Truth of fiction <em>versus</em> truth in fiction
10.13125/2039-6597/3843
Literary experiments that combine verifiable statements and fictional invention have led to the often-expressed opinion that the border between fact and fiction is collapsing. In a time when concepts such as post-truth and truthiness threaten to replace the distinction between fact and fiction with panfictionality, it is imperative to find a way to accommodate hybrid texts without sacrificing the border. This article explores different levels of truth in fictional texts, from truth of fiction to truth in fiction, as well as different ways to deal with hybrid texts, from continuum-based models to binary models, and to models allowing an overlap between fact and fiction.
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2039-6597
3843
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Marie-Laure Ryan
Between
Gradual vs. binary theories
Truth of fiction <em>versus</em> truth in fiction
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between
9
Essay
2019-12-01
2019-09-10
2019-11-30
2019-12-01
1
Marie-Laure Ryan
2019/12/01
10.13125/2039-6597/3843
Independent scholar
2039-6597
18
Gradual vs. binary theories
en
Truth of fiction <em>versus</em> truth in fiction
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/3843/3439
9
                         Truth of fiction
                      versus truth in fiction

                               Marie-Laure Ryan



Abstract
      Literary experiments that combine verifiable statements and fictional
invention have led to the often-expressed opinion that the border between fact
and fiction is collapsing. In a time when concepts such as post-truth and
truthiness threaten to replace the distinction between fact and fiction with
panfictionality, it is imperative to find a way to accommodate hybrid texts
without sacrificing the border. This article explores different levels of truth in
fictional texts, from truth of fiction to truth in fiction, as well as different ways
to deal with hybrid texts, from continuum-based models to binary models, and
to models allowing an overlap between fact and fiction.



Keywords
     Fiction; Truth; Narrative worlds; Hybrid texts; Gradual vs. binary theories




Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)
ISSN 2039-6597
DOI: 10.13125/2039-6597/3843
                                   Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)




 Truth of fiction versus truth in fiction

                          Marie-Laure Ryan


      The problem of the truth of fiction has been debated by
philosophers at least since the advent of analytic philosophy, but as long
as deconstruction reigned supreme in literary theory, it was largely
ignored by narratologists and literary critics, who considered the
concept of truth a non-issue because literature was supposed to be about
language, not about external referents. In 1994, Peter Lamarque and
Stein Haugom Olsen published a masterful treaty titled Truth, Fiction
and Literature, but at that time literary theory was still under the spell of
postmodern skepticism with respect to the notion of truth, and the book
was therefore only noticed by the kind of critics who were familiar with
the philosophical approaches to fiction.
      This situation changed within narratology around 2015 when
Henrik Skov Nielsen, James Phelan and Richard Walsh published an
article titled “Ten Theses about Fictionality” in the journal Narrative
which promoted a theory of fiction known as the rhetorical theory. Even
though this theory is not an embrace of the philosophical work that
preceded it but rather an alternative, it takes the question of truth much
more seriously than most other approaches, especially literary ones. In
this article, I will compare the rhetorical theory with the one I personally
endorse, a conception of fiction based on the notion of possible world
inspired by Lewis (1978) that also borrows ideas from Searle (1975) and
Walton (1990), in terms of their handling of the notion of truth. By truth
I will not mean what Walton calls “fictional truth”, i.e. what counts as
fact within the storyworld, nor the possibility to make true statements
about non-existing entities, an issue much debated by philosophical
approaches (Kroon and Voltolini 2018), but rather the use by authors or
inference by readers of propositions that correspond to individual facts
or general laws of the actual world.


