Fiction
Fiction
To explore the concept of fiction in the history of aesthetics, this entry comprises three essays:
Historical and Conceptual Overview
Whether in philosophy of law, philosophy of science, or metaphysics and epistemology, fictions continue to prompt much philosophical reflection today. Discussion remains most lively, however, in the philosophy of art. Still, contemporary reflection on fictions has yet to take full critical account of the long history of philosophical discussion of fictions.
The etymological sense of the English word fiction comes through the French from the Latin past-participle root, fict-, of the transitive verb, fingere. Although this word's range of reference is wide—to fashion, form, conceive, contrive, or feign—the basic sense here is that of an activity rather than that of a product.
By contrast, contemporary uses of fiction generally stress the thing as well as the action. Thus, a fiction can be either an imaginatively invented narrative, statement, idea, or the action of imaginatively inventing such things. More specifically, contemporary uses of “fiction” usually refer either to literary matters (novels or stories), conventionally accepted pretenses in, for example, social situations (polite fictions), or to some elements of legal reasoning (legal fictions). The latter uses include suggestions of something false, untrue, or not genuine that are nonetheless conventionally acceptable. Recently, some literary scholars and philosophers have used the word fictionalization to particularize both the process and the product of constructive versions of actual events and entities. Before returning briefly to the problems with fictions today, we need to look beyond our contemporary preoccupations to several of the very different ways fictions have been considered problematic in the history of philosophy.
European reflection on fictions begins mainly in the Homeric representations of the effects of bardic singing on heroic characters. Philosophically, Greek reflection focuses on forms of argument, especially Aristotle's key notion of eks hypotheseos (for instance, in Metaphysics 1004a13), and Stoic reflection on both incorporeal nonexistent things (Seneca on “giants” and “centaurs” in Letters 58.13–15) and incorporeal subsistent things (Galen on the notion of huphistasthai in On Medical Method 10, 155). Roman rhetoric, especially Quintilian's Institutio oratorio, explores the vague notion of hypothesis in the context of arguments that posit something as true that, if it were true, would either resolve or be useful in resolving a disputed issue. Similarly, Roman jurisprudence, especially Gaius's Institutio juris civilis, develops the notion of fictions as hypotheses that, in the context of particular legal situations, can allow some otherwise insoluble matters to be adjudicated equitably.
Regardless of late medieval discussions of, for example, chimeras in William of Ockham (Expositio in librum Perihermenias Aristotelis, Prooemium no. 7) or fictional entities in Francisco Suarez (Disputatio metaphysicae 31.2.2), the key notion of fictions as hypotheses is subjected to reexamination in the early modern period. Isaac Newton distinguishes in the domain of physics between hypotheses and fictions. And in mathematics Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz introduces a further distinction between positive fictions like imaginary numbers that contribute to the solution of mathematical problems and negative fictions like formless first matter that have no connection with the nature of things. In the eighteenth century these distinctions are still active in Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's aesthetics, in still clearer form in the work of Baumgarten's successor, Georg Friedrich Meier, and, later, in the scattered reflections of Jeremy Bentham.
The major modern transformations and systematizations of the classical reflection on fictions however are twofold. Besides the radical work of Newton and Leibniz, Immanuel Kant introduces a second fundamental rearticulation. Already in the Critique of Pure Reason (B 799ff.), Kant is at work on specifying the concepts of reason as “heuristic fictions” or, in the more familiar phrase, as “regulative principles” that are required for the systematic articulation of the uses of the understanding and of the unity of reason itself. In his later work, however, in the Critique of Judgment and especially in the Opus postumum, Kant tries to rethink his earlier reflection in terms of a typology of ideas and ideals of reason.
This late work in turn stimulates further developments in neo-Kantian circles. Rudolf Hermann Lotze, for example, in his 1843 Logik, while returning to the Newtonian preoccupation with distinguishing hypotheses from fictions construes fictions as “assumptions” that are made in full awareness of their not holding in the actual world. Much later, in his 1902 work, Über Annahmen, Alexius Meinong will extensively develop this notion of “assumptions.” Roughly around the same time, from 1902 to 1906 in his correspondence with Anton Marty, Franz Brentano will explore in great detail the “nonreal” status of mental objects including fictions. In his attempts to systematize neo-Kantian reflection on fictions under the Kantian notion of “as if,” Hans Vaihinger in his 1923 book, The Philosophy of As If, will take “fiction” as what some would call today a “term of art,” that is, a subjective formulation that unlike hypotheses is an element of several kinds of methodical investigation rather than a formulation of the probable results of an investigation. This stress on the practical and instrumental value of fictions was also to be pursued independently in the domains of psychology and education by Giorgio Marchesini in Italy.
