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  • Fait et fiction: pour une frontière par Françoise Lavocat
  • Erika Fülöp
Fait et fiction: pour une frontière. Par Françoise Lavocat. (Poétique.) Paris: Seuil, 2016. 640 pp.

This study sets out to defend fiction against the ‘menac[e] de dissolution’ Françoise Lavocat argues it faces (p. 13). One threat is the phenomenon of ‘storytelling’ in the sense laid out by Christian Salmon’s Storytelling: la machine à fabriquer des histoires et à formater les esprits (Paris: La Découverte, 2007), which highlights how political and commercial discourses use the power of narratives to seduce the masses, thereby discrediting narratives and fictionality. The other culprit is critical theory from the 1960s to the 1990s. Arguing that no discourse can be purely factual and that consequently what we know as history is also just fiction, Barthes, Ricœur, Veyne, Foucault, Lacan, and Hayden White, Lavocat claims, undermined the distinction between fact and fiction, radically expanding the latter. Baudrillard and Lyotard, meanwhile, inspired Japanese theorists Masachi Osawa and Hiroki Azuma to declare the end of the age of fiction under the impact of cyberculture. It can be objected, however, that such ‘panfictionalist’ approaches are hardly dominant today and that most of them do not deny the existence of the real, but simply show the distorting nature of discourse or introduce a new ontological category: the simulacrum or the virtual, which are distinct from fiction. The nature of the alleged threat thus remains blurry: is it a dissolution of ontological or discursive borders that has already taken place, a risk we are facing, or something that is not the case but that some theorists think may be imminent? Lavocat also states that ‘[n]otre époque ne peut s’empêcher de présupposer ces frontières et de les poser comme une exigence normative, sans que leur tracé soit explicité ni stabilisé’ (p. 293). The image of the enemy outlined in the first part is less important than the defence, however, which forms the core contribution of the book, consisting of a comprehensive and thorough overview of the history and current state of all things fictional or that play with ontological boundaries. The second part focuses on cultures and beliefs, retracing the history of the distinction between fact and fiction back to medieval Japanese monogatari, contesting the received idea that the modern West invented it. Lavocat also questions the indispensability of fiction, which the anthropological perspective reveals to be an ‘anomalie anthropologique’ (p. 212), before discussing how the distinction becomes indispensable once it appeared, as cases of blasphemy, lawsuits attacking fictional or semi-fictional works, or psychological trauma due to aggression against one’s online avatar well illustrate. The last part turns to logical and ontological considerations, and tackles the case of paradoxes and border-crossing, concluding that these phenomena also rely on the distinction between fact and fiction. Overall, Lavocat examines everything from tribal rituals to massively multiplayer online games, with copious references to literature from East and West and from classical to contemporary times, drawing on arguments from semiotics, narratology, history, philosophy, anthropology, cognitive science, and more. The book is thus the most erudite demonstration that logically and ontologically, socially and politically, cognitively and pragmatically, we cannot dispense with the distinction between fact and fiction.

Erika Fülöp
Lancaster University
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