ISSN 1393-614X Minerva - An Internet
Journal of Philosophy Vol. 13 2009
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Assertions in Literary Fiction Jukka
Mikkonen |
In this paper, I
shall examine two types of assertions in literary narrative fiction: direct assertions and those I call literary assertions.[1] Direct assertions put forward
propositions on a literal level and function as the author’s assertions even if
detached from their original context and applied in so-called ordinary
discourse. Literary assertions, in turn, intertwine with the fictional discourse:
they may be, for instance, uttered by a fictional character or refer to
fictitious objects and yet convey the author’s genuine assertions. The
structure of the paper is twofold. The first, descriptive part is a
question–answer type of discussion in which I shall introduce general
philosophical arguments against assertions in fiction and present
counter-arguments to them, paving the road to my account of literary
assertions. In the second, argumentative part, in turn, I shall examine the
nature of literary assertions, such as their semantic and ‘aspectival’
characteristics and their peculiar illocutionary force as well as the reader’s
stance toward them.
1. Introduction
The cognitive value of assertions in
literary fiction, their function as the author’s truth-claims, and approaches
looking for them have been objected to by various epistemological, ontological,
logical and, naturally, aesthetic arguments. The epistemological, ontological
and logical arguments advanced against assertions in fiction emphasize the
nature of fictive utterances and the author’s literary-fictive mode of speaking
which is seen to detach her from the work. In turn, the aesthetic arguments
stress the nature and aims of fictional literature. Although many of these
arguments, and the theses I have split the complex arguments into, often
overlap in the discussion, I will try to examine them separately in what
follows.
First, it has been argued that art
is not a cognitive pursuit and approaching artworks, such as literary fictions,
as knowledge-yielding devices is a kind of category mistake; further, were
there truths or true beliefs contained in literary works, these truths or true
beliefs are not claimed or warranted by the work. Call this the artistic thesis. Second, it has been claimed that
assertions in fiction are fictive utterances intended to be imagined or
made-believe, that they are assertions of a fictional speaker and that instead
of reality, they depict the fictional world of the work, for example, the
narrator’s attitudes; hence, attributing the assertions to the actual author of
the work and considering them claimed of reality is logically invalid. Call
this the fictive mode of
speaking argument. Third, it has been suggested that if assertions are part of the story, they
have to be fictional, and if they are put forward by the author, they cannot be
part of the story. Call this the unity
argument. Fourth, it has
been argued that even if there were authors’ assertions in literary fiction, identifying
and extracting them from the work would be epistemologically impossible (at
least without knowing the modus operandi),
for one cannot say whether the author, a literary artist, asserts the
propositions she expresses; rather, beliefs a literary fiction expresses should
be attributed to an “implied” author. Call this the literary mode of
speaking argument. Fifth, it has been thought that in order to perform genuine
communicative acts, the author should signal her act of asserting, so that the
readers would recognize her assertions and assess them as such. Call this the communication thesis. Sixth, it has been claimed that the
truths literary fictions convey are inarticulate and inagreeable among critics;
that literary fictions neither make use of proper terms nor argue for their
truths, and that there is nothing distinct in ‘literary knowledge.’ Call this the
triviality argument. Seventh, it
has been argued that rather than genuine assertions, assertions in literary
fiction should be considered thematic statements which characterize and
structure the theme of the work. Call this the
thematic thesis. Finally, it has been suggested that because literary
critics do not debate the truths conveyed by literary works, it is no part of
literary interpretation to assess assertions in literature as true or false.
Call this the literary practice thesis.
1.1. The Artistic Thesis
The artistic thesis is an
“aesthetic” argument which emphasizes the nature and aims of literary fiction
as a form of art. The thesis maintains that the aim of artworks is not to
convey truths but to provide aesthetic experience; it suggests that literary
interpretation aims at aesthetic appreciation, not critical assessment of
truth-claims.[2] Further, the thesis proposes that
were there truths – or correspondence between the actual world and declarative
sentences, that is, “world-adequate” descriptions – contained in a work of
fiction, the work does not claim for the truths it contains. For instance, a
formulation of the artistic thesis which may be called the ‘no-warrant
objection’ maintains that the author
does not authenticate or guarantee her (genuine-looking) assertions. The
no-warrant objection maintains that even if fiction can afford significant true
belief, it does not warrant belief, and knowledge requires warrant. (See Putnam
1978, p. 90; Olsen 1985, pp. 63–64.) Further, the artistic thesis is often
developed positively in connection with the thematic thesis which maintains
that the role of apparent “truth-claims”
in literature is to characterize the world of the work, for instance, its
theme. I shall treat this connection later.
The proponents of the artistic
thesis are right in arguing that it is not a definitive aim of artworks to convey
truths. All literary fictions do not provide knowledge, for literature is not a
constitutively cognitive practice.[3] However, some fictions, and even
sub-genres of fiction, have an aim to make truth-claims, and recognizing this
aim is essential in the appropriate response to the works. Typically, fables,
parables and allegories are mentioned as types of fictions which are intended
to make general claims and to instruct the reader. Moreover, literary criticism
also acknowledges the author’s act of asserting. For instance, by ‘tendentious
literature,’ it refers to a class of works which aim at changing readers’
beliefs, moral attitudes and even social conditions. One particular sub-genre
of fiction which advances genuine claims is the thesis novel or novel of ideas.
As thesis novels, one can mention works such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Thomas Mann’s Magic
Mountain, John Steinbeck’s Grapes of
Wrath, and William Golding’s Lord of
the Flies. Recognizing and understanding the thesis which a thesis novel
makes is necessary for its proper literary understanding.
However, “assertive fictions” are
not limited to didactic pieces and thesis novels. While thesis novels are
paradigmatic assertive fictions, all fictions which advance knowledge-claims
are not thesis novels. What is peculiar to the thesis novel is that in it the
thesis the work makes is seen to comprehensively structure the story and to
govern the plot. Many other works of fiction also have a central aim to make
claims without subordinating the story to the claims. When it comes to the
warrant objection, it is true that literary fictions do not warrant belief. As
I try to argue in this paper, literary assertions have a peculiar status as
speech acts: in general, the reader will recognize the author’s assertions, but
authors are not typically held responsible for the assertions they make in
their works.
1.2. The Fictive Mode of Speaking
Argument
The fictive mode of speaking
argument is, in turn, a motley of ontological arguments that have in common the
emphasis on the particular nature of the fictive utterance. The argument
maintains, first, that the author’s mode of speaking differs from the assertive
mode of speaking employed in everyday conversation: unlike speakers in everyday
conversation, literary authors intend their assertions not to be believed but
entertained, imagined, or made-believe by the readers. This objection can be
called the fictive utterance thesis.
Second, the argument maintains that
the author’s fictive mode of speaking postulates an implied speaker or a
narrator who tells the story, and hence, that the assertions cannot be
attributed to the actual author. In New Criticism, for instance, propositions
expressed in fictions were considered utterances of a persona and not assertions of the author.[4] For instance, René Wellek and
Austin Warren (1963, p. 25) suggest that assertions in fiction are not
“literally true,” for they are uttered by a fictional speaker. This objection
can be called the fictional speaker
thesis.
Third, the argument proposes that
fictive utterances do not refer to the actual but a fictional world. It
maintains that literary fictions and scientific articles, for example, depict
different worlds: a scientific article claims truths about the actual world,
whereas a literary fiction projects a world of its own: an assertion in a
fiction is put forward by a fictional speaker and it refers to the
self-sufficient imaginary world of the work (see e.g. Davies 1997, p. 4). A. C. Bradley (1901, p. 8),
for one, has famously argued that the nature of poetry is to be “not a part,
nor yet a copy of the real world” but “a world by itself, independent,
complete, autonomous.” Michael Riffaterre (1978), in turn, argues that to say
that fiction represents reality is to commit the ‘referential fallacy.’
Furthermore, Dorrit Cohn (1999, pp. 9–17)
argues that fiction refers to the actual world often inaccurately, for the
author fictionalizes actual events and objects and uses them as material for
his artwork. This objection can be called the
fictional world thesis. The fictive mode of speaking argument is, thus,
threefold: first, it argues that fictive utterances are intended to be imagined
or made-believe instead of believed, second, that the speaker of the work is
not the author but a fictional character, and third, that assertions in a
fiction are about the state of affairs in the fictional world of the work. As a
conclusion, the thesis maintains that fictions cannot convey worldly truths.
Now, when speaking of assertions in
fiction, one needs to make a distinction between the author’s direct assertions
and literary assertions. The so-called propositional theory of literary truth
maintains that there are direct assertions in fiction, whereas a moderate
version of the theory suggests that such assertions should rather be considered
fictitious in the first place. Let us consider first the author’s direct
assertions and then literary assertions.
1.2.1. Propositional Theory of Literary Truth
In discussions on the propositional
knowledge literary fictions convey, it has been customary to draw a distinction
between the narrative sentences that constitute the fictional story and the
author’s assertions. For instance, Monroe C. Beardsley thought that fictions
consist of two sorts of sentences: explicit (fictional) ‘Reports’ which report
“the situation, the objects and events, of the story” and ‘Reflections’ or
‘theses’ in which “the narrator generalizes in some way, or reflects upon the
situation” (Beardsley 1981a, p. 409).
