Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics 0198854129, 9780198854128

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
Bibliography
Index
Introduction
1 The Plan
2 Just One More Thing (and Three Homages)
1. Preliminaries
1.1 The Problem: A Taster
1.2 Words and Types
1.3 Proper Names
1.4 A Few Further Preliminaries
1.5 Impartations
1.6 Where Am I Now?
2 The Sign of Four
2.1 Getting Started
2 The Sign of Four
2.2 Fictional Names
2.3 The Actual and the Fictional
2.4 Fictional Impartations
*2.5 Loose Ends: Surveying the Literature
*2.6 Matters from the Real World: Authors and Speech Acts
*2.7 Searle on Fiction-Saying
2.8 Where Am I Now?
3 Emma
3.1 Preliminaries: Heterodiegetic Telling
3.2 Impartations in the Periphery
3.3 Names in the Periphery
*3.4 Narratology and Time
3.5 Where Am I Now?
4 Cat’s Cradle
4.1 Preliminaries
4.2 Peripheral Semantics
4.3 Translations
*4.4 Real Names in Fiction
*4.5 Fictional Languages
4.6 Where Am I Now?
5 An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
5.1 Preliminaries
5.2 The Way of Retelling
5.3 Prefixed Talk: The Unified Way of Retelling
*5.4 The Way of Truth: Preliminaries
*5.5 The Way of Truth: The Paratactic Hypothesis
*5.6 ‘Does Not Exist’
5.7 Where Am I Now?
6 Reflex and Bone Structure
6.1 Preliminaries
6.2 Inconsistent Fictions
6.3 Reliability: Peripheral Lying
6.4 The Excesses of Storyworld Importation
6.5 Russell Vipers and Closure
*6.6 Quoted Discourse and Narrative Levels
6.7 Where Am I Now?
7 The Turn of the Screw
7.1 Preliminaries
7.2 From Educated Naturalization to Critical Retelling
7.3 Critical Retelling and Underreading
7.4 Biased Retelling and the Canon
7.5 Where Am I Now?
8 Tess of the D’Urbervilles
8.1 Preliminaries
8.2 Other ‘Characters’
8.3 Critical Characters
8.4 Character-Names
8.5 ‘Homonymies’
8.6 Where Am I Now?
Conclusion

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Fictional Discourse

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Fictional Discourse A Radical Fictionalist Semantics S T E FA N O P R E D E L L I

1

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Stefano Predelli 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2019957830 ISBN 978–0–19–885412–8 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854128.001.0001 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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Preface This book has greatly benefited from the feedback I received in the last three years or so. Special thanks go to participants at the Aesthetics and Cognitive Science Seminar Series at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris (2016); at the workshop Proper Names in Fiction at the University of Warsaw (2016); at the IV Conference of the Brazilian Society for Analytic Philosophy at the University of Campinas (2016); at the workshop Issues in Contemporary Semantics and Ontology III at the University of Buenos Aires (2016); and at The 13th Prague Interpretation Colloquium: Fiction and Pretense at the Czech Academy of Science, Prague (2018). A heartfelt thank you goes to Francois Recanati for his hospitality during my stay at the Institut Jean Nicod and for his comments on early versions of my views. I also acknowledge with gratitude a sabbatical semester granted by the University of Nottingham, and its financial support for my attendance at the conferences in Argentina and Brazil. Last but not least, many thanks to Ben Curtis and Neil Sinclair for their help and their input.

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Contents Introduction1 1. Preliminaries

1.1 The Problem: A Taster 1.2 Words and Types 1.3 Proper Names 1.4 A Few Further Preliminaries 1.5 Impartations 1.6 Where Am I Now?

6

6 7 9 12 14 17

2 . The Sign of Four: Fictional Tellers

19

3 . Emma: The Narrative Periphery

45

4 . Cat’s Cradle: Peripheral Importations

64

5 . An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge: From Our Point of View

84

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 *2.5 *2.6 *2.7 2.8 3.1 3.2 3.3 *3.4 3.5

Getting Started Fictional Names The Actual and the Fictional Fictional Impartations Loose Ends: Surveying the Literature Matters from the Real World: Authors and Speech Acts Searle on Fiction-Saying Where Am I Now? Preliminaries: Heterodiegetic Telling Impartations in the Periphery Names in the Periphery Narratology and Time Where Am I Now?

4.1 Preliminaries 4.2 Peripheral Semantics 4.3 Translations *4.4 Real Names in Fiction *4.5 Fictional Languages 4.6 Where Am I Now?

5.1 Preliminaries 5.2 The Way of Retelling

19 21 25 28 31 35 39 43 45 47 52 57 62 64 65 70 75 80 83

84 86

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viii Contents 5.3 *5.4 *5.5 *5.6 5.7

Prefixed Talk: The Unified Way of Retelling The Way of Truth: Preliminaries The Way of Truth: The Paratactic Hypothesis ‘Does Not Exist’ Where Am I Now?

91 96 101 103 108

6 . Reflex and Bone Structure: Periphery and Interpretation

110

7 . The Turn of the Screw: Critical Discourse

132

8 . *Tess of the D’Urbervilles: Literary Characters

149

6.1 Preliminaries 6.2 Inconsistent Fictions 6.3 Reliability: Peripheral Lying 6.4 The Excesses of Storyworld Importation 6.5 Russell Vipers and Closure *6.6 Quoted Discourse and Narrative Levels 6.7 Where Am I Now?

7.1 Preliminaries 7.2 From Educated Naturalization to Critical Retelling 7.3 Critical Retelling and Underreading 7.4 Biased Retelling and the Canon 7.5 Where Am I Now? 8.1 Preliminaries 8.2 Other ‘Characters’ 8.3 Critical Characters 8.4 Character-Names 8.5 ‘Homonymies’ 8.6 Where Am I Now?

110 111 116 119 123 127 131 132 134 137 141 147 149 151 155 159 162 167

Conclusion168 Bibliography Index

171 183

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Introduction 1  The Plan This book is devoted to Radical Fictionalism, a theory about fictional discourse and narrative fiction. As evidenced by my moniker, my approach is consistent with the spirit of a fictionalist Walton-inspired take on fiction, and, more generally, with non-realist views of fictional discourse. But I also propose a radical semantic twist on traditional fictionalist themes, with special attention paid to so-called fictional names and to certain themes in narratology and literary criticism.1 Chapter  1 puts forth a few preliminary considerations about our actual (that is, not at all fictional) use of language. My tone in this chapter is deliberately informal and non-committal: I have my own views about many of the issues that I mention, but I strive to keep them to myself. This cagey attitude is deliberate, for at least two reasons. For one thing, my intended audience includes readers with an interest in fiction per se, rather than in the minutiae of natural-language semantics. For another, although my presentation occasionally betrays my semantic predilections, the points that matter may always be rephrased, developed, or rectified within alternative frameworks. At this stage, then, too much detail or argument would only stand in the way of my aim, that of providing a contrast for the Radical Fictionalist view of fictional discourse (and, incidentally, that of introducing the reader to my terminology). 1  Though suggestive, ‘fictionalism’ is admittedly not without its drawbacks, since that label is also often applied to views about (among other things) mathematical (Yablo 2001), moral (Joyce 2005), or modal (Divers and Hagen 2006) would-be entities—and, for that matter, to affairs more directly related with what commonly goes as ‘semantic’, as in so-called ‘fictionalism about truth’ (Woodbridge 2005). As noted, my use is inspired by what should anyway be recognized as a primary source for most current fictionalisms, namely the approach to fiction in Walton 1990. The remainder of this book is devoted to an explanation of how my Fictionalism differs from more traditional versions of that framework, and the sense in which it deserves to be labelled as ‘Radical’. Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics. Stefano Predelli, Oxford University Press (2020). © Stefano Predelli. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854128.001.0001

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2 introduction I get started with my official topic in Chapter 2, where I lay down the general traits of Radical Fictionalism, including the distinction between empty names and fictional names, the role of impartations in fiction, and the significance of fictional tellers. Those planning to pursue a hostile attitude towards Radical Fictionalism may do worse than to keep their objections at bay: my presentation in this chapter continues to strive for pedagogical clarity, and I reserve the right to amend a few details in the chapters that follow. I do so already in Chapter 3, where I develop and rectify the simple picture from Chapter  2 with an eye towards a fundamental aspect of Radical Fictionalism, the distinction between fictional peripheries and storyworlds. Intriguingly, a parallel duality has become independently familiar for reasons having to do with narrative structure, rather than with semantics. Officially, the aspects of Radical Fictionalism discussed in chapters 2 and 3 are meant as semantic explorations of fictional language in general. Yet, the ideas introduced in Chapter 3 begin to steer my analysis towards issues that more overtly characterize a certain type of fiction, namely the narrative type. Accordingly, themes and sources from narratology begin to pepper my presentation in Chapter  4, where the Radical Fictionalist take on peripheries and storyworlds is enriched with the discussion of themes more at home in the philosophy of literature. Among other things, I  tackle the issue of peripheral importation (with an ‘o’, not to be confused with ‘impartation’ with an ‘a’), the question of literary translation, and the problem of so-called real names in fiction. At first sight, Chapter 5 is a return to semantics proper: its topics are what I call fiction-talk (as in our utterances of ‘Holmes was a detective’) and the related question of prefixed-talk (as in ‘according to Doyle’s stories, Holmes was a detective’). I deliberately elect not to confront these widely discussed issues with the attitude of someone intent on defending his own personal stance, and on attacking all others. When it comes to these topics, my primary aim is that of assessing the theoretical commitments of my true protagonists, Radical Fictionalism and the storyworldperiphery distinction. As it turns out, my framework leaves interesting room for movement. And so, Chapter 5 presents my ­favourite treatment of fiction-talk and prefixed talk, but it also flanks it with a negotiable presentation of the alternatives that remain in principle available to a Radical Fictionalist.

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2  Just One More Thing (and Three Homages)  3 Fictional talk also bears interesting relations to a type of discourse that has hitherto not received the semantic attention it deserves, namely critical discourse. I start my approach to critical discourse in Chapter 6, where I discuss some issues loosely related to questions of in­ter­pret­ ation, here as before with a firm focus on Radical Fictionalism. My topics now more confidently straddle the disciplinary divides between philosophical semantics, narratology, and criticism: in this chapter, I venture some Radical Fictionalist theses about unreliability, inconsistent fictions, storyworld importation, closure, and narrative levels. I tackle further philosophically relevant aspects of critical discourse in Chapter  7, where I give a Radical Fictionalist analysis of what I call critical retelling. In Chapter 8, I conclude with a different aspect of critical discourse, namely its apparent commitment to so-called literary characters. In this final chapter, Radical Fictionalism gives way to a tolerant attitude towards the existence of characters, and to an analysis of character-names as actually referring proper names. Throughout the book, I append some starred sections at the end of my chapters. These are parts that may be skipped by readers mainly interested in the general shape of Radical Fictionalism, but less willing to follow my asides on fiction and narrative. Importantly, the entirety of Chapter 8 is starred, since my views on characters and their names are independent of Radical Fictionalism, and may be left aside by anyone primarily interested in my take on fictional discourse. Yet, as I explain, these views still bear significant relationships with Radical Fictionalism since, appearances notwithstanding, they are not a retreat to realist approaches to fictional discourse.

2  Just One More Thing (and Three Homages) I have been told that I often spend as much time and energy describing what I am not going to discuss as I devote to my chosen themes. There is nothing wrong with this way of proceeding. Many long-lasting debates have ensued from confusions about the true topic of contention, and from the insistence that this or that theory be applied to phenomena it was never meant to address. Here is something I am not attempting to provide: a definition of fiction, of narrative, and/or of literature, or a list of the necessary and sufficient

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4 introduction conditions for any of these practices.2 And so, when it comes to what counts as fiction, as story-telling, or as anything of that sort, our pretheoretic inclinations will do for my purposes. Accordingly, each chapter elects as its exemplars a few clear-cut, unobjectionable exemplars of fiction, such as the usual case of Conan Doyle’s stories, Jane Austen’s Emma, and some other central exemplars in the Western literary canon.3 Throughout the book, I mention a variety of sources in my footnotes, mostly with the aim of situating Radical Fictionalism within a variety of current debates. A very small sample from this bibliographical list plays a special role for me, since, one way or another, it provided the impetus for my allegiance to Radical Fictionalism. I conclude this introduction with three explicit homages, mostly as an indirect indication of the theoretical background against which I develop my own position. Pride of place goes to Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe (Walton 1990), a book that I regard as one of the dominant sources of fictionalism, in the sense of ‘fictionalism’ that interests me. Unsurprisingly, Radical Fictionalism echoes Walton’s insistence on the merely fictional status of certain would-be propositions, and it agrees with his scepticism towards easy realist way-outs. My theoretical journey starts from premises other than Walton’s and, as evidenced by my occasional stabs at some aspects of his position, it embarks on personal directions. Still, without Mimesis, this book would not have been possible.4 A work that I explicitly confront more frequently than Walton’s book is David Lewis’ ‘Truth in Fiction’ (Lewis 1978), an essay that has sparked much of the current debate on the semantics of fiction. My confrontation is often polemical, for challenging one’s idols is always a more exciting proposition than paying repeated homage. Yet, of all my counterparts,

2  For an introduction to these subjects see John and McIver Lopes  2004 and Lamarque 2009a; for a timely philosophical discussion of narrative see Currie 2010. 3  Here as everywhere else, hard cases make bad law: ‘theorists of the subject often begin to worry too early on about cases like In Cold Blood, Dead Certainties, Plato’s dialogues . . . which are—and in some cases are deliberately meant to be—problematic’ (Lamarque and Olsen 1994: 30). 4  My idiosyncratic semantic take on Walton-style fictionalism allows me to bypass current debates about many (for me tangential) features of Walton’s approach, such as his appeal to ‘make-believe’ and his understanding of our appreciation and enjoyment of fiction—see among many Carroll 1991 and 1995, Lamarque 1991, Kroon 1994a, and New 1996, and, for a more recent sample, Friend 2008, Woodward 2014, and Walton 2015.

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2  Just One More Thing (and Three Homages)  5 only those who have been exposed to Lewis’ paper have come up with anything in the vicinity of Radical Fictionalism. Another essay that, for me, comes close to what truly matters with fictional discourse is John Searle’s ‘The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse’ (Searle 1975a). In what follows, I explicitly side with Searle only with respect to the relatively tangential issue of speech-acts, which I mention in two starred sections in Chapter 2. And yet, at least when it comes to fiction-making efforts, much in Searle’s position comes closer to Radical Fictionalism than it may at first appear.

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1 Preliminaries 1.1  The Problem: A Taster Take the sentence ‘Tony Bennett sang a tune’. Even a simple example such as this may give natural-language semanticists reasons for excitement. Still, at this stage, the following utterly unexciting sketch will do: that sentence has to do with a certain man and his singing, because it contains his name, and because it flanks it with a predicate that designates the property of singing a tune. Suppose that you read ‘Mr Bennet made no answer’—towards the beginning of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, say, or in my summary of its plot. Arguably, what is now at issue cannot be anything having to do with the individual picked out by ‘Mr Bennet’, for the simple reason that no such individual exists. Hence, it would seem that our in­ter­pret­ ation of this case must have relied on regularities other than those appropriate for my remark about Tony. Since names such as ‘Mr Bennet’ emerge from works of fiction such as Pride and Prejudice, they are commonly called fictional names. And so, the central questions pertaining to the interpretation of ‘Mr Bennet made no answer’ are commonly subsumed under the heading of ‘the semantic problem of fictional names’. In a sense, this book is devoted to a particular solution to this problem, namely Radical Fictionalism. But only in a sense. Strictly speaking, as a Radical Fictionalist, I do not believe that anything is a solution to that alleged problem, because I  do not believe that anything is appropriately describable as ‘the semantic problem of fictional names’. I like the final bits in this handy moniker, namely ‘fictional names’. But I disagree with the connotations engendered by its beginning: according to the thesis defended in what follows, fictional names are not at the root of any semantic problem.

Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics. Stefano Predelli, Oxford University Press (2020). © Stefano Predelli. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854128.001.0001

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1.2  Words and Types  7 I proceed rather slowly, and a decent approximation to the final shape of Radical Fictionalism only emerges towards the end of Chapter 3. As for this chapter, nothing in it is directly devoted to Radical Fictionalism, since some independent preliminaries need to be in place before I tackle fictional discourse. Before I begin with these unexciting preliminaries, let me try to keep your interest alive with a deliberately preposterous-sounding anticipation: according to Radical Fictionalism, there is no semantic problem of fictional names because fictional names are only fictionally names, and because what is only fictionally a name is not a name at all. Mind you, for a Radical Fictionalist, fictional names fail to be names not because, deep down, they are some other kind of interpretable expression. More radically, fictional names are not names because they are not at all semantically interpretable expressions. In a nutshell, there is no such thing as the semantic problem of fictional names because semantics is no more concerned with fictional names than zoology is with toy ducks. Hoping to have stirred your interest in Radical Fictionalism, I proceed by leaving it on the backburner for a while. I devote this chapter to a swift description of certain properties of the true object of semantic interest: language, that is, actual language, the only language there is. With actual language as a term of contrast, I get started with fiction, fictional names, and Radical Fictionalism in Chapter 2.

1.2  Words and Types When we speak, we leave traces (noises, ink-marks, and the like) with the aim that they catch our audience’s attention. On appropriate occasions, these traces qualify as tokens of particular types. For instance, given certain background conditions (having to do with my intentions, my environment, and so on), my scribble ends up tokening the threeletter type ‘cat’.1 1  Philosophers of literature (though no philosopher of language I can recall) occasionally appeal to agency-deprived linguistic instances, that is, to alleged cases of language use un­accom­pan­ied by any form of intentional involvement. According to Monroe Beardsley, for instance, the so-called intentional fallacy is ‘conclusively refuted’ by the fact that ‘some texts have been formed without the agency of an author’ (Beardsley 1992: 25–6). And, in a different

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8 Preliminaries I may token that type without any noteworthy agenda—as part of a game, as the display of my handwriting skills, or as a vocal exercise. Yet, my aim will often be that of exemplifying a linguistic type, such as the English noun-type ‘cat’. I may also token that noun-type, or, continuing in that vein, the sentence-type ‘the cat is on the mat’, with no further design—as examples in a grammar textbook, say, or as instances of properly formed expressions. Yet, more often than not, I do more than that. As the vernacular puts it, I token those expression-types as expressions of English, in a semantically loaded sense of ‘English’.2 For instance, when I token the noun-type ‘cat’ I do so in order to speak of cats, and when I token the sentence-type ‘the cat is on the mat’ I do so in order to convey something about a certain feline’s position. In these cases, I token the noun ‘cat’, namely a noun-type devoted to designating cats, and I token the sentence ‘the cat is on the mat’, namely a sentence-type put to use so as to speak of the relationships between a cat and a rug. Or else, as I frequently describe this sort of cases: I token a certain sentence-type in order to exemplify a sentence, that is, in order to put forth an affair that encodes a proposition. The sentence ‘the cat is on the mat’ encodes a proposition about a cat because it contains a noun having to do with being a cat. Or, as I also write, it encodes that proposition because it contains an expression whose content has to do with being a cat. In what follows, I can afford to be nonchalant when it comes to the contents of many expressions. context, Kendall Walton speaks of ‘a naturally occurring “story”, cracks in a rock, let us say’ (Walton 1983: 86, 1990: 87). I am not only sceptical about the idea of ‘naturally occurring’ texts and stories. I also deny the sheer possibility that traces realized without the intervention of intentional agency qualify as tokens of anything, let alone as exemplars of expressions (for details, see my Predelli 2010). 2  English, the language in which I am writing, will do for my purposes. Of course, were I interested in subtleties such as the occurrence of ‘plastic’ in eighteenth-century texts, I would turn my attention towards the conventions operative at that time, and I would keep my distance from contemporary English—or, for that matter, from contemporary middle-class British English, from my own present idiolect, or from anything of that sort. Incidentally, the example of ‘plastic’ is inspired by Beardsley’s contention that ‘the meaning of a text can change after its author has died’ (Beardsley 1992: 26), because, as others have conceded, ‘the meaning of “plastic” as a synthetic substance is included in the semantic meaning of [an 18th century] text taken as a mere string of sentences’ (Lamarque 2009a: 154). Yet, mere strings only acquire a meaning within a language, and I can see no reason why one should appeal to a geo­graph­ic­al­ly constrained but historically unconcerned notion of language—why, that is, one should appeal to English, a language which, unlike Swahili, eventually interprets ‘plastic’ as a substance, rather than to eighteenth-century English, a language which does not.

