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Can Fiction Become Fact? The Fiction-to-Fact Transition in Recent Theories of Fiction
Amit Marcus
Camus’s The Fall: The Dynamics of Narrative Unreliability
Robert E. Kohn
Postmodernist Manichaean Allegory in William Gaddis’s
Carpenter’s Gothic
Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan
Margaret Edson’s Wit and the Art of Analogy
The recent pragmatic-contextual theory of fiction entails the possibility of changes between fact and fiction over the course of time. It is also perhaps commonplace to state that this process can be reversed—that fictional texts may cease to be fictional. The question of generic fiction-to-fact transition, however, is rarely confronted in the theory of fiction. This essay investigates the generic expectations attached to texts that make a full-scale transition from fiction to nonfiction difficult, both culturally and psychologically. “Fiction” is understood here in a limited, pragmatic sense of a work of fiction, a text known and categorized as fiction. The discussion is structured around five interrelated reasons that contribute to the difficulty: (1) the commonness of as-if structures in everyday life; (2) the generic combinations among literature, fiction, factual representation, and narrative; (3) the relative stability of the communal values and ways of checking facts that determine the categories of fiction and fact (the fact convention); (4) the popularity, in fiction, of metalepsis and the theme of transworld travel between different ontological spheres; (5) and the fictionalization of literature in the historical perspective.
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Amit Marcus. “Camus’s The Fall: The Dynamics
of Narrative Unreliability”
Most scholars dealing with unreliable narration consider the unreliable
narrator inferior to the reader in either knowledge or morality. This conception
implies that the readers are more reliable than the unreliable narrator
and, thanks to this difference, capable of identifying unreliabilty, with
no consequences or ramifications for themselves. Although this view is
not entirely wrong, the readers’ superiority to the narrator may change
if the readers either find out new details about the narrator that urge
them to reevaluate their classification or discover something new about
themselves that encourages them to reconsider their superiority. An interesting
combination of these two possibilities is found in Camus’s novella The
Fall (La Chute). My interpretation of The Fall focuses on the triad narrator-narratee-reader
and the narrator’s rhetorical manipulations, maintaining that the text
both undermines the binary opposition between “unreliable narrator” and
“reliable reader” and has some general implications on the position of
the reader towards fiction.
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Robert E. Kohn. “Postmodernist Manichaean
Allegory in William Gaddis’s Carpenter’s Gothic.”
Postmodernist Manichaean allegories, which pit Good against Evil, are
distinguished by their elusiveness: the upright turn out to have faults;
the nefarious, virtues. The dominant postmodernist element in William Gaddis’s
Carpenter’s Gothic is its richness in such Manichaean allegories and their
Nietzschean correlates, the Apollonian and Dionysian allegories. The “bleeding”
of the polarities is all the more strong in Carpenter’s Gothic because
the Manichaean and Nietzschean details get lost in a welter of distorted,
false, incomplete, and confusingly presented information. The pervasiveness
of postmodern Manichaean allegory in Carpenter’s Gothic further explains
why the Tibetan Buddhist duality, which holds that good and evil cannot
exist separately, resonates so strongly in this novel. Though this
connection of the duality to Carpenter’s Gothic is well known, its presence
there is now better understood. While the flurry of information makes the
postmodernist Manichaean allegory less obvious, it also renders the novel
more difficult to read, which makes for a deeper and more lasting readerly
experience.
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Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan. “Margaret
Edson’s Wit and the Art of Analogy.”
Margaret Edson’s play Wit, which embodies quotations from John Donne’s
metaphysical verse, has a macrostructure that is itself conceitlike. The
play establishes contrasts, similarities, contrasts within the similarities,
and further similarities within the contrasts, thus both dramatizing and
interrogating wit and its instrument, conceit. I analyze the operation
of this complex configuration in the relations between the two main physical-institutional
spaces of the play (the hospital and the university); between both and
the world of language, with its manifestations in two opposed yet parallel
intertexts; and in the self-reflexive dramatization of the theatre/life
analogy. The effect of these conceitlike techniques is to bridge the gulf
between opposites, transforming “insuperable barriers” into thresholds.
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