                                                                                 1
Marie-Laure Ryan, Truth of fiction versus truth in fiction



      The purpose of the rhetorical approach is to free the concept of
fictionality from what the authors call “generic fiction” – this is to say,
literary forms such as novels and short stories, as well as fiction films –
and to outline instead a theory that encompasses a wide variety of
utterances: not only literary narratives, but also “hypotheticals,
counterfactuals, speculations, and other deviations from the actual”
(Nielsen et al. 2015: 64). Here is the theory in a nutshell: “Fictive
discourse neither refers to actual states of affairs nor tries to deceive its
audience about such states. Instead it overtly invents or imagines states
of affairs in order to accomplish some purpose(s) within its original
context” (2015: 63). According to the authors, the faculty of invention
manifests itself in many genres of discourse: in informal conversation,
through jokes and “kidding around”, in political speeches, through
projections, in sermons, through parables, and in philosophy, through
thought experiments. As an example of spontaneous, non-literary
fictionality, the authors mention Barack Obama’s claim that Mitt
Romney, his opponent in the 2012 election for U.S. President, suffered
from “Romneysia”, a condition obviously invented by Obama. Through
this pun on amnesia, Obama wanted to remind his audience that while
Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts, he installed a universal
insurance plan, which he later rejected when he ran for U.S. President.
      A distinctive feature of the rhetorical approach is that it does not
use any notion of fictional world: it divides statements into fictional
ones, which are obviously invented, and factual ones, which describe
reality. A text can therefore be a blend of fiction and fact. In a world-
based conception of fiction (such as Lewis 1978, Pavel 1986, Walton 1990
and Ryan 1991), by contrast, the difference between factual and fictional
discourse is a matter of reference world. Factual discourse describes the
real world, while fiction creates an imaginary world, and asks the
audience to imagine it for its own sake, which means, to make-believe
the statements that describe it , to pretend that it is real, and to construct
it mentally on the basis of fictional facts. Following Walton, the
difference between factual and fictional statements can be captured as
“telling to be believed” vs. “telling to be imagined”. The reference world
of fiction, also known as fictional world or storyworld, can stand at


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various distances from the actual world, from nearly identical (yet
logically distinct) to very remote, as in fantastic texts1.
      The problem of truth in fiction arises on several levels. First there is
what I call in my title the “truth of fiction”. Throughout the history of
philosophy, the word truth has always had very positive connotations,
in fact philosophy can be defined as the search for truth, so that by
arguing for the truth of fiction we argue for its moral value and for its
usefulness. Reading fiction should not be an escapist activity, a flight
into some fantasy realm, but a learning experience from which we can
extract valuable lessons about the real world. As Nielsen et al. declare:
“Fictive discourse is not ultimately a means of constructing scenarios
that are cut off from the actual world, but rather a means of negotiating
an engagement with that world” (2015: 63). As an example of the “truth
of fiction” they propose a text that departs very obviously from reality,
namely the young adult novel The Hunger Games by Susanne Collins.

        Several times Collins shows Katniss facing either/or choices
     where both options are ethically unacceptable, and then shows how
     Katniss finds a way to refuse the either/or and instead to transform
     the entire structure of the situation. Thus, the fictional Katniss
     provides a model that we can try to emulate, though of course we
     have to find our particular solutions to our particular dilemmas.
     (2015: 71)

     This moral can be considered the truth of The Hunger Games. It is
largely independent of the truth of the individual statements that make
up the text, since the text represents a dystopian society that, fortunately,
differs widely from the real world. The idea that literature should
provide a lesson for the real world, rather than merely entertaining the
reader with an interesting plot, is so deeply ingrained that some critics


     1
       An unresolved issue with world-based approaches is whether the
reference worlds of fiction have to be logically consistent. Does a text that
contains contradiction still create a world? Only if we accept the paradoxical
notion of impossible possible worlds.


