Fiction as a Practice Peter Lamarque (bio) Richard Walsh offers an admirably clear outline of his own “rhetorical” theory of fiction, with pithy and telling commentary on certain theories that he rejects. As so often when an exercise of this kind is done well, readers will find themselves swept along by the arguments and nodding with agreement. This was certainly my experience, and I found the picture on offer—for the most part—both persuasive and congenial. The focus here will be on unpacking that tiresome “for the most part.” [End Page 472] Everyone comes to the topic of fiction from some perspective or other, and this of course will have a profound effect on the constraints in the discussion. My own perspective is that of the analytic philosopher, with a particular interest in aesthetics and the philosophy of literature. Even that perspective can have a wide scope. My fellow analytic aesthetician, Kendall Walton, discussed by Walsh, has a view of fiction rather different from my own, and is prepared to countenance as “fictions” such things as paintings, dolls, and toy trucks. Not much sign of “rhetoric” there! But Walton’s target is an account of representation in general, and he stipulates that the terms “fiction” and “representation,” in his sense, are interchangeable. The point about perspectives is important. Walsh throughout is critical of theories of fiction that give prominence to reference, semantics, ontology, or “worlds.” He has good reasons why he wants to distance his own rhetorical account, involving fiction as a communicative act, from definitions of “fiction” based on those approaches. However, there is no inevitable conflict between his theory and other well-established enquiries, characteristic of analytic philosophy, drawing on different aspects of fiction and raising distinct sets of questions: enquiries into, for example, “empty names” and “negative existentials” (Everett and Hofweber), the logic of fiction (Woods), the metaphysics of fiction (Thomasson), emotion and fiction (Hjort and Laver), or the worlds of fiction (Wolterstorff). Needless to say, there is no reason why Walsh should agree with what philosophers say on these topics—the accounts are controversial and varied—but I am assuming he would not want to reject altogether the very enterprises involved. In other words, enquiries into fiction that centre on reference, semantics, and ontology seem entirely legitimate from the different perspectives they represent, relative to their own distinct framework of questions. Walsh makes a passing reference to a work I coauthored with Stein Haugom Olsen (Lamarque and Olsen—hereafter L and O), remarking that the model proposed in that book is “congruent with a rhetorical approach” but is to be rejected on the grounds that it “turns out to hinge upon a recuperation of Coleridge’s suspension of disbelief” (Walsh, “Fictionality as Rhetoric” 405). In fact, “suspension of disbelief” does not figure (by name) in that early book, but in a later book of mine the notion is briefly dissected for its possible meanings and set aside as unhelpful (Philosophy of Literature 213). Be that as it may (the phrase is unimportant), the idea that in recognising fictionality a reader adopts a “stance” constraining attitudes and expectations in response, is central to my view. I wonder, though, how different it is au fond to [End Page 473] Walsh’s view. On Walsh’s account our response to fiction rests on a “cognitive assumption that a rhetoric of fictionality is in play; an assumption that has the effect of minimising expectations of an utterance’s directly informative relevance” (“Fictionality as Rhetoric” 411): indeed, even more unequivocally, “to assume the fictionality of an utterance is to understand it independently of any directly informative relevance” (416). Furthermore, fictionality calls for a “reorientation of communicative attention achieved by the contextual assumption of fictionality itself” (412) and “elicits a specific range of cognitive effects” (413); “it has a basic effect upon the way in which the audience seeks to realise the relevance of the communication” (412). And in The Rhetoric of Fictionality, he writes: “The distinction between fiction and nonfiction rests upon the rhetorical use to which a narrative is put, which is to say, the kind of interpretative response it invites in being presented as one or the other...