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1.3  Proper Names  9 Predicates (verbs like ‘run’ or verb-phrases like ‘is on the mat’), adjectives (such as ‘fat’ or ‘happy’), and nouns (such as ‘cat’) shall simplemindedly be associated with properties, with little commitment to any particular understanding of ‘property’. Other expressions shall more or less tacitly be interpreted as I go along—with the exception, of course, of the few expressions that directly matter for my topic. The cases that matter are the harbingers of particular propositions. Undoubtedly, much may be achieved through utterly general means, as in the case of ‘cats are mammals’, ‘every man runs’, or (at least according to my favourite view of definite descriptions) ‘the cat is on the mat’. Yet, sometimes, what we are after are propositions about something or someone in particular: the story of an Italian philosopher who develops a penchant for snails may well be the story of many, but, sometimes, it is my story that I wish to tell. I do so by employing singular terms. For instance, I manage to speak of myself, rather than of anyone else who is otherwise very much like me, by tokening ‘I like snails’, that is, by tokening the English first-person pronoun. I began my discussion of singular terms with a case of indexicality. But, perversely, I did so only with the aim of setting it aside. This, I hasten to add, is not because indexicality is of little importance for my topic, fictional discourse. The contrary is the case: indexicality raises such delicate and complex issues, in general and when it comes to fiction in particular, that I prefer to ground the presentation of my apparatus on less intricate and controversial questions.3 And so, I finally come to one of the protagonists in what follows, namely that other prototypical class of singular terms: proper names.

1.3  Proper Names Section  1.1 rested satisfied with a few allusions to a variety of in­de­ pend­ent­ly important ideas. My point had to do primarily with the introduction of certain terminological choices, as in my use of ‘encode’, ‘proposition’, or ‘singular term’. More importantly, my remarks introduced 3  At the very least, ignoring indexicality allows me to continue to speak of the content of an expression without bothering to repeat the independently needed caveat ‘with respect to such and such a context’. For my views on indexicality see Predelli 2005.

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10 Preliminaries a distinction between (a) sheer types such as the three-letter sequence ‘cat’, (b) syntactically well-endowed affairs such as the noun-type ‘cat’, and (c) fully-fledged expressions such as the feline-directed noun ‘cat’. This distinction is of particular importance when it comes to my favourite singular terms, namely proper names. As with ‘cat’, I may token the name-type ‘Abe’ as an exemplar of a certain expression. That name-type is the sort of thing which (like ‘every man’ and unlike ‘blue’) combines with certain other expressions (such as ‘runs’) so as to form sentence-types, as in ‘Abe runs’. And it is also the sort of thing which (unlike ‘every man’ or ‘blue’) is put to use in order to refer to a particular individual, typically, at least where I come from, to a human male. Yet, in and of itself, the name-type ‘Abe’ hardly suffices for this task, since it may be used to name a Biblical patriarch, the sixteenth President of the United States, and a lot more besides. Adapting the ter­mino­logic­al gambit from section 1.1, I say that tokens of the name-type ‘Abe’ may be put to use as different names. So, some tokens of ‘Abe’ exemplify the name borne by the author of the Gettysburg Address, whereas others qualify as instances of different (albeit homophonous) names. I concede that my terminology departs from a colloquial usage of ‘name’, as in the everyday idea that his name may be my name too. There is nothing momentous is any of this. For one thing, what the vernacular is after is hardly inexpressible in my jargon: if, informally, his name is my name too, then, in my way if speaking, what he and I have in common is a name-type, rather than a name. For another, slightly more cumbersome locutions allow my distinction to be expressed in the market­place: although, pre-theoretically speaking, we may have the same name, some uses of that name-type name him and not me. A name-type is attached to an individual once it is launched as that individual’s name. The classic model of a baptismal ceremony serves well as an informal example. So, a launcher solemnly tokens the name-type ‘Abe’ in the prominent presence of an individual i, with the aim that it may subsequently serve as i’s name. Or else, an expansive princess launches the name ‘HMS Vanguard’ by uttering ‘I name the fastest battle­ship “HMS Vanguard” ’ on some official occasion. Or, less ceremoniously, I launch ‘Vladimir’ by proposing ‘let the tallest spy go by “Vladimir” ’.4 4  Even these informal declarations may not be necessary: if a certain man is sufficiently prominent, a casual ‘hey there, Bozo’ may saddle him with that unflattering moniker, at least as

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1.3  Proper Names  11 One way or another, if all goes well, the name sticks. People related to that original launch token ‘Abe’ with an appropriate intention, that is, with the intention to conform to that initial referential association. Similarly, the witnesses at the princess’ declaration continue to use ‘HMS Vanguard’ to refer to that ship, and my acquaintances persist with ‘Vladimir’ as the name of the tallest spy. That is, as I often put it, these speakers replicate a particular name, on the basis of appropriate background conditions for their usage. Undoubtedly, things may get messy, and my simple-minded picture will probably fail to yield the intuitively desired results in at least a few cases. But the details are of secondary importance for what follows.5 In both their official forms and their casual everyday counterparts, launching attempts may misfire (and, as a result, well-meaning replicating intentions may fizzle out). For instance, a distracted and unfocused ‘I name you “Beth” ’ in front of a multitude of equally plausible candidates arguably fails to launch ‘Beth’ as anyone’s name. But the mere absence of a particular target presumably does not suffice for utter failure: sometimes, launchers successfully introduce a name, which is never­ the­less not a name of anyone or anything. So, a well-meaning and properly attired baptizer, her gaze firmly focused on a corner in the room, may venture ‘I name you “Casper” ’ while hallucinating a man there. Or else, anyone whose pedigree as a namer is not accompanied by mathematical competence may hazard ‘I name the largest prime number “Primo” ’. Here, at least according to some views, two nametypes have successfully been turned into names, namely ‘Casper’ and ‘Primo’. Yet, although all went well at the ceremonial level, things took a bad turn from the viewpoint of referential optimality: in common parlance, ‘Casper’ and ‘Primo’ are empty names.

far as I and my audience are concerned. Incidentally: my examples of launchings freely include ostensive (as in the ‘Abe’ or ‘Bozo’ cases) and descriptive affairs (as in the scenarios with ‘HMS Vanguard’ or ‘Vladimir’). For recent examples in the considerable literature on ostensive and descriptive launchings see Jeshion 2001 and 2004, Berger 2002, and Soames 2003; for my own views on this matter, see Predelli 2017. 5  All of the above is reminiscent of the so-called ‘causal’ or ‘historical’ theory of reference (see Donnellan 1970, Kaplan 1977, Kripke 1980, and Devitt 1981), but is in principle com­ pat­ible with alternative, less diachronically oriented views (see Evans  1973, the essays in Schwartz 1977, and Sainsbury 2005). For comments on the issues discussed in this section see also my Predelli 2017.

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12 Preliminaries I have peppered the foregoing paragraph with cautionary signposts (‘presumably’, ‘perhaps’, etc.). Clearly, nothing I have written suffices as a refutation of anyone who disagrees with my distinction between unsuccessful launchers, as in the case of ‘Beth’, and successful but referentially ineffective baptizers, as in the cases of ‘Casper’ and ‘Primo’.6 Nothing, in particular, suffices to refute a more demanding line about naming, according to which lack of reference suffices for misfired launching, namely, for the conclusion that neither ‘Casper’ nor ‘Primo’ managed to achieve the status of names. I prefer to follow general consensus and to opt for a softer line. I do so, in particular, because I shall benefit from the resources offered by the notion of an empty name—something that is a  name all right, even though it refers to nothing. And I can do so with such nonchalance because, as will soon be apparent, empty names only serve as terms of contrast for my topic, namely the language of fiction and its fictional names.

1.4  A Few Further Preliminaries In section 1.1, I characterized singular terms as expressions whose content is exhausted by their ability to pick out a particular individual, that is, by their ability to engender particular propositions. I happen to think that a view of this sort is on the right track. Still, according to a different descriptivist position, what names contribute are not individuals but general affairs, roughly in the vicinity of descriptive conditions or individual concepts.7 My reason for not saying much about this is not that I deem it to be independently misguided. The point is that, when it comes to my topic, the diatribe between descriptivists and anti-descriptivist views of proper names is less earth-shattering than has sometimes been assumed. For one thing, many of the problems generated by fictional discourse remain as urgent from either perspective. Moreover, and more importantly, my hypotheses, though officially presented against a referentialist background, are often rephraseable within a descriptivist paradigm. Note in particular that the diatribe about descriptivism remains independent from the picture of names that I have sketched in section 1.3. 6  For a spirited defence of the idea that names may fail to refer see Sainsbury 2005. 7  ‘Descriptivism’ encompasses a wide variety of views, including Frege-inspired sense the­ or­ies (see Frege 1892 and Dummett 1973), Russellian ‘abbreviation’ approaches (Russell 1911), and cluster-descriptivism (Searle 1958).

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1.4  A Few Further Preliminaries  13 After all, descriptivists may avail themselves of much in that picture, modulo my referentialist way of speaking. For them, for instance, ‘Abe’ may contribute such and such descriptive condition due to its relation with a certain launching. For them, ‘Beth’ may fail to behave as a proper name altogether. And, for them, ‘Casper’ may end up being associated with such and such an (empty) individual concept because of its pos­ition within a certain network, rather than in some other alley of transmission. These, indeed, ‘are matters on which, in theory, Fregeans and Direct Reference theorists might agree’ (Kaplan 1989: 576).8 Yet, the case of empty names deserves some additional comments, since it may appear to be symptomatic of more urgent discrepancies between referentialist and descriptivist views of singular terms. So, what about ‘Abe loves Casper’, given my admission that ‘Casper’, though empty, is a proper name? Since ‘Abe loves Casper’ appears to be a semantically fully-fledged sentence, it will presumably encode a proposition, one partly about Abe and loving. And yet, Abe and love do not provide all that is needed at the propositional (and truth-conditional) level. A descriptivist, perhaps, would not budge: although no referents are to be found for ‘Casper’, so she may insist, appropriate descriptive conditions may unproblematically populate the propositional level. As an antidescriptivist, I apparently need to budge. But I do so with nonchalance, given that, for me, emptiness is not the name of the game when it comes to fictional discourse, and merely serves as a pedagogically useful term of contrast. For convenience’s sake, I adopt without further ado an approach grounded on the following idea of a gappy proposition. Think of an empty name as encoding the gap, and of a sentence in which it occurs as encoding a gappy proposition—say, in the example above, a proposition with the gap occurring side by side with Abe and the loving relation. The way of gaps, of course, is not smooth: if my ‘Casper’ and ‘Primo’ are indeed both empty, it follows that ‘Casper swoons’ and ‘Primo swoons’ encode the same proposition, namely the 8  This independence reflects a wider conceptual divide, which is sometimes expressed in terms of the distinction between genuinely semantic questions and so-called pre-semantic issues. The temporal metaphor in ‘pre-semantic’ may well need to be taken with a grain of salt but remains pedagogically profitable: one needs to establish what name (if any) has been tokened, or what sentence (if any) has been uttered, before one proceeds to the application of one’s favourite semantic apparatus. The locus classicus is Kaplan 1977, section 12 (later, Kaplan apparently employs ‘metasemantic’ in this sense, Kaplan 1989: 576). See also Perry 2001 and, for my own take on pre-semantics, Predelli 2005, 2013, and 2017.

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14 Preliminaries proposition consisting of the gap and swooning. Some, I suppose, will take this conclusion to be independently unpalatable. For the reasons just mentioned, I remain unconcerned, and I happily bite what, for my purposes, is a harmless bullet.9 To repeat: I swiftly accepted the ideas of empty names and of gappy propositions, and I took a rather casual attitude towards the divide between referentialist and descriptivist views of names, simply because none of this will become a central feature in my own theory. Rather, these ideas deserve to be mentioned because they will recur as terms of contrast with what I am after, fictional discourse. Given my aims, one already mentioned feature of empty names and gappy propositions deserves to be stressed: for me, empty names and gappy propositions, if any are to be found, are names and propositions all right. In the formal mode of speech: ‘empty’ and ‘gappy’ are as subsective as ‘blue’ in ‘blue elephant’, and they are not privative like ‘fake’ in ‘fake diamond’. So, whereas fake diamonds are not diamonds, blue elephants are elephants, albeit of a rare kind. Similarly, empty names are a type of name, and gappy propositions are a species of proposition, even though, admittedly, they are not the first things one would think of if asked to think of names or propositions. And, with this, I wrap up my brief semantic detour, reserving the right to add this or that detail as I proceed. But nothing momentous is forthcoming in this respect, since my topic is not language in general, but fictional discourse. Still, before I move on to fiction, certain further features of actual (that is, not at all fictional) talk deserve closer attention. They are features that do not pertain to the semantic properties of expressions, but to certain effects of language-use. I turn to them in the final section of this chapter.

1.5 Impartations According to a picture implicit in much of what I have written thus far, we token sentences because we are interested in the propositional 9  For a small sample of the debate on gappy propositions see Donnellan 1974, Braun 1993 and 2005, Taylor 2000 and 2014, and Everett 2003.

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1.5 Impartations  15 contents they encode, and we are interested in those contents because they play a role within the economy of conversation. This much does not amount to the implausible idea that those contents exhaust our communicational aims, in the sense that, when we utter S, we inevitably communicate exactly what is semantically encoded in S. One reason why this idea is implausible is familiar enough: speakers may implicate more than (or other than) what their sentences encode, in Paul Grice’s sense(s) of ‘implicate’.10 Notwithstanding their independent significance for the study of fictional language, Gricean implicatures shall be left aside in what is about to come. Much more significant for my aims is another type of information engendered by the use of a sentence, which remains distinct not only from the proposition it encodes, but also from what speakers implicate. The sort of effects that I have in mind ensue from the fact that our engagement with language inevitably affects our environment. For instance, when we speak, we call our audiences’ attention to certain traces, we token certain sentence-types, and we exemplify certain sentences. The result is not mere disembodied informational exchange. It is also, inevitably, an enrichment of our surroundings with ink marks, tokens, and related objects and events. So, in any circumstance in which ‘the cat is on the mat’ is being used, some types are being tokened, such as the three-letter type ‘cat’ or the four-letter-plus-one-space type ‘is on’. Indeed, since tokening demands the intervention of an intention-capable agent, any circumstance in which ‘the cat is on the mat’ is being used includes the efforts of some conscious, minded individual. More: it is a circumstance in which a conscious individual intentionally tokens the three-letter type ‘cat’. That is, with respect to any circumstance in which ‘the cat is on the mat’ is being used, it is true that there exist tokens, that the type ‘cat’ is being tokened, that someone tokens types, or that someone intentionally tokens ‘cat’. Uncontroversially, nothing of this sort is encoded in the sentence under 10  See Grice 1999 and the considerable ensuing literature. I mention Gricean conversational implicature only as a familiar and relatively uncontroversial exemplar of our ability to communicate contents other than those encoded in our sentences. According to some, even what is literally communicated (as opposed to being merely hinted á la Grice) could exceed the confines of what is encoded, according to mechanisms such as enrichment, modulation, or impliciture. For a list of sources and for my own views on the so-called semantic-pragmatic interface see Predelli 2005.

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16 Preliminaries discussion, which deals with cats and mats, but not with ‘cat’, with tokening, or with intentions. I say that that content is imparted by the use ‘the cat is on the mat’, rather than being encoded in that sentence. Often, all of the above goes unnoticed or remains as mere background noise, an outcome of the medium for what really counts, the encoded proposition. But that is not inevitable, and, sometimes, impartations come to the conversational foreground. If you ask whether I recovered from a speech impediment, I may enunciate ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers’ in a clear and loud voice. Or, to cite a tale with some philosophical pedigree, a Second World War English prisoner of war may dupe his Italian captors into thinking that he is a German ally by uttering ‘kennst du das land wo die Zitronen blühen’ (Searle 1965). Our communicative aims have nothing to do with pickled peppers or blossoming lemon trees, that is, with the propositions encoded in the English sentence that I have tokened, and in the German sentence ­chosen by the captive. We rely on imparted information, in my case having to do with my ability to token certain cumbersome types, and, in that other case, with the prisoner’s familiarity with characteristically German-sounding types. All of this is just the beginning. What is at issue with a use of ‘the cat is on the mat’ is not only the vocalization or inscription of a certain type, but the use of a sentence—not any old token of ‘the cat is on the mat’, but the use of that English sentence. As a result, the effects of impartation go well beyond the existence of tokens, tokeners, and types. So, any circumstance in which ‘cat’, the familiar English noun, is being used is not only a state of affairs in which someone tokens a three-letter type. It is also an occasion in which someone tokens the noun ‘cat’, someone employs a noun for cats, and someone speaks of cats. Once again, content is in the air: with respect to any situation where the English sentence ‘the cat is on the mat’ is being used, it is true that, say, someone tokens a noun for cats or that someone is speaking about cats. Here as before, none of this is encoded in ‘the cat is on the mat’, a sentence whose content has nothing to do with nouns, with speaking, or with speakers. Much of what is imparted (and much among what is imparted that comes to the conversational foreground) is thus of a reflexive nature. For instance, whenever ‘the cat is on the mat’ is being used, it is not only the case that someone is speaking of cats, but also that she is speaking of

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1.6  Where Am I Now?  17 cats by means of her employment of ‘cat’, that is, by means of her use of an expression occurring in her utterance. Proper names follow suit. So, whenever ‘Abe swoons’ is being used, someone is speaking of Abe by virtue of tokening ‘Abe’, Abe is designated by ‘Abe’, and the person bearing ‘Abe’ is described as swooning. To stress the obvious: none of this is encoded in ‘Abe swoons’, since that sentence deals with a man and with swooning, but has nothing to do with types, with names, or with bearing ‘Abe’.11 As my examples indicate, reflexive impartations and encoded content may selectively be involved in what is imparted. For instance, my use of ‘the cat is on the mat’ also imparts that a designatum of ‘the cat’ is on the mat—that is, it imparts something derivable from my use of ‘the cat’, together with what is encoded in the predicate I have chosen. And my use of ‘Abe swoons’ imparts that a bearer of ‘Abe’ swoons—that is, it imparts content that ensues from my choice of ‘Abe’, side by side with the property encoded in ‘swoons’. Here as before, these impartations may linger as mere background noise. But, on some occasions, they come to the conversational foreground and become the true harbingers of the speaker’s intended point. Say we are debating whether any nineteenthcentury writer bears a surname appearing towards the beginning of an  alphabetically ordered list. ‘There are no Victorian authors whose name begins with the letter D’, you claim. ‘Doyle was a Victorian author’, I remind you. My conversational point also targets Doyle’s surname, rather than the man alone, as evidenced by the incongruity (or, at least, the diminished conversational perspicuity) of ‘Sir Arthur was a Victorian author’. My point, in other words, is partly directed towards imparted content: a bearer of ‘Doyle’, that is, a bearer of a name-type that begins with ‘D’, was a writer from that nineteenth-century literary tradition.

