245 f., 248, 260, 265, 267, 270 f., 278, 280, 282, 555, 579–581, 628, 635 f., 640– 643, 657, 666, 712 – reference, causal-historical theory of 249, 251 – reference, cinematic 456 f. – reference, direct 256 – reference to the external world 301 – reference to facts 729, 731 – reference, factual 358 – reference, film 462 – reference to historical facts 524 – reference, identifying 274
– reference, (intra)fictional 251 f., 260, 265, 299 – reference, intratextual 264 – reference, linguistic 250, 259 – reference, literal 593 – reference to reality 128, 454, 456 f., 472, 627 – reference, truthful 566 – referential analysis 279 – referentiality, constraints of 166 referent 268, 270 – real-world referent 112, 117 f., 128, 512 reflexivity 331 – reflexivity, self conscious 503 relation, relating 314, 317, 689 relevance 479, 567 f., 571, 573, 606, 703 reliability 82, 310, 329, 338 f., 344, 588, 598, 606, 653, 656, 704 f., 710, 717 f. – reliability of memory 307 religion 638 see also Christianity, Confucianism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Buddhism, sacred texts – religious narrative 401, 409, 413 – religious texts, narrative in 61, 588, 625 f., 630 f., 687 – religious truth 105, 401, 645 remedialization 682 Renaissance 288, 433, 435, 489, 521, 595, 635, 639–641 renarration 309 f. repetition 61 report, reporting, reportage 545, 553, 622, 698, 701, 703 f., 715–717 – report, direct thought 544, 552 – report, witness 58, 62 – reporting, factual 698 reportative speech 291, 723 reporter 698, 705, 714 representation 86 f., 498, 543 f., 547, 572, 606 f., 640, 645 – representation of consciousness 548 f., 553 – representation, factual 11, 33, 640, 721 – representation, fictional 11, 34 f., 458 – representational poetry 621 – representation, reliability of 339 res gestae 335 respiration 449
Subject Index responsibility 162, 197, 340, 471, 538, 540, 568 Resurrection of Christ 408 f. retellings, retelling 625, 667 see also renarration revelation narrative 409 rhetoric, rhetorical 60, 96, 103, 287 f., 357, 372, 454, 525, 544–547, 549, 581, 590, 598, 608 f., 615, 635, 639, 644, 709, 712 – rhetoric of authenticity 582–584 – rhetoric, classical 525 f., 603 – rhetorical devices 166, 289, 337, 706 – rhetoric of romance 494 – rhetoric of science 386 – rhetoric, theory of 287 – rhetorical strategies 561 righteousness 679 roman à clef 15, 53, 490–492, 536, 585 romance 12, 435, 490, 492, 494, 507, 514 f., 593, 629, 657, 665 romances or courtly tales 670, 672 romanticism 59, 230, 507, 641 rule-following problem 250 f. sacred texts 410 f. sarcasm 175, 177 satire, satirical 12, 16, 165, 169–171, 175–180, 230, 260 f., 435, 543, 630, 641 scenarios 151 f., 155, 361, 363, 380–382, 384, 586 – scenario analysis 362 scenes, as a tool of framing 568 f. scholasticism 445 Schrödinger’s cat 421, 423–424 science 104, 417–419, 437, 642 – science communication 418, 424, 426 – science, early modern 429 – science education 418 – science, modern 429 – science, narrative 450 – science, natural 430, 437, 639 – science, philosophy of 429 – science, popular 178, 352 – scientific practice 449 – scientific theories 417, 424 science fiction 117, 119, 124, 421, 455
777
scripture 105 – scripture, authority of 105 f. secret history (genre) 491 self 320 f., 561 f. – self-creation 321 – self, ex-centric 321 – self, experiencing 59, 548 – self, narration 59, 556 – self-relevance 586 – self-related 587 – ‘true self’ 322 semantics, semantic 157, 598 – semantic compositionality principle 246 – semantics, dynamic 281 – semantics, philosophical 245 semi-real 689 semiotic triangle 267 sensations 213, 369 sense (Frege) 219, 246, 268 sense impressions 496, 499 f. sequential analysis 373 serialization 474, 517 sermo humilis 525 sermons 61, 64, 81, 411, 668, 