With these historical contexts in view we need now to look at some elements in contemporary reflections on fiction. If we start with the distinction between fictions as products and fictions as processes, a first set of contemporary philosophical issues appears. As a product a fiction is some kind of thing. But of precisely what kind? One reply is that a fiction, say the character Emma Bovary, is a thing that does not exist in the actual spatiotemporal world. Are we then to suppose, however, that, besides the existing entities comprising the actual world, other nonexisting entities comprise other worlds? But such suppositions today remain controversial.
Perhaps a fiction is a thing that does not exist but could exist. But, instead of a proliferation of nonexistent, possible entities, we now have a problem with accounting for those fictions, say square circles, that are impossible, that is, entities with contradictory properties. Are fictions then to be construed as, say, quarks are, as theoretical entities? But many fictions appear to be concrete particulars, whereas theoretical entities are abstract. Perhaps a fiction is an ontological type only of which some actual entities are tokens. But, as we have noted, many fictions lack nonfictional counterparts. Now, just as there is no problem with having an idea of something that does not exist, there may be no problem with postulating types that have no existing tokens. But when we are specifically concerned with fictions as types, it cannot be assumed without careful argument that there are fictional types without fictional tokens.
Philosophers of course have devised strategies to deal with the simple objections here. But these strategies have given rise to more complicated objections. The result is that saying what fictions as products are remains quite difficult. Similar difficulties arise in articulating what fictions are as processes. To see this general difficulty one needs only to examine just why almost all answers to questions such as “What is the opposite of the fictional?” or “How do we quantify over fictions?” remain deeply problematic.
One approach to resolving such difficulties has been to focus on sentences that include fictions as nouns with a view toward more precisely establishing two things, the referent of such expressions and the truth or falsity of assertions that incorporate such expressions. In the first case, the problem has been to distinguish between two kinds of objects. On the one hand, the referent of a fictional expression might be taken as a nonactual object of some sort that subsists that might exist (i.e., that is not impossible), but will never exist in the sense of being a spatiotemporal segment of the one actual world. Emma Bovary will never exist. On the other hand, the referent might be taken as a possible object of some sort, that is, an object that subsists, that might exist, and that may in fact sometimes become part of the one actual world. The peculiar mental state of Emma's quite particular boredom with Charles may one day be exactly the kind of boredom Louise Colet will come to experience with Flaubert. But, however thoroughly developed, neither alternative so far has found consensus.
In the second case, the truth or falsity of sentences incorporating fictional expressions, similar debates continue. The critical issues here seem to turn on whether using such expressions commits one to asserting the existence of their problematic referents in some strong sense. Could one use such expressions without necessarily affirming the existence of an entity to which the subject of a sentence apparently refers? If yes, then exactly what would the appropriate theory of reference look like in detail? If no, then what other distinctions than the shaky one here between weak and strong senses are required to deal effectively with the putative truth or falsity of such ordinary utterances as “Just like Emma, Diana was monumentally bored with Charles.”
When we look back over both historical and contemporary discussions about fictions, including some explored in the works cited in the bibliography below, we may observe how some central aspects of the fictional require further reflection. These aspects include questions about fictions as sources of knowledge and rational belief, as capable of generating genuine emotional involvement, as heuristic resources, and as capable of exercising a formative influence on the rationalization of certain actions. It remains to be seen whether philosophers today will continue to pursue these larger concerns with the still problematic uses, nature, kinds, and roles of fictions.