1.6  Where Am I Now? I have not yet reached any momentous conclusion, in particular any conclusion having to do with fictional language. The purpose of this 11  For discussions of impartation see my Predelli 2013 and, as one of my primary sources of inspiration, Perry 2001.

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18 Preliminaries chapter has been that of describing some properties of language and of our use of it, mostly with the aim of presenting the general background for my study of fiction. I began with some comments on types and expressions, and I highlighted certain terminological choices that shall continue to characterize my presentation. I then applied my jargon to proper names: name-types such as ‘Abe’ or ‘Casper’ may be put to use as fully-fledged names, on the basis of phenomena such as launchings and replicas. In sections 1.3 and 1.4 I continued with empty names and with the related idea of gappy propositions. In section 1.5, I concluded with some comments on the effects engendered by the use of language, which I subsumed under the label of impartation. Armed with these conceptual tools, in the next chapter I begin my discussion of fictional language with some comments on the hackneyed example of the Holmes stories.

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2 The Sign of Four Fictional Tellers

2.1  Getting Started One fine day, Arthur Conan Doyle penned the following as the beginning of what was to become The Sign of Four (hereinafter Sign for short): (2.1)  Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantlepiece (Doyle 1890: 89). When he inscribed this type, I suppose, Doyle did not aim at replicating anybody else’s use of ‘Sherlock Holmes’ as a proper name. Nor, I contend, did he engage in the launch of a new proper name. He surely did not launch ‘Holmes’ as a new name for any of his acquaintances, or for any other inhabitant of the actual world. But he also failed to participate in any hallucinatory event, as in the case of ‘Casper’ from Chapter 1, or in any launching accompanied by a non-denoting description, as in the case of ‘Primo’. For the purposes of this chapter, there may well be much that is real with Doyle’s inscription. For one thing, he deliberately traced certain marks on the page, and, if my copy of Sign is at all reliable, he did so in order to exemplify the sequence of types that I have displayed in (2.1). For another, Doyle tokened those types as types of English. For instance, the occurrences of ‘bottle’ and ‘the’ in his inscription of (2.1) are respectively occurrences of a noun-type and of a determiner-type, just as the English lexicon and syntax decree. For similar reasons, his inscription of ‘Sherlock Holmes’ qualifies as a token of a name-type. In particular, it  conforms to the usual typographical conventions for name-types, including the (defeasible but generally reliable) custom to capitalize certain Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics. Stefano Predelli, Oxford University Press (2020). © Stefano Predelli. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854128.001.0001

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20  The Sign of Four: Fictional Tellers letters. More importantly, it appears in a syntactic position suitable for expression-types of that sort. Less crucially but equally tellingly, it ­displays the sort of complexity and make-up characteristic of types that normally served as personal names in Victorian England: a (somewhat unusual) given-name-type is followed by a relatively common surname-type.1 Indeed, there is much that may well be actual even when it comes to the semantic properties of most of what Doyle wrote. For instance, he followed standard semantic conventions when he penned the determinertype ‘the’ or the noun-type ‘bottle’: he tokened the former as the English definite article, and he tokened the latter as a noun, in particular as the English noun having to do with containers of a certain shape and function. Similarly, Doyle arranged his layout so as to obtain expressions that compositionally achieve this or that semantic result, according to runof-the-mill regularities. For example, he tokened the predicate-type ‘took his bottle from the corner of the mantle-piece’ as a predicate encoding the property of taking someone’s bottle from the corner of the mantle-piece. (See Chapter 4 for discussions of some details that I leave aside here). Still, according to my contention, Doyle did not conform to any of the constraints for either the launch or the replica of a real, down to earth proper name: ‘Sherlock Holmes’, the name-type he tokened when he wrote down (2.1), is simply not a name. As a result, Doyle’s inscription of (2.1) is not the token of a sentence. It is, as I have conceded, the token of an affair in which a predicate-type follows a name-type. Yet, although all of this may well do as an instance of a sentence-type, it does not suffice as an exemplar of a sentence, in the sense of ‘sentence’ from Chapter 1. It does not, in other words, suffice for encoding that which semantics associates with sentences, namely propositions. Or so I contend. I did admittedly state my starting point with remarkable confidence, leaving all sort of arguments aside, and glossing over a variety of details. As far as I know, my initial contention is ­historically accurate: Doyle neither intervened in a pre-existing chain of 1  The use of ‘Sherlock’ as a name-type is recorded in more than a few sources before Sign (at least according to Google Ngram), even though it seems to have been in actual circulation mostly as a surname.

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2.2  Fictional Names  21 transmission of ‘Holmes’ nor engaged in any sort of hallucinatory ­ceremony. Still, notwithstanding its de facto plausibility, my description of Doyle’s predicament remains sufficiently biased to warrant further explanation and justification. In a sense, the remainder of this book is  intended as an exploration of the semantic consequences of my approach, and as an indication of its place within a wider account of fiction-making. A few preliminary hints are nevertheless appropriate. I begin by gesturing towards some aspects in the contemporary debate about fiction, mostly with the aim of locating my position. I then continue with some preliminary comments about Doyle’s actual predicament and about what is fictional in Sign, before I proceed to the introduction of one of the characteristic tenets of Radical Fictionalism, having to do with impartation and with its role within fictional discourse. I conclude this chapter with three starred sections, mostly devoted to questions related to speech act theory.

2.2  Fictional Names I begin with an appeal to authority: for me, it is an initial source of encouragement that more than a few experts of fictional discourse echo my insight that ‘Holmes’, as it occurs in (2.1), is not a name. According to Saul Kripke, for instance, . . . the types of names which occur in fictional discourse are, so to speak, ‘pretended names’, part of the pretense of the fiction. (Kripke 2013: 29)

Mark Sainsbury concurs: . . . there is a question whether, as used within works of fiction, [fictional names] are really names. A name is typically used to purport to refer, but creators of fiction do not use their name-like expressions to purport to refer: rather they use them in pretending to refer. (Sainsbury 2005: 87)

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22  The Sign of Four: Fictional Tellers More than a century earlier, Gottlob Frege already intimated that . . . the proper names in the drama . . . are mock proper names; they are not meant to be taken seriously in the work.  (Frege 1897: 130)

This encouragement is a double-edged sword. Although this dignified company may spur my sceptical readers to endure, my more sympathetic audience may legitimately suspect that, though on the right track, my approach is old news. I could indeed have mentioned further companions for this initial stage of my journey. Yet, my partial list should already allay the fears of those in search of novelty: as ought to be clear to anyone familiar with the views of Kripke, Sainsbury, and Frege, these philosophers develop wildly different accounts of fictional discourse, and end up disagreeing about a variety of semantic issues. There is, then, ample room for manoeuvrings. As a result, there is hope that my own views will end up occupying an idiosyncratic and interesting niche. One aspect of the relationships between my position and a popular stance in the current philosophical debate on fiction is already worthy of mention. My starting point pertains to the introduction and transmission of names, that is, to the regularities governing the use of nametypes qua proper names. It does not stem from a longing for metaphysical parsimony, that is, from the assumption that, as the vernacular puts it, there simply is no Holmes. I must confess my unshakeable indifference towards matters of parsimony in general. And so, although I am not always sure about the metaphysical make-up of numbers, properties, or symphonies, I find no methodological advantage in expelling them from the inventory of what there is. Admittedly, when it comes to Holmes, I am firmly on the side of both common sense and parsimony-concerned philosophers: for me just as for them, Holmes is of no help in the study of ‘Holmes’ for the fundamental reason that . . . he does not exist.2 Yet, if my apparatus eventually develops in directions consistent with this intuition, 2  The suspension dots are in order: the locutions ‘Holmes is of no help’ and ‘he does not exist’ need to be taken with a preliminary grain of salt at least until Chapter 5, where I shift from the discussion of fiction-makers such as Doyle to our predicament, that is, to the predicament of someone who, like myself, is not engaged in fiction-making.

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2.2  Fictional Names  23 that is a conclusion that I welcome as an attractive consequence of my views about ‘Holmes’, rather than as its impetus. Accordingly, it is only fitting that I stress an aspect of my position that distinguishes it from many approaches to fiction directly motivated by the desire for metaphysical desert landscapes: my view is not that ‘Holmes’, as penned by Doyle, is an empty name. For, as I conceded in Chapter  1, empty names are names all right, whereas ‘Holmes’, as it occurs in (2.1), is not. By the same token, as I granted in Chapter  1, empty names flanked by predicates make up sentences that semantically encode gappy propositions, and, as I also conceded, gappy propositions are propositions. But (2.1), as inscribed by Doyle, is not a sentence, and it encodes no proposition whatsoever.3 Of course, the literature on empty names is of independent interest. It  is also laudable that those speaking of emptiness accompany their technical and sometimes difficult considerations with real-life examples. It is less praiseworthy that these examples inevitably include would-be names from fiction: ‘non historical fiction’, so we read, ‘typically has empty names’ (Eagle  2007: 141), and, to pick another example among many, plausible examples of empty names include certain names from fiction, such as ‘Sherlock Holmes’.  (Braun 2005: 596)

Admittedly, these authors may legitimately proclaim their innocence, since their choice of example has little bearing on their primary concern, referential emptiness. If ‘Holmes’ offends you, so they may retort, appeal to ‘Casper’, to ‘Primo’, or to any other empty name that suits your liking. From my viewpoint, however, a word of warning remains 3  My hypothesis, then, disagrees with the idea that fictional names are empty names in a sense radically different from the views that strive to assign referents to them. Classical versions of these positions understandably devote most of their efforts to the metaphysical status of these alleged referents, rather than to issues having to do with proper names, their launches, and their transmissions (see among many Parsons  1980, Zalta  1983, and Deutsch  1985). Of greater interest from my purposes is a different sort of referentialist take on fictional names, that is, the family of positions generally subsumed under the label of ‘artefactualism’ (see for instance van Inwagen  1977, Salmon  1998, and Thomasson  1999). For my own views about some aspects of these approaches see Chapter 8.

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24  The Sign of Four: Fictional Tellers appropriate: the way of emptiness by no means exhausts the options of those who do not think that ‘Holmes’, as it occurs in (2.1), is a referentendowed proper name. For me, indeed, it is neither a referring nor an empty name, since it is not a name at all. I say that ‘Holmes’, as it occurs in Sign, is a fictional name. But I say so with a crucial accompanying caveat: fictional names are no more a special kind of name than fake diamonds are a type of diamond. As mentioned in Chapter 1, I employ ‘empty’ in ‘empty name’ as subsective, in the sense that, if anything is an empty name, it is a (somewhat ­special) name. ‘Fictional’, at least in the privative sense in which I use this term, is nothing of this sort. Not being at all names, fictional names are of no greater interest to a semanticist than fake diamonds are to gemmologists or, to cite a historically dignified analogy, than stage thunder is to meteorologists.4 A name for my position helps to keep my exposition concise. I refer to my development of the idea that ‘Holmes’ is merely fictionally a name as Radical Fictionalism. The occurrence of ‘fictionalism’ in ‘Radical Fictionalism’ is suggestive. Indeed, as mentioned in the Introduction, much of what I end up proposing echoes familiar ideas in the fictionalist tradition, that is, in a philosophical approach that eschews realist hypotheses about Holmes, Watson, and their adventures. Yet, as I also have preliminarily indicated, my position is a stance that modulates fictionalist attitudes from a primarily semantic viewpoint, that is, from a viewpoint having to do with the semantic properties of actual singular terms, and with their contrast to similar looking affairs within fictional discourse. I introduce the official moniker for my position with some trepidation, since, at this stage, what emerges is a watered down and occasionally not too rigorous version of what I mean by ‘Radical Fictionalism’. But the ways of fiction are rich and complex, and the presentation of Radical Fictionalism in all of its glory would result in a pedagogically

4  The source is Frege, in the continuation of the passage cited above. Admittedly, there are important interpretive cruxes to be resolved before Frege’s passage may be deciphered. Note that, for Frege, ‘names that fail to fulfil the usual role of a proper name may be called mock proper names’; and yet, incomprehensibly from my viewpoint, ‘although the tale of William Tell is a legend and not history and the name William Tell is a mock proper name, we cannot deny it a sense’ (Frege 1897: 130).

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2.3  The Actual and the Fictional  25 cumbersome, if not unintelligible affair. I invite the reader to proceed through this chapter with a charitable attitude, and to keep her objections on hold at least until the end of Chapter 3, where my initial sloppiness will hopefully have been rectified, and where a variety of details will have been put in place.

2.3  The Actual and the Fictional I begin my musings on Radical Fictionalism with a tongue-in-cheek contrast between fictional lavishness and actual frugality. My contrast is tongue-in-cheek since, seriously, it is no contrast at all. What is fictional is, for me, simply nothing, so that nothing is strictly speaking being contrasted with my topic, that which occurs in actual fiction-making. As indicated in section 2.1, what actuality has to offer are the circumstances in which a certain individual penned the types displayed next to ‘(2.1)’ as part of a fiction-making effort. For the reasons mentioned there, what ensues is not the token of a sentence: given Doyle’s relationship to his token of ‘Holmes’, his efforts did not result in the use of a proposition-encoding construct. I highlight this sort of semantic ­poverty by means of an overly dramatic term of art. Doyle, I say, displayed the sentence-type (2.1), but did not token any sentence. I concede that, given what I wrote in section 2.1, ‘display’ is a bit of a heavy-handed terminological choice. As I granted, much of what occurs in (2.1) is in the encoding business, and is in this sense poorly characterizable in terms of the inert-sounding ‘display’. For instance, at least as far as I am concerned here, ‘bottle’ originates from Doyle’s pen not only as a noun-type, but as the English noun concerned with bottles, just as it does whenever it occurs in our everyday proposition-encoding sentences. Similarly, ‘took his bottle from the corner of the mantle-piece’ presumably makes it appearance in (2.1) as a verb-phrase that deals with taking one’s bottle from the corner of the mantle-piece, in accordance with the contents encoded in ‘took’ or ‘mantle-piece’, and with the usual compositional regularities that govern that sort of syntactic complexity. ‘Display’, then, carries its connotation mainly when it comes to ‘Holmes’, a name-type that, for me, never achieves the semantic richness that characterizes our uses of name-types as names. And yet, given my focus

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26  The Sign of Four: Fictional Tellers on particularity, a bit of drama is not out of place: notwithstanding all of the semantic baggage that may come with Doyle’s (2.1), when it comes to fully-sentential outcomes nothing is being achieved over and above the display of a sentence-type. The idea of a display serves me well as a rhetorical ploy, primarily intended to highlight a negative thesis of Radical Fictionalism, namely the absence of proposition-encoding sentences. Given its role in the economy of what follows, ‘display’ remains unaccompanied by more positive characterizations. At this stage, rather, it serves the pedagogical purpose of depicting the contrast that I discuss in this section, that is, metaphorically speaking, the contrast between mere actual authorial display and the sort of fictional lavishness that ensues from it. As a result of Doyle’s fiction-making effort, it is fictional in Sign that someone, as I read on, a former surgeon of the British Army by the name of ‘Watson’, recounts his adventures with an eccentric detective. Not, mind you, with any old eccentric detective with a cocaine addiction. Fictionally, Watson is intent at reporting particular content, that is, at conveying propositions that, as we may casually put it, are about Holmes, rather than about anyone else. As a result, then, it is fictional that the good doctor puts forth a certain particular proposition by means of (2.1), that is, by means of a fictionally proposition-encoding sentence. Indeed, fictionally, his semantic success is hardly a mystery. For one thing, he fictionally tokens expressions such as ‘bottle’ or ‘took his bottle from the mantle-piece’ as any speaker of English actually does. Most crucially, he also fictionally fails to engage in anything of an extraordinary semantic nature when he tokens ‘Holmes’ at the beginning of (2.1): fictionally being in the position of replicating occurrences of ‘Holmes’ eventually related to his companion’s baptism, he names the man of whom he wishes to speak. The fictional outcomes are thus equally unremarkable: (2.1), as it occurs in Watson’s mouth, fictionally encodes a particular proposition concerning his companion and the property of taking his bottle from the corner of the mantle-piece. I take it to be obvious that this telling is merely fictional. Surely, Watson’s speaking is no more real than the good doctor or the eccentric detective, for all of them are mere figments of Doyle’s imagination.

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2.3  The Actual and the Fictional  27 So, all may well fictionally have been smooth sailing when it comes to Watson’s (2.1) and the proposition it encodes. But fictional opulence is not a special type of abundance. It is, rather, nothing at all. Its nothingness may well have been concealed by my colourful fabrications. But I am not in the business of making fiction, and when it comes to my concern, namely matters of actual semantics, all of the above must shamelessly be  unveiled for what it is. It, not unlike Watson’s propositions, really amounts to nothing. Having indulged in a bit of tongue-in-cheek description of what is fictional, I may do worse than to come clean by overstating my mistakes (the reasons why these are over-statements will emerge in Chapter 5, but never mind about that here). What occurred two paragraphs ago may give the impression of an actual description of a shadowy domain—the impression that I did actually speak of special matters such as fictional doctors, fictional names, and fictional particular propositions. But there are no such special matters, and, as a result, I did not actually speak of anything at all. Or, more prudently, I did not actually depict a mystical level where ‘Holmes’ refers to Holmes, and where (2.1) encodes the proposition that Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantlepiece. I did not do so because, two paragraphs ago and for that matter just now, my would-be uses of ‘refer to Holmes’ or ‘that Holmes took a bottle from the corner of the mantle-piece’ simply do no actual semantic work whatsoever. And so, once the deceit behind ‘what is fictional’ is revealed, what Radical Fictionalism leaves untouched is the poverty of display: really, in any sense of interest for semantics (that is, for the only semantics there is, namely actual semantics) (2.1) and its ilk do not encode ­propositions. This is no virtuous deprivation, since what it leaves behind  are, at best, bits of semantic encoding that fail to achieve any propositional outcome—indications of taking bottles from a mantle-piece, say, but nothing about that most important violin-playing, cocaineaddicted taker of them. What, then, may Doyle have been doing when laboriously authoring his novels? How, on these occasions of semantic shortage, did he manage to tell a story? And, conversely, what may we be doing when we attentively follow his inscriptions, enjoy his tales, and report them to our acquaintances?