As examples of Reflections, Beardsley (ibid., p. 414) mentioned “Tolstoy’s
philosophy of history, the point made by Chaucer’s Pardoner, ‘Radix malorum est
cupiditas,’ and the morals of Aesop fables.” Beardsley (ibid., p. 409; emphasis
in original) also argued that if a work has “an explicit philosophy,
like War and Peace,” it shall be presented in the form of Reflections.[5] According to Beardsley’s (ibid., p.
422) first proposal (which he, however, doubted), Reflections are not to
be taken as assertions about the fictional world but rather as genuine
assertions by which the author presents “some general views about life that he
holds as a human being and wished to teach.”[6]
Similarly, Gregory Currie argues that fictions may
contain non-fictional sentences. According to Currie, a novelist may make
statements intended for the reader to believe. For instance, Currie (1985,
p. 391) suggests that
Walter Scott “breaks off the narrative of Guy
Mannering in order to tell us something about the condition of Scottish
gypsies. And it is pretty clear that what he is saying he is asserting.” In
general, in the “breaking off the narrative” the author is seen to suspend the
story-telling (typically in past tense) in order to make genuine claims (typically
in present tense). In the cognitivist discussion in back decades, the author’s
judgements were generally considered generalizations, that is, statements in
which the author was seen to “extrapolate” states of affairs in the actual
world from fictional events. Recall, for instance, the cognitivists’ classic
example, the opening sentence of Anna
Karenina: “Happy families are all happy in the same way, unhappy families
unhappy in their separate, different ways.” Furthermore, many
philosophers have argued that a novel, for instance, does not need to consist
completely of fictional discourse, for authors may also include assertions in
their works (see e.g.
Searle 1974; Juhl 1976; Reichert 1977; Graff 1979, 1980; Carroll 1992). Thus,
the propositional theory maintains that there may be genuine assertions in
fiction.
1.2.2. Moderate Propositional Theory of Literary Truth
The proponents of the propositional
theory of literary truth are right in claiming that evidently there are
authors’ assertions in fiction; the literary institution cannot prevent authors
from including assertions in their works. However, the theory encounters major problems
in answering the fictional speaker thesis and the fictional world thesis. The
questions the propositional theory typically provokes in its defence of direct
assertions – for instance, is there always a narrator in a work of fiction (or
in an utterance in it) or can the actual author be the narrator of a fiction
(or of an utterance in it) – can be said to be rather questions of a
philosopher of language and cursory from a literary point of view. In addition,
explicit assertions, such as generalizations, constitute only a small part of a
fiction, and limiting the author’s assertions to them really is not reasonable.
There are authors’ assertions in fiction which contain, for instance, reference
to fictional characters, and hence cannot be considered the author’s direct
assertions; rather, they should be taken in a sense figurative.
In turn, the moderate version of the
theory maintains that assertions in literary fiction are in the first place a
fictional speaker’s – the narrator’s or a character’s – assertions about the
fictional world. Nevertheless, the theory maintains that assertions of a
fictional speaker may also function as the author’s genuine assertions. In
other words, the author may perform or generate genuine acts by presenting the
acts of a fictional speaker, or convey genuine assertions by expressing
fictional assertions (see e.g. Sparshott 1967, pp. 3 & 6–7).
Dostoyevsky’s novel House of the Dead, for instance,
contains passages which can be considered autobiographical. What makes the work
a novel instead of an autobiography, is that it is presented as fiction and its
primary aim is to provide aesthetic experience.[7] However, the philosophical
meditations on punishment, prisons, and the human nature, can be considered
Feodor Dostoyevsky’s genuine meditations which aim at conveying truth-claims
and which are generally recognized as such. Now, for the moderate propositional
cognitivist it does not pose a problem that assertions in literary fiction are
uttered using the fictive mode of speaking, are asserted by a fictional
character and perhaps embody fictional elements, such as characters, events,
and places. Different fictions, literary fictions included, are often used to
convey an assertion or a message.
1.3. The Unity Argument
The unity argument actually makes
two theses, a logical and an aesthetic one. In general, the argument maintains that
a fiction should not be divided into two parts, the story and the moral. First,
it maintains that the content of a fiction cannot be logically divided into the
story told by the speaker and assertions put forward by the author: if the
assertions are part of the fiction (story), they are fictional; if they are
genuine, they are not part of the fiction (see Margolis 1980, p. 271–273). In
the same manner, Monroe C. Beardsley (1981b, pp. 301–304) argues that were
there genuine assertions attributed to the author in a work of fiction, then
the speaker of the work should be identified with the author, from which it
would follow that all the speaker’s properties should be ascribed to the author
– which would lead to absurdities. Second, the unity argument maintains that an
interpretation which considers certain assertions in a literary fiction as the
author’s assertions does not consider the work as (a coherent work of)
literature; such an interpretation would be inappropriate from the literary
point of view. Jerrold Levinson (1992, pp. 245–246), for one, makes the both claims in
arguing that dividing a literary fiction into the fictional story told be the
speaker and assertions put forward by the author would dismiss the literary
features of the work (the aesthetic version of the argument) and make it
something neither fiction nor non-fiction (the logical version of the
argument).[8]
The moderate propositional theory of
literary truth I argue for does not maintain that one should distinguish the
author’s assertions from the fictional story. Rather, I suggest that on the
literal level, assertions in fiction are fictitious. As I see it, in the
first place, assertions in fiction, also the apparently direct assertions, are
to be attributed to a fictional speaker. Every sentence in the text of a work
of fiction is a part of the fictional story. Fictive utterances, however, may
function on two levels: as assertions of the fictional world and of reality.
This, nonetheless, is not to deny
that there could not be assertions in fiction which are put forward and
intended to be recognized only as the author’s actual assertions, but to alert
the reader of the ‘aspectival’ nature of assertions in fiction. Perhaps there
might be didactic fictions, for instance, in which some assertions or even
passages, such as the Preface, might be meant to be attributed to the actual
author. However, I argue that “direct” assertions in fiction also have a double
reference: they both refer to the fictional world of the work and convey
genuine propositions. As I see it, the reader should pay attention to the
author’s literary role when interpreting peritexts, such as the Preface and the
Author’s notes.
1.4. The Literary Mode of Speaking
Argument
The literary mode of speaking
argument, close to the fictive mode of speaking argument, is a collection of
theses which stress the impossibility (or difficulty) of locating and
extracting authors’ assertions in their works. Whereas the fictive mode of
speaking argument maintains that truth-claiming in fiction is ontologically
impossible, the literary mode of speaking argument admits its possibility,
maintaining that the question is epistemological: how the author’s actual
assertions can be identified? As some other arguments presented here, the
literary mode of speaking argument has also been advanced in various
formulations and it is discussed here in parts.
First, the fictional voice thesis maintains that a reader cannot be sure
who is speaking in a work of fiction. The fictional voice thesis differs from the
fictional speaker thesis discussed earlier in that the fictional voice thesis
is not ontological but epistemological: it does not deny that character’s
assertions could function as the author’s assertions but it emphasises the
problems of recognizing the author’s actual assertions – how can we say that a
certain voice in the novel really belongs the actual author? – and their tone.
Now, many if not most anti-cognitivists admit the existence of assertions in
fiction. For them, the question is not whether it is possible for authors to
make assertions in their works, but that there is no way to identify the
assertions, or the author’s attitude toward them. For instance, Stein Haugom
Olsen argues that many of the assertions in fiction are ‘indirect reflections,’
that is, assertions that
seem to have an ironic tone, as the opening sentence of Austen’s Pride and
Prejudice, or are uttered by, “put into the mouth of,” a character who is
unreliable. Olsen argues that this sort of assertions “must be
interpreted further and they cannot be taken to represent the author’s meaning.” (Olsen 1985, p. 68.) Likewise,
Peter Lamarque (2008, p. 233) suggests that the problem in taking philosophical
statements in, for example, Shakespeare’s plays as the author’s truth-claims, is
that the statements are made by characters and not “directly asserted” by the
author. Hence, Lamarque argues that one cannot know whether or not Shakespeare
intends the statements as truths the reader should accept.
Second, the context thesis suggests that authors’ actual assertions cannot
be extracted from literary fictions. Lamarque, for one, argues that deriving
truths from Shakespeare’s plays is an inappropriate response to the works which
misses their literary nature. As he sees it,
[t]he resonance the
words have in the plays themselves, spoken by particular character at
particular dramatic moments for specific dramatic ends, is lost, and this
drains them of the distinctive literary interest their contexts supply.
(Lamarque 2008, p. 233)
Lamarque (ibid., p. 235)
also claims that philosophical statements in a novel may have an ironic
significance in their original context and this significance is lost when the
statements are “crudely extracted,” that is, applied in the assertive
discourse. Moreover, another common formulation of the context thesis maintains
that the precise reference of assertions in literary fiction gets lost when the
assertions are extracted from the work.[9]
Third, the argument
maintains that authors, literary artists, are free to express all sorts of
beliefs in their works without committing themselves to the beliefs. Because
literary interpretation, however, relies on the concept of the author as a
normative structure of the work, for instance, in order to recognize an
unreliable narrator, the implied author
thesis maintains that the locus of beliefs expressed in the work has to be
an ‘implied’ or ‘postulated’ author, a fictional entity between the actual
author and the narrator.