                                                                                 3
Marie-Laure Ryan, Truth of fiction versus truth in fiction



will propose the vaguest message to justify a work. To wit, this review
of Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me: “Strip away the counterfactual
wrapping and Machines Like Me is ultimately about the age-old question
of what makes people human” (“Who, Robot?”, 2019: 76). Different
readers will of course extract different truths from a given text, and this
is why the interpretation of literary texts is such an endless and
fascinating debate.
      It is not my intent to question this interpretation of truth as
synonymous with ethical value and as guarantee of the significance of
fiction (and, by extension, of literature). But is this kind of abstract truth
distinctive of fiction, or is it just a possibility, a nice bonus, perhaps a
feature that distinguish great narratives from the not-so-great kind? If
the label “literature” is considered honorific, then indeed the essence of
literariness could be conceived as the ability to convey this kind of truth;
but fiction is a logical category, not an inherently aesthetic one, which
means there is good and bad fiction, instructive and escapist kinds, and
we cannot regard the ability to convey truths-for-the-real-world as
distinctive of fiction. Of the millions of fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of The
Rings, it is likely that many of them never ask themselves what the text
tells them about the real world. They just enjoy the fictional world for its
own sake. Lamarque and Olsen are clear on this point: this kind of truth
is possible, even desirable, but it is not constitutive of the fictional
experience. Nor is it necessary of the literary experience.
      While the kind of truth discussed above is the product of the
reader’s interpretation, and is not explicitly stated in the text, the second
level consists of general statements – known as gnomic statements – that
are directly expressed, and that convey specific propositions. These
propositions are quantified by the universal operator of logic: “all x”
rather than “some x”. A good example is the famous first sentence of
Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way”. This second level of truth provides
a bridge between “truth of fiction” and “truth in fiction”. A statement
like “all happy families” should be verified by the plot of the novel, and
if the plot convincingly supports it, the statement should be regarded as
true for the fiction (or as true in the fictional world). But if it is taken as


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an aphorism that describes the real world, it is also representative of
what I have called the truth of fiction. Readers could decide that “all
families” is true of the fictional world, because it is convincingly
supported by the story, but false in the real world, because they know
some counterexamples.
      World-based theories of fiction can account for this discrepancy by
relying on what philosopher Jaakko Hintikka (1988) calls “language as
calculus”, a conception of language according to which, rather than
being limited to the real word, a given proposition can be evaluated
separately for several different worlds. Just as “unicorns exist” is true of
the world of fairy tales but false of the real world, and just as “Paris
exists” is true of both the real world and of the world of Proust’s A La
recherche du temps perdu, so Tolstoy’s sentence can be assigned a separate
truth value for the real world and for the world of Anna Karenina. The
rhetorical theory does not allow such double evaluation since the only
world it recognizes is the real world.
      Tolstoy’s sentence has been parodied by Nabokov, who begins Ada
or Ardor with this statement: “All happy families are more or less
dissimilar, all unhappy ones are more or less alike”. Which one is more
true ? And does it matter for the reader’s appreciation of Tolstoy’s or
Nabokov’s novels? According to Lamarque and Olsen, “[p]erhaps the
first feature to notice concerning the discourse about literature which
one finds in criticism and conversation is that it does not contain much
debate about the truth-value of [general] propositions” (332). In other
words, critics of Anna Karenina and of Ada do not really care whether
their first sentence is true or false. I cannot speak for all ordinary readers,
but many of them (including myself) enjoy these texts because of their
plot, their characters, their style, their setting, and not because of the
wisdom they express. An author like Balzac is full of general statements
about women which, in the current cultural climate, would be
unacceptable, but this has not damaged his status as one of the literary
giants of the 19th century, and I suspect that many contemporary
readers rather enjoy, tongue in cheek, his prejudiced claims about
women, as examples of how cultural attitudes have changed since the
19th century.


                                                                                  5
Marie-Laure Ryan, Truth of fiction versus truth in fiction



       The third level of truth, which I call “truth in fiction”, consists of
textually present individual statements concerning specific entities,
rather than of general statements. These statements are modified by the
existential quantifier, “for a certain x, p”, rather than by the universal
quantifier, “for all x, p”. An example is Tolstoy describing Napoleon as
the leader of the French armies that fought the czar’s armies at Borodino
in 1812. It is no secret that novels, especially realistic and historical ones,
can contain statements that happen to be true in the real world. Many
authors engage in extensive research before writing novels that take
place in determinate historical, geographical and cultural settings, and
it is not uncommon for readers to learn something about the real world
from reading fiction. For instance I learned a lot about medieval
theology from The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, because I trust the
scholarship of the author. But this learning must be placed under the
warning caveat lector: one could never quote knowledge gained from a
novel in a history book.
       Once again, the rhetorical and the world-based approaches treat
this issue differently. The rhetorical approach distinguishes a global and
a local level of fictionality; these two levels are relatively independent of
each other, so that there can be local fictionality in a globally factual text,
and vice-versa, local factuality in a globally fictional text. For instance,
the example mentioned above of Obama accusing Romney of
Romneysia is a fictional island in an otherwise nonfictional speech
aiming at persuasion. The reverse case of islands of factuality within a
global fiction is illustrated by truth in fiction 2. Such an approach explains


