Fiction and Instruction

In his important and thought-provoking essay, Richard Walsh presents his rhetorical version of fictionality as a resource integral to direct communication, arguing that fictionality is a specific use of discourse and part of the pragmatics of communication. I find Walsh’s presentation in many ways helpful in its careful and wide-ranging consideration of the merits of the rhetoric of fictionality, although his tone is occasionally quite polemic and his theoretical discussion might benefit from concrete literary examples. My response to his target essay consists of two parts: first, I try to read his model of rhetoric of fictionality in relation to the established paradigm of the rhetorical theory of narrative; and second, I aim to test his idea of fiction’s communicative and informative value in the light of recent environmental fiction and its combination of mimetic and didactic—or entertaining and instructive—aspects.

At the outset, it may be interesting to note Walsh’s critical departure from the tradition of the rhetorical criticism represented by the Chicago School. More than that, it may be surprising to realize that he all but dismisses that tradition as yet another version of a representational approach to fictionality, one which focuses on the products of the communicative process, not, he argues, on the communicative act itself. Doing this, Walsh also reads the pioneering work of Wayne C. Booth as a representative of an intra-fictional communication model, which dissociates fictive discourse from its contexts in the real world (Walsh, “Fictionality as Rhetoric” 412). But the narratological version of the communication model—with fictional agents in hierarchical relationships to each other—was developed by Seymour Chatman (whose “canonical diagram” Walsh refers to in a footnote [422n5]). In this structuralistically informed model there is no room for real authors and real readers, but instead the communication proceeds in a virtual world of imaginary beings and textual agents.

Rather surprisingly, Walsh argues that James Phelan’s way of adapting and expanding Chatman’s narratological version of the communication model ultimately also falls back into a representational model of fiction, that is, into intra-fictionality (422). However, in Phelan’s recent work, that intrafictional communication model between narrators and narratees is actually expanded to include real authors and implied authors as their streamlined versions outside the fictional frame as well as actual and authorial audiences (see Phelan, Somebody Telling 25–29). Indeed, the previously water-tight structuralist frame gradually breaks down in Phelan’s more flexible model, which suggests that narrative is not a structure but an action.

Still, Walsh’s return to Plato is most refreshing in our age of neo-Aristotelian poetics, that is, the governing narratological tradition, which foregrounds the mimetic aspects of narratives, including characters, actions, and objects in the represented fictional realm. Walsh is also careful to stress that Plato’s diegesis, according to which the poet speaks in his own person, is a fundamentally different concept from Gérard Genette’s diégèse, which refers to the represented diegetic world (403). In this Platonic vein, Walsh also constructed one of his best known, and most polemic, theses according to which in narrative fiction the narrator is either a represented character or the author—there is no room for intermediate figures such as Genette’s infamous extradiegetic–heterodiegetic narrator, not to mention the darling of the rhetorical theory of narrative, the implied author (see Walsh, Rhetoric 69–85). As mentioned, I regard Walsh’s recuperation of Plato’s distinction and his return to the author as a source of fiction’s communicative act and intent an important and welcome move, and a helpful way of using Occam’s razor in the narratological field where an intra-fictional technical concept begets an intra-fictional technical concept.

That said, one wonders whether Walsh, otherwise a most jovial person, is also somewhat Platonic in another sense, willing to bar the fellow theorists from his ideal republic of fictionality because their highly developed, and sometimes Homeric, theories of narrative and fiction do not correspond to his version (although he does reflect that under certain circumstances “it is futile to legislate...