Now, the fictional voice
thesis is not completely misdirected, for it shows that the question of the
author’s act of assertion is actually epistemological: the problem is how one
can tell which of the assertions the author has put into the mouth of a
character are actually asserted by the author. In general, there are two ways
of identifying authors’ assertions: intrinsically and extrinsically.
Intrinsically, assertions manifest themselves in the work. They are recognized
by examining the tone of the work, the style of the narrative, the design of
the work, and the like. In a truth-seeking interpretation, detecting the
author’s attitude toward the assertions she expresses in her work does not
differ from interpreting utterances in everyday conversations. In both cases,
the interpreter aims at solving the author’s aim by looking for her intention
as it manifests itself in the utterance with the help of contextual evidence,
conventions of communication, and so on. For example, Olsen’s argument
concerning “indirect assertions” only shows that assertions in fiction are not
necessarily literal and have to be interpreted further; the question is about
their tone. As J. O. Urmson (1976, p. 153) has insightfully put it, although
“satirically-minded” or “with whatever malicious intent,” the opening sentence
of Pride and Prejudice can be considered “a direct
statement by Miss Austen to her readers.” In turn, from an extrinsic point of
view, assertions in a literary fiction are identified as the author’s
assertions by referring to her public biography, non-fictional writings and
other relevant information about the author’s actual beliefs.
The context thesis, in
turn, attacks an imaginary practice of presenting complete literary works as
compact morals – which hardly anyone practices – rather than points out a
problem that would be characteristic to assertions in literary fiction only.
After all, all assertions become indeterminate, banal, and proverbial when
extracted from their original context. Consider, for instance, statements such
as “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk,”
“God is dead,” “The aim of philosophy is to shew the fly the way out of the
fly-bottle,” “It is raining but I don’t believe that it is,” “Hell is other
people,” or “Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.” Without knowing their
surrounding argumentative contexts, the assertions can hardly be grasped, at
least as significant philosophical assertions. Further, a philosopher surely
would hesitate in assessing them as true or false, for she would not know what
is actually claimed and on which grounds. Naturally, literary assertions have
some distinct contextual characteristics which I shall discuss later in this
paper.
The implied author
thesis illuminates an important feature in literature: that a fiction may seem
to express beliefs which cannot be attributed to the actual author. However,
the realm of such beliefs is, like the implied author itself, fictitious, and
genuine beliefs and claims require a human agent. Truth-claims, in turn, must
be attributed to a human agent, and if a work genuinely conveys something, it
must be the actual author’s view. Moreover, if “truth-claims” are considered
genuine truth-claims established by the author, it is difficult to see how
contradicting truth-claims might be a serious and general problem in literary
truth-claiming. Taken that a person cannot simultaneously believe and claim
that p and not-p, apparent conflicts of literary truths are to be solved by
investigating the tone of the work.[10] When it comes to contradicting
truth-claims in works by the same author, one can simply say that authors may
change their views, just like philosophers, for
instance.
1.5. The Communication
Thesis
The communication thesis
can be considered a version of the literary mode of speaking argument, the
fictional voice thesis in particular, expressed in terms of the philosophy of
language. The (Gricean) background assumption of the thesis is that
communication acts invite appropriate responses; that assertions, for example,
invite assessment which is suggested by, besides non-semantic conventions,
certain semantic markers, such as the declarative sentence form. Thus, the
thesis maintains that in order there to be assertions in fiction, the author
should manifest them.
Now, in addition to
semantic characteristics of fiction, there are also pragmatic markers or
conventions, such as the text “A Novel,” on the front cover of the work which
are considered to override the basic speech act rules and to suggest that, for
instance, the declarative sentences in the work are intended not be believed
but imagined unasserted by the reader. In order to claim truths, the author
should somehow override the fictional pact (that the content of the work is
intended to be imagined unasserted) she has established with the reader and
signal which of the assertions in the work the reader should consider genuine.[11] However, the author is not able to
indicate such a thing in the work, for everything included in the work is part
of the fictional story, the thesis maintains. Therefore, the communication
thesis concludes that one has no evidence to suppose that the author takes
responsibility for fulfilling speech act conditions (besides reference,
perhaps), for example, the sincerity condition which demands that she should
believe her assertions to be true.
Here, several questions
arise. Can there be assertions that do not manifest their assertive status? Can
the author include in her work assertions which she believes to be true and
which she intends the reader to assess? Or more broadly, can she include in her
work assertions which she presents for the readers to be considered,
entertained, or contemplated, as genuine assertions? Here, one needs to make a
distinction between expressed, asserted and communicated propositions. First,
in fiction there are a lot of propositions which the author expresses but does
not assert, for instance, philosophical propositions the author contemplates
but does not claim. Second, there are, arguably, propositions the author
believes to be true and puts forward as true. Such propositions can be called
asserted propositions (in the Searlean sense of an assertion). Third,
propositions the author believes to be true, puts forward as true and intends
for the reader to recognize as true can be called communicated propositions (in
the Gricean sense of an assertion). Of these three types, I shall examine here
communicated propositions which I consider the only
relevant group when discussing the author’s act of literary truth-claiming.
1.6. Manifesting Acts
of Assertion
If fiction is considered
a discourse able to contain assertions, the ‘literary communication act’ has to
be defined. Perhaps the most prominent way of approaching literary communication
is the Gricean intention-response model of communication which focuses on the
origins of an utterance and the speaker’s aims realized in the utterance. Now,
in order to be a Gricean communication act, an assertion needs to fulfil
certain rules. An assertion requires, for instance, that the speaker indicates
that she is making an assertion which she believes to be true by manifesting
her intention in the utterance. Further, what makes the intention a “Gricean”
intention is that the speaker intends the audience to undertake the requisite
belief (at least partly) as a result of recognizing the author’s intention in
the utterance.
In literary discourse,
the problem is that the intention the author manifests in her overall fictive
utterance is seen to rule out assertive intentions. For instance, Gregory
Currie defines the fictive utterance in his seminal Gricean theory of fiction
thus:
I want you to make
believe some propositions P; I
utter a sentence that means P,
intending that you shall recognize that this is what the sentence means, and to
recognize that I intend to produce a sentence that means P; and I intend you to infer from this
that I intend you to make believe that P, and,
finally, I intend that you shall, partly as a result of this intention, come to
make believe that P. (Currie 1990, p. 31)
Now, if the author has
invited the reader to make-believe the content of the work, how is she to
signal that she is moving from fiction-making to asserting? To begin with, as I
suggested earlier in this essay, the moderate propositional theory I argue for
maintains that assertions in fiction are part of the story. Thus, I argue that
the author’s fictive intention is present throughout the work; that the
assertions in the work are intended to be imagined in the first place.
Nevertheless, I suggest that there are literary assertions which have a ‘double
reference’ and which convey genuine assertions.
Noël Carroll has
proposed a broadly Gricean definition of ‘film of presumptive assertion,’ a
sub-genre of non-fiction film, which, I think, can be applied to literary
fiction. Carroll suggests that
x is a film of presumptive
assertion if and only if the filmmaker s
presents x to an audience a with the intention (1) that a recognizes that x is intended by s to mean that p (some propositional content), (2) that
a recognizes that s intends them (a) to entertain p as an asserted thought (or as a set of
asserted thoughts), (3) that a
entertains p as asserted thought, and (4)
that 2 is a reason for 3. (Carroll 1997, p. 188)
Literary assertions
manifest both fictive and assertive intentions, and the author intends them to
be entertained as both assertions of the fictional world and of reality. As a
preliminary notion of the literary assertion I would like to suggest that in
making a literary assertion, i) the author presents an utterance to an audience
with the intention that the audience recognizes that the utterance is intended
by the author to have a certain meaning; ii) that the audience recognizes that
the author intends them to both imagine the content of the utterance as a
narrative description that depicts a fictional world and to genuinely assess
the proposition the narrative description conveys; iii) that the audience both
imagines the meaning of the utterance as a description of a fictional world and
entertains it as an asserted thought, iv) and, finally, that recognizing the
author’s invitation to such a response is a reason for the response.
Here, questions related
to the propositional content of literary assertions and the reader’s stance
toward the content immediately arise. For instance, can a proposition be
simultaneously imagined and entertained as true? And are there actually two
propositions contained in a literary assertion, one intended to be imagined and
the other to be entertained as true? I shall discuss these questions in the end
of the paper when treating the logical status of literary assertions. What is
of interest here is the way authors invite their readers to entertain
propositions conveyed by literary assertions as asserted propositions.
The sad truth seems to
be that there is no general rule, beyond the conventions that guide speakers in
manifesting their intentions in utterances, to detect literary assertions in fiction.
(And were there such a rule, it would be soon overridden by some author.)