      2
        A philosopher who agrees with the proponents of the rhetorical theory
in treating texts that use both true facts and invention as patchworks of fiction
and nonfiction is John Searle: “Most fictional stories contain nonfictional
elements: along with the pretended references to Sherlock Holmes and Watson,
there are in Sherlock Holmes real references to London and Baker street and
Paddington Station; again, in War and Peace, the story of Pierre and Natacha is
a fictional story about fictional characters, but the Russia of War and Peace is
the real Russia, and the war against Napoleon is the real war against the real
Napoleon” (Searle 1975: 330).


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how readers can learn facts from fiction, but only if they are able to
detect what is true and what is invented in a global fiction. This sorting
out of the text into true and false statements seems to me incompatible
with the experience of narrative immersion (Schaeffer 1999, Ryan 2001),
because each statement must be evaluated separately, and this process
destroys the semantic unity of the content that the text offers to the
imagination.
      In world-based approaches, readers are concerned with the mental
construction of the storyworld, rather than with the evaluation of
individual propositions. This world is constructed on the basis of all the
propositions asserted in the text, as well as on the basis of what I have
called the principle of minimal departure (Ryan 1991) 3. It does not
matter whether a proposition is true or false in the real world:
everything the text asserts about individual entities – that is, every
proposition with an existential quantifier – must be taken as true in the
fictional world. In extreme cases, every proposition asserted by the text
could be true of the real world, but the text would still be fiction if the
author presents it as such, thereby declining responsibility for the real-
world truth of the text. Insofar as storyworlds are constructed on the
basis of all the propositions asserted in the text4, they are ontologically
homogeneous5. Within the world of War and Peace, there is no
ontological difference between Pierre, Natacha, Napoleon and General

     3
        This principle, which is inspired by Lewis’ proposal for assessing the
truth value of statements about fiction (1978), instructs readers to imagine the
fictional world as the closest possible to (their representation of) the real
world, and to make only those changes that are mandated by the text.
      4
        Minus some of those asserted by unreliable narrators, though most of
the declarations of unreliable narrators must be accepted as constitutive of the
storyworld, otherwise there would be nothing for the reader to imagine.
Unreliable narration mainly consists of objectionable judgments, and it is very
rare for narrators to be wrong about facts.
      5
        An exception to this rule is the case of embedded fictions: the characters
of a fiction within a fiction – such as the stories told by Scheherazade in The
Arabian Nights – are fictional from the point of view of the characters of the
embedding fiction, who regard themselves as real.


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Marie-Laure Ryan, Truth of fiction versus truth in fiction



