Fictionality as a Rhetorical Resource for Dual Narrative Progression Dan Shen (bio) Fictionality may be viewed from different perspectives, each giving the most weight to one of the three entities involved in communication: the addresser, the message, and the addressee. Most previous approaches endeavor to reveal the fictional nature of the message, but some pragmatic investigations [End Page 495] try to show the determining force of the addressee and the context: whether a text is put on a shelf with the classifying label of “fiction” or on a shelf with the label of “nonfiction” and whether a reader reads the text as fiction or as nonfiction would give rise to drastically different interpretations in terms of the text’s fictionality (see, for instance, Kearns 2–14)1. What has been more or less neglected is the remaining entity: the addresser, who can be viewed either as a producer of fictionality as a product or as a user of fictionality as a helpful resource in communicating with the addressee. As pointed out by Walsh, most previous approaches to fictionality rely on a product-oriented understanding of fictionality based on its relation to truth that makes it radically different from nonfictionality and its relation to truth. If the addresser is brought into consideration, she or he will be viewed only as a creator of the product as fiction. By contrast, Walsh’s rhetorical approach, which shifts attention to the communicative process, views fictionality as a rhetorical resource, one that is utilized by the addresser in trying to affect the addressee. Walsh thinks that his rhetorical position is not shared by the widely adopted rhetorical approach as led first by Wayne Booth and then by James Phelan, and he refers to the classic narrative communication model proposed by Seymour Chatman in distinguishing the two rhetorical approaches (see the section “Rhetorical Accounts” in the target essay). But in effect Chatman’s model is based on a misunderstanding of the concept of the “implied author” put forward by Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction at the height of formalist criticism excluding the consideration of the author. In order to talk about the author as a prerequisite for rhetorical criticism, Booth used the metaphor of real author’s “creating” the implied author to make the latter appear textual. As I made clear in “What is the Implied Author?” (see also Shen “Booth’s,” “Implied”), if we examine Booth’s formulations carefully, we’ll find that Booth’s distinction between the implied author and the real author is no other than one between the author in the process of writing a text and the author in daily life—the implied author is the very writer of the text. Unfortunately, Booth’s “creating” metaphor formed an almost unavoidable pitfall for narrative theorists including Chatman, who confined the communication among “Implied author → Narrator → Narratee → Implied reader” to the text (Shen, “What” 88–89). To me, so long as rhetorical critics including Booth himself and Phelan in recent years are concerned with how the writer communicates with his intended audience and how individual readers react [End Page 496] differently to the communicative invitation, there is no essential difference between the Walsh and the Booth–Phelan rhetorical approaches, since both are concerned with how addressers utilize rhetorical resources to affect addressees. Phelan’s Somebody Telling Somebody Else, for instance, proposes a paradigm shift from viewing narrative as a structure to viewing it as a rhetorical action in which a teller deploys resources of storytelling for particular purposes in relation to particular audiences, a position in my view essentially compatible to that of Walsh. What is more, the Booth–Phelan line can help flesh out the “implicatures” generated by an understanding of fictionality as discourse designed to move away from direct informative relevance: in addition to cognitive effects as emphasized by Walsh, it highlights affect and ethics. It may be noted that the Booth–Phelan rhetorical line puts more emphasis on various narrative techniques as rhetorical resources such as point of view/focalization and narratorial unreliability. If attention is paid to fictionality, it is treated as one of many rhetorical resources (see Phelan, “Local Nonfictionality” and “Local Fictionality”). By contrast, Walsh, concerned...
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Mar 11, 2019
Peg Murray-Evans 
Open Access