Nonetheless, some general guidelines may be sketched. In literary culture,
authors’ manifest their assertions by several narrative factors: the form and
content of the utterance, the tone and style of the narrative and its manner of
representation, the design of the work, and the like. Consider, for instance,
these openings of works of Borges:
It may be said that
universal history is the history of a handful of metaphors. The purpose of this
note will be to sketch a chapter of this history. (Borges 1964a, p. 189).[12]
In our dreams
(writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do
not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in
order to explain the horror we feel. (Borges 1964b, p. 240).[13]
The form and content of
these utterances clearly invite the reader to entertain them as a set of
asserted thoughts, for they are in the indicative form and make assertions concerning
(broadly) philosophical issues.[14] General philosophical propositions –
particularly as opening sentences of a work – also question the sharp
distinction between ‘fictional’ and ‘genuine’ entertainment of propositions.
When reading sentences as those cited, the reader might not know whether she is
reading a short story or a philosophical essay. (Were the works cited later
discovered fiction, the narrator’s continuous references to actual philosophers
and their views hardly make the reader to disentangle the extrinsic assessment
of the philosophical views the opening has established.) Appeals to the
reader’s expectations in reading philosophy and in reading fiction – whether
the interpretation aims at aesthetic experience or truth – become feeble abstractions
in cases in which there are, for instance, explicit philosophical discussion in
fiction.
As I see it, assertions
in fiction call for evaluation akin to assertions in everyday conversation. For
instance, that the passage (which develops Coleridge’s philosophical view) –
It has been said
that every man is born an Aristotelian or a Platonist. This is the same as
saying that every abstract contention has its counterpart in the polemics of
Aristotle or Plato; across the centuries and latitudes, the names, faces and
dialects change but not the eternal antagonists. (Borges 1964c, p. 146).[15]
is presented in a
fictional story does neither affect its sense nor make it less interesting than
it would be if uttered in another context. Nevertheless, these sentences,
considered as assertions in philosophical discourse and literary discourse
function as different speech acts. Put in rough terms, in philosophical
discourse, assertions are intended to claim truths, and the speaker of the work
is generally the author. In literary discourse, in turn, assertions primarily
characterize the fictional world of the work, and they cannot be attributed
outright to the actual author. However, the author may make claims in her work.
This is the peculiarity of literary asserting which I shall discuss in the end
of the paper.
1.7. The Triviality
Argument
Akin to the literary
mode of speaking argument, the triviality argument is also an epistemological
argument. Whereas the literary mode of speaking thesis stresses issues concerning
different voices in fiction and the context of literary assertions, the
triviality argument focuses on the nature and value of ‘literary knowledge.’
The triviality argument also comes in many flavours. First, the argument
questions the whole concept of literary knowledge by claiming that the truths
fictions convey are trivial, inarticulate and inagreeable among readers (the vagueness thesis). Second, it claims
that literary knowledge is not knowledge proper, because it does not make use
of proper concepts (the no-concept thesis).
Third, it argues that literary knowledge necessarily remains trivial, because
fictions do not argue or provide reasons for the claims they make (the no-argument thesis), or support them
with evidence (the no-evidence thesis).
Fourth, it suggests that there is no distinct sort of knowledge such as
literary knowledge and that the cognitive function of literary fiction is
subordinate to other discourses (the
uniqueness thesis).
First, the vagueness
thesis maintains that truths to be learnt from fiction are banal, vague or
inarticulate. Jerome Stolnitz (1992, p. 197) famously claims that the “truths”
fictions express are mere banalities: for instance, both in Dickens’s Bleak House and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the truth was
“knowable and known” before the works, and nothing new was expressed in them.
Further, Stolnitz (ibid., pp. 193–194) maintains that the truth to be
learned from Austen’s Pride and Prejudice
– “Stubborn pride and ignorant prejudice keep attractive people apart” – is
“pitifully meagre.” In turn, Peter Lamarque emphasizes the “vagueness” of
literary truths. As he sees it, it is difficult to discern the truth-value of
literary truths, for generalizations, for instance, are sometimes just too
general. According to Lamarque (2008, p. 234), generalizations are “just as
likely as proverbs to contradict each other.”[16] Moreover, Lamarque suggests that
literary assertions, such as Shakespeare’s generalization “All the world’s a
stage” in As You Like It, are often “metaphorical, and perhaps the best
we can say is that the metaphor is apt and telling.” As a conclusion, he (ibid., p. 234)
suggests that perhaps generalizations should be considered “merely powerful
prompters to get us to think along certain lines.” Finally, Stein Haugom Olsen (1985, p. 71) appeals to the practice of reading and suggests that when asked what
truths a given great work of literature conveys, the answers are generally
inarticulate or inagreeable among the audience. The notion suggests that either the generally
accepted paraphrases of a work’s thesis show that literary truths are trivial
or, as the context thesis suggests, inseparable from the work.
The vagueness thesis can be easily shown inadequate.
One should note that the
so-called banality of literary truths actually stems from a straw-man-like
attempt to produce a compact restatement of the meaning of a complete work.[17] However, making one sentence
paraphrases, such as “Stubborn pride and ignorant prejudice keep attractive
people apart,” of literary works is not a part of the practice of truth-seeking
interpretation. Indeed, such a condensation would flatten any sort of work,
were it a work of philosophy, fiction or physics. For example, there is hardly
a work of philosophy whose “meaning” would be agreeable among professional
philosophers – especially should it be restated by a single sentence. (Those
who disagree might try to formulate universally acceptable, cognitively
significant single sentence paraphrases of, for instance, Hume’s Treatise.)
Nonetheless, when
considered in the light of the complete work, literary truths are far from
trivial. The practice of reading shows that the truths people gain from
literature are significant; consider, for instance, how people like Mill,
Freud, and Wittgenstein have said to have learnt important truths from
literature. Histories and encyclopaedias of philosophy also discuss the
literary works of authors, such as Kierkegaard, Camus and Sartre. Furthermore,
when it comes to the excessive “generality” of assertions in fiction, one
should note that while assertions in fiction might be too general in
themselves, their surrounding narrative adjusts their extension (genuine
reference). Here, one encounters again the role of context in interpreting assertions.
Assertions
in literary fiction, for instance, draw cognitive purport from other narrative
sentences. For example, generalizations often just recap the story and
explicitly state the theme of the work. Naturally, a generalization detached
from the work and presented as an autonomous assertion is quite likely to be
trivial – like any assertion drawn from a work of philosophy, as it was noted
when examining the context thesis. As in utterances in general, the meaning of literary utterances in
particular depends on their contextual features. Literary assertions are
understood in the light of the context of the utterance, the utterer’s
character, and the way the act of assertion is depicted. This is not to say
that literary assertions could not be paraphrased, but that paraphrasing
them generally requires explicating their contextual features, such as the
utterer’s character.
Second, the no-concept
thesis maintains that literary truths are banal, because knowledge is tied to
the use of proper concepts and because fictions neither make use of them nor
introduce new concepts. Matthew Kieran and Dominic McIver Lopes (2006, xii)
formulate the no-concept thesis hereby: How can one say that Orwell’s 1984 conveys a message that
individualism becomes suppressed in totalitarianism, if the point is not
explicated in the work itself? After all, the word “totalitarianism” does not
exist on the pages of the book. Kieran and Lopes think that the cognitivist’s dilemma is that either the
readers already believe the point the work conveys or they do not: if they do,
then art is trivial (the vagueness thesis); if they do not, then the question
is what ties the state of affairs in the world of fiction to the truth about
the actual world (the no-concept thesis).
The no-concept thesis can be refuted by, to begin
with, noting that there are literary fictions which explicitly address the
problem they examine and make use of concepts, such as “Pierre Menard” which
explicitly discusses the role of a work’s historical background in literary
interpretation, or, for example, existentialist fiction which discuss the
(“inarticulate”!) feelings of angst and anxiety. Nevertheless, most
“cognitively valuable” fictions do not employ technical concepts or terms
related to the issue they treat. Rather, the truth that people learn from
literary fiction suggests that literary knowledge does not depend on the
explicit use of proper terms but that it implies them. John Gibson (2007,
pp. 101–102), for one,
insightfully suggests that fictions “illuminate” readers’ understanding of
concepts, “operate upon” truths and “fulfil” the knowledge they already
possess. As he (ibid., p. 114–115) sees it, instead of telling one
about what jealousy is, Othello’s behaviour illuminates one’s understanding of
it.[18] According
to Gibson (ibid., p. 117), literature contextualizes concepts and
presents them to readers in concrete form.
Third, the no-argument
thesis maintains that literary knowledge is trivial, because literary fictions
do not reason the assertions they make or support them with evidence (see Beardsley 1981a, p. 429; Stolnitz 1992, pp. 196–197). For instance, Stolnitz (1992, p. 196)
argues that because literary works are unable to reason their claims, the
“literary truths” derived from the works remain a set of proverbial notions
that may simply override each other. In turn, the no-evidence thesis maintains
that because fictions do not argue for the assertions they make or imply, the
validation has to be achieved by referring to some independent sources, such as
the author’s non-fictional writings or state of affairs in the real world
(Margolis 1980, p. 270; see
also Stolnitz 1992, pp. 196–197). Hence, the proponents of the thesis argue
that literary truths do not actually derive from the fictional work but the
extra-fictional sources.
