The aim of this section is to provide a plausible account of fiction before moving on to give a plausible account of literature. I should point out that it is not always clear from the work of those defining fiction whether they have all fictional representations, printed works of fiction or individual fictional propositions in mind. In each case the result will have some bearing on what is meant when a text is referred to as ‘fiction’ which is our focus. Prima facie, it seems easier to account for fiction than literature; after all, doesn’t ‘fiction’ just refer to what is made up? Defining fiction is not this straightforward; for one thing many fictional narratives refer to facts about things that are not made up and describe real people, places and events. In addition, some predominantly factual accounts contain fictional elements. Thucydides says:
The speeches here represent what in my judgement it would have been most important for the individual speakers to say with regard to the current circumstances, while keeping as possible to the general sense of what was actually said.
(History I. 22 trans. P. J. Rhodes 2014: 65 my italics)
Further, there are some narratives that are made up that do not constitute the kind of fiction I seek to elucidate. Such narratives include: blatant lies, white lies, fantasies, jokes, unscrupulous curricula vitae, counterfactual or alternative histories, thought experiments in science or philosophy and legal fictions.
Essentialist accounts of fiction, which seek a set of necessary and sufficient conditions on fiction, dominate recent discussion. The mainstream essentialist accounts of fiction state that a fiction (written or verbal) is an utterance where:
- a) There is a mandate that we imagine X where
- b) X is at most accidentally true.3
Stacie Friend has argued against the essentialist view principally by the provision of counter-examples. To reveal, with Friend, what is problematic about the orthodox, essentialist view requires an additional distinction, that (a) can be further divided into two constituent claims:
- (a1) There is a mandate.
- (a2) There is a distinct kind of imagination at work.
(a1) is usually specified along Gricean lines (by the essentialist Gregory Currie and others); though for Kendall Walton it is a matter of the requirements involved in playing a game of make-believe. A more significant point concerns (a2) as the essentialist needs to give an account of what is meant by ‘imagination’ in a way that shows a necessary link between imagination and fiction. This essentialist account of fiction takes for granted that the same distinct kind of imagination is at play in all fictions.
Let us assume that, given the mandate, the imagination referred to is that of the reader of fiction and not the writer. We are talking, in other words, about ‘the recreative imagination’ rather than the ‘creative imagination’ (Currie and Ravenscroft 2002: 9–11). While there is no overall agreement as to the nature of the imagination in the case of fiction, various candidate notions have been suggested: the experience of mental imagery, some form of simulation or make-believe (see Friend 2008: 151–156). If imagination is taken in any of these three senses then it lends itself to Friend-type counter examples. Friend’s principal criticism of the essentialist account is that the kinds of imagination specified are not particularly connected with fiction. Friend says that the ‘[I]nvitation to imagine, whether explicit or not, is common to narrative works of non-fiction’ (Friend 2012: 183). Two examples are cited. The first is Ernest Shackleton’s South, an autobiographical account of the explorer’s failed expedition to Antarctica, in which the reader is invited to engage imaginatively with the story. The second is Simon Schama’s A History of Britain which explicitly invites the reader to imagine a setting and think about what it would be like to be present at one of Disraeli’s lavish parties. Friend’s two examples are a blueprint for a counterexample to the essentialist account of fiction in respect of the kind of imagination at play.
Kathleen Stock (2013, 2017) seeks to retrieve the essentialist account of fiction in light of Friend’s criticism with the following account of propositional imagining.
For Thinker T to imagine that p requires that:
- T entertain the thought of p being the case and
- either T does not believe p or inferentially connects p to other thoughts where there is at least one thought that T does not believe.
Stock describes the relevant cognitive act in (1) as follows: ‘[B]y imagining I don’t mean anything particularly full blooded’, that is imagining need not ‘involve anything particularly experiential’ but ‘thinking of a certain case as being the case’ (Stock 2013: 887). A simple conjunction is sufficient for the inferential connection referred to in (2). If p is ‘I am typing’ then this statement is not sufficient for us to say ‘T imagines p’. However, if T thinks ‘I am typing’ and ‘I am on the moon’ then T is imagining (Stock 2017: 146). On Stock’s account, if a text gives rise to imagining then this is sufficient for that text to be fiction.
However, Stock’s account does not offer a thorough enough explanation as to why a text counts as a fiction; this inadequacy applies to shorter as well as longer pieces. Consider the following scenario which would be incorrectly classified by Stock as fiction. We discover that Socrates did write something which turns out to be a tract on mind and body dualism, connecting dualism to monotheism, in much the same way as Descartes did in his conceivability argument in the Sixth Meditation. For the sake of this counter example, say that Socrates was merely rehearsing dualism as a provocation and was indeed a ‘great ironist’ as Nietzsche calls him in Beyond Good and Evil (V. 191). A present day reader with anti-dualist leanings reads the text, is able to entertain the thought that dualism is the case but either does not believe dualism is the case or connects dualism to other thoughts that the reader does not believe such as God’s omnipotence or ‘what is conceivable is possible’. Stock would have to count such a Socratic work as fiction according to criteria (1) and (2), but this categorisation is surely overridden by the context and the presence of other features standard to philosophy such as the role of the principle that ‘if I clearly and distinctly understand X apart from Y (and vice versa) then X and Y are metaphysically distinct and could exist apart.’ This work by ‘Socrates’ is philosophy not fiction.
At best Stock supplies a necessary but not a sufficient condition on fiction but her account does not include enough detail on what fictions have in common so does not count as a satisfactory way of determining what counts as fiction. An essentialist account of fiction may be retrieved with a better account of the imagination but at present imagining is ‘[A] notion yet to be fully clarified’ (Walton 1990: 21) and the trail goes cold.
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