Ten Theses against Fictionality

It is well known that classical narratology derived its categories from narratives of prose fiction. And it is largely accepted that to fully address the phenomenon of narrative, narratology needs also to account not only for narrative fiction across media, but for non-fictional narratives, from conversational storytelling to political rhetoric. A consequence of this transmedial, interdisciplinary expansion of the field is the realization that narratologists have tended to take fiction itself for granted and thus need to engage with the concept of fictionality as much as the concept of narrativity. On the one hand, we have calls for a fiction-specific approach to narrative, which Dorrit Cohn once suggested could be called fictionology (“Signposts” 110).¹ On the other hand, we have calls for a general approach to fictionality across all narratives, fictional and non-fictional. At stake here is the broader question of the theoretical relation between fictionality and narrativity in the wake of the narrative turn across the humanities and social sciences.

Fictionality as a nominal field of study emerged in the 1970s and 1980s within philosophy of language and logic rather than literary theory, and was explicitly framed as a debate between semantics and pragmatics.² The former often drew on modal logic to discuss the propositional value of fictional statements; and the latter was inspired by speech act theory to discuss how fiction works as a form of communication which does not rely on literal truth statements. These debates were particularly concerned with the referentiality of proper names and focused on the study of individual sentences rather than the genre of fiction.

Dorrit Cohn’s well known 1990 article, “Signposts of Fictionality: A Narratological Perspective,” was an attempt to correct the overwhelming pragmatic bias of these early debates. However, Cohn’s main concern was to counteract the postmodern conflation of narrative and fiction, which she defined as “nonreferential narrative.” Her method, which connects her work to earlier linguistic approaches to literature offered by Käte Hamburger and Ann Banfield, was to distinguish fiction from nonfiction by identifying textual elements that signal its status as fiction (including the presentation of characters’ thought and the duplicate vocal origin of author/narrator), and, in doing so, caution against the straightforward application of narratological categories to a discipline such as historiography.

The question of signposts and the broader philosophical question of fictionality gained momentum in the ensuing decades and continue to be debated, but the latest incarnation has been given impetus by the challenge to narratology proposed by the inimitable Richard Walsh, who asserts, in The Rhetoric of Fictionality (2007), that his “book is symptomatic of a growing sense of paradigm shift” (3) enabling him to “re-examine fundamental questions in narrative theory through the prism of a new conception of the rhetorical nature of fictionality” (7).³

Walsh argues from a pragmatic perspective that there are no necessary or sufficient textual indicators that determine the generic status of fiction, and that we recognize fiction only by its context, that is, by the fact that a work is presented and received as fiction. His point is that fictionality is not a quality of the genre of fiction, but “a feature of communicative rhetoric” which can be found across a range of discourses from history to biography. These claims have been made before. For instance, in 1980, Siegfried Schmidt wrote, “Fictionality is not a quality of TEXTE but a quality attributed to KOMMUNIKATE” (“Fictionality” 539). And in the same year, Wildekamp, Van Montfoort, and Van Ruiswijk argue that “fictional utterances occur not only in ‘literary’ texts but constitute a general social phenomenon in all sorts of communication situations” (565). Walsh’s specific aim, however, is to redirect narratology away from ontological questions when addressing narrative fiction.

Walsh dispenses quickly with existing philosophical theories of fictionality by arguing that they “can be collectively understood as gestures of disavowal” (14) because they frame fictionality as a problem of truth yet seek to resolve it “by detaching the fictive act from the domain of truth, that is, language” (15). In particular he argues against the pretense model of speech act theory—that fiction...