Proponents of the
no-argument thesis are right in that while literary fictions contain and imply
truth-claims, these truth-claims are not reasoned as in, for example,
philosophy. Instead, literary fictions rely on rhetorical argumentation. Works
of literary fiction persuade readers of their truths enthymematically: they
imply the deliberately omitted conclusion or premise; the work suggests the
unstated part of the rhetorical argument and the reader fills it in.
(Naturally, a reader may appeal to the author’s non-fictional writings or state
of affairs in the actual world to validate the truths in the work, but this is
to explicate what is implicit, or deliberately omitted, in the work; literary
persuasion depends on the reader who is invited to fulfil what is unstated in
the enthymeme.)
Further, Stolnitz’s
objection which maintains that literary truths may contradict each other, for
there is no method for solving the contradiction, may be questioned by
remarking that authors who make assertions in their work generally attempt to
persuade their readers of their points. The difference between literature and
philosophy is just that they use different ways in persuading their audiences:
philosophy prefers argument, whereas literature favours different forms of
rhetorical argumentation. Literary fiction, for instance, prefers illustration
and appeal to emotion; it shows-that p,
shows-how p and
shows-what-it-would-be-like if p.
Moreover, both in philosophy and literature, it is ultimately the reader who
considers which of the several alternative views provides the best grounds for
believing in it.
In turn, the no-evidence
thesis which concerns the validation of literary truths, can be shown
inadequate by noting that when literary fictions are considered roughly similar
to hypotheses or philosophical thought experiments, their lack of “genuine”
evidence does not make them cognitively insignificant. One should note that the
no-evidence thesis deals with empirical evidence, and literary works are
generally seen to provide types of knowledge in which empirical evidence is not
consider important, such as on moral philosophical issues.
Fourth, the uniqueness
thesis maintains that literary fictions’ ability to transmit factual knowledge
is unlike to illuminate the cognitive significance of literature qua
literature. The thesis maintains that even if literary fiction could warrant
important true beliefs, it does not convey them in any distinctive manner. It
has been argued, for instance, that the propositional cognitive gains of a
historical novel, conveyed through narrative descriptions, is not distinctive
of the work as a literary work; same truths could be achieved, yet more efficiently,
from a work of history (see Stolnitz 1992, p. 191–192 &
196; see also Diffey 1997, p. 210). Further, the thesis maintains that different ‘cognitive practices’
have their distinct scopes: it claims that philosophy, for instance, has its
own methods and objects of study, whereas literature does not. Hence, the
uniqueness thesis maintains that the cognitivist’s task is to explain, first,
the distinctive cognitive value of fiction, and second, its methods and objects
of study. (See Kieran & Lopes 2006, xiii–xiv.)
Literary fictions,
nonetheless, have their distinct manners of conveying knowledge. The uniqueness
of literary knowledge is gained by several characteristics of which I shall
mention here only a few: the literary narrative form which includes the narrator
and the multiplicity of viewpoints, illustration, and the elaborateness of
literary representation.[19] First, the literary narrative form
provides features which distinguish literary fictions from other narratives.
Literary fictions may, for example, make use of an omniscient narrator who is
able to depict the train of characters’ thoughts. Such a narrator may discuss,
for instance, characters’ motives, intentions, thoughts, and feelings, and thus
make the treatment of the subject more detailed and full. Further, fictions
often present multiple viewpoints in examining, for instance, ethical
questions. And unlike philosophers’ dialogues such as those of Plato, literary
fictions generally aim at representing characters’ viewpoints as thorough or
“autonomous” views without roughly subordinating them to the thesis of the
work.[20] Second, literary fictions may
illustrate, for instance, a philosophical issue by showing what it would be in
a certain situation, or what it would be like to feel in a certain way. Third,
literary fictions are elaborate, which is appreciated when they are considered
thought experiments.
For instance, Noël
Carroll (2002, pp. 18–19) suggests that the elaborateness
of ‘literary thought experiments’ is a cognitive virtue, because they expose
“hidden motives and feelings of the agent” better than those of philosophers. Moreover, Eileen John (2003, pp. 150–157)
suggests that while elaborateness may sometimes make it hard for the reader to
tell what is the relevance and integrity of fictional particulars to (general)
philosophical issues, the details may also steer the reader toward
philosophical concerns. Colin McGinn (1996, p. 3), in turn, suggests that fictions
are interesting because they combine the universal and the particular in intelligible
way. Finally, Catherine Z. Elgin (2007, pp. 48–49) argues that philosophers’ thought
experiments are “sometimes unconvincing because they are so austere.” Further,
Elgin (ibid., p. 50) suggests that fictions do not need to present
paradigm cases but they may also show extreme cases and thus reveal “aspects of
things that are normally obscured.” What comes to the Harean fear of not
distinguishing the essential features, that is, features relevant to the
philosophical issue, from the accidental features, that is, fictional
particulars, a common reader surely realizes what is relevant to the issue.
However, in the strict sense, literature does not have distinct methods of
study. Besides offering propositional and non-propositional knowledge, literary
fictions deploy distinctive artistic methods to clarify one’s understanding of
different issues so that people come to see the things in a new light (see Kieran 1996; Kieran 2004; Carroll 1998a), “enhance” or “enrich” the reader’s knowledge
(Graham 2000), or help the reader acknowledge things (Gibson
2003; Gibson 2007).
Finally, the question of the triviality of literary
knowledge depends on what one means by ‘philosophy.’ Peter Kivy, for one, notes that the banality
thesis is put forward by academics, mostly philosophers and literary critics,
to whom literary truths are “old hat.” Kivy reminds one that academics are
neither the only nor the principal audience at which fictions are aimed.
Rather, fictions are aimed at “a general, educated public,” who might encounter
a certain philosophical issue first in a fiction (Kivy
1997a, pp. 20–21; see also Carroll 2002, pp. 8–9).
1.8. The Thematic
Argument
The thematic argument is
a positive version of the artistic thesis or, as a matter of fact, a theory of
the core of literary interpretation. As to assertions in fiction, the argument
maintains that they are best considered explicit thematic statements which
serve an aesthetic purpose and structure the artistic content – the theme – of
the work. According to Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, perhaps the most
well-known supporters of the thematic approach today, thematic statements are
propositions which “express generalizations or judgements based on or referring
to these described situations, events, characters, and places,” (Lamarque & Olsen 1994,
p. 324) some, but not all, of them being in the form of “general statements”
similar to Beardsleyan theses (ibid., p. 402). Furthermore, Lamarque and Olsen (ibid., pp. 324–325) argue
that thematic statements are either explicit or implicit: explicit thematic
statements occur in themselves in the work, whereas implicit thematic
statements are extracted from the work and formulated by the reader in the act
of interpretation. Here, I shall limit my examination to explicit thematic
statements.
Now, Lamarque and Olsen
suggest that often thematic statements are not asserted by the author, and
argue that thematic statements can be assigned significance without being
construed as the author’s assertions (ibid., pp. 328–329). Elsewhere, Lamarque argues that
because the author’s commitment to the propositions varies from case to case,
readers are not automatically invited to accept them as true but to entertain
them. He also suggests that although thematic statements seem to carry the
reader beyond the fictional world and invite her consideration as reflections
on the actual world, they should be primarily taken as “thematic guides or
clues to understanding the characters.” (Lamarque
1996, p. 94.) Following Lamarque and Olsen, John
Gibson (2007, p. 93) claims that while thematic statements
elicited from a literary work may be true of reality, the worldly truth of
thematic statements is unclaimed by the text.
Moreover, Lamarque and
Olsen argue that the truth-seeking interpretation arrives at banalities because
it ignores the context in which literary assertions (thematic statements)
occur. Lamarque and Olsen argue that the truth-seeking view which maintains
that an assertion such as the opening sentence of Anna Karenina could be considered a truth-claim, is “patently
inadequate, even naïve, from the literary point of view, with its added
dimensions of value and interpretation.” According to them, the sentence has
“little or nothing to do with trying to induce a belief in a reader about happy
and unhappy families,” and it is rather “an initial characterization of a theme
which gives focus and interest to the fictional content.” (Lamarque & Olsen
1994, pp. 66–67.) Again elsewhere, Lamarque
similarly argues that a certain philosophical statement by Bradley Pearson in
Iris Murdoch’s Black Prince is ironic and functions “primarily as a
thematic statement characterizing one of the themes [...] and offering a range
of philosophical concepts to apply to the work as a whole” (Lamarque 2008, p. 235).
Furthermore, Lamarque
claims that besides their function, also the content and truth of statements in
literary fiction differ in thematic interpretation, which aims at illuminating
the work and underlying its themes to make sense of it, and truth-seeking
interpretation, which looks for insight into human lives (ibid., pp. 236–237).