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28  The Sign of Four: Fictional Tellers

2.4  Fictional Impartations Fictionally, Watson’s speaking tells the story of his eccentric acquaintance, partly by virtue of straightforwardly encoding particular content. Yet, fictionally, his telling also achieves further results. In particular, it fictionally engenders the same sort of environmental reverberations that our speaking actually does, according to the regularities discussed in Chapter 1. An actual, name-deprived example will do as a preliminary reminder. Suppose that I utter (2.2)  the game is hardly worth the candle. As a result, I make it the case that some expressions are being tokened, that someone exemplifies the noun-type ‘game’, that someone is using the noun ‘game’, that someone is speaking of games, and all of that. Fictionally, when Watson tokens (2.2) (Doyle 1890: 89), he achieves the same effects: as he writes, his fictional surroundings become populated by tokens of expression-types, by someone who tokens ‘game’, and by someone who speaks of games. That is the way of impartation. And, of course, similar impartations also ensue when proper names are at issue. Returning to a real-life example, my use of, say, (2.3)  Doyle was born in Edinburgh on the 22nd of May 1859 imparts that a name-type is being used, that I use a name pronounced and spelled as ‘Doyle’, that someone speaks of Doyle by means of ‘Doyle’, and so on. It does so because, whenever I use that sentence-type, I token the name-type ‘Doyle’ as a particular name—because, that is, I token it as a participant in a sequence of uses eventually leading to Sir Arthur’s baptism. Straightforwardly, my use of (2.3) also imparts that whoever is being targeted by that name has the property encoded in ‘was born in Edinburgh’, that is, the property of having been born in Edinburgh. Consequently, my use of (2.3) also imparts that a bearer of ‘Doyle’ was born in Edinburgh, notwithstanding the fact that my sentence fails to encode anything about bearing or about a five-letter long surname. Once again, fictional impartation follows suit: by virtue of effects

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2.4  Fictional Impartations  29 parallel to those ensuing from my actual use of (2.3), Watson’s fictional use of (2.1), repeated here (2.1)  Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantlepiece (Doyle 1890: 89), fictionally imparts that someone uses a name-type, or that someone uses a name pronounced and spelled as ‘Holmes’. And, given the assumption that Watson’s fictional use of ‘took the bottle from the corner of the mantle-piece’ encodes a certain property, his fictional inscription of (2.1) also imparts that a bearer of ‘Holmes’ took his bottle from the corner of the mantle-piece. Here as before, my business with (2.2) or (2.3) is real enough, but Watson’s interactions with (2.1) or (2.2) are not. Really, there are no such things as Watson, his tokens, and his speaking. Really, a fortiori, there are no such things as his conveying or imparting anything. Yet, although what is encoded in Watson’s chosen sentence is merely fictional, much of what his speaking fictionally imparts is something that we actually manage to entertain and negotiate. When I spoke of what (2.1) fictionally encodes, I had to indulge in a bit of nonsense: fictionally, (2.1) says that Holmes took a bottle, and yet, really, ‘that Holmes took a bottle’ picks out nothing at all. But when I spoke of what Watson’s use of (2.1) fictionally imparts, I could do so with a straight face. It imparts that someone tokens ‘bottle’, say, or that someone speaks of bottles. And also, it imparts that a bearer of ‘Holmes’ took his bottle from the corner of the mantle-piece. All of this content is utterly unproblematic. You and I and Doyle peacefully coexist with bottles or with the property of being a bottle, and we equally peacefully coexist with the name-type ‘Holmes’ and with the relation of bearing. Were the need to arise, we could even smoothly encode all of that in our own very real, actuality-concerned commentary, as I just did when I wrote (2.4)  a bearer of ‘Holmes’ took his bottle from the mantle-piece. Although Watson’s imparting is merely fictional, then, what he fictionally imparts is not. It is run-of-the mill content which we actually entertain, understand, communicate, impart, or encode.

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30  The Sign of Four: Fictional Tellers Here as in everyday life, some of this fictionally imparted content may well initially reverberate as mere background noise, something to which we hardly pay any attention when casually leafing through the pages of Sign. But one sort of impartation inevitably catches our attention: in the absence of any actual particular proposition about Holmes, what we latch onto is something in the vicinity of impartations such as (2.4). In the absence of a particular proposition, that is, what we absorb are general surrogates, namely general affairs about bearing and name-types. (Well . . . since I happen to believe that quoted expressions are singular terms, I also think that these affairs are actually particular contents about expression-types.5 In order to keep my exposition concise, I still call them ‘general’ in the sense that they are not the sort of particular contents one actually derives from actual uses of proper names, such as particular contents about a certain man). Fictionally, of course, Watson’s story is not a general account of namebearers and name-types. It is, rather, a report on the exploits of a ­particular sleuth, his particular sidekick, and the equally particular individuals they befriend. But this fictional particularity is merely fictional. For us, it populates a merely fictional scenario, one which we approach through the general impartations engendered by fictional telling. It is, in other words, not Watson’s fictional encoding that hooks us onto his tale, but his fictional uses—not what is encoded in his fictional sentences, but what is imparted by his speaking of those sentences, that is, in a terminology I continue to employ in this book, by his telling. The ideas of fictional use and fictional telling shall keep me occupied at different junctures in what follows. Still, enough has been said to provide at least the bare-bones of Radical Fictionalism, and to lay the ground for the developments and amendments that I begin to introduce in Chapter 3. For the moment, I rest satisfied with a coda about issues that are of some intrinsic interest, but that do not play a primary role in my take on fiction. I begin in section  2.5 with a brief comparison between the hints from this section and certain positions in the contemporary literature on fiction. I continue in sections 2.6 and 2.7 with some ideas having to do with speech-act theory, and in particular with its 5  For my views on quotation see Predelli 2009b.

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*2.5  Loose Ends: Surveying the Literature  31 relationships with my notion of display. Some of my conclusions on these topics will eventually return in later chapters, where they will be more explicitly incorporated in my account of fictional language.

*2.5  Loose Ends: Surveying the Literature Here are five samples from philosophers of different persuasions, who put forth their own analyses of certain fictional scenarios, or who summarize the way in which they understand other people’s commitments on these matters. Speaking on behalf of what he calls ‘anti-Meinongianism’, Peter van Inwagen proposes to paraphrase ‘Mr Pickwick is jolly’ as if The Pickwick Papers were not a novel but a true record of events, then there would have been a jolly man called ‘Mr P ickwick’ (van Inwagen 1977: 300).

Kendall Walton, giving voice to a simple-minded option for ‘trying to do’ without fictitious objects, envisions the possibility that Cervantes’ Don Quixote makes it fictional that there is a person whose name is ‘Don Quixote’, who has a squire named ‘Sancho Panza’ . . .  (Walton 1990: 131).

Thinking of the short story ‘Jack got up in the morning and ate breakfast’, Gregory Currie presents its content as there is someone called ‘Jack’ who got up in the morning and ate breakfast (Currie 1990).

In his discussion of views committed to actually existing abstract characters, Robert Howell unpacks ‘Anna Karenina is a women’ as there is an object x such that it is Anna Karenina fictional that (x is named ‘Anna Karenina’ and x is a woman)  (Howell 2010: 156).

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32  The Sign of Four: Fictional Tellers Finally, returning to this chapter’s guiding example, Amie Thomasson’s discusses what she calls ‘fictionalism’ in terms of the notion that, in the case of Doyle’s novels, there once was a man, such that he was called ‘Holmes’, was a detective, was very clever, etc.  (Thomasson 2003: 212).

All of these remarks occur relatively casually, and some of them are explicitly mentioned only as examples of what others may be tempted to say about fiction. Yet, it is this very temptation that interests me most. Of all the things I would say about a remarkable actual person, I am not sure that mention of the names she bears would inevitably be the first thing that comes to mind. Yet, when it comes to would-be equally remarkable individuals, all of the quotes from the foregoing paragraph insistently bring these onomastic characterizations to the foreground. Forget about fighting windmills and pursuing a lost cause, and begin your recollections about Cervantes’ extraordinary hero with the notion that there is a person whose name is ‘Don Quixote’ and who has a squire named ‘Sancho Panza’. Leave his penchant for cocaine and his skills as a violinist for later, and start your summary of Doyle’s stories with the reminder that there once was a detective who was called ‘Holmes’. Postpone any allusion to extramarital affairs and a troubled personality, and open your summary of Anna Karenina with the information that a certain woman is named ‘Anna Karenina’. For a Radical Fictionalist, this temptation is not only understandable, but unavoidable: in real instances of language use to no lesser extent than in fiction, it is an inevitable effect of impartation. And it is, inevitably, an effect that emerges with particular urgency whenever straightforwardly encoded content remains unavailable. The offer is one we cannot refuse. In the absence of the proposition that Holmes took his bottle, we absorb the fictional particularity of Watson’s report by means of the only kind of propositions we manage to negotiate—in this case, among other things, the general proposition that a bearer of ‘Holmes’ took his bottle. All of the above shall receive further attention as I proceed. For the moment, it is apt that I compare and contrast my suggestions with certain strands and theses currently in circulation. I start, in the final paragraphs of this section, with so-called pragmatic Millianism and with

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*2.5  Loose Ends: Surveying the Literature  33 appeals to semantic ascent. And I continue, in the next sections, with an only prima facie tangential issue in speech-act theory. Millianism is a theory about the semantic properties of proper names, roughly the view that names are rigid non-indexical devices of direct reference. Although I happen to be a devoted Millian (for the reasons put forth in my Predelli 2017), in Chapter 1 I introduced my views on fictional names against a relatively neutral background, one which (mutatis mutandis) ought to be palatable even to semanticists of a descriptivist persuasion. Still, Millianism deserves a brief mention at this stage since, rightly or wrongly, it is often perceived as a theory of names that is in a less promising position than descriptivism when it comes to fictional discourse. Accordingly, it is the Millians who have more insistently attempted to resolve the difficulties raised by fiction along non-semantic lines, and, in particular, along the lines of what is  sometimes called ‘pragmatic Millianism’. According to pragmatic Millianism, ‘sentences containing empty names’ pragmatically convey general descriptive propositions (Piccinini and Scott  2013: 240), So, although Doyle’s inscriptions of ‘Watson was a surgeon’ and ‘Holmes was a surgeon’ encode the same (gappy) proposition, so pragmatic Millians contend, Doyle’s use of them pragmatically conveys different descriptive contents. And, according to pragmatic Millianism, it is the information that is pragmatically conveyed by Doyle that eventually steers our interest in his stories, that is, in the narratives in which those sentences occur.6 This idea may seem to bear some remote resemblance to my suggestion, since both I and pragmatic Millians focus our attention on the effects of use—in my case, on the effects of fictional use. The similarities, though, are very partial indeed. For one thing, as noted, pragmatic Millians consider the sentence-types displayed in Sign as sentences, that is, as encoders of (gappy) propositions. And, for them, whatever pragmatic mechanism is responsible for outcomes of descriptive propositions, it is not anything that I have described in terms of impartation. It is, rather, something in the vicinity of a common understanding of ‘what is

6 This position is defended in various guises by Adams and Stecker  1994, Adams and Dietrich  2004, and Adams and Fuller  2007; see also Recanati 2018 and his discussion of Walton 1990.

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34  The Sign of Four: Fictional Tellers pragmatically conveyed’ by a speaker, which is in turn triggered by ­certain noteworthy conversational features of the propositions encoded in her chosen sentence. That, of course, is not the alley I am pursuing. The point, for a Radical Fictionalist, is not that Doyle’s sentences encode contents that are uninformative, gappy, blatantly false, or anyway unsuitable. Relatedly, the point is not that Doyle pragmatically conveys information about, say, the relation of bearing and the name-type ‘Holmes’, by virtue of employing sentences which, semantically, have nothing to  do with either. None of this will do because, according to Radical Fictionalism, Doyle’s sentence-types are not at all in the business of encoding propositions, and his inscriptions of those sentence-types have nothing to do with the use of any sentence. The point, in other words, is not pragmatic calculation, that is, the derivation of what is hinted by Doyle when he employs sentences that strictly encode something else. The issue has rather to do with the inevitable effects engendered by the use of language—the real effects engendered by, say, my real use of ‘Doyle’, and the fictional effects engendered by Watson’s ­fictional employment of ‘Holmes’.7 By the same token, Radical Fictionalism is hardly anything properly describable as a theory of semantic ascent, that is, as the view that, whereas sentences involving ‘Doyle’ speak of Doyle but not of ‘Doyle’, sentences including ‘Holmes’ encode information about ‘Holmes’.8 I  shall indirectly return (in Chapter  4) to the relationships between semantic ascent and Radical Fictionalism, primarily from the viewpoint of translation. For the moment, I rest satisfied with noting that, for me, sentences including ‘Doyle’, the actual name of that popular Victorian 7  On the other hand, a view that may bear some parallelisms with mine is Ken Taylor’s, who (i) derives ‘truth-conditionally irrelevant’ (Taylor 2000: 22) descriptive and nominal content, (ii) stresses the differences between his position and pragmatic Millianism, and (iii) pursues what he calls ‘one and half stage pragmatic processes’ (Taylor 2000: 32, see also Taylor 2014). Interesting hints can also be found in Manuel Garcia-Carpintero’s work on fiction, which focuses on ‘descriptive’ nominalistically oriented material, allegedly analogous to John Perry’s reflexive content (Garcia-Carpintero  2015: 151; see Perry  2001). Yet, Taylor’s presentation is couched in terms of ‘meaning rules’, and one-and-a-half processes do not seem to correspond to impartations. Garcia-Carpintero, on the other hand, reaches his conclusions in terms of ‘conventionally implicated descriptive presuppositions’ (Garcia-Carpintero 2015: 151). As a result, he remains committed to what I reject, namely to theories of empty names and gappy propositions (Garcia-Carpintero  2015: 154)—and, incidentally, to the further notion that, when occurring in fiction, ‘singular terms both empty and non-empty . . . are not rigid’ (Garcia-Carpintero 2015: 155). 8  For comments on this view see for instance Zemach 1998 and Evans 1982.

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*2.6  Matters from the Real World  35 author, never encode any content about a name or about the relation of bearing (obviously barring predicates that ostensibly do so). And, most importantly, that, for me, there are no such things as sentences including the name ‘Holmes’, given that, for me, there is no such thing as the name ‘Holmes’. The point, in a nutshell, is not at all about any extra-ordinary properties of Doyle’s or anybody else’s actual use of expressions. It is, rather, a point about utterly ordinary effects fictionally achieved by Watson’s fictional contributions.9

*2.6  Matters from the Real World: Authors and Speech Acts In the next chapter, I move from Doyle’s Sign to Jane Austen’s Emma. I  do not do so merely for variety’s sake: the case of Emma introduces important amendments to Radical Fictionalism, and indirectly casts a new light on my remarks in this chapter. Certain background assumptions shall nevertheless remain untouched, including the informal idea that, when it comes to cases such as (2.1), an author’s role may at least informally be described as that of a displayer, in a sense of ‘display’ that I have begun to elucidate above.10

9  This may be as good a place as any to mention descriptivist theories of (actual) proper names that have recently gained some popularity, and that I did not mention in my discussion of classic descriptivism in Chapter 1. According to these theories, proper names semantically encode metalinguistic information, as in the idea that my use of ‘Mary’ encodes the property of bearing ‘Mary’ (see the sources discussed in my Predelli 2017 for different modulations of this idea). For the reasons put forth there, I find these approaches hopeless. Still, my misgivings may be put aside at this stage. If ‘Mary’ is to achieve its particular referential target (say, Mary Wollestonecraft but not Mary Shelley), these analyses will presumably appeal to contextual and/or indexical elements, roughly as in ‘the bearer of this use of “Mary”’. Since Watson’s uses of ‘Holmes’ are uncontroversially merely fictional, the presumed indexicality of that name will then be resolvable by appealing to merely fictional contexts. For a Radical Fictionalist, then, it will once again fail to engender actual propositional contents. 10  Incidentally, I take on board a relatively common-sense idea of authors, leaving aside as not immediately relevant a variety of typologies and distinctions that may well be of independent interest (as in, say, Monika Fludernik’s distinction between ‘a precursory author’ who ‘is the author of a source that has a decisive influence on a text’, an ‘executive author’ who ‘is responsible for the creation of the text, a ‘declarative author’ who ‘features as author on the title page’, and a ‘revisionary author’ who ‘is responsible for amendments to the text and is often the publisher or editor of a work’, see Fludernik 2009: 15; for further discussions of the idea of author see among many Wolterstorff 1980, Livingston 2001, Lamarque 2009b, and Currie 2010).

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36  The Sign of Four: Fictional Tellers Especially when it comes to Austen, the description of her efforts in terms of display may hint in the direction of a disparaging attitude that I would surely deem to be inappropriately disrespectful. A note of caution, then, is appropriate from the outset. From the semantic viewpoint, I found it rhetorically advantageous to stress (and occasionally overstress) my take on ‘Holmes’ by alluding to Doyle’s predicament as that of a mere displayer. Yet, there is nothing that is independently ‘mere’ in any of this. I for one could not have achieved anything on a par with Doyle, and more accomplished writers than Doyle could not manage anything remotely resembling Austen’s style and storytelling skill. Indeed, all of what I have written remains compatible with the notion that, in a sense, authors of fiction convey, communicate, or put forth real, accessible, and often important contents about the human condition, the struggle of the oppressed, or the deepest moral dilemmas.11 Talk of meaningful contribution is in this sense unobjectionable: . . . narratives are structures of events that are themselves ‘meaningful’, although the meaning of a narrative episode is of an altogether different nature from the meaning of a linguistic construction or act (Wilson 2004: 394).

Of course, that my views are compatible with these truisms hardly entails that they provide an explanation of them, that is, that they pave the way for an analysis of such meaningful outcomes. Throughout this book, I remain utterly silent when it comes to the achievement of these loftier contentful effects, and I rest satisfied with the relatively uninformative notion that, one way or another,

11  This may also be as good a place as any to anticipate that I shall have little use for the idea of an implied author. I avoid this concept primarily because it strikes me as ‘a superfluous concept’ (Bal  1981) or, worse, as an ‘ill-defined and elusive notion’ and ‘an anthropomorphized phantom’ (Nünning 1999: 543, see also Nünning 2005). More importantly for my avoidance of ‘implied author’, much of the literature on that subject depicts implied authors as actual facets, projections, or guises of real flesh and blood authors, that is, as actual constructs that would anyway be of no help from my viewpoint. Indeed, utterly independently of fiction, ‘whenever we [actually] speak or write we imply a version of our character that we know is quite different from many other selves’ (Booth 2005: 77). As a result, the idea of an implied author boils down to ‘a streamlined version of the real author, an actual or purported subset of the real author’s capacities, traits, attitudes’ (Phelan 2005: 45; for discussions see among many Chatman 1990 and Currie 2010).

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*2.6  Matters from the Real World  37 authors . . . often make political (Gorky’s Mother), philosophical (Sartre’s Nausea), and moral (James’ The Ambassadors) points through their literary writings  (Carroll 1992: 108).

