The Concept of Contamination in Transuniverse Relations: Napoleon in a Fictional World

Abstract

Richard J. Gerrig revisited one of the most persistent myths of literary theory, Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” to point out that, contrary to what the English poet believed, our natural proclivity is not to disbelieve, but to believe that everything is true, even fiction. He reversed Coleridge’s concept and revealed that the real effort on the part of the reader is the “construction of disbelief” when one reads fiction; we do not need to willingly suspend disbelief since we naturally believe. But then what happens when one reads a novel in which real historical figures such as Napoleon are mentioned, or even used as characters? The best way to answer this question is to adopt similar conclusions as the ones reached by Brian McHale in Postmodernist Fiction regarding authors who project themselves into their fiction, metalepsis of the author in other words: “the supposedly absolute reality of the author becomes just another level of fiction, and the real world retreats to a further remove.” Thus, when authors enter their fiction, they become fictional themselves and reality is dissolved within fiction. I argue in this article that when a real person enters a fictional space, she or he is contaminated by its ontological environment, that is to say fiction.