Fabulation

7 Key excerpts on "Fabulation"

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  Deleuze and Philosophy

  • Constantin Boundas(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • EUP

    (Publisher)

  So that I might know what I am outside writing. (Perrault 1983: 56) Perrault’s relationship to his subjects might seem peculiar to his own cinematic undertakings, but Deleuze sees his films simply as particularly clear manifestations of the artist’s proper relationship to the people in all genuine creation. As in The Trial , the actual artist and the virtual com-munity are parts of a single machine, and the work of art is the genera-tive conjunction of those forces in their mutual intercession. Fabulation is the name for the process whereby the artwork initiates the invention of a people to come, and in the case of Perrault’s films, the lived speech of the Québecois engaged in ‘legending’ is central to the fabulative process. Fabulation and Narration Fabulation, then, is closely associated with fiction, invention and the ‘power of the false’. But at a certain point, one must ask, what has fabu-lation to do with narration? Fabulation, after all, comes from the Latin fabula , which may be rendered as ‘talk’, ‘conversation’, or ‘small talk’, but also as ‘story’, ‘tale’, ‘myth’, or ‘legend’. In this regard, fabula resem-bles its Greek counterpart, mythos , which may be translated as ‘word’, ‘speech’, ‘story’, or ‘legend’. And the French fable , besides denoting the literary form of the fable, has as older meanings ‘story’, ‘fiction’, ‘legend’, while La Fable , according to the Robert dictionary, may refer to ‘the set of mythological stories as a whole’. Surely, it would seem, Fabulation must have something to do with the creation of fabulae , just as ‘legend-ing’ must bear some relation to the enunciation of legends. Curiously, Deleuze says little about narration per se in his remarks on Fabulation, and in this he is a dutiful follower of Bergson. Bergson regards the mythologies of the world’s religions as products of fabula-tion, but he says very little about myths themselves.

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  Fiction and Art

  Explorations in Contemporary Theory

  • Ananta Ch. Sukla(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Fictionality can be dictated by the author’s intentions, or it can be something made fictional by use. Presumably, fiction could be dictated merely by the Library of Congress designation printed on the back of a book jacket. However, what is fictional is not merely what is not true. Fictionality is not simply aligned with lying or falsehood, nor can nonfiction be simply aligned with truth or fact. What is fictional is not based on subject matter alone, and it is not based only on truth value or reference failure. Lies are not what become fiction and fictions are not mere lies. Fiction is not a conglomeration of false sentences. It cannot be seen only as a negation of truth, but it is an intentional construction of a certain kind. Fictions can and often do correspond to real places, persons and events, but are not necessarily about real places, persons and events. Fiction is a literary genre which is to be read in a particular way. Also, we use stories – narratives – as a form of explanation and as explanations are used as justification in corresponding ways in which we validate truth claims. Conversely, nonfiction is also a literary genre that we are taught to read in a particular way, and is dependent upon certain social and literary conventions for us to understand it properly. It is not merely that which is true simpliciter but one of the preconditions of nonfiction is that it is true and documentable. What is true also goes well beyond just ‘what happened’ or what corresponds to ‘reality’. Nonfictional literature appeals not just to a simplistic version of truth as ‘what really happened’. But narratives written about true events, events that really happened, are still largely The Fictional Truth: Nonfiction and Narration 173 constructed into stories by editing time, event, setting, tone, character and emotion and often constructing or inventing causation. Narratives are also always written from a particular perspective.

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  The Philosophy of Science Fiction

  Henri Bergson and the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick

  • James Edward Burton(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  I mean, he too is somewhat malfunctioning’ (Dick, in Anton and Fuchs 1996: 43). In Ubik (2000c [1969]), another of Dick’s novels in which the disjunction between private and shared worlds is central, the main characters struggle to understand why certain technological objects have begun to revert to their earlier equivalent forms. Yet it is irresolvably uncertain whether it is the actual machines or the characters’ Fabulation: Counteracting Reality 43 own psychological mechanisms that are changing. This is made especially clear when, in a strange parallel to the example cited by Bergson, two characters find themselves hesitating on the point of entering a lift. While Al Hammond perceives the lift as having reverted to a 1910 model with an open cage and a lift operator inside, his colleague Joe Chip sees the modern automated version to which he is accustomed. By concentrating on his memory of the lift’s modern form, Hammond is able to restore it, causing yet another apparently fictional lift operator – whose function again is to instigate attempts to overcome the difference between two versions of reality – to vanish (2000c: 124–5). Fabulation, then, is Bergson’s tentative answer to the question of what it is that makes social life possible among individuals with intellect. It is the faculty which prevents what he terms the war-instinct from becoming dominant. However, the history of human culture, which, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, is simultaneously a history of barbarism, testifies to the limited scope of this overcoming: thus we should view Fabulation not as the conqueror of the war-instinct, but as the marker and enabler of the possibility of going against the war-instinct – a possibility whose actualization hangs constantly in the balance, both during the course of a person’s daily existence, and through the course of human history.

