Jokes, Definitions, and Historical Junctures of Fictionality

Abstract

Jokes, Definitions, and Historical Junctures of Fictionality Simona Zetterberg Gjerlevsen (bio) This response to Richard Walsh’s target essay “Fictionality as Rhetoric: A Distinctive Research Paradigm” is written in the vein of the generosity of the debate around the rhetorical theory of fictionality first suggested by Walsh. I concur with Walsh that the rhetorical theory is a distinct research paradigm at odds with all previous engagements with fictionality. In the target essay, Walsh condenses the shared idea that sustains the rhetorical theory: “As a rhetorical move, it 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” (412). The rhetorical theory of fictionality presents a reorientation of the understanding of fictionality away from any idea of a fictional object toward the act of communicating. Yet, a research paradigm is only refined and advanced because of continuous debate about its principles and consequences. In his essay, Walsh objects to the definition of fictionality as intentionally signaled invention in communication proposed by Henrik Skov Nielsen and myself, in the article “Distinguishing Fictionality.” In this essay, I will address our issues of disagreement concerning our proposal that fictionality has to be intentionally signaled before attending to Walsh’s third suggestion for areas of further investigation, namely its historical junctures. I will suggest a number of directions for a historical investigation of fictionality and outline some consequences for working with a rhetorical concept of fictionality historically. I imagine myself sitting in the bar that opens Walsh’s target essay. I am in the company of a raconteur who tells a joke as an excuse for his late arrival—and for not buying the first round of beer. Since the joke is framed as an excuse, it might not be immediately apparent that it is a joke, but at some point in the telling, I am prompted to realize that it is. Walsh explains this inference process: “The joke is revealed as a joke by the way it cuts short our expectations of the story’s informative relevance; the way it makes the question of its truth status beside the point” (398, my italics). “The way” refers [End Page 426] to the interpretive shift to fictionality, but the explanation seems to me an answer to how the listener interprets the joke after having already realized that it is a joke. What is missing in Walsh’s formulation and, I think, in his definition of fictionality, is an explanation of exactly the way the receiver realizes the fictional intent of the utterance. The reorientation “from nonfiction to fiction” (398) requires that something cues the listener to opt out of the interpretive framework of “nonfiction.” Walsh objects to the idea of signs of fictionality included in the definition suggested by Nielsen and me and argues instead: “What is crucial about the assumption of fictionality is that it directs attention away from the direct informative relevance of the utterance; it is redundant to also assume that the implied reason for doing so is that the utterance is untrue” (415). Once realized to be a joke, the joke may function as such independent of whether its content is of directly informative relevance. Yet it seems to me, the issue of informative relevance does not concern the act of realizing the communicative intention of deploying fictionality. That is, the question of what exactly prompts the assumption of fictionality remains. From my perspective, the communicator has to signal fictionality for such an interpretive shift to occur. Indeed, our proposed definition of fictionality as intentionally signaled invention in communication takes its point of departure in such a premise. In the case of the joke, the communicator might signal fictionality by appeal to previous knowledge of joke-telling and the generic form of a joke, or by transgressing what the listener will understand to be a real-world logic (as being able to bite off one’s ear by standing on a chair). Both possibilities imply that the communicator is not trying to make his or her utterance come across as true or as a lie, but as invented. In his target essay...