Fiction Updated: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology, and Poetics ed. by Calin-Andrei Mihalescu, Walid Harmeneh

Abstract

ESC 25, 1999 Calin-Andrei Mihalescu and Walid Harmeneh, eds., Fiction Up­ dated: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology, and Poetics (Toron­ to: University of Toronto Press, 1996.) xiii, 327. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. As its title suggests, this collection endeavours to make more current our understanding of relations between truth and fiction in contexts predominantly but not exclusively imaginative. The authors of the twenty-four essays featured here take their cue from the multi-faceted Prague-School work of Lubomir Dolezel, who taught for many years at the University of Toronto. Priv­ ileging neither mimetic theory nor deconstruction but building rather on “possible-worlds semantics,” this collection seeks to find a different and more spacious ground or more penetrating avenue by means of which to rework our understanding of those analogies and hypotheses, the as ifs and what ifs, on which so much fiction productively turns. The volume, after a substan­ tial introduction by the editors, unfolds in six parts dealing successively with Fictions and Philosophies; Models; Names, Genre, Gender; Fictions and Histories; Poetics; and Dolezel and His Worlds. The four essays in the first section engage in unevenly com­ plementary ways with the ontological status of “fictional worlds.” Ruth Ronan relies on terms like “original,” “accurate,” and “lit­ eral” to expose the “conceptual affinity between literary theory and possible-worlds frameworks” that derive from a more gen­ eral relativizing of truth (29). Nicholas Rescher poses a number o f troubling questions that reveal our reliance on and limited understanding of anything other than the “natural history” of fictions (38). John W oods turns the logical screws to little literary purpose, while Peter McCormick returns to the need for a metaphysical component in any theory of fiction while at the same time modestly reminding fellow philosophers that the best art and criticism need not look to philosophy for the ef­ fective rendering (and unravelling) of complexity. The section on Models begins forbiddingly for the average literary reader, but Pierre Ouellet’s appeal to the reader’s “experience” of a text is a relief (78), as is his accessible valuing of the “close but tenuous” link between the experienced world and fictionality 108 R E V IE W S (89-90). Siegfried Schmidt establishes some interesting paral­ lels between fiction and mass media while locating young people in something of a post-dichotomous ‘nineties zone’. The high­ light of the section on Names, Genre, Gender is Eva Kushner’s essay on the renaissance dialogue — Platonic, Ciceronian, and Lucianic versions — where she makes good use of Dolezel’s nar­ rative typology to present imagined conversations as a shrewdly wordly version of possible worlds. The most impressive essays in the volume are in the fourth and fifth sections. Linda Hutcheon’s meditation on Coetzee’s Foe offers a challenge to possible-worlds semantics that she her­ self terms “friendly” (214) but that seems to me irrefutable. W ith her usual patience and generosity, Hutcheon discloses the homogenizing cultural imperatives behind Dolezel’s taxonomy of narrative modes; at the same time,with her eye for the sub­ tleties of reflexive resistance and dissent, she ably defends Coetzee against most implications of Nadine Gordimer’s accusation of “stately fastidiousness” (225). The essays by Umberto Eco (on Aristotle’s Poetics) and Michael Riffaterre (on Bakhtin’s treatment of the chronotope) are lesser things, and of interest primarily because of the reputation of their authors. Nancy Felson-Rubin reminds us that fictions are purveyed orally as well as textually, but she restricts herself to the example of Homer. No hint here o f the rich Indigenous oral traditions to which Canadian comparativists and narratologists need to pay more, and more respectful, attention. The essays on Chinese narrative by Douwe Fokkema and Polish formalism and struc­ turalism by Edward Mozejko offer welcome reminders of the diversity of the one world whose existence we are bound to ad­ mit, before we turn in conclusion to the preoccupations and achievement of Lubomir Dolezel. In this connection, HansGeorge Ruprecht gives an imaginary account of Borges and Dolezel in Prague in 1968, just before the Russian tanks rolled in to crush the reform movement headed by Alexander Dubcek. The final chapter...