Changing Overcoats: Villiers’ “L’Intersigne” and the Authority of Fiction

Changing Overcoats: Villiers’ “L’Intersigne” and the Authority of Fiction Ross Chambers TTEMPTS AT A LIMITING DEFINITION OF THE FANTASTIC are bound to fail because the fantastic is at once a specific genre (a part of literature) and something that is specific to litera­ ture (and so coextensive with it). A recent paper by Catherine Lowe pro­ poses persuasively that the fantastic is the manifestation in literature of that which eludes theory, and consequently of that ungraspable uncanni­ ness that defines the literary itself.1I will follow her lead in not worrying too much about the fantastic as a specific genre (or even—to use Rose­ mary Jackson’s word—mode2 ) but I will take the fantastic to be para­ digmatic of the general category of the fictional, for my interest is in learning from it what it can teach about the intriguing problem of the authority of fictional narrative. Fictional authority poses many questions: some major ones are the following. How is it that a text presented as, and recognized as, a “ fic­ tion” —as non-factual, untrue, a fabrication—can acquire authority, in the sense that it is accorded attention by empirical readers? What kind of authority can this be (what kind of attention does such a text draw)? And—even more curiously—how is it that such texts acquire authority by figuring their own acquisition of authority?3To these questions I pro­ pose first to supply rather sketchy “ answers” that correspond to the hypotheses I am currently working with, and then to test their explana­ tory value by undertaking a brief reading of “ L’Intersigne.” 4 A fictional text simulates the transmission of information from a “ narrator” to a “ narratee.” Thus, in “ L’Intersigne,” a general narrator reports to a general narratee an event which, as it happens, is another act of storytelling. To a group of friends (“ gens de pensée” ) gathered around a fireside and taking tea on a winter’s evening (propitious cir­ cumstances for an effective tale), a pale young man contributed a story because it concerned a topic of interest (“ la nature de ces coincidences qui...” ) that had arisen in conversation: V o l . XXVIII, No.3 63 L ’E s p r i t C r é a t e u r —Voici une histoire, nous dit-il, que je n’accompagnerai d’aucun commentaire. Elle est véridique. Peut-être la trouverez-vous impressionnante. Nous allumâmes nos cigarettes et nous écoutâmes... (p. 219). Because of the absence of commentary, both the audience of baron Xavier’s story and the general narratee are left to draw their own conclu­ sions concerning the relevance of the story to the “ nature” of certain coincidences; but that is not really the point. The point is for the tale to work its effect, to be “ impressionnant.” And so the rest of the text (a fiction)5records its (fictive) storyteller’s (fictive) story as (fictively) told to the (fictive) narratees. Contrary to the baron’s assertion, there is absolutely nothing “ véridique” here. Nor is the frame-story necessarily any more truthful—and even if it were, it would be entirely pointless if the framed narrative did not itself carry the force of authority. The narratees (the group of friends listening to the baron’s tale, but also the general narratee), are clearly produced as receiving the stories as acts of veridiction. But any reader—as distinct from the narratees produced in the text—who might seek truthful knowl­ edge here (that is, the transmission of information that could be accepted and acted upon as, in some sense, factual or real) would be a naïve reader, that is, not a “ reader” at all. Yet, the fact that empirical readers of fiction nevertheless simulate a belief in narrative information of a fic­ tive kind6is a matter of common experience and observation; and it leads to the question: why? What, for a reader, is to be gained by reading in the narratee position, that is, by simulating an appropriate response to the rhetorical devices of “ faire croire” (here, the bald statement: “ Elle est véridique,” for instance) deployed by a fictive narrator anxious to produce interest...