Megalomania or Arbitrary Delimitations: The Scope of Fictionality?

Since The Rhetoric of Fictionality was published in 2007, it has had a big impact on narrative theory, eliciting multiple responses in a number of important publications. Additionally, it has been present in numerous panels at the annual conferences for the International Society of the Study of Narrative as well as starting vigorous debates on the society’s listserve. Its reformulations of core assumptions about narrative have been both contested and adopted (and in the latter case, often accommodated or reshaped to fit others’ agendas). There is no unifying or universally agreed upon theoretical take on a rhetorical approach to fictionality. The closest we get to that is probably the article “Ten Theses about Fictionality,” which is co-authored by Henrik Skov Nielsen, James Phelan, and Richard Walsh. In the first end-note, the shared vision is declared:

[W]e advance our ten theses as a foundation for a larger project built on the principle that fictionality [ . . . ] is a valuable, oft-employed means to affect our understanding of and reasoning about what is actual, factual, and real. The project’s ultimate goal is to develop a unified theory of fictionality that will offer a viable account of its manifestations across diverse genres and discourses [ . . . ].”

(Nielsen et al. 71n1)

In endnote two of the target essay, Walsh comments on the collaborative effort in “Ten Theses about Fictionality.” According to Walsh, “Ten Theses about Fictionality” articulates “a broader, collective rhetorical agenda” (i.e., broader than what is expressed in The Rhetoric of Fictionality), yet he also adds that it “elides some significant points of difference among rhetorical approaches, which are elucidated towards the end of this essay” (“Fictionality as Rhetoric” 422n2). The rhetoric of fictionality does not exist, but multiple, competing rhetorics of fictionality obtain and compete. Hence, Walsh’s target essay twelve years after the initial release of The Rhetoric of Fictionality is a timely addition to the debate about rhetoric, narrative, and fictionality. There is much to be admired in the target essay, not least the thoroughness and clarity with which Walsh distinguishes between different groups of approaches to fiction and fictionality in Section 1–5, the differences between various rhetorical accounts of fictionality, and how his take veers off from related positions.

One of the most interesting issues with rhetorical approaches to fictionality is the question of the scope of the theory, which is taken up by Walsh in Section 8 of the target essay. Here, he addresses fictionality in relation to counterfactuals, metaphor, and irony. Whereas most proponents of rhetorical approaches to fictionality can agree on the importance of perceiving of fictionality as a matter of optimizing relevance in a given communicative context, there is far less consensus on which actual rhetorical, local, and “localizeable” strategies might cause recipients of a message to assume that a rhetoric of fictionality is being invoked. As Walsh notes, once fictionality is “dissociated from generic fiction, a host of candidate utterances present themselves as possible instances of fictionality” (“Fictionality as Rhetoric” 416). Walsh suggests, then, that delimitations of scope “require further theoretical elaboration, or perhaps just a practical determination of conceptual boundaries” (416). We might label the dilemma here as one between the megalomania of the theory, on the one hand, and, on the other, the potential arbitrariness of deciding on such delimitations. Supporters of the notion that figurative language, for example, may belong to a rhetoric of fictionality would endorse the grandiosity of the theory’s scope. Walsh’s argument for not considering figurative language to belong to a rhetoric of fictionality, however, falls largely in the other category. Walsh states that “[i]diomatic usage resists calling metaphors fictions” (416; but does that preclude metaphors being employed as a rhetoric of fictionality?). Furthermore, the distinction between local and global conceptions of fictionality gives rise to speculations about “how local, how finely granular, manifestations of fictionality may be.” Walsh suggests a “principled basis” in which “fictionality is an utterance-level phenomenon, whereas metaphors function within utterances” (428). The relevance of the metaphor is, hence, established by the utterance. In cases where the metaphor constitutes...