The contortions of this famous passage are good evidence of Aristotle’s efforts to square his initial hypothesis on poetry’s interest in what “would happen” with the irrepressible fact that tragedy uses proper names. These proper names, which keep popping back up each time the philosopher seems to have the lid on the box, effectively resist the bringing of all poetry, as distinct from history, under the banner of generality. In other words, comedy and tragedy are not general in quite the same way, just as the distinction between the comic poet and the historian is not exactly the distinction obtaining between the tragic poet and the historian. By Aristotle’s own reckoning, tragedy and comedy function differently. It is not merely that one depicts people better than they are and the other worse (as he writes elsewhere in the Poetics), nor only that one speaks of distinguished families and lofty sentiments, while the other busies itself with the low born and their mundane concerns (as later commentators would repeat). Rather, tragedy deals with real people and comedy with types.
This, at any rate, was what later European commentators would take from Aristotle, and it proved surprisingly adequate to poetic practice for about 2000 years: comic characters were invented; serious protagonists were taken from history. Thus Diderot, toeing the Aristotelian line in 1758, could still divide discourse into three types: “History, where facts are given; tragedy, where the poet adds to history what he thinks likely to increase its interest; comedy, where the poet invents everything.”19 Of course, Diderot leaves out other possibilities, notably fable. And one can easily come up with examples that sit uncomfortably or not at all with the preference for attested subject matter. Aristotle himself backs up after declaring that tragic poets “stick to the actual names” and gives a dutiful nod to Agathon’s now lost tragedy Antheus, which did feature invented characters. (Antheus leads the author of the Poetics to shrug off his hypothesis that the reality of characters imparts necessary conviction, since he freely admits that invention doesn’t in the end infringe on the audience’s pleasure.) But Antheus is to all appearances a one-off, for nowhere in the classical corpus do we find references to other such tragedies. To be sure, the Greek novels of Achilles Tatius, Xenophon, Heliodorus, and others, recount the adventures of characters who have no sanction outside the text, as do the works of Petronius and Apuleius that Mikhail Bakhtin pointed to as antecedents of the modern novel.20 By the same token, however, these works were long denigrated precisely because, like “mere” fables, they lacked the prestige of history. Any number of famed Renaissance works, from More’s Utopia (1516) and Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1516–32) to Rabelais’s chronicles (1532–52) and Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1590–96), are hardly Aristotelian, and indeed flaunt what we can no doubt broadly call their fictionality. Yet on inspection the invention practiced by these writers bears little relation to the fictionality of a character like Balzac’s Goriot: such works are parodically inseparable from either attested heroes of the chivalric past (Ariosto, Spenser), or the truth claims of the New World travel narrative or medieval chronicle (More, Rabelais).21 Rather than being fictional, they parody what someone else is purported to regard as true.
It is not to impugn the creativity of pre-nineteenth-century writers that I resist speaking of literature as a house of fiction with many, many rooms. Nor does taking fictionality for something other than a universal property of literature imply that invented heroes were, in Foucauldian parlance, “unthinkable” for the Greeks, Romans, or Europeans of the Renaissance. In different ways, all the writers I have just mentioned invent characters from scratch, and an alternate version of the present study could no doubt inventory at length such practices. But our modern indifference to what Frege called characters’ “reference” keeps us from making the simple empirical observation that underwrites Before Fiction. For much of Western literary history, the principal traffic of literature was in heroes readers had already heard about.
Historical Faith
Curiously—at least at first glance—reference was never more doggedly asserted than just before its nineteenth-century eclipse: for about a hundred years now, literary historians have been drawing attention to the fact that early novelists insisted on the literal truth of their works.22 And literary historians have also noted, with understandable puzzlement, that few if any contemporaries, readers or writers, seem to have believed in this truth. The situation made for some oddly contorted speculations, like this one, occurring in a famous letter by Richardson to William Warburton. In the middle of Clarissa’s serial publication, in 1748, Richardson regrets that Warburton’s preface for the third volume explicitly referred to Richardson as the author of the letters, not their editor:
Will you, good Sir, allow me to mention, that I could wish that the Air of Genuineness had been kept up, tho’ I want not the letters to be thought genuine; only so far kept up, I mean, as that they should not prefatically be owned not to be genuine: and this for fear of weakening their Influence where any of them are aimed to be exemplary; as well as to avoid hurting that kind of Historical Faith which Fiction itself is generally read with, tho’ we know it to be Fiction.23
A rapid interpretation of Richardson’s remark would hold that the novelist is reflecting on the very nature of the reading experience; when we read we enter the fictional world by accepting it provisionally as true even though we know otherwise. The letter would be, then, one more reason to believe that fiction always has been fiction. Yet the passage is historically marked, and its propositions are less compatible than they first appear with modern habits. After all, Richardson’s desired posture is very close to the one Rousseau will devise and execute for Julie: the letters should be presented as genuine, but without intent to deceive (there is properly speaking no hoax). But what might that mean? And why bother, if the nature of the reading experience is (as everyone knows) the provisional or temporary acceptance of what we do not really believe?
Richardson gives two reasons for maintaining an “Air of Genuineness,” the first of which the modern reader may skip right over in a rush to get to the seemingly more recognizable contention that we read fiction quite simply as if it were history. For that first reason is a bit unfamiliar: admitting the exemplary characters as mere fabrications, Richardson holds, will undercut the moral aspirations of the book. The remoteness of Richardson’s logic stems from two sources: on the one hand, (“high”) literature since Richardson’s time has largely divested itself of overt moralizing (it may investigate moral dilemmas, but it shouldn’t propose exemplary heroes); on the other, even in the (typically “lower”) forms that do propose models of behavior (most obviously, children’s literature), it may now be hard to see why a character’s nonexistence would disable exemplarity. On the contrary, perhaps it is more common now to assume that invented characters make better role models, since reality, to strike a Lukácsian note, is no place for heroes. Historically, however, this position stands out, because moral exemplarity had always been underwritten by the reality of the exemplars: history itself was our moral compass, and so exemplars were never simply made up, they had to have existed. (Again, we would do better to think of that existence not so much as “empirical” or “documented” as simply attested: exemplary heroes exist in the realm of common knowledge or fame in the Latin sense of “renown,” fama.) Richardson’s worry, then, does make sense within older frameworks for understanding character, recalling for example Aristotle’s argument that real characters make for greater conviction.
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