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  Narrative Form

  • S. Keen(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Fictional worlds, according to Pavel, are as various as fictional practices, and they include ‘salient’ worlds with no corresponding references to verifiable existents in the actual world. Fictionality thus encompasses fictional worlds that pretend to be repre- sentations of the real world and fictional worlds that make highly improba- ble, even impossible, truth claims. Some definitions of narrative fiction hinge on the presence of truth claims, though it is usually recognized that these truth claims are imbued with a high degree of indeterminacy, as Sidney noted when he said that the poet is not a liar, because he affirms nothing about the real (brazen) world. Michael Riffaterre writes in Fictional Truth that, ‘Fiction is a genre whereas lies are not’ and ‘A novel always con- tains signs whose function is to remind readers that the tale they are being told is imaginary’ (Fictional Truth, 1). (The objection that some early fictions and a minority of contemporary narrative fictions present them- selves in the guise of the nonfiction genres I take up in Chapter 10.) The invitation to understand a narrative’s claims as imaginary initiates world- Fictional Worlds and Fictionality 119 making: as Wolfgang Iser suggests, it invites the creation of an ‘As If’ world. That world may resemble the actual world or not. Realistic fiction asserts its reflection of the actual world in a way that may render its fictionality trans- parent, but realistic narratives rely on the reader’s capacity to generate a sense of wholeness and actuality out of a finite set of references, the reader’s world-making. Realistic fictions are as separate from the everyday world of a reader as the most flagrant make-believe. Wolfgang Iser argues that the reader’s consciousness of a gap between actual and fictional worlds is instigated by the existence of the imaginary.

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  Handbook of Narratology

  • Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, Jörg Schönert, Peter Hühn, John Pier, Wolf Schmid, Jörg Schönert(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  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 (see Martínez & Scheffel 2003). 2.3 Types of Fiction The difficulty of getting a clear picture of the distinction between fac-tual and fictional narrative results in part from a long history of shifting uses of the term “fiction.” The sense which is most current today—that of a representation portraying an imaginary/invented universe or world —is not its original nor its historically most prominent domain of refer-ence. In Latin, fictio had at least two different meanings: on the one hand, it referred to the act of modeling something, of giving it a form (as in the art of the sculptor); on the other hand, it designated acts of pretending, supposing, or hypothesizing. Interestingly, the second sense of the Latin term fictio did not put emphasis on the playful dimension of the act of pretending. On the contrary, during most of its long his-tory, “fiction,” stemming from the second sense of the Latin meaning, was used in reference to serious ways of pretending, postulating, or hy-100 Fictional vs. Factual Narration pothesizing. Hence the term has usually been linked to questions of ex-istence and non-existence, true and false belief, error and lie. In classical philosophy, “fiction” was often used to designate what we today would call a cognitive illusion (→ illusion). Hume used the term in this sense when he spoke about causality or about a unified self, calling them “fictions” (Hume [1739] 1992: Bk I, Pt IV, Sec VI). Now, this type of fiction, as Hume himself explicitly stated, is quite different from fiction in the artistic field. It is part of the definition of a cognitive fiction that it is not experienced as a fiction. A narrative fic-tion, by contrast, is experienced as a fiction.

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  Reality and Truth in Literature

  From Ancient to Modern European Literary and Critical Discourse

  • Irena Avsenik Nabergoj(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • V&R Unipress

    (Publisher)

  3. Reality in Myth, History and Fiction Myth, history and fiction are naturally interwoven in various ways and throug- hout the ages they have been of rival importance. The Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek- English Lexicon cites two important semantic aspects of the word “myth”: 1. word, speech; 2. tale, story, narrative. The Greek-based “myth” is often equated with the Latin word “fabula,” for which the Lewis and Short Latin Dictionary provides two main entries: 1. a narration, narrative, account, story ; the subject of common talk; 2. a fictitious narrative, a tale, story. A definition from literary theory supplements the basic definition with fundamental elements linked to the place and role of myth in literature. John Anthony Cuddon’s 1998 Dictionary of Literary Terms & Literary Theory contains a crucial definition with regard to content: Nowadays a myth tends to signify a fiction, but a fiction which conveys a psychological truth. In general a myth is a story which is not “true” and which involves (as a rule) supernatural beings – or at any rate supra-human beings. Myth is always concerned with creation. Myth explains how something came to exist. Myth embodies feeling and concept – hence the Promethean or Herculean figure, or the idea of Diana, or the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. Many myths or quasi-myths are primitive explanations of the natural order and cosmic forces. (Cuddon 1998: 526) Chris Baldick’s 2004 Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms refers to the multiple meanings of myth: myth, a kind of story or rudimentary narrative sequence, normally traditional and anonymous, through which a given culture ratifies its social customs or accounts for the origins of human and natural phenomena, usually in supernatural or boldly imaginative terms.

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  How to Make Believe

  The Fictional Truths of the Representational Arts

  • J. Alexander Bareis, Lene Nordrum, J. Alexander Bareis, Lene Nordrum(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  Therefore, I favour a multilayered approach to the concept of fictionality. I call this ap-proach ‘multilayered’ because it encompasses three different elements that are situated on different analytical levels. The three components of this multi-layered approach are: 1) The fictional world, 2) the game of make-believe and 3) institutional practice. The different levels addressed by the different compo-nents are obviously the referential or semantic level for the fictional world, the author/reader or communication level for the game of make-believe and the institutional or pragmatic level for institutional practice. It is beyond the scope of this paper to give a detailed account of this multilayered concept of fictionali-ty; I therefore have to limit myself to some very general considerations. Fictionality and Make-Believe in Drama, Theatre and Opera | 247 I argue that fictionality is a concept that designates phenomena that in some way or another deal with fictional worlds, that the way these fictional worlds are dealt with involves a game of make-believe and that this game is embedded in an institutional practice. A slightly more elaborate account would run as follows: A fictional work, in general, is a work produced according to the conventions of the institutional practice of fictionality. Such a work has as a rule been composed and published by the author with the specific intention that an audience uses the work as a prop in a game of make-believe and that audi-ences will actually adopt the so-called fictional stance towards the narration because they recognize this intention. To function as a prop in a game of make-believe means that a work mandates imaginings by virtue of conditional princi-ples of generation which are part of the conventions of the institutional prac-tice.

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