679 shi (court historians) 649 short report 718 signposts – signposts of factuality 42, 339 f., 567, 577–582, 585 f., 590, 616, 620–623, 629, 635, 653, 666 f., 669, 672, 715, 723, 730–732 – signposts of fictionality 42, 78, 159, 339, 535 f., 549, 567, 577, 579 f., 582, 585 f., 588 f., 590, 623, 626, 732 – signposts, paratextual 159, 340, 524, 557, 565, 567 – signposts of referentiality 461 signs, Peirce’s three types of (symbol, icon, index) 76, 90 simulation 40, 87, 593, 658 – computer simulation 438 sincerity 318, 521, 573, 583 – insincerity 666 situation models 151 sjuzhet 397 skepticism 127, 417, 419, 496, 507, 637 f., 718 – skepticism, analytic 490
778
Subject Index
– skepticism, radical 222, 250 – skepticism, referential 263 – skepticism, semantic 251 social media 77, 162, 351, 353, 469 social psychology 133, 152 sociology 313, 319, 367–371, 374, 569, 580 soap opera 482 soragoto (falseness) 663, 671 source, sources 475, 595, 616 f., 619, 627, 636–638, 642, 653, 667 f., 672, 687 f., 697, 703, 715 – source credibility 135, 470 – sources, external 317 – source monitoring 139 spectator(s) (film) see witness speech act 3, 93, 192, 233, 270, 353, 511 f. speech act theory 3, 192 statecraft, governance 654 story-telling 78, 289, 355, 480, 544, 569, 658, 710 structuralism 503 f. structure vs. history 487, 504 style, stylistic 525, 590 – style, educated 603 – style, realistic 340, 714 subcreation 121 subjectivity, subjective experience 89, 303, 555 supernatural 650, 654, 656, 659 supposition 165, 169, 177, 180 surrealism 91 suspension of disbelief (Coleridge) 45, 121, 123, 502, 506, 534, 546, 598 syllogism 128–130, 245, 250 f. television 75, 85, 480 tellability 83, 179 temporality 61, 301, 367, 419, 423, 519, 550, 580 tense 53, 59 – elements of tense: slow-downs, pauses, contractions 57 testimony, testimonial 496, 526, 636 see also witness text, textuality, textual 560, 565, 571 – textual criticism 636 – textual strategies 41, 154, 332 f., 524
theater 31, 45, 76, 81, 87, 90, 116, 392, 680 theology, practical 402 theory of evolution 432 f., 436 theory of forms (Plato) 210 therapy, narrative in 13 third-person narrative 648, 652, 665 thought(s) – thought collective (Denkkollektiv) 431, 433 f. – thought confidence 136 – thought experiment 423 – thought favorability 135 – thoughts (Frege) 216–218 time of narration 58 time, of story 58, 668 timelessness 58 toggle theory of fiction 150, 154 topicality 644 tradentship, tradents 653 tradition 408, 594 f., 620, 627–631, 649, 681, 698 tragedy 435, 620, 640 transgression, transgress 555 f., 559 f., 562 transmediality, transmedial 29–31, 33, 43–46 transmission 616, 622, 636, 638, 647 see also oral transmission transportation/immersion 121 f., 142 – transportation, narrative 142–144 trauma narrative 528–530 trauma, traumatic experience 13, 298, 303 f., 308 f., 528 f., 587, 610 travelogues, travel narratives, travel writings 52 f., 59, 82 f., 325, 328, 491, 494, 714, 722, 726–728, 732 true account 628, 705 trust(worthiness) 306, 338, 353, 570, 573, 664, 678 truth 172, 272, 283, 593, 635, 637, 650, 652, 654, 663, 666, 697, 716 – truth, absolute, divine, eternal, higher, spiritual, or universal 401 f., 410, 413, 625, 671, 689, 698, 705, 716 f. – truth affirmations 594, 598 – truth assertions 594 – truth, association of facts with 3, 395 – truth, Christian 405
