The Distinction of Fiction (review)

The Distinction of Fiction. By Dorrit Cohn. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. ix + 197 pp. $42.00 hardcover.

The relationship between fiction and nonfiction has always been a problematic one, and since Aristotle, there has been no dearth of apologists for the serious nature of imaginary works of literature. In the eighteenth century, it was common practice to preface novels with evidence of their authenticity. The convention of the manuscript found in a desk drawer or the discovered diary were attempts not so much to persuade readers of a work's authenticity, but to urge readers to approach them with the same seriousness as a nonfictional piece of writing. For although not true in the historical sense, fiction has always laid claim to its own kind of idiosyncratic "truth." In the late twentieth century, the situation seems to have been reversed (at least among literary critics)--historical writing has been charged to defend itself against accusations of fabulation. Most such claims are strained at best. Since both historical and fictional writing enchain causally connected events in a temporal sequence, goes the argument, and since causal relations between events cannot be proven logically but only inferred from experience (as Hume demonstrated long ago), the connection between events, or narrative, is essentially nothing more than a human projection with no claims to authenticity; it cannot describe the way things really are "out there," whatever that means.

In her latest work, the doyenne of American narratology Dorrit Cohn cites such deconstructivist critiques to launch her own discussion of the ontological status of fiction, the Distinction, as her title reads, of Fiction. What is fiction, and how does it relate to other forms of writing? Is it possible to determine its necessary and sufficient properties? Recently, such questions have been treated mostly by philosophers of language, especially speech-act theorists, and, as Dorrit Cohn points out in her preface, it is odd that such a textually based methodology as narratology has not investigated these issues earlier. Cohn is not the first narratologist to take on questions of fictional ontology (see for example Gérard Genette's Fiction et diction, 1991 and Thomas Pavel's Fictional Worlds, 1986), but what Cohn brings to the debate is what lies at the heart of her classic study of narrative form Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (1978), that is, a focus on voice or person. By concentrating on the psychic or vocal origin of texts that seem to straddle the fictional/nonfictional divide--such as biography, autobiography, and historical fiction--she distills three formal criteria that may be used to mark out the boundaries of fiction. These are her "Signposts of Fictionality" (the title of chapter 7).

Cohn's first formal indicator is cognitive privilege (traditionally referred to as omniscience): in the realm of fiction alone is an author conventionally entitled to portray the private subjective experiences of another human being. Biographers may speculate on their subjects' private thoughts, but any psychic insights are usually qualified with something along the lines of, "He or she must have been thinking . . ." Indeed, argues Cohn, the most imaginative biographer would be hard put to justify the type of omniscience Tolstoy uses in The Death of Ivan Ilych, where the author presents us with the direct psychological experience of a man passing from the living to the dead.

There is more to this first signpost than mere mind-reading, however. Not only are we privy to a character's mental life in certain types of fiction, but we often experience time and space from a character's perspective as well. Hence, only in fiction do we come across such grammatically odd constructions as, "His plane left tomorrow," where the past tense refers not to the past in relation to the speaker (the narrator), but rather to the present of a fictional character looking forward to the following day (24-25).

This criterion holds, of course, only for works narrated in...