Chisholm, Roderick M. Fictitious Objects. In A Realistic Theory of Categories: An Essay on Ontology, pp. 121–123. Cambridge and New York, 1996.Find this resource:
Currie, Gregory. The Nature of Fiction. Cambridge and New York, 1990.Find this resource:
Iser, Wolfgang. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore, 1993.Find this resource:
Lamarque, Peter, and Stein Haugom Olsen. Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective. Oxford, 1994.Find this resource:
Loetzsch, F. Fiktion. In Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, edited by Joachim Ritter et al., vol. 2, pp. 951–953. Basel, 1972.Find this resource:
McCormick, Peter J. Fictions, Philosophies, and the Problems of Poetics. Ithaca, N.Y., 1988.Find this resource:
Parsons, Terence. Nonexistent Objects. New Haven, 1980.Find this resource:
Proudfoot, Diana. Fictional Entities. In A Companion to Aesthetics, edited by David Cooper, pp. 152–155. Oxford and Cambridge, Mass., 1992.Find this resource:
Walton, Kendall L. Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, Mass., 1990.Find this resource:
Wilkenson, Jennifer. How Not to Do Things with Fictional Discourse. South African Journal of Philosophy 14 (1995): 162–167.Find this resource:
Woods, John. The Logic of Fiction: A Philosophical Sounding of Deviant Logic. The Hague, 1974.Find this resource:
Contemporary Literary Account of the Fictive
Most people associate the term fiction with the storytelling branch of literature, but in its other guise it is what Samuel Johnson called “a falsehood; a lye.” The equivocalness of the word is revealing, for each meaning sheds light on the other. Both meanings entail similar processes, which we might term “overstepping” what is: the lie oversteps the truth, and the literary work oversteps the real world that it incorporates. It is therefore not surprising that literary fictions were so often branded as lies, since they talk of what does not exist, even though they present its nonreality as if it did exist.
Plato's complaint that poets lie met its first strong opposition in the Renaissance, when Sir Philip Sidney rejoined that “the Poet … nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth,” since poets do not talk of what is, but of what ought to be, and this form of overstepping is quite different from lying. Fiction and fictionalizing entail a duality: the liar must conceal the truth, but the truth is potentially present in the mask disguising it. In literary fictions, existing worlds are overstepped, and although they are individually still recognizable, they are set in a context that defamiliarizes them. Thus, both lie and literature contain two worlds: the lie incorporates the truth and the purpose for which it must be concealed; literary fictions incorporate an identifiable reality that is subjected to an unforeseeable refashioning.
Even if nowadays literary fictions are no longer charged with lying, they are still stigmatized as being unreal, regardless of the vital role fictions play in our everyday lives. In Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis, 1978), Nelson Goodman shows that we do not live in one reality but in many, and each of these realities is the result of a processing that can never be traced back to “something stolid underneath.” There is no single underlying world, but instead we create new worlds out of old ones in a process that Goodman describes as making “fact from fiction.” Fictions, then, are not the unreal side of reality, let alone the opposite of reality, which our “tacit knowledge” still takes them to be; they are, rather, conditions that enable the production of worlds whose reality, in turn, is not to be doubted.
This may be one of the reasons why we cannot talk of fiction as such, for it can only be described by way of its functions, that is, the manifestations of its use and the products resulting from it. This is evident even to cursory observation: in epistemology we find fictions as presuppositions; in science they are hypotheses; fictions provide the foundations for world pictures; and the assumptions that guide our actions are fictions as well. In each of these cases, fiction has a different task to perform: with epistemological positing, it is a premise; with the hypothesis, it is a test; with world pictures, it is a dogma whose fictional nature must remain concealed if the foundation is not to be impaired; and with our actions, it is anticipation. Since fictions have such manifold applications, we might well ask what they appear to be like, and what they reveal in literature.
The literary text is a mixture of reality and fiction, and as such it brings about an interaction between the given and the imagined. Because this interaction produces far more than just a contrast between the two, we might do better to discard the old opposition of fiction and reality altogether, and to replace this duality with a triad: the real, the fictive, and the imaginary. Undoubtedly, the text is permeated by a vast range of identifiable items selected from social and other extratextual realities. The mere importation into the text, however, of such realities—even though they are not being represented in the text for their own sake—does not ipso facto make them fictive. Instead, the text's apparent reproduction of items within the fictional text brings to light purposes, attitudes, and experiences that are decidedly not part of the reality reproduced. Hence, they appear in the text as a product of a fictionalizing act.