Subject Index – truth claims 360, 362 f., 535, 595 f., 620, 630, 639, 641 – truth conditional calculus 280 – truth, concept of 618, 669, 677, 681, 689, 697, 711 – truth, empirical 363, 594 – truth, exact 640 – truth, factual 566, 571, 668, 673, 703 – truth, fiction-internal vs. fictionexternal 252 f. – truth, hidden 702 – truth, historical 338, 628, 659, 666 f., 717 f. – truth, literal 230, 593, 596, 599, 671, 718 – truth of the matter 697 – truth, moral 594 – truth, objective 637 – truth, obligation to 465 f. – truth, philosophical ideas of 639 – philosophical truth theory 188, 223 – anti-realism 189, 202, 204–206, 212, 222, 429 – coherentism 202 – consensus theory of truth 203 – constructivism 223 – correlation theory of truth 200 – correlationism 224 – correspondence theory of truth 102 f., 198–200, 202, 205, 218 f., 315, 472 – deflationism 189 f., 195 f., 198, 200 f., 206 – disquotationalism 195 – identity theory of truth 218 – neoprosententialism 192 – pragmatism 158, 162, 202 – truth, as a property 193 – truth, non-/propositional 188 – prosententialism 192 f. – realism 189, 197, 206, 209, 222, 429 f. – realism, alethic 189, 204, 217 – realism, semantic 220 – realism, semantic anti- 212, 220 – truth pretense 593–595, 597, 599 – truth, programs of 618–620 – truth, redundacy theory of 191
779
– truth, in religion/religious 402, 404, 406 f. – truth standards of in various media 83 – truth talk 188, 192, 195 – truth value 358, 362, 679 truthbearer 193–195, 199 f., 218 truthful representation 616 truthfulness 557, 572 f., 584, 589, 595, 626, 658, 666 – truthfulness, referential 336 truthmaker/truth-maker 199, 218 twin paradox 421–423 ubiquity 106 f. uncertainty 397, 458, 512, 559 unconscious plagiarism 139 understanding 238 uniqueness see definite descriptions unities of action, place, and time 489, 493, 496, 498, 504 universals, problems of 209 f. unnarration 519 unreliability, unreliable 154, 338, 343, 373, 462, 550, 718 see also narrator, unreliable unverifiability 648, 654, 656 validation, validity 352, 362, 429, 431, 626, 660, 697, 711, 717 f. – validity, claim of 272, 626–629, 631, 638 – validation, in science 433 f. – validation, of scientific facts 430, 436, 438 valuation 573 f., 599 – valuation processes 566 value 560, 566, 598 variability 601 variants 672 veracity 627, 642, 703, 716 f. verifiability 17, 402, 627, 654–656, 659 verification 204, 413, 470 f., 476, 581, 638 verisimilitude, vraisemblance 17, 120 f., 124, 150, 483, 487–493, 495, 497, 501, 504, 511, 520, 522, 525, 572, 584, 598, 623, 643, 671, 696, 698 verse 488, 602, 640 f., 658, 684, 696 f., 700 f.
780
Subject Index
video games 76, 88, 90, 117, 122 f. virtuality, virtual 16, 113, 116–118, 121 f., 493, 496, 499, 501, 504, 506 f. virtue, personal vs. social 323 visions 409–411 visualization 80, 481, 626 – visualization of reality 379 visual media 76 voice 53, 58 f., 343, 346, 516, 527 wishful thinking 139, 144 witness, witnessing, eye-witness, eyewitness 58, 80, 82, 87, 108, 138, 330, 338, 394–396, 433, 446, 459, 470 f., 476, 498, 526, 581, 595, 615–617, 623, 627, 636, 652 f., 669, 706, 713–716, 718 world(s) 200 f., 203, 222 f., 267, 270, 273, 278, 281–283, 461, 511, 573 – world, actual 4, 74, 78 f., 83, 117 f., 120 f., 124, 127, 175, 253 f., 279, 281, 335, 339, 343, 545 f., 549 – external world 212 f., 218, 225, 269, 297, 299, 301, 304 – world(s), fantastic 88
– world(s), fictional 5, 78 f., 81–83, 88, 128, 130, 339, 461, 527, 547, 549, 712 – world, historical 88, 339, 343, 346 – world(s), imaginary 16, 78 f., 87, 120– 124, 283 – world knowledge 39, 141 f., 339, 343 – world-making 347, 431, 461 – world(s), possible 35, 78, 166, 152, 247 f., 253, 279–281 – World, Primary 121 f., 124., 339 – world, real (empirical, natural, true) 5, 7, 16, 62, 79, 81, 83–87, 120, 122, 128, 130, 138, 143 f., 150, 152, 155, 281, 332 f., 337, 379, 387 f., 419, 429, 443, 445–447, 450, 455, 471, 483, 519, 535, 537, 581, 588, 625, 631, 666, 678, 703 – World, Secondary 121 f. – world, social 303, 319 – storyworld 8 f., 152, 155, 175 f., 519, 524 f., 527, 545, 659 – world(s), virtual 117 f., 122 f. writing, written 82, 328, 332, 406, 408, 411, 570, 604, 627, 630, 664, 696– 698, 726