Commentary on “Fictionality as Rhetoric”

I am grateful for the invitation to comment on Richard Walsh’s paper. It strikes me as a matter of regret that, although there is a community in literary studies and a community in philosophy both working on the nature of fiction, there are not more attempts to find common ground. Hence we all have cause to be grateful for to Walsh for venturing his thoughts on the matter. I have learned a lot—it is difficult, for example, not to be impressed by how much people in literature know; the bibliography alone is enough to make a philosopher blush.

Having said all that, I must admit to being puzzled by the positive proposal. It appears to be something like this. There are some views that define fiction in terms of the language referring not to the real world, but to some nonactual world. That is a mistake. Instead, fiction is defined in terms of (broadly) what happens at the level of utterance—not considered as a type, but as an event in its full contextual particularity. It is an instance of rhetoric. However, and this is my problem, I cannot see that categorising it under “rhetoric” helps much. Consider two scenarios. In the first, my wife is about to pick up a pan that I know to be burning hot. Panicking, I point and shout “AAAHHH!!!” She does not pick up the pan. That is, I utter a sound that she hears, and this guides her behaviour. My verbalisation is pretty much equivalent to, and would have had the same effect as, my shoving her, throwing something at her, or waving my arms about. Second, consider a piece of rhetoric proper, say Anthony saying of Brutus that he is an honourable man. For Anthony’s rhetoric to have the desired effect his audience would, unlike my wife, need to grasp the meaning of what has been said. Thus, claiming that a sentence is uttered rhetorically does not excuse one from providing, or, at least, relying on, an account of what that sentence means. However, that surely is the tricky part of the debate. And that, as far as I can see, is absent from Walsh’s paper.

However, help is at hand. Walsh, as we have seen, rejects the view that fictional discourse is such because it refers to nonactual entities. He also claims that “to assume the fictionality of an utterance is to understand it independently of any directly informative relevance” (416). Furthermore, he claims that fictionality is a matter of what people do with the language. All these claims, and more, dovetail perfectly with probably the best extant account of what it is for something to be fictional: that of Kendall Walton. After all, as he makes clear in Part Four of Mimesis As Make Believe, Walton entirely rejects any kind of account that requires reference to fictional entities. Hence, Walsh can, I suspect, get everything he wants by simply co-opting Walton’s theory. There might be thought to be an obstacle to this—namely, that Walsh has himself refuted Walton’s theory in the course of writing his paper. Perhaps fortunately for success of his project, this is not the case.

The substance of Walsh’s criticism is that Walton holds that we have “no genuine emotional involvement with fiction at all” (405). This, however, is a misreading of Walton. Indeed, Walton has said explicitly, when commenting in a later paper on the reaction to his theory, “it goes without saying that we are genuinely moved by novels and films and plays, that we respond to works of fiction with real emotion . . . . My make-believe theory was designed to help explain our emotional responses to fiction, not to call their very existence into question” (Walton 38). Walsh attributes to Walton the view that “engagement with fictions involves quasi-emotions, themselves part of a game.” However, for Walton, the term “quasi-emotion” refers to the “physiological–psychological component” of an emotion, whether that emotion is felt toward a fictional object or an actual object (Walton 196). Walton even gives examples of the...