Fiction and History, Form versus Function

Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. ix + 197 pp.

In her new book, Dorrit Cohn attributes to fiction a "distinction" in two senses of the word: uniqueness and differentiation. Cohn attempts to uphold the distinction between the fictional and the nonfictional (mainly historiographic) narrative domains as a reaction to a prevailing critical climate (deconstructionist, poststructuralist, postmodernist) that has developed in the last decades and has tended to blur the borderlines between fiction and nonfiction—usually by declaring that "everything is fiction." Such claims are based, in most cases, on two kinds of argumentation (possibly combined). The first is motivated by the growing skepticism regarding our ability to reach a consensus about "facts" and their nature; the second stems from the growing awareness that even texts claiming to have a nonfictional status are highly structured or "emplotted," perhaps no less so than fictional texts. Cohn attempts to expose the fallacies inherent in such argumentation and to demonstrate that fictional texts possess both a unique status and unique textual features.

The book's opening chapter surveys different meanings of the term fiction; Cohn claims that its literary-critical meaning needs to be limited to "the genre of nonreferential narrative." The sequel includes two "pivotal" chapters (2 and 7) that deal with the book's main topics from a broad theoretical perspective and suggest general criteria of fictionality. In the other chapters, Cohn attempts to apply those criteria to works that are especially interesting or problematic with regard to their fictional—or nonfictional—status.

In chapter 2 ("Fictional versus Historical Lives"), Cohn proposes a set of criteria for discriminating historical from fictional narratives that center on individual lives. In this context, Cohn largely follows K�te Hamburger's well-known book The Logic of Literature (1973 [1968]): in order to draw the borderlines between history and fiction, she argues, it is essential to separate two main "regimes" of narrative form—that of "third-person" and that of "first-person." ¹ Unlike Hamburger, though, Cohn does not banish the whole first-person regime from the fictional domain. She contends, instead, that fictional narratives in this regime are much more similar to historical narratives than those in the third-person regime and, therefore, that in each regime the borderlines between history and fictions are differently drawn.

As for third-person fictional narratives, Cohn in fact repeats Hamburger's principal argument, claiming that the "crux" of fictionality is to be found in the narrator's ability "[to convey] the intimate subjective experiences of its characters, the here and now of their lives to which no real observer could ever accede in real life" (24). ² This ability creates "a distinctive epistemology," which is illegitimate in the domain of third-person historical biography. In first-person narratives, on the other hand, the reigning epistemology is similar to that of historical narratives in the same regime, since both are based on the narrator's inability to penetrate the consciousness of characters other than himself or herself. Therefore, a basic formal similarity exists between historical and fictional narratives in this regime, and as a result "the referential nature of autobiography can only be theoretically secured by a shift of emphasis from its content [or modes of presenting that content] to its speaker. . . . It hinges quite simply on the ontological status of its speaker . . . his identity or nonidentity with the author in whose name the narrative has been published" (31–32).

The next four chapters apply these criteria to works that appear to problematize and/or subvert them and thereby constitute interesting test cases. Chapter 3 examines Freud's case histories with a view to demonstrating their historical status in the face of the current tendency of treating them as fictional: Cohn surveys Freud's stated intentions regarding the nature of his case histories as well as reviewing these case histories themselves. Chapter 4 discusses Proust's A la Recherche...