Because this act of fictionalizing cannot be deduced from the reality repeated in the text, it clearly brings into play an imaginary quality that does not belong to the reality reproduced in the text but cannot be disentangled from it. Thus the fictionalizing act converts the reality reproduced into a sign, simultaneously casting the imaginary as a form that allows us to conceive what the sign points to. As this transformation is brought about by the fictionalizing act, the basic quality of this act begins to emerge: it is a crossing of boundaries. Two distinct processes are set in motion by the act of fictionalizing. Reproduced reality is made to point to a “reality” beyond itself, while the imaginary is lured into form. In each case there is a crossing of boundaries: The determinacy of reality is exceeded at the same time that the diffuseness of the imaginary is called into form. The fictionalizing act leads the real to the imaginary and the imaginary to the real; it thus conditions the extent to which a given world is to be transcoded, a nongiven world is to be conceived, and the reshuffled worlds are to be made accessible to the reader's experience.
As the product of an author, the literary text evidences a particular attitude through which the author directs himself or herself to the world. As this attitude does not exist in the world to which the author refers, it can take on a form only by being literally inserted into the real world. The insertion takes place not by plain mimesis of existing structures but by a process of restructuring them. Every literary text inevitably contains a selection from a variety of social, historical, cultural, and literary systems that exist as referential fields outside the text. This selection is itself a stepping beyond boundaries, in that the elements selected are lifted out of the systems in which they fulfill their specific function. This applies both to cultural norms and to literary allusions, which are incorporated into every new literary text in such a way that the structure and the semantics of the systems concerned are decomposed. The elements that are now incorporated into the text are not in themselves fictive, but their selection is an act of fictionalizing.
A complement to the act of selection is the act of combination. The different elements that are combined within the text range from words and their meanings through encapsulated extratextual items to the patterns in which characters and actions are organized. Combination, too, is an act of fictionalizing, with the same basic mode of operation: the crossing of boundaries.
On the lexical level this is to be seen, for instance, with neologisms such as James Joyce's coining of the term benefiction, which combines the words benefaction, benediction, and fiction. Here lexical meanings are used to derestrict semantic limitations. The lexical meaning of a particular word is faded out and a new meaning faded in, without the loss of the original meaning. This establishes a figure-and-ground relationship allowing both the separation of the individual elements and a continuous switching of the perspective between them. In accordance with whichever reference forms the foreground or background, the semantic weighting will be shifted.
A second level of relating is to be seen in the organization of specific semantic enclosures within the text. These give rise to intratextual fields of reference themselves brought about by the relationship between and among external items encapsulated in the text. Generally, these fields of reference provide an occasion for the hero to step over their boundaries. Such boundary crossing is a subject-creating event. It is a “revolutionary element” because it breaks down “accepted classifications.”
Fictions also play vital roles in the activities of cognition and behavior, as in the founding of institutions, societies, and world pictures. Unlike such nonliterary fictions, the literary text reveals its own fictionality. Because of this, its function must be radically different from that of related activities that mask their fictional nature. The masking, of course, need not necessarily occur with the intention to deceive; it occurs because the fiction is meant to provide an explanation, or even a foundation, and would not do so if its fictive nature were to be exposed. The concealment of fictionality endows an explanation with an appearance of reality, which is vital, because fiction—as explanation—functions as the constitutive basis of this reality.
When a fiction signals its own fictionality, it necessitates an attitude different from that adopted toward fictions hiding their fictionality. The incorporated “real” world is, so to speak, placed in brackets to indicate that it is not something given but is merely to be understood as if it were given. In the self-disclosure of its fictionality, an important feature of the fictional text comes to the fore: it turns the whole of the world organized in the text into an “as-if” construction. In the light of this qualification (implicitly accepted the moment we embark on our reading), it is clear that we must and do suspend all natural attitudes adopted toward the “real” world once we are confronted with the represented world. This is not present in the text for its own sake, nor is its function exhausted merely by its denoting reality. Just as the incorporated “real” world is bracketed off, so too are our natural attitudes.
Whenever bracketing occurs, a purpose makes itself felt that can never be a property of the world represented, not least because the represented world is built out of a selection of items from the world outside. In this overarching purpose the pragmatic function of the fictional work is adumbrated, for fictions are inextricably tied to their use. The reality represented in the text is not meant to represent reality; it is a pointer to something that is not given, although its function is to make that something conceivable.