He suggests that as a thematic statement, a statement in fiction is not banal,
for it connects to the theme of the work, but as a truth-claim the very same
sentence is, because a truth-claim should – for some rather odd reason – stand
on its own feet. For instance, Lamarque argues that the value of Dickens’s
novel Our Mutual Friend is “in the working of the theme” (which is,
according to Lamarque, that money corrupts), not in “the theme’s bare
propositional content” which he considers banal. (ibid.,
p. 239.)
All in all, Lamarque and
Olsen present a nice group of arguments. To sum up their main theses, they
claim that i) the function of statements in literary fiction is to structure
the theme of the work; ii) often the general propositions in fiction are not
asserted by the author; iii) considered as the author’s assertion, a statement
in fiction would be naïve, whereas as a thematic statement it would not; iv)
statements in fiction may be assigned significance (as thematic statements) or
entertained without considering them truth-claims; v) statements in fiction may
be true of the work when taken as thematic statements but false of the world
when taken as genuine assertions.
Now, arguments of this
sort are to a high degree addressed against strictly propositional theories of
literary truth whose problems they illustrate well. However, the arguments do
not apply to the moderate propositional view. As noted, the moderate propositional
theory maintains that statements in fiction have a dual purpose. Once
again: in addition to structuring the theme of the work, assertions in fiction
may function as the author’s assertions. On the contrary, the thematic approach, in
emphasizing the thematic level essential to literary works, easily dismisses
the focal, conversational function of literature. Also, while thematic
statements are not stricto sensu
claimed by the work of the world, they might convey the authors’ assertions;
after all, the fictional or literary nature of a work is not an obstacle to
asserting.
Third, the thesis which
maintains that the content of sentences in fiction would differ whether they
were considered thematic statements or literary assertions, is simply absurd.
How does the author’s, or alternatively the reader’s, propositional attitude
towards a literary utterance affect on the content of the literary utterance?
In no way. The only difference between a thematic statement and a literary
assertion is that the latter is also considered to have assertive force. Berys
Gaut, for one, insightfully turns the issue around by noting that Kundera’s
general views about psychology and history, for instance, “the ruminations on
the significance of the fact that we live our lives only once” in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, are
not banal, for they structure the complete work (Gaut
2007, p. 172). Thus,
literary assertions need not stand on their own feet but they may also connect
to themes. And as noted in the triviality argument, the apparent banality of
literary assertions is caused by making compact restatements of works. Lamarque
and Olsen’s paraphrases of themes of literary works also oversimplify works’
thematic contents;[21] the thematic statements Lamarque
and Olsen formulate in their studies are trivial and vague. Now, as will be
shown later in the paper, certain kinds of literary assertions are not meant to
be presented as autonomous statements; if their context is of relevance to
understanding them, the context should also be paraphrased.
Fourth, thematic
statements can admittedly be assigned significance without construing them as
truth-claims. Their content can be entertained without judging whether or not
they are asserted. It is also true that statements in fiction, considered
literary assertions, cannot be considered outright “as is,” but that their
tone, for instance, must always be assessed. What, then, does it matter to
whom, if any, a literary assertion is attributed? Let us briefly consider expressed
unasserted propositions. When writing a philosophical fiction, the author
composes a work which contains philosophical propositions. However, in order to
convey knowledge, the propositions need not to be claimed by the author. When
writing fiction, the author does not bind herself to the truth of the
propositions even if she believes them or has beliefs similar to them. A
proposition, which a statement in a fiction conveys, may be, for instance, an
exaggerated version or an opposite of the author’s opinion, or represent some
aspect of her thought. Fictions admittedly contain a lot of ‘contemplative
propositions’ which can be considered neither assertions nor suggestions of the
author.
Nonetheless, in many
instances we are interested in the “message,” such as the philosophical
meaning, of a work; we are concerned with what the author has to say about
issues important to us. When attending to a truth-seeking interpretation of
Sartre’s Nausea, for instance, we are
looking for the philosophical meaning of the work, that is, the meaning
determined by the author. This act can be called interpretation as retrieval, and its focus is the meaning of the
work. Nevertheless, literary readings often produce thoughts beyond the meaning
of the work – for instance, contemplation on issues related to the moment of
interpretation. This act can be called creative
interpretation, and its focus is the applied meaning or the significance of
the work to the reader. Now, both types of interpretation need to attribute the
philosophical points they derive from the work to someone. All in all, in order
for there to be knowledge, there must be, put in rather rough terms, a human
agent who believes a certain justified true thought-content. And if the
thought-content is not stated by the author, the reader needs to perform the
act of assertion herself.
Finally, assertions in
fiction may certainly be true of the world of the work but false of reality.
Pessimistic generalizations about human nature, for instance, may aptly
describe the state of affairs in a certain saturnine fictional world.[22] Yet, the truth-seeker’s question is:
what does the author intend to do, besides her artistic act, by depicting such
a dark work and claiming such things, why does she portray such events.
However, before examining the nature of literary assertions, I shall discuss
the literary practice argument which can be considered an institutional version
of the artistic thesis introduced in the beginning of the essay.
1.9. The Literary
Practice Argument
The literary practice
argument maintains that assessing assertions in fiction genuinely, i.e.
extra-literarily, as true or false is not a part of literary interpretation. In
their thematic account, Lamarque and Olsen maintain that the proper way to
approach literary fictions is to aesthetically appreciate their thematic
content. To begin with, Lamarque and Olsen argue that the absence of a debate
on the worldly truth of thematic statements in the critical practice suggests
that discussing the truth of literary assertions is not a feature of the
literary practice itself (Lamarque & Olsen 1994, pp.
332–333). Respectively,
Lamarque argues elsewhere that because critics rarely move from thematic
interpretation to debating the worldly truth of thematic statements, this
implies that engaging in, for example, philosophical debate on the theme of a
literary work is not part of “the ‘practice’ of reading” (Lamarque 2008, p. 237). He also claims that debating the worldly truth of assertions in
literary fiction is unsophisticated activity which ignores the implied speaker
and tone and status of the work (Lamarque
2006, pp. 134 & 136; see also Olsen’s similar views in Olsen 1973, pp.
227–229; Olsen 1981, pp. 531–533; Olsen 1985, p. 58; Olsen 2000, pp. 29, 31,
33–34 & 39–41). As
Lamarque sees it, those who give their primary interest to the discovery of
propositional truths in literary fiction cannot be considered subtle readers (Lamarque 2008, p. 239).
The literary practice
argument is, nonetheless, misguided in several ways. First, a proper literary
response includes recognition of the author’s public aims, including her
conversational intentions. As suggested in the beginning, there are sub-genres
of fiction in which the author’s act of making genuine assertions is an essential
part of her literary task; respectively, assessing the truth of the assertions
is part of the literary appreciation of such a work. For instance, Noël Carroll
remarks that it is an essential part
of the literary task of a realist novelist ― ‘realism’ considered
here not a historical genre but a manner of representation ― to
accurately observe the social milieu she depicts. In proportion, Carroll
suggests that it is part of the literary response of a realist novel to
approach the work in terms of social and psychological insight the work is
meant to deliver. (Carroll 2007, p. 32 & 36.)
Second, the practice of
academic criticism does not determine the nature of literary practice. Peter
Kivy, among others, notes that the place for analysis and argument in the
literary practice is in the readers’ minds (Kivy
1997a, p. 22). Kivy
remarks that although assessing the worldly truth of thematic statements is not
practiced by academic critics, it is commonly practiced by general readers in
their act of appreciation. Moreover, he argues that the critics’ task is to
explicate to the general readers the thematic statements the work directly or
indirectly makes (which the readers, in turn, assess) (Kivy
1997b, pp. 122 & 125).
But Kivy has an even more important insight: a special characteristic of
literary appreciation, its temporal dimension. As he notes, literary experience
is often “gappy”: large novels, for instance, are read in parts. Further, Kivy
notes that literary appreciation has an “afterlife” akin to aftertaste in wine
experience: appreciation continues after the book has been finished. As Kivy
sees it, readers are meant to consider the truth and falsity of thematic
statements, as part of the artistic effect of the work, in the gaps and
afterlife of literary appreciation. (Kivy 1997a, p. 23.) And as Kivy remarks, when a
reader is pondering serious issues raised by a novel after reading it, she is
still enjoying the work (Kivy 1997b, pp. 131–134). Kivy’s notion of the literary
experience is felicitous, and it is easy to find support for it – not only
through one’s personal experience but also by noting that publishing literary
works as serials has been a significant practice in the literary tradition.
Finally, Lamarque’s appeal to the “simplicity” of truth-seeking approaches is,
again, outdated. A moderate
propositional approach, such as a conversational philosophical interpretation
of Sartre’s Nausea, neither excludes
the appreciation of the work in its search for the author’s intended meaning
nor ignores the implied speaker or the style and tone of the work in evaluating
Sartre’s truth-claims.
2. Characteristics of Literary
Assertions
Literary assertions have special
features that distinguish them from assertions of ordinary discourse. These are
their semantic and aspectival features and illocutionary force. Literary
assertions i) are performed by a fictional character and ii) often embody
fictional elements, such as, reference to fictional characters, places, or
events. In this paper, I have argued that assertions in literary fiction should
be taken in the first place as assertions of a fictional character, and hence
suggested that the assertions should be considered literary assertions. In
turn, the illocutionary force of literary assertions, as I try to illustrate,
refers to their peculiar character as speech acts.
