Personification without Impossible Content

I argue that the ontological status of fictional characters is determined by the beliefs and practices of those who competently deal with works of literature, and draw out three important consequences of this. First, heavily revisionary theories cannot be considered as 'discoveries' about the 'true nature' of fictional characters; any acceptable realist theory of fiction must preserve all or most of the common conception of fictional characters. Second, once we note that the existence conditions for fictional characters (established by those beliefs and practices) are extremely minimal, it makes little sense to deny the existence of fictional characters, leaving anti-realist views of fiction unmotivated. Finally, the role of ordinary beliefs and practices in determining facts about the ontology of fictional characters explains why non-revisionary theories of fiction are bound to yield no determinate or precise answer to certain questions about fictional characters, demonstrating the limits of a theory of fiction.

Textual Practice, 2018

Recent work from both novelists and literary critics has suggested that the contemporary novel is sick of fiction and has turned instead to the 'real'. This article questions this understanding of the contemporary novel and, by focusing in particular on the 6-volume Min Kamp by Karl Ove Knausgaard, suggests instead that the most important representational model for the contemporary novel is the virtual. In establishing this, the article returns to both a history of the concept of the virtual and to Coleridge's 'willing suspension of disbelief' in order to make visible the role of the virtual as a model for contemporary prose fiction. Belief, Fiction and Non-existence After being championed, in much postmodernist theory, as the model for all narrative, the fictional, if we listen to an increasing number of writers, can no longer be believed in. In his admission of his repeated experience of fiction as surplus to requirement, published in an article in the Guardian at the beginning of 2013, Ian McEwan writes that, when his 'faith in fiction falters', he no longer believes what 'imaginary Henry said or did to non-existent Sue', and what he wants instead is knowledge of 'reality'. 1 With the time saved by not reading fiction, McEwan suggests, he could catch up on some case law which has the benefit of being about, in his words, 'Real events!' 2 In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (2010), David Shields, 'bored by out-and-out fabrication', has ceased to believe in fiction too. The fiction writer's burden is one of 'unreality, the nasty fact that none of this ever really happened'. Unlike McEwan, what Shields wants instead is not to be told the 'truth' about 'real events', but for fictional writing to itself consist of 'reality'. The writing he finds most exciting and persuasive is by writers who, rather than making it up, are, in his words, 'breaking larger and larger chunks of "reality" into their work'. 3 This articulation of the rejection of the fictional because of a failure of belief in its burdensome 'unreality' can be found too in the six volumes of Min Kamp (My Struggle), by the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard (2009-2011; English translation 2013-2016; volume 6 has not yet been published in English). The volumes consist of a non-chronological account of Knausgaard's life from infancy to, in the last volume, the effects on him of the publication of the earlier ones. In some of the volumes this account is interspersed with essayistic writing on, for example, death, ageing, politics, art and music. Many reviewers of Min Kamp have compared Knausgaard to Proust because of the work's combination of novelistic form and autobiographical content. In the second volume (published as A Man in Love in the UK) (2009/2013), Knausgaard accounts for this formal hybridity. He describes the moment in 2006 or 2007 when he realized that, after having written two critically successful novels, Ute av verden (1998) (Out of the World) and En tid for alt (2004) (the English translation was published as A Time To Every Purpose Under Heaven in the UK in 2008 and as A Time for Everything in the US in 2009), he was sick of fiction: 'Just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me nauseous, I reacted in a physical way. Had no idea why. But I did'. 4 Later he admits that he can no longer write conventional fiction because 'every single sentence was met with the thought: but you're just making this up. It has no value. Fictional writing has no value….'. 5 Volume 4, published as Dancing in the Dark in the UK (2015), suggests retrospectively that a sense that writing should, rather than make things up, return us to the 'real' was already present at the beginning of Knausgaard's experience as a writer, despite his two works of fiction. He claims that as he began to write, aged 18, what motivated him was the way writing connected him to the reality of his past. Rather than making things up, his writing at this point instead returned him to the time in childhood when 'the trees were trees, not "trees", cars not "cars", when dad was dad, not "dad"'. 6 The six volumes of Min Kamp purport to be writing which dispenses with fiction's inverted commas and returns to us what Knausgaard calls in volume 1 the 'there' of the world. 7 What is strange about this eschewal of belief in fiction by novelists because of its fabricated nature, and strange too about the unquestioning approbation that has dominated responses to it from reviewers, readers and critics, is that, according to the critical orthodoxies, no one ever asked them to believe in the first place. Once the novel as fiction was established and authors no longer needed to protest the truth of their work, the critical orthodoxy became that, as Catherine Gallagher has argued, belief did not transfer to the unashamedly fictional but rather the fictional established itself as 'believable stories that did not solicit belief'. 8 Rather than believe, critic after critic has asserted that what fiction asks readers to do instead, using Coleridge's phrase from the Biographia Literaria (1817), is to 'willingly suspend disbelief'. This demand has been glossed by Gallagher in such a way that, for her, it is clear that disbelief crucially remains part of the experience of fiction-reading: Novels seek to suspend the reader's disbelief, as an element is suspended in a solution that it thoroughly permeates. Disbelief is thus the condition of fictionality, prompting judgments, not about the story's reality, but about its believability, its plausibility. 9 Here, disbelief in a story's reality is a precondition of, or is woven into, its believability. For so many contemporary writers, however, believability, rather than being dependent only on plausibility, is destroyed precisely by disbelief in a story's 'reality'. The condition for belief has

Axiomathes, 2017

I argue that modal realism is unable to account for fictional discourse. My starting point is an overview of modal realism. I then present a dilemma for modal realism regarding fictional characters. Finally, I provide responses to both horns of the dilemma, one motivating modal dimensionalism, the other motivating a disjunctive analysis of modality.

This essay concerns fiction in art and science. I argue that the term ‘fiction’ used in this manner is a category mistake (concept versus genre) and I believe this essay may succeed in “baking philosophical bread” by recognizing a verbal dispute. I am, therefore, suggesting an entire thread of discussion be re-evaluated. I provide an exposé of Catherine Z. Elgin and Nelson Goodman’s brand of fictionalism (i.e. that we glean understandings in the arts and sciences from fictions in the form of non-literal truth) and concentrate on unpacking the concept of fiction. I argue that representations (narratives of all sorts including models) are made of both fictional elements and faceted elements (with the exception of the possible or impossible ideal version e.g. God’s, which, would include only facets). Understandings are not gleaned from fictions but rather from faceted elements so ordered as to create understanding and usually leading to predictions, explanations, and manipulations. I define facets as ordered features whereas fictions (the genre) are groupings of disordered features. Full fiction is, therefore, by definition the expression of nothing or with respect to ideal languages (mathematics), the expression of contradiction. Representations are primitives and both fictions and facets are parts of them. Narratives are thus fictional by degree. Narratives which are highly fictional are of value (often playful) but they still always contain at least one facet. Ultimately all representational activity should be regarded as irreal i.e. incomplete although sometimes connected to reality and caught between a perfectly faceted realist description and complete fiction.