Thus the purpose of the self-disclosing fiction comes to light. If the world represented is not meant to denote a given world, and hence is turned into an analogue, it may serve two different purposes at once. The reaction provoked by the represented world could be directed toward conceiving what it is meant to “figure forth.” The analogue, however, could simultaneously direct the reaction to the empirical world from which the textual world was drawn, allowing this very world to be perceived from a vantage point that has never been part of it. In this case the reverse side of things will come into view. The duality of the analogue will never exclude either of the two possibilities; in fact, they appear to interpenetrate, making conceivable what would otherwise remain hidden.
All the acts of fictionalizing that can be distinguished within the fictional text are acts of boundary crossing. Selection transgresses the limits of extratextual systems as well as the boundaries of the text itself by pointing to the referential fields that link the text to what is beyond the page. Combination transgresses the semantic enclosures established by the text, ranging from the derestriction of lexical meanings to the hero's infringement of strictly enforced borderlines. Finally, the “as-if” construction discloses the fictionality of fiction, thus transgressing the represented world set up by the acts of selection and combination. It brackets off this world, thereby indicating that it is to be used for an unverbalized, though overarching, purpose.
The acts of fictionalizing can be clearly distinguished by the different gestalt each of them brings about: selection results in intentionality; combination results in relatedness; and self-disclosure leads to bracketing. All these cases are “facts from fiction,” as none of them is inherent in what it refers to, nor identical to the imaginary.
Furthermore, the various acts of fictionalizing carry with them whatever has been outstripped, and the resultant doubleness might therefore be defined as the simultaneity of the mutually exclusive. This formula allows for describing the structure of the fictional component of literature. It gives rise to a dynamic oscillation resulting in a constant interpeneration of things that are set off from one another without ever losing their difference. The tension ensuing from the attempt to resolve this ineradicable difference creates an aesthetic potential that, as a source of meaning, can never be substituted by anything else. This does not imply that the fictional component of literature is the actual work of art. What it does imply is that the fictional component makes the work of art possible.
Anderegg, Johannes. Fiktion und Kommunikation: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie der Prosa. Göttingen, 1973.Find this resource:
Assmann, Aleida. Die Legitimität der Fiktion: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der literarischen Kommunikation. Munich, 1980.Find this resource:
Cebik, L. B. Fictional Narrative and Truth: An Epistemic Analysis. Lanham, Md., 1984.Find this resource:
Costa Lima, Luíz. The Dark Side of Reason: Fictionality and Power. Translated by Paulo Henriques Britto. Stanford, Calif., 1992.Find this resource:
Henrich, Dieter, and Wolfgang Iser, eds. Funktionen des Fiktiven. Munich, 1983.Find this resource:
Iser, Wolfgang. The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology. Baltimore, 1993.Find this resource:
Kasics, Kaspar. Literatur und Fiktion: Zur Theorie und Geschichte der literarischen Kommunikation. Heidelberg, 1990.Find this resource:
Keller, Ulrich. Fiktionalität als literaturwissenschaftliche Kategorie. Heidelberg, 1980.Find this resource:
Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York and Oxford, 1967.Find this resource:
Martinez-Bonati, Félix. Fictive Discourse and the Structures of Literature: A Phenomenological Approach. Translated by Philip W. Silver with the author. Ithaca, N.Y., 1981.Find this resource:
Merrell, Floyd. Pararealities: The Nature of Our Fictions and How We Know Them. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 1983.Find this resource:
Pavel, Thomas G. Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, Mass., 1986.Find this resource:
Prado, C. G. Making Believe: Philosophical Reflections on Fiction. Westport, Conn., 1984.Find this resource:
Riffaterre, Michael. Fictional Truth. Baltimore, 1990.Find this resource:
Roberts, Thomas J. When Is Something Fiction? Carbondale, Ill., 1972.Find this resource:
Rockwell, Joan. Fact from Fiction. London, 1974.Find this resource:
Schlaffer, Heinz. Poesie und Wissen. Frankfurt am Main, 1990.Find this resource:
Searle, John. The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse. New Literary History 6 (1975): 319–332.Find this resource:
Epistemology of Fiction
Since the time of David Hume, it has been thought obvious that fictional narrative evokes a different response in the reader than historical narrative. Hume says that we read history with a cognitive attitude of belief, an attitude attributable to the fact that persons and events uncreated and uninfluenced by our wills are the sources of the reading experience. [See Hume.]