Kutuzov, since all of them are real persons within this world. It is only
when readers de-immerse themselves from the storyworld, and look at
it from an external perspective – the perspective of the real world – that
they make a distinction between characters that are born fictional, and
characters imported from reality. While the rhetorical approach is better
at explaining how people can extract knowledge from fiction, the world
approach is better at explaining the reader’s imaginative experience.
      An issue that causes problems for both the rhetorical and the
world-based theories of fiction (and in fact, for any theory that attempts
to define fiction and therefore to set a boundary between fiction and its
other), is the existence of texts of uncertain status with respect to the
fiction/fact binary. If a trend can be detected in recent literary narrative,
it is the increase of verifiable statements. I am thinking not just of
realistic novels and historical fiction, but of texts like Maus by Art
Spiegelman (to which I will return later), In Cold Blood by Truman
Capote, which narrates a true crime using some novelistic techniques
such as dialogues or representation of the characters’ private thoughts,
and My Struggle by Karl Ove Knausgaard, which is called a novel but
consists mostly of autobiographical material and could just as well have
been called a memoir. The existence of such texts has led to the
frequently heard claim that the border between fact and fiction is
collapsing.
      These transgressions, or hybridizations, raise indeed the question
of why we still need a border. Rather than trying to draw a strict
dividing line between fact and fiction, why not arrange narrative texts
along a continuum, based on the proportion of truth and invention? This
continuum would look like figure 1a below. On the left, we have
strongly factual narrative genres such as historiography, biography,
court testimonies and news reports, which must rely on documented
facts and adhere narrowly to the truth. One step to the right, we find
genres that represent what I call low factuality, such as autobiography,
memoir, and conversational narratives. Autobiography and memoirs
contrasts with biography and history in that authors can make assertions
about the main character (i.e. themselves) without documenting them,
since they are the only one to know. The unreliability of memory makes


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it often impossible to tell what is true and what is not, especially when
the author dwells on deeply private matters. Conversational narratives
such as gossip or narratives of personal experience are told to be
believed but they must also entertain the audience. These conflicting
goals often lead storytellers to play loose with the truth. For instance,
dialogues enliven the performance, but the audience does not expect
from the storyteller to remember conversations precisely: it is good
enough to report what people could have said. Next on the scale are the
narratives I have mentioned above as hybrids of truth and invention—
In Cold Blood, My Struggle, and Maus. Further to right are novels that
place non-existing characters in a realistic historical setting. Then we
have science fiction, fantasy, and to the extreme right, nonsense texts
such as Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky or texts that could never be
true of the real world because they contain logical contradictions. The
criterion that orders these texts concerns the possibility of their
actualization, or if one prefers, their distance from the real world.




       Figure 1 - Gradual and binary models of the fact / fiction distinction



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Marie-Laure Ryan, Truth of fiction versus truth in fiction



      According to this model, standard narrative fiction occupies the
right side of the continuum, factual narrative the left side, and hybrid
experimental texts are somewhere in the middle. But there is one big
problem with this account. It classifies texts according to their relation
to reality, but it does not take into consideration the author’s intent, nor
the user’s awareness of this intent. Therefore, it cannot distinguish
fiction from lies and error, both of which also depart from reality. This
equation of fiction with falsity corresponds to a widespread non-
technical, “naïve” use of the term fiction, demonstrated by Donald
Trump when he labelled Fear, a book by Bob Woodward that depicts the
dysfunctionality of the Trump White House, “a work of fiction”. Writing
fiction was of course very far from Woodward’s intent, whether or not
his book contains inaccuracies. Fictionality is not a matter of degree of
truth of a text with respect to reality, it is a matter of framing6. The exact
same content can be presented as fact or as fiction, though when it is
published as fact, it will be subjected to different criteria of validity than
when it is published as fiction. This ambivalence can be demonstrated
by the case of A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, a text which chronicles
the narrator’s drug addiction and recovery. It was originally published
as a memoir and selected by the Oprah Winfrey book club for the non-
fiction category. But a scandal erupted when many inaccuracies and
fabrications were discovered, and Winfrey withdrew her endorsement
because the book did not fulfil the truth requirements of a memoir.
Nowadays A Million Little Pieces is published as a novel, and though the
text is exactly the same, the controversy has abated. What this example
demonstrates, is that the divide between factual and fictional narrative
is far more rigid than the continuum model suggests, and that it does
not depend on the truth of the text. Factuality is a matter of degree, since
representations of the real world can be more or less true, but fictionality
is not: realistic and historical fiction is no less fictional than the genres
on the extreme right side, such as fantasy and science fiction.

      6
       This framing is usually performed through a paratextual label implying
fictionality or factuality (“novel”, “memoir”). But when there is no such label,
the classification of the text is problematic.