My reasons for mentioning all of this do not stem only from my desire to expunge all disparaging overtones from the idea of a mere displayer. Indirectly, the above also provides an introduction to my comments on an issue that has received a great deal of attention among philosophers of literature (though, tellingly, much less so among philosophers of language and semanticists), namely the question of speech-acts. I start with a terminological concession: if, one way or another, authors do indeed make political or moral points, then their works achieve communicative effects that may perhaps be described in terms of actual speech-acts, at least according to a wide and somewhat fuzzy sense of ‘speech-act’. So, in some sense, Maxim Gorky may well assert something about the struggle of the Russian working class or about the political role of women—he may do so, at least, in the sense in which, as Walton puts it, ‘there is the not uncommon practice . . . of making a point by telling a story’ (Walton 1990: 78). I take it to be sufficiently obvious that this sense of ‘assertion’ only bears a relatively remote resemblance to the use of that term in linguistic pragmatics, at least as long as ‘what fiction writers assert when they make assertions is usually not what their sentences explicitly express’ (Walton  1990: 78). Yet, a different but equally wide and not too well defined sense of ‘speech act’ also appears at another juncture in the current debate on fiction, in particular in relation to the diatribe about dedicated acts related to fiction-making, or, as I shall put it, dedicated acts of fiction-saying. When it comes to this diatribe, the point has to do not with, say, Gorky’s interest in the working classes or  with Doyle’s musings about human ingenuity. It has rather to do with something more closely related to these author’s written output. With a variety of caveats and qualifications, so some have contended, authors do not assert but fiction-say the content in the texts for which they are responsible. Clearly, if this presumed fiction-saying force is meant to apply to the content encoded in the sentences occurring in a work of fiction, then the project of identifying a dedicated illocutionary act remains off-limits

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38  The Sign of Four: Fictional Tellers from the viewpoint of Radical Fictionalism: since nothing is encoded in (2.1), nothing is being asserted, ordered, or fiction-said by Doyle on that occasion.12 The connotations in my informal idea of a display are thus appropriate in this respect as well. And so, Doyle’s display of a sentencetype is an exceedingly poor candidate for the role of a dedicated type of illocutionary act, at least in the sense that it not the sort of act resulting from the association of a specialized force to a propositional content. Still, for me as for anybody else, fiction remains a contentful enterprise. In some sense or other, then, it may well be unobjectionable to insist that, in the end, Doyle bears the responsibility for certain propositional locutionary outcomes, which we are invited to entertain in ways other than those appropriate for assertions, requests, or any other run-of-the-mill illocutionary force. For instance, it may well be unobjectionable to conclude that, as a result of Doyle’s fiction-making effort, we come to imagine (or pretend, or make-believe, or something of that sort) that a bearer of ‘Holmes’ took his bottle from the mantle-piece.13 This much does not strike me as being particularly informative, but it seems harmless enough. My misgivings, at this stage, are terminological: since speech-act theory typically encompasses discussions that go well beyond the mere identification of this or that psychological attitude, speaking in terms of dedicated speech acts may well in the end turn out to be not that productive. Worse, it may turn out to be misleading. Indeed, this jargon has misled at least some among the proponents of fiction-saying approaches to fiction, who have often felt the need to develop their position in direct confrontation with the classic issues in speech-act theory properly conceived. They have, in particular, felt the need to counter certain well established arguments, typically associated with the work of Searle, and directed against the idea that authors of fiction attach a dedicated kind of force to the content of their sentences. I devote the next section to a brief discussion of this debate, also with an eye to a few details more directly linked with my take on fictional discourse. 12  Non-propositional speech acts (for instance, expressives as in ‘alas!’) may safely be left aside in my discussion of fiction-saying. See Searle 1969 and the ensuing literature for more informative and/or appropriate candidates, and Recanati 2013 for comments. 13  The alternatives in my parenthetical are not equivalent (see among many Walton 2014 and 2015, and Woodward 2014 and 2016).

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*2.7  Searle on Fiction-Saying  39

*2.7  Searle on Fiction-Saying As I wrote towards the end of section 2.6, nothing in Doyle’s display of (2.1) may be described as the performance of an illocutionary act, at least in a sense of ‘illocutionary act’ having to do with the association of illocutionary force with encoded propositional content. My reason for this conclusion had to do with particularity: Doyle’s display of ‘Holmes’ does not amount to the actual use of a proper name, and, as a consequence, (2.1) does not qualify as a proposition-encoding sentence. But leave particularity aside for the moment, and focus on simpler instances, such as the occurrence in Sign of (2.2), repeated here (2.2)  the game is hardly worth the candle. In this case, let us assume, Watson’s fictional use fictionally achieves straightforward semantic effects, and his sentence straightforwardly encodes unobjectionable propositional content, the content that the game was hardly worth the candle. What, then, is Doyle’s actual relationship to this very actual proposition? I take it to be sufficiently clear that, although Doyle was in the position of negotiating that proposition, he did not put it forth with assertoric force when he displayed (2.2) as part of Sign. Doyle did not assert that the game is hardly worth the candle, because he was in the business of fiction-making rather than, say, journalism. Since no other standard force seems to do the job, and since Doyle unquestionably inscribed (2.2) as part of a wider communicative enterprise, some have concluded that his display of that sentence-type must have been accompanied by a dedicated type of force. In a nutshell, for them, Doyle fiction-said that the game was hardly worth the candle. When I tackled my main topic, namely fictional particularity, I paid particular attention to Watson’s fictional predicament. His fictional standing serves me equally well as an introduction to my (and Searle’s) worries about the view from the foregoing paragraph. So, fictionally, Watson not only inscribed (2.2), but he also did so with assertoric intentions: fictionally, he asserted that the game was hardly worth the candle. As a result, it seems reasonable to conclude that it is fictional in Sign that the game was hardly worth the candle—or, at least, it is reasonable to

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40  The Sign of Four: Fictional Tellers draw this conclusion on the basis of certain background assumptions, such as Watson’s reliability in this respect (see Chapter 6 for comments on this caveat). Yet, independently of the extent to which we may take Watson at his fictional word, we would not have reached that verdict, had we been exposed to, say, ‘is the game worth the candle?’, that is, had we been presented with Watson’s fictional question whether the game was worth the candle. Or, at least, we would not have come to that conclusion in the absence of evidence that Watson’s question was rhetorical, as in his later fictional employment of (2.5)  could I hope to make it good before twelve foolish tradesmen in a jury-box?14 And so, given what assertions, requests, or rhetorical questions fictionally achieve, we form our picture of what is fictional. It is fictional in Sign that the game was hardly worth the candle, say, and it is fictional in Sign that someone had little hope of making it good before a jury. As mentioned, I have no qualms with the idea that all of this is, in some sense and with many qualifications, Doyle’s intended message. Indeed, what Doyle was after was the depiction of a fictional scenario in which the game was hardly worth the candle and all the rest. I also have no qualms with the further suggestion that Doyle did not intend me to believe any of that—that, say, he invited me to imagine or to pretend this and that, or anyway to take it in any old way in which one should take those who are engaged with fiction-making. Yet, as I explain in what follows, if this is what fiction-saying amounts to, it is not a special kind of speech act, on a par with asserting or requesting. It is, rather, whatever fiction amounts to, namely the subject matter for a theory of fictionmaking rather than for a theory of illocution. This, I take it, is the fundamental point in Searle’s polemics against a dedicated fiction-saying speech-act in ‘The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse’ (Searle 1975a). Superficially, his argument focuses on certain assumptions about illocutionary-force-indicating-devices such as (simplifying harmlessly) the verb-order in the interrogative mood or the absence of an overt subject in the imperative mood. Searle’s picture of 14  Actually, the citation is ‘how could I . . .?’. I prefer a yes/no question for my purposes.

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*2.7  Searle on Fiction-Saying  41 illocutionary-force-indicating-devices is stated with enviable boldness. There is, he writes, a systematic set of relationships between the meaning of the words and sentences we utter and the illocutionary acts we perform in the utterance of those words and sentences  (Searle 1975a: 319).

Accordingly, Searle’s initial presentation seemingly takes the shape of a direct argument: given the aforementioned systematic relationships, if fiction were a matter of fiction-saying ‘it would be impossible for anyone to understand a work of fiction without learning a new set of meanings’ (Searle  1975a: 324). And yet, so the argument concludes, when we understand a work of fiction, we do not learn a new set of meanings, but rather become better acquainted with the ways of fiction. Searle’s presentation is overly enthusiastic. In fact, I suppose, ­illocut­ionary acts do not directly correlate with illocutionary-forceindicating-devices, as testified by so-called indirect speech acts, a ­phenomenon that Searle himself analysed in detail (Searle 1975b). Yet, illocutionary-force-indicating-devices and meaning are not crucial for Searle’s strategy. Gloss over that misleading rhetorical gambit, and let the point be concerned with Standard Speech Act Theory, that is, with a theory for all sorts of illocutionary acts except a presumed ‘illocutionary act of telling a story or writing a novel’ (Searle 1975a: 323). Then, if that illocutionary act were the point, it would be impossible for anyone to understand a work of fiction without expanding Standard Speech Act Theory—not, mind you, without learning ‘a new set of meanings’, but anyway without being acquainted with a new type of force. Yet, Searle concludes, anyone who first approaches a fictional work may well come to learn what I have casually called ‘the ways of fiction’, but would not need to add anything to her previous understanding of speech acts. This reconstruction of Searle’s main argument has the advantage of  eschewing any controversial assumption about illocutionary-forceindicating-devices. Still, as I have presented it, it may appear to further a merely terminological decision. After all, one would indeed need to learn something if she were to understand ­fictional works appropriately. At the very least, she would need to be preliminarily acquainted with a  form of speech that invites imagining, make-believe, pretense, or

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42  The Sign of Four: Fictional Tellers something of that sort. So, is this invitation a suitable topic for anything one may appropriately call ‘speech act theory’? The main thrust of Searle’s essay has to do with considerations favouring a negative answer to this question, for reasons that are substantive, rather than merely terminological. Searle has no bones to pick with the notion of something peculiar with fiction, which one may well need to learn as a prerequisite for understanding it—if anything, he overstates the point by repeatedly speaking of ‘conventions’ and ‘rules’. Appealing to one of the least helpful metaphors I have ever encountered, Searle invites us to think of the conventions of fictional discourse as a set of horizontal conventions that break the connections established by the vertical rules.  (Searle 1975a: 326)

Leaving orientation metaphors aside, the point with fictional discourse is that its characteristics apply across the board, i.e., that they equally affect standard illocutionary acts. So, jump on the fictional bandwagon once and for all, and, while on it, note how the regularities that govern actual speech acts continue to hold in the pretence, or in what I am asked to imagine rather than believe. The point is methodological: fictionality does not bring up yet another type of force, since its influence is detectable in all standard illocutionary acts. More than that, it is detectable in all standard illocutionary acts in exactly the same way. As a clarification of this methodological point, consider the following. In actuality, whatever regulates, say, assertions and questions entails a certain relationship between these speech acts, once their respective forces are applied to one and the same content. So, the following discourse is odd: ‘the cat is on the mat; is the cat on the mat?’ Or, at least, it is odd as long as one is performing an assertion when uttering the first sentence and asking a question when uttering the second. This is so because (roughly) felicitously asserting that the cat is on the mat requires that the speaker believes that the cat is on the mat, whereas felicitously asking whether the cat is on the mat requires that the speaker is not already in possession of that belief. Yet, ‘the cat is on the mat; is the cat on the mat?’ would also be odd if fictionally occurring in Watson’s mouth, and it would be so for precisely the same reason.

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2.8  Where Am I Now?  43 Contrast this natural explanation of the fictional case with an appeal to dedicated speech acts: someone actually fiction-says that the cat is on the mat, and afterwards actually fiction-asks whether the cat is on the mat. The result is infelicitous. So, fiction-saying that P and fictionasking that P would need to be designed so as to guarantee that their simultaneous occurrences engender infelicity. Yet, anything that could do the work in this respect would have to be a replica of the relationships that hold between saying and asking. ‘Fiction’ in ‘fiction-saying’ or ­‘fiction-asking’ would remain an idle cog in the theory of illocution.15

2.8  Where Am I Now? This chapter introduced some of the central tenets of Radical Fictionalism, such as the notion of actual authorial display, the idea of merely fictional names, and the centrality of fictional tellings and impartations. So, the token of ‘Holmes’ in (2.1) is approached as the actual display of a name-type, rather than as a proper name: ‘Holmes’ is a merely fictional name, and (2.1) is a merely fictional encoder of propositional content. The contentful results that we derive from our approach to Sign are derived by impartation, that is, they ensue from Watson’s ­fictional telling of his adventures. As a result, sections 2.3 and 2.4 put forth a preliminary version of my take on what is fictional in a work, with a special focus on the contrast

15  For speech-act theories of fiction see for instance Ohmann 1971 or Urmson 1976. Searle’s own view is couched in terms of pretense. According to a common misunderstanding of his position, authors of fiction pretend to assert (or ask, request, etc.) the propositional content encoded in their sentences: ‘given the propositional content of this sentence . . . it seems to follow . . . that Arthur is performing the speech act of assertion. . . . But . . . we do not in fact hold him so responsible’ (Davies 2007: 39), and ‘Searle’s view is that it is not meaning that is affected by fictive utterance but force’ (Lamarque 2009a: 181; according to a similar misunderstanding of so-called ‘fictionalism’, ‘. . . when Doyle wrote that Holmes lived in Baker Street . . . Doyle just pretended . . . to perform this illocutionary act, so he was not committed to the content of his claim’s being actually the case’ (Berto 2011: 318); for criticisms of this view, see Zemach 1998). Intriguingly, much of what Searle actually suggests is in fact close to Radical Fictionalism, even though from an importantly different perspective: ‘the author pretends to perform illocutionary acts by way of actually uttering (writing) sentences. In the terminology of Speech Acts, the illocutionary act is pretended, but the utterance act is real. In Austin’s terminology, the author pretends to perform illocutionary acts by way of actually performing phonetic and phatic acts’ (Searle 1975a: 327). Accordingly, what is actual is, in my terminology, the author’s display, but not her locutionary commitment.

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44  The Sign of Four: Fictional Tellers between fictional particularity and actual content. The ideas subsumed under my use of ‘what is fictional’ shall come to the foreground in the next chapter, where they are developed and generalized from the viewpoint of an example importantly different from Sign, namely the heterodiegetic case of Emma.

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3 Emma The Narrative Periphery

3.1  Preliminaries: Heterodiegetic Telling A few decades before Doyle’s Sign, Austen inscribed the following types: (3.1)  Emma Woodhouse . . . seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence (Austen 1816: 37). For the reasons put forth in Chapter  2, the occurrence of ‘Emma Woodhouse’ in Austen’s inscription is not the occurrence of a name: Austen, not unlike Doyle, was not in the habit of hallucinating, and did not aim at replicating any of her acquaintances’ pre-existing names. As a result, her token of (3.1) is not the token of a sentence: Austen displayed a sentence-type, but she did not use any expression responsible for encoding a particular proposition. Like (2.1), then, (3.1) involves a name-type that is fictionally put to use as a proper name, in this case as the name of a handsome young lady. And so, fictionally, (2.1) and (3.1) encode particular pro­posi­tions, respectively about that eccentric detective and that lady. Yet, the lady, the detective, their names, and any proposition about them are merely fictional. Here as before, contentful results are obtainable by impartation. Not unlike Watson’s fictional uses, the fictional telling in which Emma’s teller is engrossed fictionally imparts a great deal of information—that someone is speaking, say, that someone employs a name spelled and pronounced as ‘Emma’, or that the bearer of that name seemed to unite the best blessings of existence. Once again, this hodgepodge of content will need to be negotiated by processes that still need to be discussed. Yet, its sheer presence is cause for optimism. Although the imparting is merely Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics. Stefano Predelli, Oxford University Press (2020). © Stefano Predelli. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854128.001.0001

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46  Emma: The Narrative Periphery fictional, much of what is imparted is real enough, and is a proper object of our understanding. It is, indeed, our only means to access that which, following colloquial usage, I have called ‘what is fictional in a work’, that is, in this case, what is fictional in Emma. Thus far, then, what distinguishes Emma from Sign is hardly anything of momentous philosophical significance. Yet, when the idea of what is fictional in Emma is coupled with all of the above, an important difference separates Austen’s novel from Doyle’s story. As noted, the appeal to impartation characteristic of Radical Fictionalism gives particular prominence to the idea of fictional telling: it is the fictional use of expression-types that engenders actually accessible propositional content. The reason why, in Chapter 2, I began my presentation with Sign lies primarily in the fact that, in that instance, fictional telling is hardly a contentious hypothesis: just as it is fictional in Sign that someone solves baffling crimes, it is equally fictional in Sign that his faithful sidekick speaks about them. Yet, this emphasis on fictional telling seemingly generates obvious tensions once we abandon Sign’s homodiegetic narrative and we move on to the case of Emma.1 After all, if it is fictional in Sign that a detective solves baffling crimes, it would seem to be equally fictional in Emma that, say, a handsome young lady united the best blessings of existence, lived with her petulant father, and displayed an unusual interest in the romantic life of others. But if it is also fictional in Emma that someone employs (3.1) as part of his descriptions of life at Highbury, it would seem to follow that, fictionally, that teller roams side by side with that lady and her father—that, fictionally, he could have kissed the former or kicked the latter. And this much, I suppose, is an unpalatable if not outright absurd conclusion, since Highbury’s fictional census counts Emma and Mr Woodhouse among its inhabitants, but has no room for a reporter who dutifully describes their everyday lives. Care, then, must be taken to keep promiscuity at bay. Emma’s teller not only never crosses Emma’s path, but is in principle prevented from doing so, since, in some sense, that teller and that lady fictionally inhabit different domains. And, at least initially, they do so because of a general 1  Regarding the homodiegetic/heterodiegetic duality, and related concepts such as the distinction between first-person and third-person narratives, the idea of narrative voice, or the notion of focalization, see among many Genette 1980, Berendsen 1984, Bal 1985, Tooley 1988, Porter Abbott 2002, Gunn 2004, Fludernik 2009, and Currie 2010.

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3.2  Impartations in the Periphery  47 feature of Austen’s chosen mode of fiction-making, namely heterodiegetic telling. Indeed, as will emerge from this chapter, heterodiegetic telling motivates important developments and amendments of the picture from Chapter  2. It motivates, at the very least, a distinction between what I call the narrative periphery occupied by Emma’s teller, and the storyworld inhabited by Emma, Mr Woodhouse, and all the rest. Jargon is not explanation. In a sense, the remainder of this book is  devoted to the analysis of a Radical Fictionalist understanding of storyworlds, of peripheries, and of their mutual relations. This prom­ inence is methodologically justified: the storyworld-periphery duality, though clearly independently recognizable by different views of ­heterodiegetic fiction, is inevitably entailed by the approach to fictional names, fictional particular propositions, and actual imparted content that I introduced in Chapter 2. In the distinctive shape that begins to emerge in this chapter, it is the prerogative of my insistence that contentful results are derivable from fictional telling, and not from actual encoding. Accordingly, as indirectly indicated by some of the examples occurring later in this chapter, the distinction between storyworlds and periphery emerges not only as a characteristic of heterodiegetic fiction, but, in the end, as a feature of fictional discourse tout-court. I begin my discussion of the storyworld-periphery divide with a general discussion of the impartations fictionally engendered by Emma’s teller, or by the tellers in certain other fictional scenarios. In section 3.3, I continue by considering instances that, for a Radical Fictionalist, are of primary interest, namely cases of fictional particularity and examples involving fictional names. In section 3.4, I approach what I have called ‘a hodgepodge of imparted content’, and I start my discussion of the sort of  imparted content more directly relevant for our reconstruction of Emma’s storyworld. I conclude with a starred section on a narratological topic that may profitably be clarified from the viewpoint of the storyworld-periphery duality, the issue of narrative time.