Hume's claim that fiction construed as such does not induce beliefs might seem to settle the case against the possibility of acquiring knowledge from fiction. For if fictions do not even produce beliefs, they assuredly cannot, in standard theories, produce the justified or otherwise warranted true belief that is knowledge. Even if fiction does produce some beliefs, it might be argued, these beliefs concern only what fictionally happens to fictional characters in fictional worlds, and these events have no determinate relationship to what happens in our world. There are methods by means of which one finds out what our world is like, methods involving controlled observation, experimentation, and statistical analysis. Novel reading is not another such method.
Nevertheless, it is to literary fiction—and more recently to film and television—that people turn in order to express and communicate their views about life and the world and in order to learn. In eighteenth-century Germany, the novel gradually displaced didactic poetry, the sermon, and the advice-giving magazines after 1740, and lonely young readers everywhere have always devoured novels in the hope of finding insight into the problems of how to love and how to leave, how to determine the limits of parental authority, and how to choose a modus vivendi. Have they thereby refuted Hume, or do they fail to grasp that what they are reading is only fiction? As Paul Veyne has noted, the ancients did not distinguish systematically between history and fable: the tradition was there and it was truth, that was all, and contemporary consumers of books, films, fiction, and daytime serials may appear to exhibit the same sublime indifference (1988). Indeed, the real world as we experience it is permeated by fictions of our own authorship—by scenes of fantasy, hope, and fear that reside in an indeterminate region between what we expect to happen, really, and what we hope or fear may or will happen. Our own privately concocted fictions and quasi fictions appear to be indispensable to our thinking and planning and so to our cognitive functioning. As scientists perform thought experiments to generate knowledge of the physical world, so ordinary people might seem to use their capacities to envision and imagine to generate knowledge of the human world.
Although all this may be conceded, it is still far from clear that a stranger's imaginings can give one anything worthy of the name of knowledge. The question whether literary art in the public realm can be a source of knowledge has been discussed since Plato's time. Three main positions have been taken: (1) Fictional works make a negative contribution to our knowledge of the world, including awareness of moral truths, arousing beliefs and expectations that are inaccurate and distorted; (2) fictional works are able to make a positive contribution to our moral, psychological, and historical knowledge of manners, mores, and political events; and (3) fictional works are a source of ideas and exert a powerful influence on behavior, but they cannot be supposed to provide knowledge in any important sense.
Plato, Augustine, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau may be counted among the proponents of the view that the relationship of literature to knowledge, specifically to moral knowledge, is a negative one. “Poetry maims the thought,” Plato decides in book 10 of The Republic. Fictions are thrice removed from reality as copies of copies of Forms, and they “keep company with that part of the soul that is not the best.” By this Plato means that a preoccupation with fictional entities supplants the search for true knowledge, and that attention to fictional persons—the Homeric heroes, with their displays of unmanly weakness and emotionality—provokes imitation of inappropriate models. [See Plato.] Augustine, who wanted to live in the truth, found that the theater provoked only tears and lust, and Rousseau argues that the illusions of the stage wrongly glamorize the situations and actions of monstrous women like Phaedra and Medea, and that moralistic plays in which the virtuous are rewarded and the wicked punished fail to make an impression on the audience: “[A]s a result of showing them that we want to instruct them, we no longer instruct them” (Rousseau, 1968). The early novel, especially the “French” novel with its encouragement to galanterie and to an active social role for women, was attended by warnings and reproaches from clergymen. Indeed, Immanuel Kant contrasted the effeminacy and amorality of a novel-reading society with sublime and bibliophobic ideals of virtue. Sigmund Freud extends the Plato-Rousseau analysis by arguing that fictional works are public versions of private fantasies of violence and eroticism. They deliver libidinal gratification to the reader within the framework of a moralistic story line that is unfolded with technical and stylistic expertise. The framework mitigates the guilt and disgust that would otherwise attend the sharing of forbidden fantasies. Readers believe themselves edified—but that is not why they read.
