The rise of the novel belongs to this context. If the language of poetry can be defined by deviation from the norm of everyday speech and discursive statements, then linguistic non-deviation from the norm is equivalent to non-poetry, and the novel, therefore, appears as a discursive text, particularly close to the genre of historiography. Whoever wanted to present a story as history had to forego deviations of language, style, and form. Thus, the modern (realistic) novel belongs to the great movement of disenchantment of the world in Western civilisation since the Renaissance.
Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, often called the first modern novel, presents itself as the unadorned autobiographical report of a castaway; Goethe’s epistolary novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, presents itself as the authentic collection of letters between two lovers and their circle of friends. Single passages here and elsewhere in novels cannot be recognised as part of a work of art – with exceptions, it must be admitted: Fielding’s narrator in Tom Jones reveals himself as the creator and legislator of the world of his hero and, thus, reveals the novel as a novel; the grammar of Jane Austen’s passages of free indirect style is clearly not in the way of everyday speech. (The genre of the romance is a different matter: Gothic Novel, Science Fiction, Fantasy etc. are in another literary tradition than the novel.)
As a consequence, the traditional characteristics lost their importance as the defining criteria of literary works of art. Verse, rhyme or dense imagery which had determined a text as a work of art, showed themselves as mere decoration, as externals. (The case is similar to that of discarding the ancient definition of fish as animals living in water, in favour of a less superficial definition where, for instance, whales and dolphins are grouped as mammals.) This meant that the relationship between text and reality became the decisive distinguishing mark between discursive texts and literary works of art, now called fictional texts. Broadly speaking, discursive texts refer to a reality existing or presupposed as existing independently of them; their function lies in the description, explanation, elucidation, and criticism of this reality. Fictional texts, in contrast to that, create the world which they seem to describe in the very act of description. And if explanations or argumentations appear in a novel – speech acts typical of discursive texts – then this argumentation is ‘only’ the representation of an argumentation, at least as long as the reader or hearer takes the fiction as fiction.
This last remark reminds one of the role the recipient plays in the act of reading. Readers or hearers react differently to what they think is a discursive text than when they think it is a fictional text. When a theatre-goer begins to understand Iago’s treachery, he normally does not jump onto the stage to warn Othello.
The appropriate mode of reception of a work of fiction is, in the famous words of S. T. Coleridge, “willing suspension of disbelief” (Biographia Literaria, Chapter XIV), in other words, the suspension of such critical questions as we normally pose, concerning a discursive text. Most importantly, we suspend our awareness that fictional worlds are worlds that exist only because their existence has been declared by the text, and this is, of course, a petitio principii. We accept the fictional world as it is presented to us, and it is only from there that we proceed with our critical questions.
3. Results and consequences
Let us now review our results on a more abstract level. Lyric poetry and epic poetry are recognisable as different from discursive speech by their form, respectively by their deviation from the form of discursive speech. Their poetic character is a property of the works themselves, and thus the distinguishing mark is an ‘essential’ criterion, and the theory is ‘essentialist’. “Willing suspension of disbelief” is the appropriate mode of reception, but it is not a necessary element of the definition and is, therefore, normally neglected.
In contrast, modern types of prose narrative – the novel, but other realistic subgenres, too, the short story, for instance – are not defined by their language, and their “literariness” or “poeticity” is not necessarily recognisable in the text itself. Its distinguishing mark is its fictional status, that is, its special relationship to reality. This criterion is ‘relational’ because it is a relation between objects, not a property of an object. The mode of reception, “willing suspension of disbelief”, is a constitutive element in the framework of this definition and, thus, appears for the first time as a problem. A mode of reception, however, is a ‘pragmatic’ category.
Thus, there is a combination of two defining categories, one relational, the other pragmatic. Each alone is insufficient as a definition. If the pragmatic category alone sufficed, the definition of what a work of art is would be entirely a matter of subjective choice. This would clearly not be a useful definition. Most people, in fact, agree in most cases on whether a text is fictional or not. However, there are cases where one can disagree or where, in one context, one can take a text as fiction and, in another, as a report. Historical novels are obvious examples.
The categorisation of a literary work of art as fiction is, thus, much more complex than the traditional categorisation as ‘poetry’, because two categories are involved. It is also more difficult, because relational and pragmatic categories are less definite than essential properties.
But this is not all. Even when a work of art is defined by its fictionality, a certain share of essential properties remain: a great portion of dialogue, for instance, points to the fictionality of a text and is not expected in a work of astronomy or economics, and the same is true for interior monologue, irony of the narrator, structural symmetries etc. There seems to exist a certain affinity between fiction and certain forms of speech felt to be ‘poetical’.
All in all, then, fictionality is a hybrid category: chiefly relational, but requiring, even promoting, a special way of reception, and with an affinity to certain forms of expression. (This also explains why the craftsman-like aspect of literature no longer plays an important role. Fictionality has nothing to do with aesthetic quality. ‘Ugly’ fiction is fiction, too, third-rate fiction is fiction, too.)
Arranged in the form of two tables:
I
| ontological status defined by | distinguishing criterion | type of foregoing category | |
|
lyric and epic poetry, etc.
|