3.2  Impartations in the Periphery As repeatedly indicated, our actual linguistic uses actually impart ­pro­posi­tions that are not encoded in the sentences we employ. Similarly,

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48  Emma: The Narrative Periphery a teller’s fictional use of (3.1) fictionally imparts propositions as diverse as  the propositions that, say, someone is speaking, that someone uses ‘Emma’ as a proper name, or that a bearer of ‘Emma’ seemed to unite the best blessings of existence—that is, it imparts much that is not fictionally encoded in that fictional sentence. Since impartations ensue independently of the presence of singular terms, I simplify my discussion by temporarily abandoning (3.1), and by focusing on a name-deprived example. Take, then, my actual use of (3.2)  the event had every promise of happiness. Here as before, my use actually imparts that there exists a speaker, that someone tokens the type ‘promise’, or that someone is speaking about prospective contentment. It imparts all of this in the sense that these propositions are actually true with respect to any occasion of use for (3.2). And so, even though they are not part of the conditions required for the truth of (3.2), they provide a true description of how things are when that sentence is being employed.2 In this respect, fictional telling is not different from actual speaking. So, whenever (3.2) fictionally occurs (Austen 1816: 38), it is in a sense fictionally true that someone is speaking, or that someone is speaking about promises of happiness. The fictional reasons for this outcome reflect the actual regularities mentioned in the foregoing paragraph: although (3.2) does not encode anything about speaking, the fictional circumstances for the use of that sentence-type are inevitably such that, fictionally, someone is speaking, or that someone is speaking about promises. Yet, the parallelism with the actual mechanisms of impartation also indicates a special sense in which these impartations happen to be fictionally true. As I explain in what follows, if what matters are the circumstances of fictional use, the site appropriate for imparted content is the fictional site of speaking, namely the periphery. In principle, it may well not be appropriate to conclude that any of the aforementioned impartations fictionally describe Emma’s storyworld.

2  For an independent discussion of these details (and for the need to amend at least some of the examples I provide, for instance by eschewing possibly controversial appeals to the present tense) see my Predelli 2013.

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3.2  Impartations in the Periphery  49 In  principle, for instance, it may well not be the case that, in Emma’s storyworld, anyone comments about happiness or promises, or even that anyone speaks at all. ‘In principle’. Clearly, this sort of imparted content may in the end fictionally provide a true description of Emma’s storyworld. That someone is speaking, for instance, is uncontroversially the case there. Yet, it is so only due to its teller’s report of Emma’s and her acquaintances’ incessant conversations, and, incidentally, due to the fact that this report may be taken as fictionally accurate. As for that other example from the foregoing paragraph, the proposition that someone has spoken of promises does also admittedly provide a fictionally true description of Emma’s storyworld, given that, by sheer statistical plausibility, some of Highbury’s chatty inhabitants must surely have commented on that topic. But all of this is by the by, and is not inevitable. It may then be inevitable that the actual impartations ensuing from my actual speaking truly describe my world, that is, the situation in which I  actually happen to be located. But what is inevitable in the fictional domain is that a fictional teller’s impartations are fictionally true with respect to his periphery, but not necessarily with respect to the storyworld he describes. In fact, similar impartations are flat out false in the case of the storyworlds in other heterodiegetic narratives, such as my own Tales from a Barren World: (3.3) nobody has ever spoken a word, and nobody ever will . . . no intelligent life ever developed . . . conscious beings do not exist. Not much of a story, I concede. Yet, my storyworld is clear enough, and, equally clearly, it is not a storyworld that admits of tokens, of speaking, or of speakers. Its sparse landscape may well include stones and clouds, but it has no room for any token of ‘nobody’ or ‘ever’, for anyone pronouncing ‘nobody has ever spoken’, or indeed for any speaker whatsoever. The speaking, here as with Emma’s teller, populates the periphery, and the periphery alone. Another example may help to drive the point home. For reasons similar to those mentioned above, the actual use of (3.2) imparts that someone speaks English, in the sense that the proposition that someone speaks English is true on any occasion in which someone employs that sentence.

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50  Emma: The Narrative Periphery Similarly, as a result of the fictional occurrence of (3.2), it is fictionally the case in Emma’s periphery that English is being spoken. Once again, this also happens to provide a fictionally accurate description of Emma’s storyworld, since, fictionally, Highbury’s inhabitants did indeed communicate in English. But, as before, this much is accidental, and is not at all a result of the mechanics of impartation. That English has ever been spoken, for instance, fictionally falsely describes Barren World’s periphery. For that matter, it also falsely describes the storyworld of another story of mine, Viktor the Russian Spy, which begins (3.4)  I am a monolingual Russian speaker, and this is my story. I introduce Viktor not only as yet another exemplar of my fictionwriting skills, but also with an eye towards certain issues that I shall discuss later on, first and foremost issues having to do with translation (see Chapter 4). But even at this stage, the case of Viktor is of some additional interest. Viktor is a homodiegetic narrative, at least in the sense that its teller not only speaks in the first person, but also (had I bothered to cite the remainder of my tale) operates in the storyworld and interacts with its inhabitants—fictionally kisses or kicks them, say. Yet, even here, the storyworld-periphery distinction is unavoidable. Adopting a familiar spatial metaphor, the speaking (in English) is ‘from the outside’, even though the individual from which it ensues is a (monolingual Russian) storyworld participant. The possibility of such a tale, then, also entails a revision of some of my preliminary comments on Sign in Chapter 2 and, occasionally, in the initial section of this chapter. So, if it is at all inevitably fictional in Sign that someone speaks, that he speaks English, or that he speaks of his adventures with an eccentric detective, it is so only in a peripheral sense. So, by virtue of what Watson’s telling fictionally imparts, it is un­avoid­ ably the case that someone speaks in English about his own adventures. But, if this much also provides a fictionally accurate depiction of the storyworld, it does so only by accident, that is, by virtue of certain (fictional) special characteristics of Watson’s predicament. Were I daring enough to put forth my own interpretation of Sign, and were I in the mood of carefully rereading Doyle’s novel, I would begin by keeping an open mind. Are Watson’s recollections something Holmes could possibly

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3.2  Impartations in the Periphery  51 stumble upon? Is it fictionally the case that Watson’s notes could have been left in Baker Street, or that they should have been hidden from Moriarty’s view? And, even, is it true that, in Watson’s fictional surroundings, English is being spoken? In the end, I would probably settle for the obvious answers: Watson the sidekick is indistinguishable from Watson the teller, and his fictional retelling could have been overheard by Holmes or Moriarty. Similarly, given the fictional characteristics of  Holmes’ London, Watson and Holmes did indeed communicate in English (but see Chapter 4 for a few details on this). But I would not have been able to settle for these answers simply on the basis of my exposure to Watson’s fictional telling. In principle, the storyworld-periphery divide applies to this homodiegetic scenario to no lesser extent than to Emma.3 Ignoring the storyworld-periphery distinction has left one of the most perceptive students of fictional discourse with egg on his face: there is a paradox akin to contradiction in a third-person narrative that ends ‘and so none were left to tell the tale’.  (Lewis 1978: 266)

And yet, there surely is no paradox here, whether it be ‘akin to contradiction’ or a manifestation of the kind of pragmatic absurdity exemplified by actual uses of ‘nobody is speaking’ or ‘I never speak about myself ’. For instance, in my Barren World, nobody was left (or, for that matter, had ever even begun) to tell the tale. The peculiarities that characterize these exemplars, of course, do not disappear, since ‘nobody is speaking’ or ‘nobody is left to tell the tale’ are indeed close enough to the para­dox­ ical as peripheral descriptions. That they smoothly and non-para­dox­ically occur in the mouth of a peripheral teller testifies to the importance of the storyworld-periphery divide: a principled gulf separates what is fictionally described from the fictional site of the describing.

3  The peculiarities of impartations across the periphery-storyworld duality may be reiterated with the help of sentences whose encoded contents overlap with the impartations engendered by their use. For instance, ‘someone sometimes speaks’ displays a peculiar penchant for truth, in the sense that it is true in all circumstances for its use, even though it is not true by virtue of meaning alone (for details, see my discussion of ‘settlement’ in Predelli 2013; among my sources of inspiration, see Castaneda  1957, Hintikka  1962, and Kaplan  1977). Yet, were Emma’s teller to fictionally employ ‘someone sometimes speaks’, he could in principle fictionally put forth a proposition that is false in Emma’s storyworld—just as the teller for my Tales from a Barren World would, were he to token that sentence.

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52  Emma: The Narrative Periphery

3.3  Names in the Periphery In section  3.2, I began my exploration of the storyworld-periphery divide by discussing certain general features of (actual and fictional) impartations, and by appealing to name-deprived examples such as (3.2). The reason for doing so had to do with the fact that, according to Radical Fictionalism, fictional telling and fictional imparting play a fundamental role in the study of fictional discourse. Accordingly, a closer approach to some of the general features of fictional telling and imparting helped to unveil some equally general aspects of fictional discourse, such as its commitment to the periphery-storyworld distinction. And so, focusing on the case of (3.2), I stressed how imparted content is a kind of content that fictionally characterizes the periphery, rather than the storyworld. Or, at least, it reflects the periphery as a matter of prin­ ciple, whereas it may truly describe the storyworld only on the basis of further assumptions, such as the hypotheses that, sooner or later, Emma’s acquaintances must have spoken of promises, or that, given any reasonable interpretation, Watson and Holmes communicated in English. All of this turned out to be of some independent interest. For instance, it allowed me to stress the importance of the storyworld-periphery divide for homodiegetic scenarios, and it gave me the excuse for a polemical jab against Lewis. Yet, it is fictional particularity that provided the starting point for Radical Fictionalism in Chapter 2, and that con­ tinues to interest me here. Since I approach fictional particularity with a focus on proper names and/or name-types, it is thus imperative that I return to a case such as (3.1), repeated here for legibility’s sake: (3.1)  Emma Woodhouse seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence. Much of what I wrote in section 3.2 immediately applies to this case. So, for example, the fictional occurrence of (3.1) imparts that someone is speaking, that there exist tokens, or that someone is speaking of blessings. And, most importantly, all of this imparting takes place within the periphery, rather than the storyworld. For instance, the peripheral occurrence of (3.1) guarantees that ‘someone is speaking’ is peripherally true, without offering an equal guarantee when it comes to the storyworld.

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3.3  Names in the Periphery  53 Yet, the peculiarities of (3.1) also allow me to highlight a curious feature of the periphery-storyworld boundary, one that is fundamentally related to issues of particularity and proper names. The feature I have in mind is peculiar, because, rather than strengthening the gulf between peripheries and storyworld, it brings to light a noteworthy exception to it. Or else, in a better metaphor, it brings to light the sense in which that boundary, though inevitably in place, is also a porous frontier. Emma’s fictional teller cannot fictionally kiss that handsome young lady or kick her father. Yet, fictionally, he can speak of them, and he can do so by means of using their names. Hence, the distance that detaches him from that lady’s cheek and from that man’s ankles does not separate him from certain events in their biographies—from an event in which that man and his then new-born daughter lingered by the baptismal font, say, or at any rate from some sort of episode responsible for the launch of ‘Emma’. Fictionally, the name ‘Emma’ may have started its life in a church our teller could never visit, and it may have been replicated by speakers he could never encounter. Yet, that name also reverberates within his peripheral niche, and, as it does so, it continues to reach onto that distant and otherwise unreachable woman. For the moment, I rest satisfied with recording this semantic peculiarity of heterodiegetic storytelling with another piece of ad hoc ter­min­ ology: Emma’s storyworld, I say, is referentially permeable from the viewpoint of its periphery. Interestingly, the semantic wonders of permeability echo a familiar independent peculiarity of fiction, or, at least, of some types of fictional discourse. If Emma’s teller is in principle unable to kiss or kick those of whom he speaks, he would seem to be equally incapable of observing them—of witnessing their movements, listening to their conversations, and feeling the texture of their clothes. Yet, that heterodiegetic teller is not only in no worse position than we are when it comes to our neighbours’ whereabouts, their dialogues, or their attires. At least sometimes, he is apparently much better off. Rising to the role of omniscient narrator, he infallibly describes his storyworld, never getting a single detail wrong even when it comes to his subjects’ most private thoughts and most recondite feelings.4 4  Or so I invite you to assume for the sake of the example. The epistemic profile of Emma’s teller may well be less than straightforward: ‘in Emma there are many breaks in the point of view, because Emma’s beclouded mind cannot do the whole job’ (Booth 1961: 250), and ‘oddly

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54  Emma: The Narrative Periphery What actual semantics and epistemology forbid, fiction allows. Fictionally, a teller whose eyes are never described sees better than we may ever hope to see, and a teller whose mouth is never portrayed speaks the names of those he cannot kiss or kick. He does so, of course, in the periphery, since, at least in eminently reasonable novels such as Emma, none of this would ever do for any inhabitant of the storyworld. Yet, in that periphery, his disembodied voice breaks the secrecy that surrounds his physiognomy, his personality, and (notwithstanding my repeated use of ‘he’, mostly as a handy device for distinguishing Emma’s teller from its fictional female protagonist and its actual female author) his gender.5 Above, I wrote that the teller’s tokens of ‘Emma’ are tokens of a proper name, due to the permeability of the storyworld he depicts. In particular, though in principle unable to pick up Emma’s purse, he nevertheless picks up her name, for instance by replicating appropriate occurrences of ‘Emma’ in the storyworld. (Sprinkle all of this with ‘fictionally’, which I sometimes omit for brevity’s sake). I am confident that ‘Emma’, the handsome lady’s name, inhabits Emma’s storyworld, because I feel that I can rely on the evidence provided by reported discourse. For instance, I assume that, in Emma’s storyworld, that young lady’s father utters (3.5)  I have a great regard for Emma, because the teller attributes (3.6)  ‘I have a great regard for Emma’ (Austen 1816: 41) to that old man, and because I see no reason to reject the teller’s report as untrustworthy. It is this circulation of names in the storyworld enough, an Austen narrator can only read minds within a radius of three miles of her protagonist’ (Nelles 2006: 118). 5  Or, at least, he speaks in utter secrecy in the absence of critical justifications for this or that conclusion in these respects: the notion that, say, Emma’s teller is fictionally an assertive middle-class woman rather than a reserved aristocratic boy is to be defended on the basis of matters of style, rhetorical emphases, or something of that sort (more on this later). The evidence, in either case, would be one derivable from that fictional teller’s sole responsibility, namely the peripheral report of storyworld events. For general considerations regarding the gender of narrators see Lanser 1981.

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3.3  Names in the Periphery  55 which I took to be reachable from peripheral sites. And so, not unlike Mr Woodhouse in the storyworld, the peripheral teller uses the name ‘Emma’ in, say, (3.1) as any old participant would, who is located within a network of uses stretching to that young woman’s baptism. Yet, Mr Woodhouse and his acquaintances replicate Emma’s name by virtue of fictional relationships utterly parallel to the actual relationships that allow us to employ ‘Austen’ or ‘Aristotle’. But Emma’s teller does so only by virtue of the wonders of referential permeability. Or so I hypothesized. Admittedly, an explanation in terms of the peripheral replication of storyworld tokens may not be the only ex­plan­ ation available to a Radical Fictionalist. As an alternative, perhaps, one may suppose that Emma’s teller, far from replicating the linguistic events in his permeable storyworld, makes up his names as he proceeds. In this view, then, what is at issue is not replication but launching: a name spelled as ‘Emma’ is being launched by the peripheral teller so as to name the individual who, in the storyworld, bears a name of the same type. I remain open to a suggestion of this sort. Given my purposes at this stage, I can keep a tolerant attitude because the alternative that I have envisioned does not obliterate the point of referential permeability, namely the porosity of the storyworld-periphery divide. What crosses the boundary, in the view now under consideration, may well not be a strand in a network of transmission, as I supposed above. It would nevertheless be the teller’s referential focus, or at any rate whatever is required for the launch of names endowed with the desired referential profile. ‘Let me call thee “Emma” ’, he may peripherally declare. Yet, he would achieve his aim only with the help of his trespassing gaze, or with the aid of a pointing index capable of reaching into the storyworld. I speak of this sort of scenario as a case of peripheral launching. As  mentioned, I am indifferent to the question whether Emma’s teller engages in peripheral launchings, or whether he participates in the transmissions that I have envisioned in the first part of this section. I am, at any rate, firmly in favour of the idea of peripheral launchings for at least some cases. Take as an example my own Adventures of an Unnamed Child: (3.7)  there once was a child who remained nameless throughout his life. Noname, as I shall call him, lived happily ever after.

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56  Emma: The Narrative Periphery Clearly, the name ‘Noname’ is not an inhabitant of the described ­storyworld, and it is certainly not an inhabitant of that storyworld qua name of a nameless child. It is, rather, a name in the narrative periphery, and it is so due to the teller’s launching efforts. Permeability, then, remains the name of the game: the teller’s ‘I name thee “Noname” ’ is accompanied by an unwavering focus that breaks out of his barren periphery, and that reaches a nameless infant within a more populated storyworld.6 I thus happily proceed by taking on board both versions of referential permeability. In some cases, so I grant, tellers fictionally replicate the names that are fictionally in circulation within the storyworlds they describe. In other cases, surely, the proper names they fictionally employ get tokened in the periphery alone. My tolerance in this respect may perhaps be worthy of further scrutiny (see Chapter 4 for a few further details). For the moment, I simply leave all details aside, resting satisfied with noting how, one way or another, cases such as (3.1) and (3.7) promote a permeable understanding of the storyworld-periphery divide. The storyworld-periphery distinction returns at various junctures in the remainder of this book. At this stage, I temporarily wrap things up with a coda pertaining to the relationships between my semantically grounded considerations and a parallel but independently motivated divide in contemporary narratology. I discuss it from the viewpoint of an important contrast, that between peripheral and storyworld time. 6  Incidentally, a rather persistent niche in analytic philosophy of literature questions the inevitability of fictional narrators, and, as a consequence, of what I have called fictional tellers. As far as I can tell, the arguments for this negative thesis take the form of a challenge to their opponents: no good reasons have been provided, so some contend, for the conclusion that tellers are always present. The fourth chapter in Currie 2010 and more recently chapter nine of Matravers  2014 provide vigorous critical assessments of narrator-favouring arguments, including Jerrold Levinson’s ‘ontological gap’ argument (Levinson 1996; see also Carroll 2006) and George Wilson’s ‘illocution based’ argument (Wilson  2007 and Wilson  2011, see also Wartenberg 2007). As a result, we occasionally read that ‘there are also clear cases where there is no fictional telling. Graham Greene often writes in a plain third-person omniscient narrative style. In The Heart of the Matter, he tells the pathetically tragic tale of Scobie, and I see no reason to suppose that anyone else does’ (Kania 2005: 50). I, on the other hand, do not see any way to even understand ‘the pathetically tragic tale of Scobie’, since, not admitting of Scobie, I can hardly admit of his tale. Regrettably, similarly unwarranted appeals to particularity populate both sides of the debate. ‘It is true in the fiction that “Katie loves Hubble” is an assertion; but is “that Katie loves Hubble” really an assertion, or merely a propositional content?’ (Carroll 2006: 176). And ‘suppose . . . that the narration of The Way We Were contains the sentence “Katie loves Hubble”. Naturally, that sentence expresses the propositional content that Katie loves Hubble’ (Wilson 2011: 119).

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*3.4  Narratology and Time  57

*3.4  Narratology and Time The distinction between storyworlds and peripheries bears intriguing similarities with a familiar claim in the study of narrative fiction. In particular, it nicely accompanies what has been described as the common core in contemporary narratology: if [narrative theories] agree on anything it is this: that the theory of narrative requires a distinction between what I shall call ‘story’—a sequence of actions or events, conceived as independent of their manifestation in discourse—and what I shall call ‘discourse’, the discursive presentation or narration of events.  (Culler 1981: 169–70)7

Of course, my periphery-storyworld duality is the result of primarily semantic considerations, and it is not intended to have immediate consequences on (the various interpretations of) the distinction mentioned by Jonathan Culler. Still, my framework indirectly invites new perspectives on a few issues in the narratological arena. In particular, it invites a re-assessment of debates that, from my viewpoint, are grounded on philosophically dubious, if not outright untenable assumptions. In this coda, I elect as an exemplar of what I have in mind the diatribes surrounding an apparently fundamental property of fictional discourse, its ‘doubly temporal logic’ (Chatman 1990: 9). This duality is generally elucidated by example: so-called internal time (or ‘clock time’), that is, the fictional temporal characterization of storyworld events, contrasts with the external time (or ‘narrative time’) of its presentation. In this approach, given a particular duration of storyworld events, narrative time can independently be expanded or contracted, as in more or less detailed tellings or in more or less ample digressions and descriptions.8 For instance, at least according to popular descriptions of narrative time,

7  For some parallelisms with the (related but different) divide between story and fabula or fabula and suzjet see Bal  1985; see also Genette  1980, Porter Abbott  2002, and Fludernik 2009. 8 The locus classicus is the distinction between pause, scene, ellipsis, and summary in Genette 1980.

