Troubles With Fiction

Abstract

In a recent contribution,1 Colin Falck has advanced the thesis that a certain type of approach to literature suffers from certain defects as a result of which it can shed no light on the aesthetic dimension of literary art. Falck develops his thesis via a sequence of subsidiary claims which are intended to demonstrate the need for an entirely different approach. The type of analysis under attack is labelled 'truth-conditional', and it is maintained that its proponents have introduced notions like 'makebelieve' and 'pretence' in order to account for the ways in which assertions made in fiction differ from those in real life (363). The 'truth-conditional' analysis is faulted for engaging with literature 'from an actuality-dependent or instrumental viewpoint' (363). This is something of a mischievous disjunction, since while there may well be an emphasis on the actuality-dependence of fiction in respect of its source material, it does not follow that there is anything 'instrumental' about it, in the sense that it precludes fiction from offering anything new or insightful as opposed to merely reinforcing common beliefs and prejudices. But there is a deeper confusion at work here, between 'fiction' and 'literature'. The latter notion is generally agreed to have a normative dimension; the former is not obviously normative at all. At the very least, Falck needed to say more at this point to dispel the impression that he has run the two together. Another contention is that certain kinds of fiction (described as 'poetry') do not make statements at all, and that therefore a statement-based analysis is severely compromised (364). But absence of statement-making in a discourse, poetical or otherwise, does not amount to absence of any anchorage (via reference, for example) to real things. In relation to Falck's own example from Blake (365), an apostrophic style of speech does not of itself render the subject-matter of the poem fictional rather than nonfictional. We are brought dangerously close to a further confusion of the fictional with the figurative or the non-literal. Of course one can fictionalize about something real, and one can speak figuratively about something real; but to do the one is not to do the other. Already there seems to be a problem determining exactly what Falck means by 'fiction'. The difficulty is hardly assisted by the cryptic assertion that 'not all fictions create worlds' (365). At this point one is