Good Family: Agreeing and Disagreeing with Richard Walsh

Abstract

Good Family: Agreeing and Disagreeing with Richard Walsh James Phelan (bio) As a collaborator with Richard Walsh and Henrik Skov Nielsen on “Ten Theses about Fictionality,” I was not surprised to find myself nodding frequently as I read through Richard’s target essay. “Yes, Richard, just so!,” I thought to myself as I read such claims as the following: “The premise most fundamentally at odds with a rhetorical approach is that fictionality does not attach to the fiction-producing communicative act, but to its product, a fictional referent or object” (Walsh, “Fictionality as Rhetoric” 399). And As a rhetorical move [fictionality] is not intrinsic to any particular features of the utterance, but is circumstantial; it consists in the re-orientation of communicative attention achieved by the contextual assumption of fictionality itself. This assumption . . . is just a pragmatic, contextual inference about communicative purposes manifest in the shared cognitive environment between communicator and audience. (412) My overall responses to the target essay, then, are endorsement and admiration: how great to have Richard making such a forceful case for a rhetorical approach to fictionality. Nevertheless, as Richard notes, in order to focus on the “Ten Theses” that he, Henrik, and I put forward in 2015, we had to set aside some “significant points of difference” (“Fictionality as Rhetoric” 422n2) in our individual views. Since Richard appropriately uses the target essay to articulate his views, I respond with my take on some of the contested issues. Given the limits of space, I address only two points: (1) the relation of my proposal about narrative communication to an understanding of fictionality as rhetoric; (2) the relative explanatory power of our respective conceptions of fictionality.1 For [End Page 502] Richard, fictionality is “a contextual assumption prompting us to understand an utterance’s communicative relevance as indirectly, rather than directly, informative” (414), an assumption entailing the idea that the truth status of the utterance is beside the point. For me, fictionality is intentionally communicated invention, projection, or other means of directing an audience to consider nonactual states or events. This conception entails the idea that truth status is part and parcel of tellers’ and audiences’ judgments about an utterance’s fictionality—and about its effects.2 Here’s Richard’s characterization of my work on narrative communication3: [W]hen James Phelan, whose rhetorical approach to fiction has deep roots in the history of narrative theory, proposes to adapt and extend Seymour Chatman’s version of the narrative communication model (Phelan, “Authors, Resources, Audiences”) . . . it seems as if the weight of that heritage has pulled his concept of fictionality out of orbit, in another kind of lapse back into a representational model of fiction. (415) I see I need to clarify my argument. My discussion of Chatman is not an effort to “adapt and extend” his communication model (which famously posits a one-way transmission from real author to real reader through implied author, narrator, narratee, and implied reader). Instead, I reject the model and propose to replace it with one that I find more responsive to the practices of narrative artists. The fundamental difference between the two models follows from the difference between a structuralist and a rhetorical view of narrative. For Chatman narrative is a structure that synthesizes a what (story) and a how (discourse), and, thus, for him, communication is subordinate to structure. That’s why characters (elements of story) are not in his line of transmission. For me narrative is an action in which authors use (or opt not to use) a wide assortment of resources (narrators, characters, temporality, space, etc.) in diverse combinations in order to accomplish particular communicative purposes in relation to particular audiences—whose presence influences the teller’s narrative act. Furthermore, this account applies to both fictional and nonfictional narratives, and it locates the differences between them in the “context of communicative intent” (402) governing their production. Thus, in my view both structure and representation are subordinate to communication. I infer from the target essay that Richard would agree. If so, then he and I will continue to have some disagreements about details [End Page 503] of my model (e.g., the role of a narrative audience), but...