2.1. Semantic Features
Literary assertions are akin to
metaphors in the sense that they both have a dual-layered meaning.[23] For example, on a literal level,
literary assertions that make reference to non-existent entities would most
likely be false if assessed as assertions (I say most likely, so that the
hairsplitting logician would not remind me of that “No man is an island.”) If
assessed literally, the sentence “Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has
enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of
reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the
erroneous attribution” would be false, for there is no Menard who had invented
a literary technique.[24] However, on another, ‘figurative’
level, literary assertions are intended to be assessed and may be true. Taken
figuratively, the sentence proposes that the historical background of a
literary work plays a substantial role in determining the meaning of the work.
So, when encountering a literary assertion, the reader is intended, by the
author, to perform two acts: i) to imagine the proposition P1 that
depicts the fictional world of the work and ii) to genuinely, i.e.
extra-fictionally, assess the proposition P2 which the proposition P1
conveys.
In addition to their dual-layered
meaning, literary assertions are often semantically dense in a distinct way.
They may, for instance, employ fictional concepts whose meaning is constructed
by the descriptions and other utterances that constitute the story. A literary
assertion may contain, for instance, a reference to a fictional character
(including indexicals),[25] which functions as a concept or
symbol and thus gives the literary assertion a surplus of meaning because of
the content of the concept. Sometimes fictional concepts such as characters
shift into metaphors (or iconic characters) in language, as people characterize
each other Fausts, Don Quijotes, Don Juans, Robinson
Crusoes, and Bartlebys
2.2. Aspectival Features
The aspectival features of literary
assertions must be taken into consideration when evaluating them. Literary
assertions may be presented, for instance, by an unreliable character so that
they have an ironic tone as the author’s assertions. There are also, for
instance, philosophical statements in fiction which should not be taken to
express the author’s beliefs because of the features of the character who makes
the statements. Hence, when attending a truth-seeking interpretation, readers
should look for signs that show whether the speaker who performs the assertions
in the work should or should not be taken to be expressing the author’s views.
Viewpoints related to literary assertions
can be, roughly, divided into three groups: i) fictional speaker as the
author’s mouthpiece, ii) fictional speaker as a part of the author’s assertion
act, and iii) the interplay of speakers. The distinction is arbitrary, and it
is intended to rather illustrate the aspectival features of literary assertions
than to classify them. The most obvious case of asserting in fiction is that in
which a fictional speaker functions as the author’s mouthpiece. In instructive
fiction, such as philosophers’ fictional dialogues and didactic literary
fiction, an author often makes use of an author surrogate, a character who
expresses the beliefs, views, and morality of the author. In philosophy, there
is, for instance, Plato’s Socrates and Hume’s Philo. In fiction, in turn, an
author surrogate is often the main character and/or the narrator of the work,
for instance, the narrator of Dostoyevsky’s House
of the Dead or Camus’s Fall.
While a large part of so-called
assertive fiction makes use of an author surrogate, there is also a large group
of literary fictions in which an individual character does not directly
represent the author’s views but should rather be examined as a part of the
author’s overall assertion act (although the author might more or less identify
with the character). Consider, for instance, Joseph Garcin’s famous line “[…]
Hell is – other people” in Sartre’s No Exit.[26] When investigating Garcin’s
utterance, the moderate propositional theory pays attention to the aspectival
features of the utterance: it notices that Garcin does not clearly understand
the events around him and that in the context of the overall work, the
assertion, considered as Sartre’s assertion, should be considered ironic and
part of the statement or thesis the work as a whole makes.[27]
Whereas the characters of No Exit serve ― in a traditional
philosophical interpretation ― the existentialist point Sartre is making
by the work, there are philosophical fictions which have more complex
structures and which seem to embody alternative views. This type of literary
asserting may be called the interplay of speakers. Now, Dostoyevsky’s Brothers
Karamazov and Mann’s Magic Mountain, for example, clearly advance philosophical points.
Furthermore, these works seem to express several “autonomous” philosophies: in
the former, there are, for instance, the views of Alyosha, Dmitri and Ivan; in
the latter, the views of Naphta, Settembrini, and the narrator, the protagonist
Hans Castorp. Nonetheless, in cases of this kind, particular views, such as Alyoshas’s
philosophy of life, cannot be outright attributed to the actual author. More
like, a character’s view should be considered suggestive or elliptical to the
actual author’s view, or the author’s point should be formed as a synthesis or
combination of the particular views.[28] The author’s philosophical message
should be constructed by investigating what the work as a whole suggests and
examining issues such as its tone and plot.[29]
2.3. The Illocutionary Force of
Literary Assertions and the Reader’s Stance Toward Them
As noted earlier, literary
assertions are akin to metaphors, for the point they make is not in general the
one stated literally but the one stated “figuratively.” Moreover, like the
so-called cognitive content of an assertive metaphor, the assertion which a
literary assertion conveys may be formulated in several correct or apt ways.
Literary assertions, however, differ from assertive metaphors used in ordinary
discourse in that because of her poetic license, the author is not committed to
the general speech act rules or conversational maxims: She is not expected to
endorse the propositions put forward; yet, she may do so. Moreover, although
she may make genuine claims, she is not generally held responsible for what she
is taken to state. Some philosophers have come to suggest that the
illocutionary force of assertions in fiction is somehow weaker than assertions
in ordinary discourse. Anders Pettersson, for one, maintains that if one says
that there can be statements in “genuinely literary contexts,” one has to admit
that “their affirmative character is weakened and somewhat dubious” and that
one is rather dealing with ‘aetiolations’ than ‘full-blown assertions’ (Pettersson
2000, p. 122). The way by which a statement in fiction conveys the author’s
assertion is sometimes difficult to define. Obviously, both linguistic and
literary conventions play a focal role in interpreting literary assertions, for
instance, in constructing their meaning. However, I would like to briefly
discuss the definition of the literary assertion in order to specify its
function and especially the reader’s attitude toward it.
To begin with, the terms ‘literal’
and ‘figurative’ and the metaphor analogy used earlier in this paper in
illustrating the two levels of literary assertions are helpful but inexact,
because literary assertions may, for example, figuratively construct the
fictional world (say, by a metaphorical utterance) and because the fictional
and assertive levels of a literary assertion may be identical: a literary
assertion may make the same claim or suggestion on both levels. Hence, I shall
propose the terms ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ viewpoint: the former refers to
the fictional level of a literary assertion, whereas the latter refers to the
assertive level of a literary assertion. In producing literary assertions, the
author intends the very same utterance to function as a twofold assertion which
states one thing about the work’s fictional world and another thing about
reality.
Now, a question arises: what is the
reader’s overall attitude, her mental state, towards literary assertions? Here,
it has been suggested that the paradigmatic theories of fiction, the
make-believe theories proposed by Walton, Currie and Lamarque and Olsen, are
inadequate in explaining the reader’s stance. It has been noted that the
make-believe theories come into conflict in cases in which the reader
encounters stated, implied or even unasserted true propositions in fiction,
because the theories maintain that ― make-believe being the reader’s
comprehensive attitude toward the content of the work ― she should
make-believe the propositions she believes or knows to be true. However, a
proposition believed or known to be true by the reader cannot be consistently
also made-believe in the sense the make-believe theories maintain, that is,
made-believe and not believed. (Carroll 1991, p. 544; New 1996, pp. 160 &
162; John Gibson 2007, pp. 164–170.)
The problem of make-believe theories
is that they suggest that assertions in fiction are to be made-believe, that
is, imagined being true. Nonetheless, the author’s literary-fictive use of
language is not just everyday language stripped of its assertive force, but a
mode of speaking of its own. The issue which the make-believe theory ignores is
that while fictive utterances are not primarily assertive of the actual world,
they are something positive: they are assertive of a fictional world (uttered
by a certain speaker and from her point of view). As I see it, the solution to
the problem lies exactly in the double reference of literary assertions:
intrinsically, they are descriptive of a fictional world, whereas extrinsically
they are descriptive of reality. Or, to put it in another words, literary
assertions are used by the author to perform different acts. For example, a
general philosophical statement in a work of fiction, which the author
genuinely makes, claims a proposition or a set of propositions true of the
fictional world and true of the actual world; it is simultaneously used in
performing the act of fiction-making and the act of truth-claiming.
Conclusion
The borders between ‘intrinsic’ and
‘extrinsic’ imagination, entertaining a proposition as asserted of a fictional
world and entertaining it as asserted of reality, are often vague – consider,
for example, the reader’s mental state in encountering (general) philosophical
propositions in fiction. Nevertheless, I think that the view I have sketched is
apt, if we considered fiction-making as an act, in which the author invites the
reader to entertain a set of thoughts of the state of affairs in an imaginary
world. Moreover, the account I have sketched explains, for instance, how a
certain proposition may be true of the fictional world and yet false of
reality.
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NOTES
[1] By assertions, I mean sentences that are used
in putting forward general non-trivial propositions; typically, cognitivist
theories of literary truth-claiming focus on general propositions about human
existence. In turn, by ‘literary fiction’ (and by the elliptical expression
‘fiction’) I mean aesthetically valuable works of imaginative literature.