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58  Emma: The Narrative Periphery Ian McEwan’s novella On Chesil Beach, encompassing some 200 pages, recounts the hardly-two-hour nuptial experience of a pair of newlyweds. (Narrative Wiki 2017)

and James Joyce’s novel Ulysses has a relatively short [clock] time, twentyfour hours. Not many people, however, could read Ulysses in twenty-four hours. Thus it is safe to say it has a lengthy narrative time. (Wikipedia 2017)9

The importance of this duality for our understanding and appreciation of fictional discourse goes without saying. Although digressions and disorderly presentations may characterize all sort of speech (as in the case of prolix or ill-organized academic essays), flashbacks, anticipations, and descriptive parentheses play a meaningful and fundamental role in the economy of fictional narrative. Still, for my purposes here, it is not the significance of this ‘doubly temporal logic’ that matters, but its theoretical implementation.10 The very description of this duality in terms of the contrast between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ times is, in this sense, symptomatic: what is often contrasted with the fictional temporal profile of storyworld events is external in the sense of being real. This understanding of ‘external’ or ‘narrative’ time is explicit not only in the aforementioned informal allusions to the number of pages in On Chesil Beach or to the hours needed to read Ulysses, but also in academically dignified sources. There, if anything is of a controversial nature, it is the choice between the actual duration of reading (or, occasionally, writing) and the actual space occupied by the text. Whereas, for some, narrative time ‘refers to the time it takes an average reader to read the whole text’ (Amerian et al.  2016: 1034), for others it has ‘nothing to do with the time taken to write or read the narrative’ (Prince 1982: 54), and is rather

9  For academic exemplars, see Tooley 1988, Porter Abbott 2002, or Fludernik 2009. 10  My discussion of the relationships between so-called internal and external temporal perspectives is also conceptually distinct from the study of the temporal structure of each dimension, and in particular from the study of storyworld time. I mention some aspects of this independently interesting issue in some footnotes appended to Chapter 6, where questions of storyworld interpretation come to the foreground.

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*3.4  Narratology and Time  59 equal to the relationships between the duration of the narrated—the (approximate) time the events recounted go on or are thought to go on— and the length of the narrative (in words, lines, or pages, for instance). (Prince 1982: 55)

A minority opts for Catholic compromise: ‘there is no basic difference between counting the time of narration in minutes or in the number of printed pages’, anticipated Günther Müller a few decades before the debate got started (Müller 1947: 75­–6).11 Clearly, issues of storyworld (that is, ‘internal’) time are inextricably linked with wider interpretive inquiries. For instance, whether Emma’s fictional walk with Knightley took an hour, a minute, or a year may be established only on the basis of hypotheses pertaining to the teller’s reliability, to the extent to which common-sense regularities may be assumed to apply to Emma’s surrounding, and to a variety of other crit­ ic­al issues (some of which I discuss later on, especially in Chapter  6). The traditional approach to narrative (or ‘external’) time, on the other hand, dispenses with anything that may plausibly be related to the idea of interpretation: what is allegedly at issue in this case is not in­ter­pret­ ation and criticism, but physics (or metaphysics). In other words, in that approach, what holds the key is the ticking of the clock, the size of the printed page, or the text’s word count (or, in Müller’s indifferent attitude, some not better elucidated spatio-temporal measure). The relationships between this approach and my framework may be stressed by eschewing the description of narrative time as ‘external’, and by favouring an alternative terminology. Storyworld time, for me, contrasts with peripheral time. In turn, this contrast is highlighted by the connection between real time (or space) and what, in my framework, provides the only actual counterpart of fictional discourse, namely 11  The space-oriented approach is anticipated in Gerard Genette’s discussion of narrative time: ‘the speed of a narrative will be defined by the relationships between a duration (that of the story, measured in seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years) and a length (that of the text, measured in lines and pages)’ (Genette 1980: 87–8). Mieke Bal goes as far as sanctioning this real and spatial dimension in terms of an accidental property of written discourse: ‘a written linguistic text is linear’ (Bal 1985: 81). For appeals to the actual time of reading see for instance Porter Abbott 2002: 14–15 or Genette 1980: 33–4. On a partially related issue, see also the peculiar appeal to actual voiced readings in Kivy 2009, where reading events are treated as tokens of a literary work. Regarding the ideas of pace and order, see Müller 1947 and Chatman 1990.

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60  Emma: The Narrative Periphery authorial display. McEwan’s display, I grant, takes some 200 pages, or at least it often does, depending on font-size, margins, and other typographical decisions. Our perusal of Joyce’s display, I also grant, takes more than one day, or at least it generally does, depending on our speedreading skills or on the number of times we put down the book and enjoy a cup of tea. Yet, in my framework, these displays remain of no significance when it comes to the study of fictional storyworlds, of fictional peripheries, and of their equally fictional relationships. Indeed, far from highlighting any interesting narratological distinctions, physics, typography, and tea breaks obliterate them. After all, if the contrast that mattered were that between Emma’s fictional walks and the actual time it took me to read about it, an otherwise naive worry would surely be appropriate: it is not clear what makes this disparity [between internal and external time] especially remarkable, or especially relevant to narrative, or especially relevant to narrative time. After all, there is also a difference between the length of time occupied by the siege of Moscow and the length of time it takes me to say ‘the siege of Moscow’. (Herrnstein Smith 1980: 224)

Yet, uncontroversially, pauses, stretches, or temporal ellipses do catch our attention, and the intuition behind the so-called internal-external time divide remains unshakeable, despite the obviously irrelevant difference between an actual event’s duration and the interval occupied by its verbal description. The interesting divide, then, does not separate the story’s fictional progression from the actual affairs in which authors, readers, or printers are involved. Rather, it contrasts two equally fictional temporal dimensions, that which pertains to fictionally told incidents, and that which characterizes the fictional telling of them. In my jargon, as mentioned, it is a divide that separates storyworld time from peripheral time. A few paragraphs ago, I characterized issues of storyworld time as the subject matter of interpretation, an idea that I introduced with the example of Emma’s walk in the countryside. Were we to have enough free time to debate the fictional duration of that event in greater detail, we would resolve (or at least temporarily settle) our disagreement by

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*3.4  Narratology and Time  61 employing the usual procedures of critical interpretation, that is, by engaging in the very same type of inquiry that we deem appropriate for settling the issue of Mr Woodhouse character or of Highbury’s class structure. We look for textual clues, we appeal to common sense, we invoke the author’s designs, or we defend the intriguing consequences of this or that reading. In all of these cases, of course, we may well freely appeal to actuality (see chapters six and seven for further comments). Yet, the actuality in question does not pertain to Emma’s gait, for the obvious reasons that neither Emma nor her movements are anything at all. By the same token, for me, we do not debate questions of peripheral time with the help of rulers or chronometers. Rather, we resolve them by appealing to textual clues, common sense, and all that I have rather swiftly subsumed under the label of ‘interpretation’. A fully-fledged analysis of this notion goes well beyond the remit of this section. Still, a few negotiable but hopefully plausible examples are in order before I move on to other matters, especially since they highlight an important feature of our assessment of peripheral time, namely its appeal to what we commonly characterize as ‘narrative style’. In a footnote to section 3.3, I conceded that my depiction of fictional tellers as disembodied, genderless, and faceless, though pedagogically appropriate at that stage, was an exaggeration. Indeed, in my later discussions of matters of interpretation (especially in Chapter  6) I shall insist that, as part of our understanding of fiction, we flesh out that fictional source, and we form hypotheses about his or her personality, tone of voice, or manner of speaking, just as we do when it comes to Mr Woodhouse’s temperament or Knightley’s walk. When it comes to tellers such as Emma’s, the fictional arrangement of their words and the fictional design of their speech, that is, what may casually be called their style, are a primary, if not unique source of evidence. As I read on, Emma’s reporting voice takes on a certain quality of assuredness, with the steady pace of a calm and collected speaker. Whereas, as I examine, say, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky 1880), I cannot help but notice how that teller’s voice assumes the characteristic qualities of a nervous reporter—with equally noteworthy occasional breathers, as he takes the time to digresses on matters of moral philosophy. A candid admission is appropriate: I do not know whether any of these casual remarks about Emma and Crime and Punishment are at all

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62  Emma: The Narrative Periphery on the right track. Yet, for that matter, I am equally unsure about my initial assessment of Mr Woodhouse as a jovial old man and of Emma as an intelligent young lady. I am unsure about all of this because these are critical issues, and because I am not a literary critic. But that is precisely the point that matters for the storyworld-periphery distinction, and for its relevance for narrative time. Peripheral time, to no lesser extent than storyworld time, is fictional, and is the subject matter for an in­ter­pret­ ation of fiction, rather than for any account of actual temporal sequences. If narrative time accelerates, lingers, stretches, or compresses, it does so fictionally: it is the fictional voice that echoes in the periphery which, fictionally, accelerates, lingers, stretches, or compresses. Textual features, such as word count or the time we spend with our gaze focused on the printed page, are of no consequence. Or, at least, they are of no greater consequence than whatever significance actual authorial display happens to have when it comes to any other interpretive issue: the printed page (or the spoken tale) provide the raw material from which our in­ter­ pret­ation derives the (temporal or not so temporal) characteristics of merely fictional dimensions. In a nutshell, narrative time, not unlike the semantically oriented issues that I have discussed in this chapter, is intelligible only on the assumption of an utterly fictional distinction, that between fictional peripheries and fictional storyworlds.

3.5  Where Am I Now? In this chapter, I developed and rectified the ideas from Chapter 2, and I  introduced another fundamental aspect of the Radical Fictionalist approach to fictional discourse, the distinction between peripheries and storyworlds. I began with heterodiegetic Emma as my guiding exemplar. Later, I argued that the periphery-storyworld divide also applies to homodiegetic scenarios such as my Viktor and, at least in principle, Sign. Accordingly, I returned to my preliminary comments about impartations, and I  enriched the ideas from Chapter  2 by paying particular attention to peripheral impartation. In turn, fictional particularity motivated the introduction of some ideas that shall continue to keep me occupied in

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3.5  Where Am I Now?  63 what follows, in particular the notions of referential permeability and of peripheral launchings. All of this shall soon be developed by taking into consideration a variety of features of fictional discourse that I have not yet discussed. I start with some additions to Radical Fictionalism in Chapter 4, where I pause on so-called ‘importations’ and on translations, before I append some starred sections on a few additional details.

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4 Cat’s Cradle Peripheral Importations

4.1 Preliminaries Let me start with a brief summary of the main traits of Radical Fictionalism. For variety’s sake, I move on to a new instance of fictional discourse, Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, hereinafter Cradle for short. Cradle’s text includes (4.1)  Felix Hoenikker had put the chip in a little bottle (Vonnegut 1965: chapter 23). As repeatedly mentioned, Radical Fictionalism denies that this ­sentence-type encodes a proposition. For a Radical Fictionalist, then, contentful effects are achieved not by virtue of semantic encoding but through the impartations of fictional use. For instance, by virtue of fictionally employing (4.1) as a sentence, Vonnegut’s fictional teller imparts that a bearer of ‘Felix Hoenikker’ performed a certain action, namely the action designated by the predicate ‘had put the chip in a little bottle’. That is, in a technical-sounding jargon, it imparts that such and such was the case with the individual to which ‘Felix Hoenikker’ refers. Why does the telling in Cradle’s periphery impart that? Why, in ­particular, does it impart something about referring, rather than, say, describing or quantifying? Because, I suppose, ‘Felix Hoenikker’ fictionally appears as a proper name in Cradle’s periphery and is therefore fictionally being used as a device of reference. But what is the justification for this ‘therefore’? After all, Cradle’s periphery and storyworld are rather peculiar, if not downright bizarre settings. They are, at any rate, the result of Vonnegut’s inventive whim, rather than a description of everyday life. Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics. Stefano Predelli, Oxford University Press (2020). © Stefano Predelli. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854128.001.0001

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4.2  Peripheral Semantics  65 So, what grants the conclusion that ‘Felix Hoenikker’, Cradle’s fictional name, peripherally does what actual names actually do? According to the ideas developed in this chapter, the reply to these queries appeals to an adaptation to the periphery of a notion familiar from the study of storyworlds, namely importation. (‘Importation’ is not particularly fitting for me, given its graphic similarity with ‘impartation’, a term for an utterly distinct concept; I stick with well-established terminology, and I invite the reader to keep her a’s and o’s straight). Here is an example of run-of-the-mill storyworld-importation (inspired by Lewis 1975: 41): in the absence of any indication to the contrary, we justifiably assume that, in Cradle’s storyworld, a certain Episcopalian lady from Newport has exactly two nostrils, even though nobody tells us so. We assume that because, in actuality, you and I and any other unremarkable human being have as many nasal cavities, and because, in this case, what holds in actuality may be imported within a fictional storyworld. I shall return to some aspects of storyworld-importation in Chapter 6. At this stage, I swiftly mention this idea merely as an antecedent to what interests me here, namely the characteristics of peripheral telling. Accordingly, the next section proceeds with an adaptation of importation to the peripheral site, with particular attention to the peripheral importation of semantic regularities—as in the suggestion that, in the periphery to no lesser extent than in actuality, names serve as devices of reference. Some of my conclusions, in particular those devoted to fictional co-reference, are developed in section 4.3 with a focus on the question of translation. The idea of peripheral importation may also play a role for aspects of Radical Fictionalism that are of lesser immediate semantic significance. Accordingly, I discuss them in two starred sections at the end of this chapter, where I venture a few negotiable comments on so-called ‘real names’ in fiction, and where I suggest a few hypotheses about merely fictional languages.

4.2  Peripheral Semantics According to Radical Fictionalism, the fictional use of ‘Felix Hoenikker’ engenders a variety of impartations (‘impartation’ with an ‘a’), most

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66  Cat ’ s Cradle: Peripheral Importations notably impartations having to do with the fictional role of that name as a device of reference—such as the impartation that a bearer of ‘Hoenikker’ did this or that. This, in turn, partly follows from a non-negotiable type of peripheral importation (‘importation’ with an ‘o’): actual semantic regularities, such as the fact that names refer to individuals, inevitably affect the expressions that are fictionally employed in the narrative periphery. And so, fictionally, it is not only the case that ‘Emma’ is the name of a certain handsome young lady and that ‘Felix Hoenikker’ is the name of a Nobel-prize winning physicist. It is also the case that, qua names, they are fictionally (peripherally) employed as devices of reference. For me, in fact, more than that. As a result of the peripheral importation of actual facts about proper names, it is also the case that ‘Emma’ and ‘Felix Hoenikker’ are fictionally rigid and non-indexical designators of that woman and that man. That is, in their peripheries, they are expressions that conform to the dictates of so-called Millianism, just as ‘Austen’ or ‘Vonnegut’ do among us, in the actual world. Or so I say as a consequence of my independent commitment to this view of actual names. I may be wrong about this. At the very least, nothing that I have written up to now and nothing that I will write in what follows provides any justification for my Millian sympathies.1 But that is not the point. If, to my astonishment, ‘Austen’ and ‘Vonnegut’ actually abbreviated definite descriptions or encoded descriptive contents, so, fictionally, would ‘Emma’ and ‘Felix Hoenikker’. As Saul Kripke puts it, [when] I use the name ‘Harry’ in a work of fiction, I generally ­presuppose as part of that work of fiction . . . that the criteria of naming, whatever they are—Millian or Russellian or what have you—are ­satisfied. . . . Far from it being the case that a theory of the reference of names ought to make special provision for the possibility of such works of fiction, it can forget about this case, and then simply remark that, in a work of fiction, it is part of the pretense of that work of fiction that these criteria are satisfied.  (Kripke 2013: 23–4)

Note that the peripheral importation of semantic regularities need not trickle down to the storyworld. I may, if I so wish, tell the tale of a 1  Again, see Predelli  2017 for my defence of Millianism and my misgivings with at least some kinds of descriptivism.

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4.2  Peripheral Semantics  67 descriptivist world, one in which name-types are uncontroversially and overtly employed as abbreviations of definite descriptions. Indeed, I may even tell a homodiegetic tale of that sort. Still, if Millianism is correct, my teller’s peripheral use of names would stubbornly conform to its dictates, even though the names occurring in reported speech would not. Yet another extract from my own literary production helps to clarify this point and its consequences: (4.2)  Abe once told me: ‘necessarily, Babe is messy’. And yet, Babe could have been the cleanest piglet around. Had you bothered to read my Babe the Piglet short story in its entirety, you would have realized that, in its storyworld, ‘Babe’ is explicitly introduced along naively descriptive lines: fictionally, an imposing committee of onomastic authorities once declared that ‘the unique fattest piglet’ could be abbreviated as ‘Babe’, and that no token of ‘Babe’ could ever be employed in any other way. What is fictionally said by Abe is thus something to the effect that, for any possible world w, the unique fattest piglet in w is messy in w. And yet, what is fictionally asserted by Babe’s teller, as per the second sentence in (4.2), is that there are possible worlds w in which Babe, that very piglet, is not at all messy.2 And so, onomastic diktats may well diligently be followed by anyone within Babe’s storyworld, where Abe, his conversational partners, and anybody else employ ‘Babe’ as an abbreviated description. But peripheral importation trumps storyworld semantics. Accordingly, in Babe’s periphery, proper names do what names actually do: they directly pick out individuals, rather than abbreviate descriptions. (Here as before, if you wish, modify my tale with your preferred actual take on names and a suitably contrasting storyworld semantics.) In a sense, then, Babe’s periphery is non-disquotational. So, (4.3)  Abe said: ‘it is necessary that Babe is messy’. But Abe did not say that it is necessary that Babe is messy

2  This much also has a bearing on the idea of peripheral launching from Chapter 3, since Babe’s teller does not replicate ‘Babe’ through the wonders of referential permeability but launches it as a peripheral name. He must be doing so for genuinely semantic reasons, at least on the assumption that one and the same name may not be a device of Millian reference and, at the same time, an abbreviated description.