Freud's theory is perhaps hard pressed to account for contemporary popular fiction, which is highly explicit in its depictions of violence and eroticism. This literature, however, tends to be loaded with factual and pseudofactual information about the financial and glamour industries, politics, spying, medicine, weapons, boats, and human geography, suggesting that aesthetics and didacticism continue to play their mitigating role. Latter-day Platonists insist nevertheless that consumption of popular fiction can lead to personal moral degradation, to misogyny or misanthropy, and to a loss of sympathy and humanity. Romance novels as well have been attacked as engendering delusive representations and expectations in women that prevent them from adjusting to reality. Such fictions, it is argued, do not provide a temporary respite from reality, but actually substitute for it with deterimental consequences, precisely as the older critics charged.
Since the rise of literary criticism, however, generations of critics have dedicated themselves to defending the value of fiction as a source of knowledge. Their orientation may be representational, in case they regard fiction as containing philosophical and moral truths of propositional form, which the reader by analysis and reflection can find in the text. Or it may be practical, in case they regard fiction as producing not knowledge that but knowledge of how or knowledge of what certain experiences are like. Praxis-oriented critics argue that fiction has a morally and psychologically ennobling or enabling effect on the reader through its creation of certain states of awareness, receptivity, and consciousness of alternatives.
Both representation- and praxis-based accounts suggest that reading a novel is rather like sitting next to a voluble stranger on a long train trip: although you take in only one person's admittedly partial and unverified view of the world, you go away edified, or so it seems. But what have you in fact learned? The futility of worldly ambition, the vanity of love, the inevitability of conflict between parents and children, the possibility of reversals of fortune, the volatility of secrets, the treachery of men, and the costs of naïveté are common themes of novels. But recognizing that such and such is the theme of a novel is not the same as recognizing that the corresponding proposition is true. Fortunately, closer arguments for a positive connection between literature and knowledge are available. The following discussion provides some examples.
1. Fiction writers are typically close observers of human affairs who themselves possess a high level of psychological and moral awareness. Thus, knowledge is worked into the text and retrievable from it, even in the absence of a specific didactic intention.
2. Fiction acquaints us with the first-person experience and thought patterns of those who are radically other to us: members of the opposite sex, of other cultures, of different ages and stations.
3. Recognizing, as Aristotle said, is a kind of learning attended by pleasure (Poetics 1448b). Recognizing fictional types—the shallow suitor, the vain wife, the miser, the unscrupulous politician—is a cognitive activity and one that equips readers to identify unsavory and attractive characteristics in themselves and others.
4. Reading a fictional work or otherwise engaging with one mobilizes the reader's empathetic reactions. The strengthening of these reactions develops the response of sympathy, which is the basis of moral feeling.
5. The dialectical structure of fictional works in which opposing values clash in a way finally decided by the outcome encourages the reader's development of inner deliberative resources, including the important moral ability to see both sides of a question. Readers moreover tend to discuss and argue about books and characters with other readers, and this discussion produces moral and psychological insight.
Argument two is similarly unconvincing. As long as fictional works do not acquaint us with the interior thoughts of actual members of the classes named, but with thoughts imaginatively ascribed to members of those classes by an author, they do not provide knowledge of the actual world. Novelistic sequences are plausible not, in the statistical sense, probable: in no case do novelistic sequences reflect rules of cause and effect. Crime may in fact pay, ambition may satisfy, secrets may stay buried, passionate love may endure.
Argument three appears at first to be a fully acceptable argument. When a child, after numerous trials, is able to recognize animals like lions and giraffes in a picture book, we believe that it has learned something, something it would have been hard to learn in the real world. So why can one not learn from encountering and recognizing character types in books? There are two problems with the analogy. First, characters in works of fiction are not drawn, labeled, and subject to editorial verification as the animals are in children's books. Second, according to social psychologists, these supposed human “species” do not really exist in nature, in which people's behavior is demonstrably more determined by context than by dispositions and drives. Our sorting of people into types—our stereotyping—may help to make our moral and practical reasoning simple and easy, but it does not produce knowledge of the world.
