The Links between Fiction and Rhetoric

Richard Walsh’s paper persuasively argues that fiction supports the communicative, rhetorical function of literature. Fictional plots and characters do indeed help us see the ways of the world and formulate value judgments about particular matters as well as about human condition in general. Epics, novels, plays, and movies tell stories that do not fully belong to the real world that surrounds us in order to make readers and spectators realize that human existence is not exactly what they thought it to be and, at the same time, recognize and better understand things they always silently sensed to be the case. When we attend a performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest or read the play, Prospero’s unheard-of magic powers astound us and, at the same time, invite us to sense how deeply usurpation and exile hurt their victims. As readers and spectators, therefore, we neither trust fully nor entirely mistrust fictional stories. Rather, we identify the areas of human experience highlighted by these stories and allow ourselves to resonate to the situations and actions involved, while at the same time reflecting explicitly or tacitly on their merit and appeal.

During the performance of The Tempest spectators see that Prospero’s magic powers are an invention rather than a faithful rendition of what usually happens on Mediterranean islands. They appreciate the author’s art of taking them away from their daily world to an unknown space populated both by seductive and less seductive beings. If, by chance, a young spectator concluded that magicians like Prospero and spirits like Ariel exist in the actual world, people familiar with literary fiction could explain that for a long time myths, legends, fairytales, and old historical narratives did indeed take the existence of magic and spirits for granted. The supernatural facet of life, however, slowly ceased to be part of our general assumptions about the actual world and became a trace of our earlier collective imagination. Thus, even when literary works describe literally implausible situations—as are Prospero and Ariel’s powers and actions—they still aim at showing us the true worth of various human passions and actions. The tempest, the shipwreck, Prospero and Ariel’s ways of maneuvering the kidnapped characters do not strike readers and spectators as a credible counterfactual facet of the actual world. Yet they blend smoothly with Antonio and Alonso’s earlier intrigues to depose Prospero from his position as legitimate Duke of Milan and exile him and his daughter, with Prospero’s own deep grievance, with his mild reprisal, and with his generous projects for the future. Consequently, the play sounds, if not vividly plausible, at least valid as an example of ideal moral attitudes, in other words, as a worthy development of a praising or blaming (i.e., epideictic) discourse.

I speak of “ideal attitudes” rather than accurate facts because literary works present us fictional situations that go far beyond concrete behavioral and historical data (although such data are usually present, from Homer’s epics to the most recent mystery novels) in order better to bring the norms and values that guide human life to the reader’s mind and heart. These norms and values are in some cases evoked in their national and historical specificity, as it happens in many nineteenth-century historical novels, beginning with Waverley by Walter Scott, or in a more general way, as is the case with Shakespeare’s comedies and romances. The public is in both cases transported from its original place to the world imagined by the literary work, be it the rather credible eighteenth-century Scotland or the magic island in The Tempest. At the level of perceptible situations and actions, crossing the distance from the factual world to the worlds of fiction can therefore be more or less laborious. The distance from contemporary Chicago, where I live nowadays, to the Highlands Edward Waverley visited at the time of the Jacobite rebellion (1745) is reasonably easy to cross, given that Scott’s novel respects the empirical data of the world it presents. The distance from any actual place to Shakespeare’s Tempest...