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.
We know what a novel, a movie and a computer game are when we encounter them, and we know what to do with them. In the best cases, we are indeed amazed, and quite possibly irritated and confused, by many aspects of the work. One of those aspects could well be its fictionality. But the mere observation that these media do not fit our sense of reality only comes up in very specific cases; its contemplation is neither a general quality of all fiction, nor of all literary narrative or art. Nor do we entertain, at least not in most cases and certainly not in all, an explicit notion that the fiction contradicts reality. We never apply a logical sensor for contradiction in the first place, no more than we try to treat a painting as if it were the depicted object, or a menu as if it were food. In each of these cases, we do not start off by confusing images, words and meanings with some other reality, bump into a wall, and then file the experience under its appropriately named deviance. There is no deviance, because concrete truth is not a norm; looking at something as fictional is not, in and of itself, more or less work than reflecting on its philosophical truth.
To challenge that view of fiction as a mere deviance from a factual norm is to confront at least three prejudices on the subject, each of which, I believe, is typical for a specifically modern view of fiction and indeed of art, but none of which should be allowed to stand as generally claimed systematic truths.
First, the deviance view assumes a simple binarism, by which fictionality and factuality proceed from one another by mutual negation. A third alternative is grudgingly accorded to conscious deceit, but within the realm of acceptable and successful discourse, a statement either makes a claim to truth or it doesn’t, rendering it as factual or fictional. But on closer examination, we don’t check for or expect concrete truth in many statements and depictions in our life; and among the many non-veritudinal programs that we employ every day, not and all and yet many different ones apply to fiction. So neither is factuality a norm, nor is it or its fictional counterpart a monolith.
Which is why secondly, the deviance view avoids discussion of the many positive qualifications of fiction: Aesthetic functions, performative and deliberative modalities of thought, emotional engagement, humor, and so on. Even the famous creation of possible worlds has been reduced, in many albeit not all theories of fictionality that employ the term, to the entertaining of a merely-possible world, as if possibility were actuality’s poor cousin. But of course, it isn’t; even within a strictly philosophical context, most would agree that whatever is real is possible. But if that is the case, then depicting a possible world is one name for what we do when we depict the actual world, and it alone cannot be fiction’s virtue.
And finally, all of this assumes that we have one monolithic sense of reality in the first place, so we may differentiate fiction by its deviance from it. This is usually the point where we start drumming our fingers on tabletops to illustrate reality, a somewhat helpless gesture under the best epistemological circumstances. You might or might not think that you can reassure yourself of existence by banging your hand against it (it’s certainly not the worst way); but that’s not the point. The point is this: When did you last feel the need to drum against a table because you saw a fictional person do fictional stuff on TV?
Sometimes, that need does arise. But it does not emerge from fictionality as such, and so it should neither be used to explain what fictionality is, nor should art that destabilizes our sense of reality be reduced to fictionality. Meanwhile, fiction’s real problems arise elsewhere. They come up when a fictional object switches from the context of one habitual program to another without warning: That is the case when Mickey Mouse returns as antisemitic Farfour, or when the Justice League from DC’s superhero comics becomes a template for a group of anti-griefing griefers in the virtual world of Second Life. The distinction between fact and fiction is unperturbed in these cases — nobody wonders whether Mickey and Farfour are real man-sized mice — and yet these are the real scandals of fictionality, and they deserve a lot more attention: For they are both a source for knowledge about fiction, and the field where that knowledge is needed.
(These thoughts are brought on by the fruitful and fascinating discussions during last weekend’s third workshop of Remigius Bunia’s Netzwerk Fiktion. My thanks once more for the invitation, the organisation, and to everyone who joined the discussion.)
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