Fiction: Serious Business or Play-World for the Imagination?

Richard Walsh may be the most brilliant devil’s advocate currently active in narratology. He has tackled a wide variety of subject matters (narrators, emotion toward characters, narrativity of music, emergence in narrative, video games, literary cartography), displaying an encyclopedic knowledge and an ever-curious and critical mind that never adopts an easy or widespread position. After slaying (or at least confronting) the third person impersonal narrator, he is now taking on the leading theories of fiction and the currently popular notion of world (Wolf). In this paper, he proposes a theory of fiction that breaks with the notions generally proposed as cornerstones of fictionality, such as pretense, nonseriousness, make-believe, nonasserted propositions, lack of reference, reference to other worlds, and even invention (though this one was central to Nielsen, Phelan, and Walsh, “Ten Theses”), and he replaces them with a conception of fiction as rhetorical resource. What does this formula mean?

Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines rhetoric as “the study of writing or speaking as a means of communication or persuasion.” The term rhetoric has wide currency in narratology; it is generally associated with an approach to narrative concerned with the strategies through which narrative information is efficiently conveyed to the audience. In this perspective, narrative uses rhetorical resources, without necessarily being one itself. But Walsh is concerned with fiction, not with narrative, and his purpose is to capture the essence of fiction. For him, fiction does not simply display rhetorical resources, it is itself a rhetorical resource to which people resort for a certain type of communicative purpose.¹ He reviews an impressive number of theories in order to show how they all miss the communicative nature of fiction. This blindness can be attributed to two major factors.

The first consists of defining fiction negatively as “nonserious” utterance (Austin), “affirming nothing” (Sir Philip Sidney), merely “pretending” to perform speech acts (Searle), or “entertaining (or presenting) propositions unasserted” (Carroll), while failing to specify the purpose of this attitude, or operation. This deficiency could, however, be easily remedied by adding a clause that captures the intent of the sender in positive terms.

The second cause of blindness to communication resides in the postulation of an imaginary world, or fictional world as the target of an act of make-believe that creates, in the most successful cases, an experience of immersion. Being myself a proponent of the notion of fictional world (Ryan, Possible Worlds), or more broadly of storyworld, a concept that covers the semantic domain of both fictional and factual narratives (Ryan, “From Possible Worlds to Storyworlds”), I feel particularly challenged by this position. According to Walsh: “It is not just that fictional-worlds approaches have nothing to say about communicative purposes; it is that they actually foreclose the possibility that the distinctiveness of fiction might have something to do with its communicative use” (“Fictionality as Rhetoric” 401). Why could the creation of an imaginary world, and the invitation extended to the audience to use this world as a “prop in a game of make-believe,” to borrow Walton’s formula, not constitute an act of communication? The reason lies in Walsh’s conception of communication. In his ontological model, there is only one world, the real world. It follows that all communication must refer to this world. If fiction is defined as referring to another world, it cannot be regarded as communication; and since rhetoric is essentially a means of communication, a rhetorical theory is incompatible with a conception of fiction as a world-creating activity. Though Walsh does not state explicitly that fictional communication must be about reality, this idea is made clear in the 2015 article coauthored by Nielsen et al. that introduced the rhetorical theory of fiction: “Fictive discourse is not ultimately a means of constructing scenarios that are cut off from the actual world, but rather a means of negotiating an engagement with that world” (63).

Walsh’s restriction of communication to messages that concern the real world derives from his conception of meaning, which is inspired by Wilson and Sperber’s theory of meaning as relevance. This...