Fiction as a Logical, Ontological, and Illocutionary Issue
This essay examines some of the theses proposed by Felix Martínez-Bonati in Fictive Discourse and the Structures of Literature, using them, as well as some proposals by Lubomír Dolezel, as building blocks in an attempt to formulate answers to the following philosophical questions: (1) Can the sentences of fiction be truth-functional; (2) Do fictional characters possess only those properties which are specified by the text, or do they present, like the ontologically complete inhabitants of the real world, an infinite number of properties ? (3) What distinguishes the act of writing fiction, in illocutionary terms, from other modes of expression ? Felix Martínez-Bonati’s discussion of the unreliable narrator is shown to impose a positive answer to the first of these questions, at least for realistic narrative fiction: if narrators can be unreliable, their declarations are neither automatically true nor automatically false, but susceptible of either truth or falsity with respect to the fictional world. It is argued, however, that due to differences in the semantic structure of fictional universes, neither the logical nor the ontological question can receive a unified answer for all types of fiction. This leaves the illocutionary level as the only viable basis for a general characterization of fiction. It follows that fictionality is a way of speaking rather than a way of being or a predictable relation to truth.
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The Modal Structure of Narrative Universes
The claim that a plot is a temporal succession of different states of affairs mediated by events is one of the least controversial of narrative theory. But how does one represent narrative states, and what makes events narratively significant ? This paper argues that there is much more to the specification of narrative states than just stating what is the case and what is not in the world given as "the real one" by the narrative discourse. A narrative state is not simply the extension of a set of propositions in a unique domain, but a constellation of possible worlds linked to each other by various types of relations. Another term for this constellation is modal system. The modal system of narrative is shown to comprise an actual world, or factual domain, surrounded by the "possible worlds" of the characters mental representations. These possible worlds include: knowledge worlds, wish worlds, obligation-worlds, and intention worlds (i.e. active goals and plans). Whenever a private world differs from the actual world, the narrative universe falls into a state of conflict. Narratively signficant events are those that create or resolve conflict, by bringing one of the possible worlds of a character’s domain either closer or farther from the actual world. Plots are thus traced by the movements of worlds within the global narrative universe.
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