[2] Another popular version of the
artistic thesis maintains that art is hostile to truth (considered as
‘scientific truth’) and that the author’s act of assertion downplays the
literary value of her work. For instance, Peter Lamarque (2008, p. 253) argues
that didactic works, that is, works that are “overt in their teaching aim,” are
generally valued low by critics. However, the
existence and cognitive relevance of truth-claims in literary fiction and the
literary value of fictional works which make assertions are distinct issues. In the literature and truth
discussion, ‘cognitivism’ advances an epistemic thesis which maintains literary
fictions convey knowledge, whereas ‘aesthetic cognitivism’ makes an artistic
thesis which maintains that the knowledge-claims a fiction makes increase its
literary value. In this paper, I argue for cognitivism which maintains that i)
some fictions make assertions, ii) these assertions generally have a peculiar
character, and iii) that assessing assertions in literary fiction is part of
the literary appreciation of the work.
[3] As Berys Gaut (2007, p. 180) notes,
no-one really argues for ‘cognitivist essentialism’ which would maintain that
it is a constitutive end of the practice of literature that it aims at truth.
In turn, Peter Kivy notes that “the expression of [genuine] propositions is
neither the sole purpose of any literary work nor a purpose at all of many
literary works” (Kivy 1997a, p. 17; emphasis in original).
[4] The Latin word persona means masks actors wore or characters they played.
[5] Likewise, J. O. Urmson (1976, p. 153) argues that one sort
of truth which commonly occurs in fiction is “the direct statement of the author, [in] propria persona, to his reader.” In turn, the literary critic
Seymour Chatman (1980, pp. 243–244)
suggests that besides fictional sentences, fictions may contain “general
truths,” “philosophical observations that reach beyond the world of the
fictional work into the real universe,” which he also calls “factual
assertions.”
[6] One should, however, note that
Beardsley considered both the distinction between Reports and Reflections and
the author’s assertion act problematic. Further, he also thought that
Reflections should perhaps rather be taken as statements unasserted by the
author and part of the story and the narrator’s discourse (see ibid., p. 422–423).
[7] Actually, literary
critics have argued that Dostoyevsky, by means of the narrator’s meditations on
the liberal nature of punishment in his “contemporary Russia,” wants to
explicitly distinguish himself from the story.
[8] The
propositional theory is not, nonetheless, entirely misguided in asking that if
the existence of multiple narrators in a work does not break its artistic
integrity, why could not the author be one of the narrators; why could not the
“authorial voice” belong to the actual author?
[9] Some anti-cognitivists
refer here to the artistic thesis, claiming that because it is difficult or
impossible to recognize authors’ assertions in their works and because
extracting them seems to lose their contextual relevance, this shows that truth
is not an issue in literary interpretation.
[10] Admittedly, recognizing the
author’s actual claims may sometimes be difficult. For instance, Kierkegaard’s
works such as Either/Or are interplay
of philosophical views, and locating the actual author’s, Søren Kierkegaard’s,
view conveyed by the work – what he intends to say by the work as a whole – is
not easy.
[11] Naturally, author’s paratextual declarations,
such as claims concerning the origins of the story, have to be regarded with
suspicion
[12] “Quizá
la historia universal es la historia de unas cuantas metáforas. Bosquejar un
capítulo de esa historia es el fin de esta nota.” (Borges 1976, p. 14.)
[13] “En
los sueños (escribe Coleridge) las imágenes figuran las impresiones que
pensamos que causan; no sentimos horror porque nos oprime una esfinge, soñamos
una esfinge para explicar el horror que sentimos.” (Borges 1998)
[14] M. W. Rowe (1997, p. 320) notes that if the function of
general propositions in literature would be to alert the reader to the themes
of the work, then they would not need to be in the universal form. Further,
Rowe claims that “it seems essential, and is clearly part of the author’s
intention in using the universal form” that general propositions would “refer
beyond the page of the novel.” This is because authors “will often want to show
what aspects of their characters’ behaviour are unique to the individual, and
which are typical of human nature generally.” Actually, Rowe goes so far as to
claim that a general proposition in literature is like a general proposition
anywhere: “if there are no special reasons for thinking otherwise, it is
asserted, and it means what it says.”
[15] “Se
ha dicho que todos los hombres nacen aristotélicos o platónicos. Ello equivale
a declarar que no hay debate de carácter abstracto que no sea un momento de la
polémica de Aristóteles y Platón; a través de los siglos y latitudes, cambian
los nombres, los dialectos, las caras, pero no los eternos antagonistas.”
(Borges 1985, pp. 90–91.)
[16] Elsewhere, Lamarque (2006,
p. 137) suggests that
it is often difficult to demonstrate general propositions in literature true or
false.
[17] This point has been made or
suggested by philosophers, such as Gaskin (1995, p. 399), Conolly & Haydar (2001, pp. 110–111
& 122), and Carroll
(2007a, p. 36).
[18] Gibson notes that the cognitive
gains of Othello do not lie in giving the reader knowledge of the world but “in
the ways in which he can embody this word, bring it to life, and give it shape,
structure, and vitality.” (ibid., p. 115)
[19] Many philosophers
argue that literary fiction has special cognitive gains based on the poetic
devices characteristic (but not essential) for literary works, such as the
metaphor. I shall, however, here ignore the treatment of poetic devices and
leave it for those more acquainted with them.
[20] By the “autonomy”
of literary characters, I simply mean that (great) characters are complex,
dynamic and indeterminate and (in realist literature) aimed to create an
illusion of a flesh-and-blood person. For a paradigmatic view of ‘autonomous’
characters who seem to live their own life, see Mikhail Bakhtin’s classic study
Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics. In the work, Bakhtin
famously argues that “Dostoyevsky […] creates not voiceless slaves […] but free
people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing
with him and even of rebelling against him.” Further, he claims that “A
plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine
polyphony of fully valid voices in fact the chief characteristic of
Dostoevsky’s novels.” (Bakhtin
1984, p. 6; emphases removed)
[21] The authors themselves note this
(see Lamarque & Olsen 1994, p. 406). See their paraphrases in ibid., p. 405.
[22] Here, see Lamarque’s (2008, p. 237)
view of Nussbaum’s interpretation of Euripides’s Hecuba.
[23] Arguably there are also
metaphorical assertions in literary fiction which function like those used in
ordinary discourse.
[24] Borges 1964d, p. 44. “Menard (acaso
sin quererlo) ha enriquecido mediante una técnica nueva el arte detenido y
rudimentario de la lecture: la técnica
[25] For similar views of fictional
characters as concepts (that are used to refer to people or their properties in
the actual world), see Martin 1982, pp. 225, 227–229 & 233–234; Carroll
2007, p. 34.
[26] “[…] l’enfer, c’est les autres”
(Sartre 1947, p. 182).
[27] One should also note that in the
last sentence of Borges’s “Pierre Menard,” the author of the concluding
statement is the unnamed narrator of the story. Taking into account the
fantastic events and the tone of the work, the assertions Borges conveys
through the narrator’s assertions seem to be humorous. Here, the moderate propositional theory suggests that the concluding
statement should not be taken literally but as an exaggerated version of the
author’s view, and to assert that the historical background of a
literary work affects on the meaning of the work. Moreover, sometimes it is also difficult to locate the locus of an
assertion or a thought expressed in a literary fiction. For instance, free
indirect speech is often ambiguous as to whether it conveys the narrator’s
views or thoughts of the character depicted. In such cases, the most plausible
way to gain the author’s truth-claims, if any, is to rely on information
gathered from the work and public information about the author.
[28] One should remark that the point of
view of a literature assertion is here taken into account by including the
speaker as a part of the definition, were the author directly using the speaker
as her mouthpiece or as a part of her overall assertion act. Moreover, one
should note that in this paper I have been speaking of literary assertions, not
giving a theory of literary interpretation. For instance, the intrinsic and
extrinsic viewpoints are not characteristics for literary assertions only but
to fictional discourse in general. From the intrinsic point of view, Alyosha
Karamazov is a “flesh-and-blood” person, whereas from the extrinsic point of
view he is a fictional character created by Dostoyevsky.
[29] Naturally, background information
about the author and the reader’s interpretative frame also affect on
constructing the author’s truth-claims. For instance, it has been suggested
that none of the voices in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or
represent Kierkegaard’s actual opinions (see e.g. Westphal 2002, p. 23).
Rather, Kierkegaard is seen to convey his philosophical claims by the complete
work – were it the general existentialist interpretation that the reader should
choose either the aesthetic or the ethical way of living depicted in the work,
or the interpretation, generally inspired by the work’s sequel Stages on Life’s Way, that the views
depicted in the work are stages of life (leading to the religious stage), or
even the interpretation which maintains that the work advances Kantian ethics.
Copyright © 2009 Minerva
All rights
are reserved, but fair and good faith use with full attribution may be made of
this work for educational or scholarly purposes.
Jukka
Mikkonen is Researcher of Philosophy at the University of Tampere,
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