Abstract
Fictional truth is commonly analyzed in terms of the speech acts or propositional attitudes of a teller. In this paper, I investigate Lewis’s counterfactual analysis in terms of felicitous narrator assertion, Currie’s analysis in terms of fictional author belief, and Byrne’s analysis in terms of ideal author invitations to make-believe—and find them all lacking. I propose instead an analysis in terms of the revelations of an infelicitous narrator.
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Notes
The concern is with truth in fiction as opposed to truth through fiction.
Byrne’s (1993) invites this interpretation.
Lewis’ (1978) analysis only roughly fits into this format.
But see Krasner (2002), p. 265.
Walton (1990, pp. 148-9) suggests that this sort of fictional “clutter” should simply be ignored.
It is important to note that, despite being a hypothetical member of the author’s community, the fictional author is of a distinct ontological kind than the actual members of this community. In particular, she is explicitly fictional and, hence, of the same ontological kind as characters in the fictional story.
Of course, the fictional author of an inconsistent fiction could not tell it as known fact, at least not at a possible world.
Of course, more subtle actors and storytellers might indicate unreliability other than by their manner of speaking. And the script or the story by itself might also suffice without the need for any ham acting.
Currie’s view entails that mindless fictions—or, more generally, fictions which exclude a teller—are contradictory. Currie himself simply embraces this consequence:
“[on] my theory mindless fiction generates a game of make-believe in which we are called upon to make believe contradictory things: that it is told as known fact and that there is no one there to tell it.” (1990, pp. 125-6).
This is not meant to be a decisive objection to Byrne’s position. The point is simply, by appeal to the analogy with theatre, to draw attention to the unfamiliarity of (both Currie’s fictional author and) Byrne’s ideal author. Despite merely being an idealized version of the actual author, the ideal author is nevertheless a distinct figure and one for which we find no analogue in theatre.
The considerations raised here pose a difficulty for an analysis of fictional truth in terms of invitations to make-believe made by the actual author as well as Byrne’s ideal author.
Or, more generally, from the interplay between the conversational principles and what Byrnean fiction-tellers say.
Alternately, Byrne might invoke very general maxims from which both the familiar Gricean maxims and the fiction-specific maxims follow.
The fictional world embodied by a text is just the collection of fictional truths embodied by it.
Arguably, however, readers often do not come to the table with a neat delineation between relevant and irrelevant background information; rather, they have to determine what background information counts as relevant by working out what kind of world the narrative informant is describing. This is addressed more fully in Section V below.
Although I am committed to the utility of the “fictional worlds” idiom, I do not take it to have ontological import.
It is, of course, theoretically possible that more than one theory will equally (and best) fit the evidence. In such circumstances, what a narrator reveals will have to be identified with what is entailed by all such best theories.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for this objection.
An author may, of course, engage in imaginative activities of various kinds as part of the creative process but there is no requirement that she do so—failing to do so does not undercut her claim to be engaging in composition.
Alward 2006. I would argue that engagement with oral fiction requires similar imaginative activity on the part of listeners.
See Kania (2005), p. 52.
Or, if her act of fiction-telling is written, she produces a manuscript she intends to be imagined to be authored by some such figure.
References
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