Further Reflections on Fictionality: Rejoinders to the Responses

Abstract

Further Reflections on Fictionality: Rejoinders to the Responses Richard Walsh The responses to the target essay bring an impressive range of perspectives to the topic of fictionality, and I am immensely grateful to the respondents for their considered attention to my arguments. Their counterarguments, queries, affirmations, and extrapolations do a great deal to fill out the nuances and complexities of the ideas in play, carrying discussion a long way beyond [End Page 508] the compacted observations of the essay itself. Seeking a way to respond in my turn, I have seized upon the fact almost everyone has commented on multiple aspects of the topic, establishing numerous lines of inquiry that cut across perspectives, and across each other. Finding the best way through such an involved set of ideas is no easy task, but I have chosen to organise my comments around these subtopics, rather than groups of respondents, in the hope that the result will be a less fragmentary, less repetitive, and more coherent piece of writing than it could otherwise have been. The remarks that follow, then, move very freely between respondents, but follow a general trajectory delineated by four topical clusters. These are issues concerning the definition and scope of fictionality; issues concerning the concept of relevance and the context of relevance theory; issues involved in a rhetorical conception of fictionality; and the implications for particular contexts and in particular examples. definition and scope Two preliminary concerns, raised by several respondents, are that my definition of fictionality is cast in negative terms and that it is circular; I particularly enjoyed Lasse Gammelgaard’s suggestion that I may be trying to neither have my cake nor eat it (439–43). The negative form of the definition (as, most succinctly, independence from direct informative relevance) is something I have highlighted myself elsewhere (“Afterword” 5), and is necessary to accommodate the concept’s historical and cultural contingency. More positive characterisations are possible only by descending to more particular contexts. In any case, given the fact that negative definition has always been a feature of theories of fiction—as not true, not referential, not seriously asserted—Henrik Nielsen’s extended riff on this point perhaps over-plays the reservation, and indeed his illustrative quotations tend to efface beneath ellipses the positive assertions of the original, as in “not a frame separating fictive discourse from ordinary or ‘serious’ communication . . . [but a contextual assumption]” (Walsh 30, qtd. in Nielsen 445). Stefan Iversen is more even-handed, seeing this negative definition as “both a strength and a weakness” (479); the weakness—or as I would prefer to say, the unavoidable constraint upon the target essay’s argument—is the lack of developed case studies about historical variants of fictionality, something I shall return to under “Implications” below. [End Page 509] The respondents’ suspicions about circularity perhaps reveal a more fundamental resistance to the terms of the argument. Jarmila Mildorf asserts that “the argument that fiction (as ‘utterance’) has the purpose to make readers infer its fictionality is circular” (466); in doing so she misunderstands the argument, which insists that the assumption of fictionality is contextual, not intrinsic to the utterance and so certainly not its purpose (Walsh 3, 18, 20, 22, 27). Equally, there is some misunderstanding in Nielsen’s observation that “there is a telling instead of begging the question going on. If fictionality is best understood as a quality of fiction, then it is either the case that the distinction between fictionality and fiction re-collapses, or it is the case that fiction (as communication) needs itself to be defined, or else the description is entirely circular” (447). He is using “fiction” to mean “generic fiction,” whereas I use the term inclusively, preferring to qualify it (as generic, ad hoc, or whatever) where necessary. To dissociate the terms fictionality and fiction seems like linguistic violence to me, and I take it that fictionality is the quality of the phenomenon, fiction, to be explained—whatever your theoretical stance. That granted, it is not circular but highly consequential to propose that fiction is fundamentally a distinct communicative resource; though I would be happy to call it a mere tautology if only the advocates of contrary...