Monthly Archive for June, 2010

What is the problem of fiction? A standard view points to an arbitrary selection of sentences in a novel, notes that they are not true, and proceeds to discuss why we aren’t taking the author to court. How astounding that we should accept such obviously deficient statements! It is only an understanding of fictionality, we tell ourselves, that allows us to cope with this profound irritation.

But this common view, while not exactly false and definitely useful for philosophical reflection in literary theory, can blind us for the simple fact that such irritation hardly ever occurs in real life. It paints a picture of modern audiences that read a novel, or watch a movie, or play a computer game, and experience amazement at the preposterous claims in the material, only to eventually calm their sense of irritation and betrayal by concluding, with a collective sigh of relief, that it wasn’t meant to be real. But that whole journey from factual interpretation through confusion into resolution does not usually take place at all, and when we focus on it to explain fiction, we might well miss some of fiction’s real effects and problems.

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