Argument four is convincing only to the extent that one accepts sympathy as the basis of moral feeling and the heart as a reliable guide to action and rejects Kantian or utilitarian formulations. That literature of a certain complex, probing, psychological type increases sensitivity and understanding has been eloquently argued. It is a factual question, however, whether people who consume more literature or who are more involved with and interested in the fiction they do consume are more sensitive or sympathetic than readers of nonfiction or nonreaders.
Argument five, that literature assists us in envisioning alternative courses of action, provides no assurance that the outcome of the deliberation and conversation engaged in by habitual readers of fiction is more likely to be morally or practically correct than the unspontaneous action of the unreflective moral rigorist. “Thought experiments” are not appropriate when the type of knowledge we are seeking is a posteriori, not a priori.
With the failure of these arguments, it may be seem that the following conclusion is warranted. Literature is a source of vivid ideation and profound cognitive and emotional satisfaction. It induces imitative behavior and a tendency to self-scrutiny, both of which may, but need not, be morally beneficial. As well, it generates sophisticated moral discourse through the discussion of fictional characters, the proliferation of interpretations. Yet none of this implies that fiction readers as a class, or even certain kinds of fiction readers, acquire moral and psychological knowledge, or authoritative historical knowledge, and it certainly does not imply, as is sometimes claimed, that literature supplies a kind of moral-psychological knowledge that cannot be acquired through systematic instruction or general life experience. Readers, it may be noted, are accommodating creatures who willingly embrace the relevance to their own condition of stories about life in a London slum or in the world of cocktail-drinking, heel-clicking diplomats and top generals, and about hobbits and bunnies as well.
It may be reasonably argued, however, that the anticognitivist's conclusion is too harsh. It does not take into account the manner in which imaginative representations are controlled by cultural beliefs and assumptions or the importance of the “pang of recognition” in psychological and moral life. Relativists may deny that “moral knowledge” refers to anything beyond the mores of a given culture, and it might be pointed out that even if the stereotyping that literature arguably facilitates is, in the terms of empirical psychology, irrational, and to be distinguished from scientific concept formation, learning about the world implies learning about the stereotypes others form. Thus, coherentist conceptions of truth tend to favor the notion that literature is a source of knowledge. Novelists cannot help but betray in their work what their society or their local subculture believes and what norms it lives by, and this mirroring, however unintentional, instills a kind of knowledge in readers. Even in literature that appears to be profoundly critical of social norms and expectations or that presents a utopian alternative, there is revelation and mirroring. That fiction may be a powerful force in cultural indoctrination suggests that there is a cognitive reciprocity between writers and readers. If literature was not intended to and did not teach us, was not adapted to us in this respect, we would not be able to understand it at all.
Second, fiction constantly presents readers with situations in which outward actions disguise true plans, intentions, and feelings, and it frequently offers an implied commentary on the manifest and the hidden, the exercise of power, and the secret resistance or inner chaos that pressure outwardly applied may produce. The novelist, the dramatist, and the filmmaker are able to present the first-person experience of the protagonist as ludicrously or poignantly out of synchrony with the objective third-person view of an event, merely by exercising technical control over point of view. They thereby reveal the first-person perspective as the limited one it really is. The “pang of recognition” typically attaches to fictional situations that bring home this fact—which is a fact—to us.
Modern critics from Charles Baudelaire to Theodor W. Adorno have tended to reject all suggestions of a direct didactic role for fiction, and literary modernism has experimented with forms designed to mock or subvert the reader's hope and expectation of finding a message in literature. Typically, social and geographic locations are not identified, psychologically charged situations are presented in a confusing and disengaged way, there is no recognizable plot based on cause-and-effect sequences, mysteries may remain permanently unexplained, and the outcome offers no satisfaction of the reader's moral and emotional wishes. Postmodern literature has, however, returned to the elaborately plotted novel, to psychologism, to social criticism, and the high moral register. It rejects the ideal of objectivity and the search for a truth behind appearances that informed both classical and modernist fiction. The abandonment of these ideals, together with its powerful sense of cultural engagement, will assuredly alter the nature of debates about the epistemology of fiction. The ubiquity of copies, models, and simulacra in contemporary life and the recognition of constant leakage between the fictional and real worlds promise to influence future discussion in interesting ways.
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