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      Every serious theory of fictionality postulates a binary distinction
between the texts of the right side and the texts of the left side. This
distinction has been conceived in various ways. For the rhetorical theory
(2015), fictionality is a matter of signaled invention, as opposed to
hidden invention (deceit) and non-invention (fact). For Searle (1975), the
distinction is a matter of sincere vs. pretended assertion. For Walton
(1990), factual texts are offered to be believed and fiction is offered for
make-believe. For Noël Carroll (1996), authors of factual discourse assert
propositions and authors of fiction present them unasserted. For world-
based theories, nonfiction refers to the real world and fiction creates an
alternate possible world. These accounts do not admit degree: either you
signal your invention, or you hide it. Either you pretend to perform
speech acts, or you do it seriously. Either you refer to the actual world,
or you build and refer to an alternate possible world.
      The binary theories are certainly a step above the continuum
model, since they propose an account of fiction that distinguishes it from
lies and errors, but they are not perfect. By placing texts either on the
right or left side of the divide (figure 1b), they encounter difficulties with
texts that combine features from fiction and factual narrative, and that
different users will classify differently. Virtually everybody will agree
that a classical Napoleon biography—one that is accepted by historians
as a serious work—belongs on the left, even if the author engages in
speculations of the type “what if”, such as “what if Blücher had not been
able to connect with Wellington at Waterloo?”7 And virtually everybody
will place War and Peace on the right side of the divide, despite Tolstoy’s
claim to make valid statements about history. (A very long ending
exposes his philosophy of history and why he believes that Napoleon
could never have conquered Russia.)



     7
       Counterfactual (“what if”) statements are regarded as fiction by the
rhetorical theory, but not by world-based theories, because they only construct
nonactual possible worlds in order to say something about the real world
(Lewis 1973), and they do not invite readers to contemplate an imaginary
world for its own sake.


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Marie-Laure Ryan, Truth of fiction versus truth in fiction



      But what about works like In Cold Blood, My Struggle, or especially
Maus by Art Spiegelman? A case can be made for Maus as a historical
work: Spiegelman recorded his conversations with his father, an
Auschwitz survivor, and he stayed as close as he could to his father’s
testimony. Many people, including myself, read the graphic narrative in
order to get an idea of the Holocaust experience. The historical truth of
the narrative is a major source of its appeal, and a major form of the
reader’s curiosity. But a case can also be made for its fictionality. Maus
presents a world inhabited not by humans but by cats and mice and dogs
and frogs. These characters behave like humans, but they still look like
animals. So how does the reader imagine the storyworld of Maus: is it a
world inhabited by speaking animals who behave like humans—like the
world of one of La Fontaine’s or Aesop’s fables? In this case it would
clearly be a fictional world. Or is it a world inhabited by Nazis who
pursue Jews like cats hunt mice? In this case one could say that in the
storyworld of Maus there are no cats nor mice nor other animals (except
for the attack dogs kept by the Auschwitz guards), there are only Nazis
and Jews and other identities. The visual representations of Nazis as cats
and Jews as mice would be like a visual metaphor: when somebody says
of my friend Bill that he is a donkey, I do not imagine Bill with long grey
ears, I assume that the speaker means that he is stupid. But the
interpretation of the cats and mice as visual metaphors ignores the
graphic nature of the medium. Visual media give less freedom to the
imagination than language-based ones, because unlike language, they
consist of sensory data that force the mind to visualize things the way
they are represented in the text. If I imagine the world of Maus visually,
I will imagine it with cats and mice, and if somebody was going to
expand the world of Maus through fan fiction, this fan would draw a
cartoon with cats and mice. We cannot make the cats and mice disappear
from the imagination by saying that they are just metaphors, or
allegories, because they are the main source of the text’s artistic
innovation.
      This ambiguity explains why nobody has an easy time classifying
Maus as either fact or fiction. As Marianne Hirsch notes, “the Pulitzer
prize committee invented a special category for Maus, suggesting the


