Signposts of Fictionality: A Narratological Perspective

Abstract

have been drawn, withdrawn, retraced, and re-effaced on various grounds-logical, ontological, phenomenological, pragmatic, speechactional, deconstructive, semantic-without looking to the discipline that has dug most deeply into the ground of narrative itself. There is a certain poetologic justice to this snub: narratologists themselves have, to a quite astonishing degree, ignored the question of demarcation between fiction and nonfiction. One can hardly deplore this omission in studies that openly (by way of title, subtitle, and/or prefatory remarks) limit their area of investigation to fictional narratives (Chatman 1978; Rimmon-Kenan 1983). But most narratological studies, including such classics of the discipline as Barthes's Introduction to the Structural Analysis of (1977 [1966]) and Genette's Narrative Discourse (1980), don't explicitly restrict their field, and some even quite expressly announce that they intend to encompass nonfiction as well (Bal 1985; Prince 1982b). In the absence of counterindications of any sort, a narrative poetics of this overarching kind leads one to believe that the entire panoply of conventions, the figures, structural types, and discursive modes it identifies, applies equally within and without fiction, even when-as is nearly always the case-its textual exemplifications are drawn exclusively from the