Synchronous Fictions

Iam grateful to Bruce Holsinger for soliciting these thoughtful and thought-provoking responses to my and Julie Orlemanski's articles. They expand the temporal and geographical parameters of our arguments in crucial ways. Together they insist on the contingent nature of fiction, not just across particular times and places but inside them. They show too how fiction resists transparency, with Sarah M. Allen and Jack W. Chen, for instance, writing that "part of the difficulty in assessing the nature of fictiveness in medieval Chinese narrative is there was no clear distinction between more and less fictional narratives."1 In my reading of travel literature in the Latin West, that haziness is more a feature than a bug: opting not to distinguish degrees of fabularity, its authors also chose not to draw clear boundaries around truth and falsehood. I focus on marvels as puzzling phenomena whose appeal is based at least partly on their ontological indeterminacy. These marvels are more provocative as possibilities that can be neither proven nor definitively disproven than they are as pure inventions or clear facts. I suggest that this indeterminancy points to a feature that is more broadly visible (although certainly not everywhere) within the literature of the medieval Latin West: a fondness for situations where questions of truth and falsehood are bracketed or unresolved. I turn briefly to medieval theories of imagination in order to suggest that the faculty was piqued precisely by such irresolution. John Mandeville, as I read him, leans into such uncertainty. This irresolution is neither a universal feature of late medieval Western European literature, nor one confined only to it. I do think, however, that it is especially prominent in the period's literature, as suggested by its fondness for marvels. I focus on marvels in travel literature because they resist Gallagherian dismissals of premodern literature particularly well. Both Orlemanski and Katharine Eisaman Maus stress the protean nature of both fiction and fiction's conception of truth. As Maus writes, "In different genres, in other words, different kinds of events present as 'true.'"2 The special power of marvels is that they play with that very murkiness—maybe marvels are true, maybe they are not, and it is hard to know one way or the other—and turn it to their advantage.