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impossibility of categorizing it as either fiction or nonfiction” (1997: 274).
Nancy Pedri (2013) writes that such texts are neither fact nor fiction
(figure 1c). But this verdict gives readers no reason to be interested in
Maus: if it is not fact, it does not contribute to their knowledge; but if it
is not fiction, its world is not worth imagining for its own sake. The
rhetorical theory would say that Maus consists of both fictional
elements—the animals—and non-fictional ones—the narrative based on
the father’s testimony. This explanation works on the micro-level, but
the theory also postulates a macro-level on which a decision must be
made: is Maus a global fiction that contains lots of facts, or a global
factual narrative that contains lots of invention? The theory gives no
reason to choose one of these interpretations over the other.
       My own solution to this dilemma says that a work like Maus
combines the appeal of fiction and fact (figure 1d). We read fictions for
the sake of the pleasure we take in imagining the storyworld. We read
factual narratives for the sake of getting information about the real
world, which means for the sake of acquiring knowledge. Why should
these two types of motivation be incompatible with each other? The
alternative to regarding Maus as neither fiction nor fact is to make the
territories of fiction and fact overlap, so that hybrid texts can find a
home, without giving up the advantage of a clear distinction between
fact and fiction. In the zone of overlap, I place not only Maus, but In Cold
Blood, My Struggle and New Journalism8. The overlap model explains
why some people call these works factual, others call them fictional, and
still others do not know.
       It could be objected that postulating an overlap is an ad hoc solution
that denies the specificity of fiction. A definition that works for both

     8
        A different situation occurs in texts that are clearly marked collages of
fact and fiction. For instance, the novel Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
combines quotations about Lincoln borrowed from historical texts with
fantastic dialogues between the people buried in the cemetery where Lincoln’s
young son, Willie, has been laid to rest. This novel is clearly part fact, part
fiction, and it is easy to tell which parts belong to which category. Rather than
placing it in a zone of overlap, I would split it between two zones.



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Marie-Laure Ryan, Truth of fiction versus truth in fiction



hybrid texts and clear representatives of fact and fiction would certainly
be more satisfactory, but such a definition would have to be at the same
time gradual and binary—which means, it would have to resolve a
logical contradiction. I see no way of doing this. Figure 1 captures all the
possibilities (except for the possibility of giving up any distinction
between truth and fiction), and I have shown that options (a), (b) and (c)
all present significant weaknesses, so this leaves only (d). The lesson to
be drawn from the case of hybrid texts is that there is no perfect theory
of fictionality that answers all the questions one might want to ask.
Every theory is inspired by a desire to account for a certain type of
phenomenon: the world-based theories try to capture the imaginative
experience of readers, players or spectators of fiction; the rhetorical
theory wants to show that the mental operations that underlie culturally
recognized fictional genres also appear spontaneously in other types of
discourse. Once a definition has been crafted, it can be used as a heuristic
device to make decisions about marginal cases. But no theory can be
valid unless it is able to account for the difference between War and Peace
and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or between Lord of the Rings
and The Mueller Report. This difference has to do with expectations of
truth. In a time when concepts such as post-truth (McIntire 2018) and
truthiness threaten to replace the distinction between fact and fiction
with panfictionality (Ryan 1997), i.e. with the idea that all texts are
fabrication, it is imperative, as Lavocat (2016) forcefully argues, to
defend the border.




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Marie-Laure Ryan, Truth of fiction versus truth in fiction



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                                       The Author
Marie-Laure Ryan

      Marie-Laure Ryan is an independent scholar working in the areas
of narratology, media studies and digital textuality. Her most recent
book (co-edited with Alice Bell) is Possible Worlds Theory and
Contemporary Narratology.

        Email: marilaur@gmail.com



                                       The Article
Date sent: 31/05/2019


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                                   Between, vol. IX, n. 18 (Novembre/November 2019)



Date accepted: 31/10/2019
Date published: 30/11/2019



                       How to cite this article
Ryan, Marie-Laure, “Truth of fiction versus truth in fiction”, Finzioni.
Verità, bugie, mondi possibili, Eds. R. Galvagno - M. Rizzarelli - M. Schilirò
- A. Scuderi, Between, IX.18 (2019), http://www.betweenjournal.it/




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