Unless otherwise indicated, translations and ellipses are my own; italics in quoted sources are not. Without completely modernizing punctuation, I have occasionally modified it for clarity. For economy I typically use last names alone when referring to authors of the period under study; readers needing greater precision of course will find it in the Index.
Introduction:
The Three Regimes of the Novel
One peculiarity of novels when they first arrived in the eighteenth century was that they told new stories rather than recomposing old ones. Their characters were singular; each novel had to introduce its readers to a new world. This has not changed.
—John Mullan, How Novels Work
Gottlob Frege’s essay “On Sense and Reference,” published in 1892, stands at the beginning of modern philosophical interest in fictionality—that is, in the truth status of fictional propositions. Poetry—roughly, what we now call literature—had of course long been seen as a special kind of deceit that, at least for poetry’s many defenders, led mysteriously back to the truth. “The truest poetry is the most feigning,” says Shakespeare’s Touchstone; “The novel establishes its birthright as a lie that is the foundation of truth,” writes Carlos Fuentes much more recently; and indeed, the literary ground since the Greeks is strewn with chestnuts such as these.1 “The history of Western literary theory,” as one noted theorist puts it, “can be summed up as a continuous debate on the classical dictum that poets are liars.”2 Frege’s interest was nonetheless distinct, for he was interested in semantic questions regarding language’s capacity to refer to the world; literary language was a curious subspecies that did not, he argued, refer at all. If we read, in Homer, that “Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while he was sound asleep,” we understand the proposition as having a sense even though the proper name Odysseus has no reference in the real world, and thus no truth-value. “In hearing an epic poem … apart from the euphony of language we are interested only in the sense of sentences and the images and feelings thereby aroused…. Hence it is a matter of no concern to us whether the name ‘Odysseus,’ for instance, has a reference, so long as we accept the poem as a work of art.”3
“A matter of no concern to us,” perhaps, but would the ancient Greeks have felt the same way? To be fair, Frege’s essay is only tangentially concerned with literary reference; it focuses on the way signs in general refer, and Frege, like many early theorists, felt that sharply separating out literature from “natural” forms of discourse clarified the issues.4 It is therefore not surprising that, as a theory of fiction, Frege’s treatment of Homer leaves much to be desired. But one of its shortcomings in particular is shared by more modern and elaborate theories of fiction. That shortcoming is historical. We are welcome to our doubts about Odysseus’s reality, or for that matter about Athena’s—as were, presumably, the Greeks—but Homer certainly didn’t “invent” them in the manner that Balzac invented Old Goriot or Dickens invented Little Dorrit. Epic heroes and the gods were quite simply attested: they were authorized by tradition. They may or may not have had reference in Frege’s empirical sense, but they didn’t need any: they possessed a type of extratextual existence that the protagonists of the typical nineteenth-century novel did not.5 Which is to say that along with asking what fiction “is,” we might also ask if fiction always is, in the same way: mightn’t calling Odysseus fictional be to mischaracterize Greek practices of poetic invention, and to read the Odyssey as if it were a modern novel?
We might offer sympathetic support for Frege’s contention that literary protagonists have no reference by limiting it to the nineteenth-century novel—a likely source of the philosopher’s conviction in the first place. The difficulty, however, is that substituting a sentence from Balzac or Dickens for Homer’s verses leads to new complications: Old Goriot or Little Dorrit may have no reference, but their inventors refer rather insistently to the Paris and London of their day—not only to places, but also to the workings of money and class and institutions. Such reference obviously falls outside Frege’s understanding of the term, predicated as it is on the proper name. We could, then, refine Frege’s proposal, perhaps noting with John Searle and others that certain fictional genres contain “nonfictional commitments,” which is to say, references to known people and places.6 This type of accommodation does not, however, solve the problem, which I repeat is at bottom historical: unlike ancient epic, the nineteenth-century novel speaks about specific, local, empirical phenomena, but it does so using completely nonexistent characters engaged in actions that never happened. Homer, meanwhile, spoke of legendary people and events, both (we may speculate) because of their intrinsic interest (heroes, by definition, are worthy of being known) and for the moral or ethical lessons they taught (heroes, by definition, are exemplary). Not without reason are we used to thinking of Western literary history along the lines laid out by Erich Auerbach in Mimesis: literature becomes more and more real, more focused on physical reality. But Frege’s remark, by its very inadequacy, reminds us that we must also factor in the converse: modern literature at its most splendidly realist is also removed from reality in a way it had never been before. It can talk a lot about history, implicitly or explicitly, but it does not claim to treat the same people and events that historians do. The difference between Homer and the modern novelist is thus not one of degree: the way the texts work, their modes of reference, are simply incommensurable. And if we agree to call the mode of Balzac and Dickens fiction, then Homer did not write fiction.
The Odyssey is not fiction? Not a novel, granted—even the many scholars who remain divided about the novel’s origin can probably agree on that much. But surely fiction and literature as such are coextensive: “All literatures, including the literature of Greece, have always designated themselves as existing in the mode of fiction,” writes Paul de Man.7 Indeed, “fiction” is the innocuous term used when generic objections are feared or when genre is uncertain: The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queene may or may not be novels, but they are surely fiction. In fact, “fiction” is the most unobjectionable term of all, better even than “literature,” a word (and therefore, troublingly, maybe even a concept) that has come into use very recently.8 Of course, like “literature,” “fiction” has a lexographic history. It derives from the Latin fingere, to invent; it was long used as a synonym for lies, and sometimes for poetry, especially types of poetry that did not aspire to the dignity of epic or tragedy; around the nineteenth century it became synonymous with the novel and, as I’ve noted, with narrative literature more generally.9 Yet my point is not ultimately lexographic: as a handful of scholars working on the early English novel have suggested, it is the operations we associate with fiction that are historically bounded.10
Broad uses of the word fiction can of course have their own logic and utility. In many ways, humans are uniquely fiction-making animals, as Kendall Walton for one has shown, and it may be that this cognitive ability is an evolutionary adaptation.11 Moreover, there is certainly nothing inherently wrong-headed about using “fiction” as an umbrella designation for discourses about poetry.12 Still, a clue that all literatures have perhaps not always operated in the fictional mode can be found in one of de Man’s favorite authors: Rousseau famously refused to identify himself as the author of Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), a text he presented as authentic correspondence even as he called that authenticity into doubt. Clearly, it would be inaccurate to say, with Frege, that “it is of no concern” to him or his readers whether his heroine Julie existed. It must be of concern; otherwise he would not have gone to the trouble of addressing the issue in not one but two prefaces. Few if any were duped by Rousseau’s posture; it was unconvincing