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68  Cat ’ s Cradle: Peripheral Importations could fictionally occur in my teller’s mouth as a true description of Babe’s storyworld. This is so because, when Abe uttered those words, he said that, in all possible worlds, whoever is the fattest piglet is messy. And this, of course, does not fictionally encode the proposition indicated by my teller’s use of ‘that it is necessary that Babe is messy’, namely a would-be singular modal claim. But let me leave these subtleties aside and let me return to this section’s main thesis, namely the thesis that actual semantics is inevitably imported within a periphery (though not necessarily within a storyworld). For instance, as mentioned, peripheral occurrences of proper names are, fictionally, occurrences of Millian names, or of whatever else proper names actually happen to be. By the same token, it is thanks to the rigours of peripheral importation that actual semantics reverberates on further aspects of fictional names, and, for that matter, of expressions in general. In this respect, one phenomenon deserves to be mentioned, namely fictional co-reference. A few pages before his display of (4.1), Vonnegut displayed (4.4)  Felix Hoenikker [was] one of the so-called fathers of the first atomic bomb (Vonnegut; chapter 4). As a result, it is fictional that, before tokening (4.1) as a sentence, Vonnegut’s teller employed (4.4) so as to encode a particular propositional content. By the same token, it is fictional that the occurrence of ‘Felix Hoenikker’ in (4.1) is semantically linked with that previous occurrence of that name-type, in any sense of ‘linked’ appropriate for actual, to no lesser extent than fictional co-reference. Or, at least, so it seems to me, and for that matter to anyone I bothered to consult on this matter. I, for one, can see no reason for entertaining a reading of Cradle according to which a plurality of bearers of ‘Hoenikker’ are seamlessly discussed by a teller with a nonchalant attitude towards homonymy and communicative perspicuity. Yet, that option must remain in principle open, at least to the extent to which it is an open possibility in real-life actual usage: my mother’s primary care physician is Dr Shapiro. He referred her to another specialist, another ‘Dr Shapiro’ as it happened. My mother

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4.2  Peripheral Semantics  69 reported gratitude to Dr Shapiro for sending her to Dr Shapiro and compared Dr Shapiro’s virtues to those of Dr Shapiro in a blithe piece of discourse, clearly oblivious to the homonymy. I was racing to keep up (which I was strangely able to do).  (Kaplan 1990: 108, footnote 13)

In the fictional case of ‘Hoenikker’, just as in this actual scenario, the matter will need to be settled on the basis of the usual semantic or pragmatic regularities. Context, charity, and/or guesses about the speaker’s intentions allowed David Kaplan to keep up with what actually coreferred with what. Hypotheses about the fictional stance of Vonnegut’s teller, about his communicative aims, or about the implausibility of a multitude of storyworld Hoenikkers allow us to keep up with fictional co-reference, according to a parallel, inevitably imported pattern.3 Of course, the significance of peripheral semantic importation generalizes beyond proper names. Here as before, ‘Hoenikker’, names, reference, and co-reference came to the foreground because of my Radical Fictionalist interest in particularity and singular terms. But parallel considerations also apply to nouns, prepositions, compositionally complex expressions, and all the rest. For instance, ‘chip’ in (4.1) is fictionally employed so as to designate a certain property because it is used as a noun, and because, in Cradle’s periphery just as in everyday life, that is what nouns do. Or else, when it occurs in the mouth of Vonnegut’s teller, ‘in a little bottle’ has to do with being inside a small container because, in his periphery to no lesser extent than in actuality, that way of combining ‘in’, ‘a’, ‘little’, and ‘bottle’ achieves these semantic effects. Given my focus on names, further comments on ‘in’ or ‘bottle’ may safely be left aside. My concern with particularity also bears the responsibility for my continued emphasis on proper names in the next section, where I apply some of my considerations about peripheral importation

3  On a related note: the issue of fictional co-reference has received a great deal of attention mostly from the viewpoint of an issue that, for reasons of space, I only mention in passing, that of inter-fictional co-reference. Our intuitions, here, do not seem to be sufficiently solid to warrant systematic theorizing. As Stacie Friend points out, ‘the cases where we are most likely to take two different names to co-identify are those where a character, such as Superman, is given two names in a single fiction. But when we have different works or sources, our practices of identifying or distinguishing characters may turn on the aims with which we undertake interpretation’ (Friend 2014: 319–20. See also Bjurman-Pautz 2008).

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70  Cat ’ s Cradle: Peripheral Importations to an issue that is of some special significance for Radical Fictionalism, namely the issue of translation.

4.3 Translations I think that I can justifiably say that I have read The Brothers Karamazov. I can say so even though I do not know one word of Russian, and I would be unable to make head or tail of anything that Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote. What I did when, as I would commonly say, I read The Brothers Karamazov is that I followed and absorbed the text of David Magarshack’s English translation. Some of my monolingual Italian compatriots may equally justifiably contend that they have read Emma or Cradle. What they saw and interpreted were perhaps the following types: (4.5)  Emma Woodhouse sembrava riunire in sé alcune delle migliori benedizioni dell’esistenza (Austen 1816/2002: 1), or (4.6)  Felix Hoenikker [era] uno dei cosiddetti ‘padri’ della bomba atomica, that is, the types tokened in Anna Luisa Zazo’s translation of Emma and in my own translation of Cradle. In their cases, then, these narrative peripheries are populated by very different affairs from ours, since their tellers fictionally employ Italian expressions. For instance, Zazo’s teller fictionally tokens ‘benedizioni dell’esistenza’ as a type that encodes the property of being a blessing of existence, and my teller fictionally employs ‘bomba’ as a noun for bombs, according to the semantic regularities of Italian. All of this is as it should be. Commonly, our interests as casual readers are directed towards the storyworld, and, as far as the storyworld is concerned, not much is of particular consequence when it comes to, say, (4.5) or (4.6). And so, Austen’s and Zazo’s tellers both fictionally describe a bearer of ‘Emma’ as blessed, and the tellers in Vonnegut’s Cradle and in my translation both fictionally introduce a bearer of ‘Hoenikker’ as a father of the atomic bomb. Yet, storyworlds are not the exclusive objects

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4.3 Translations  71 of our attention. Austen, in particular, may well make much of the trivial tale of a handsome lady, but her ultimate genius lies in the periphery she shapes, that is, in what we commonly call her ‘style’. And here, as we say, something does indeed get lost in translation. Our more careful everyday reports follow suit. As they move away from the marketplace and enter the department of English literature, my compatriots correct their confident attitude: what they had read were not Emma or Cradle, but their Italian translations. That is not to say that the compromises are inevitably a merely peripheral business. There are trade-offs, and even issues that are of relevance to the fictional depiction of a storyworld may be sacrificed at the altar of peripheral style. One obvious instance of this has to do with reported discourse. For instance, in Emma’s storyworld, it is true that a certain elderly man once uttered ‘poor Miss Taylor’. For obvious reasons, Italian translators abandon their concern for storyworld fidelity: what is reported is ‘povera Signorina Taylor’, that is, a type which Italian monolingual speakers are in the position of decoding. This much, I suppose, is mere courtesy. Or, at least, it is not something about which we should make a big deal. Surely, no reasonable Italian reader would think that Mr Woodhouse, a man most unlikely to abandon his native idiom, suddenly comes up with an Italian expression. According to blind adherence to the demands of pure quotation, he did indeed do that. But blind adherence, here as in many other occasions, is inappropriate. I have fond memories of (very actual) lectures in which Alonzo Church reported that Frege wrote the German equivalent of ‘equality gives rise to challenging questions’. But we are not always as literal as professor Church— and, incidentally, we do not have our surnames associated with an influential translation argument, as in Church 1949. On more than a few occasions, I wrote (4.7)  Frege wrote: ‘equality gives rise to challenging questions’. Nobody, as far as I can remember, objected that Frege never wrote in English. And so, I actually attribute English words to a monolingual German logician, Zazo’s teller fictionally attributes Italian words to an Englishman, and not even the most pedantic interpreter cares. And,

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72  Cat ’ s Cradle: Peripheral Importations with this, I abandon the issue of reported speech in translated fictions. I do so because what interests me are not the courtesies of translation, but its rigours. In this respect, a different kind of trade-off is of special interest from the Radical Fictionalist viewpoint, since it is more closely related to its main concerns, namely fictional names, fictional particularities, and impartations. As repeatedly pointed out, for a Radical Fictionalist, ‘Emma seemed to unite the best blessings of existence’ or ‘Hoenikker was the father of  the atomic bomb’ are not proposition-encoding sentences. In the absence of encoded particularity, we settle for impartation: a bearer of ‘Emma’ and a bearer of ‘Hoenikker’ were such that, in their respective storyworlds, they united the best blessings or invented powerful explosives. In these instances, we and the Italians end up with (roughly) the same results. For instance, as mentioned, the fictional uses of (4.5) and (4.6) impart that bearers of ‘Emma’ and ‘Hoenikker’ possessed the properties encoded in the Italian predicates ‘sembrava riunire le migliori benedizioni’ and ‘era uno dei padri della bomba atomica’, that is, as before, that they united blessings and made bombs.4 And yet, as I am about to explain, this convergence is a lucky accident. The English and the Italians may well end up with the same impartations when it comes to Emma and ‘Emma Woodhouse’ or to Cradle and ‘Felix Hoenikker’, but, in other cases, things follow a different pattern. There are good reasons why, speaking in the vernacular, ‘Emma Woodhouse’ or ‘Felix Hoenikker’ remain unchanged in translation. For one thing, the reader exposed to the Italian translation of, say, Emma should surely be in touch with a narrative that depicts a young lady who grew up in the English countryside. And, according to common sense, these kinds of fictional individuals naturally bear English sounding names: ‘Emma Woodhouse’ and not ‘Emma Casalegno’, say. And yet, in actuality and in fiction, national allegiances and phonetic characteristics do not exhaust a name’s baggage.5 ‘Emma Woodhouse’ or ‘Felix Hoenikker’ 4 The results are only roughly the same, since the phonetic properties of ‘Emma’ or ‘Hoenikker’ in the mouths of Italian and English readers will probably differ, but never mind about that here. 5  Nobody denies this. I, as uncompromising a Millian as there can be, would not dream of doing so. Indeed, I just did not do so, for instance when I recognized that ‘Woodhouse’ is more English-sounding than ‘Casalegno’. For developments and discussions of these connotations from a Millian viewpoint see my Predelli 2017.

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4.3 Translations  73 may be rather tame in this respect. But, for different reasons, ‘Dim’ in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (Burgess  1962) or ‘Grose’ in Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (James 1898) are probably not. I shall return to James’ housekeeper and her name in a later chapter. As for Burgess, the similarities between ‘Dim’ and ‘dim’ are clearly not accidental. The point becomes blatantly obvious after we register that the fictional bearer of ‘Dim’ is not the sharpest knife in the fictional kitchen: (4.8)  there was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really dim . . . (Burgess 1962: 1) It would be good if these allusions to lack of intelligence could be ­preserved in translation. And so they are. In Floriana Bossi’s Italian translation, ‘Dim’ is rendered as ‘Bamba’: (4.9)  c’ero io, cioè Alex, e i miei tre soma, cioè Pete, Georgíe, e Bamba, Bamba perchè era davvero bamba . . . (Burgess 1962/2014: 1) In fact, Bossi strives for more than the sheer preservation of colourful connotations. Her teller calls Alex’s companion by a name that is not only homophonic with an Italian equivalent of ‘dim’, but that also preserves Burgess’ colloquial tone—‘bamba’ being a regional, low-register adjective for dim-witted individuals.6 The result is less than unconditional success, but the intent is praiseworthy. And yet, from the Radical Fictionalist viewpoint, the peripheral repercussions seem to be spectacular. The Italian reader is exposed to the impartation that a bearer of ‘Bamba’ was such that, in the described storyworld, he sat together with his companions. But nothing of this sort is appropriate for Burgess’ novel, since ‘Bamba’ appears neither in its storyworld nor in its periphery. In general, this peripheral discrepancy between original and translation is no more controversial than the aforementioned differences 6  Issues of sheer recognizability, pronounceability, or familiarity may also be of relevance. For a multitude of name changes that derive from the mere desire to avoid unfamiliar-looking tokens see standard translations of tales directed to a young audience (see Klingberg  1978 and  1986). For general discussions of actual impartations and failures of translation see my Predelli 2013.

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74  Cat ’ s Cradle: Peripheral Importations of  reported speech in the storyworld: for one reason or another, the translator’s trade-offs engender a bearer of ‘Bamba’ instead of a bearer of ‘Dim’. Yet, the peripheral ways of ‘Bamba’ still deserve some additional comments. They do because, as I am about to explain, translation is a deferential enterprise. It seems appropriate that Burgess’ name takes pride of place on the cover of Bossi’s translation. After all, it is he, rather than Bossi, who is the fiction-maker. By the same token, Burgess would deserve at least partial recognition, were I to recount the tale of a juvenile delinquent with a superficial fondness for Beethoven and all the rest. For, once again, it is Burgess who made up that story, whereas I simply . . . tell it again. And so, we may well enjoy retelling Burgess’ story, and we may even do so in inventive and original ways—we omit this or that detail, we change a bit of background colour, or, as in Bossi’s case, we retell the whole tale in Italian. Yet, our eye remains fixed on the original, that is, on Burgess’ actual display and on all that fictionally ensues. One thing that ensues from this actual deference is a presumption of fictional co-reference. So, in English versions or adaptations of Burgess’ story, fictional tokens of ‘Dim’ fictionally replicate the tokens of ‘Dim’ in Burgess’ periphery. In the case of my retelling, for instance, my teller’s tokens of ‘Dim’ fictionally link up with the tokens uttered by Burgess’ teller. And, if a replacement for ‘Dim’ is at all deemed to be necessary, a new name-type enters the periphery, but it does so under the assumption that it fictionally co-refers with that original ‘Dim’. In the jargon inspired by the kind of peripheral launchings introduced in Chapter 3, then, a new name is introduced in Bossi’s periphery. But it is fictionally introduced with the help of an implicit quotationaldescriptive introductory ceremony, as when, in actuality, I identify a new name’s bearer by means of some other moniker for it. ‘Let the bearer of “Abraham” go by “Abe”’, I may say, with my attention focused on a particular use of ‘Abraham’. ‘Let the bearer of “Dim” go by “Bamba” ’, Bossi’s teller fictionally declares, his gaze intently directed towards a particular peripheral occurrence of ‘Dim’, namely, towards the fictional use of ‘Dim’ in Burgess’ periphery. For those caught up in the game, the outcome is the straightforward preservation of propositional content: whatever actually relates, say, ‘London is pretty’ and ‘Londra é bella’ also fictionally relates ‘Dim being really dim’ and ‘Bamba era davvero bamba’.

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*4.4  Real Names in Fiction  75 For a clear headed Radical Fictionalist, what we are left with are inevitably different impartations. Still, they are impartations that pave the way for our access to what, with some legitimacy, we continue to call ‘the same story’. Fictionally, a bearer of ‘Bamba’ or, as the case may be, of ‘Dim’ was really dim. And, with this, I conclude my commentary on some aspects of peripherally imported semantics. In the next chapter, I move on to further issues of immediate significance for Radical Fictionalism, having to do with so-called talk about fiction (and, incidentally, with the idea of retelling that I already casually introduced towards the end of this section). Before I wrap up this chapter, I continue with a couple of starred sections devoted to questions that are of lesser relevance for Radical Fictionalism per se, but that bring to light its relationships with some independent aspects of language and its use. In section 4.4, I discuss the issue of so-called ‘real names’ in fiction from the viewpoint of what I call ‘metaphysical importation’. In section  4.5, I append a few negotiable ideas about fictional languages.

*4.4  Real Names in Fiction I devoted most of this chapter to peripheral semantic importations, as in the idea that fictional names such as ‘Hoenikker’ peripherally conform to the semantic traits of actual names such as ‘Vonnegut’ or ‘London’. For instance, in my view, they fictionally behave as devices of nonindexical rigid reference, they are subject to the usual constraints for co-reference or homonymy, and they are occasionally translated (or, as the case may be, mistranslated) just as their real-life cousins are. I focused on these importations because they provided an apt addition to my comments on Radical Fictionalism in chapters 2 and 3. But further linguistically-oriented actual regularities are arguably imported in the peripheral sphere. Indeed, in Chapter 2 I already implicitly appealed to peripheral importation when I sided with Searle’s contention that fictional speech-acts fictionally follow the pattern of run-of-the-mill assertions, questions, and all the rest. And, in later chapters, I shall discuss properties of fictional tellers derived from the peripheral importation of pragmatic, conversational, and psychological aspects of actual speaking.

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76  Cat ’ s Cradle: Peripheral Importations Sandwiched between the anticipation from Chapter  2 and that which will come later, I now venture a few tentative remarks about what, for want of a better word, I call the importation of the metaphysics of words, or metaphysical importation for short. Two caveats are appropriate before I begin. First, I have no qualms with the notion that fictional narratives may depict metaphysically impossible scenarios, and hence that storyworlds may be unwilling to reflect the actual structure of what there is. Yet, what is at issue in this section is not the general metaphysical liberality of some storyworlds, but (i) peripheral metaphysics, and, in particular (ii) the peripheral metaphysics of words.7 Second, I organize my presentation around a particular account of identity criteria, namely what I call ‘the etymological view’, without bothering to provide any argument or justification for it. For my point is not metaphysics per se, but, here as before, the reverberations of certain ideas for my protagonist, Radical Fictionalism. Accordingly, my conclusions will be conditional: if metaphysical importation is at all inevitable, and if the etymological view strikes you as being on the right track, then such and such ensues from a Radical Fictionalist viewpoint. It will come as no surprise that the spotlight shall continue to shine on proper names, even though what I am about to say may well be applicable to expressions of all kinds. Recall then Chapter 1’s recommendation of an actual semantic distinction between names that are outwardly the same, as with Mary Wollstonecraft’s and Mary Shelley’s first names. And give my semantic considerations an (unintended) metaphysical spin, as in the idea that the inventory of what there actually is must include at  least two affairs spelled and pronounced as ‘Mary’—the idea, for instance, that a new object came into existence at the time of Ms Shelley’s baptism, regardless of the previous wide circulation of that four-letter type. As noted, that’s already cutting it finer than the everyday notion that one name may name different people. But there may be reasons for even finer discriminations. In particular, according to the etymological view of name-identity, names are identified not only by their spelling (or  pronunciation) and reference, but also by their origin.8 And so, 7  For a sample of the current debate on the metaphysics of words see Kaplan 1990 and 2011, Cappelen 1999, Alward 2005, Bromberger 2011, and Hawthorne and Lepore 2011. 8 For more careful considerations of related matters, see among many Kaplan  1990, Textor 2010, or Sainsbury 2015.

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*4.4  Real Names in Fiction  77 according to the etymological view, Wollstonecraft’s first name, as it originated by a baptismal font in the spring of 1759, is also a different thing from the name launched when, much later, a stranger noticed her from a distance and proposed ‘let us call her “Mary” ’: same four-letter type and same reference, but a presumably significantly different etymology. The etymological view is a view. But why bring it up here? My interest in this view has to do with its relevance for Radical Fictionalism when it comes to an independently interesting question, namely the question of so-called ‘real-names’ in fiction, such as ‘Newport’ in Cradle, or, to cite a classic example, ‘Napoleon’ in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.9 Let me start by granting something that strikes me as relatively harmless: real objects may be, as Walton puts it, objects of a fictional narrative, in the sense that they can inhabit their storyworlds (Walton 1990: 106). If I so wished, for instance, I could spin a yarn about you, that is, I could make up a tale whose storyworld includes you, the very thing that you actually happen to be. And, similarly, Tolstoy authored a novel whose storyworld includes Napoleon, that actual megalomaniac Corsican, side by side with merely fictional Bolkonsky and Rostov.10 Or so I suppose without further justification, since the point here is not Napoleon in the storyworld but ‘Napoleon’ in the periphery. So, are the tokens of ‘Napoleon’ that fictionally occur in the mouths of Tolstoy’s teller tokens of our actual names of that man? Or else, returning to this chapter’s guiding example, is our ‘Newport’, the name for a certain place in Rhode Island, anything that, fictionally, Vonnegut’s teller tokens? I do not wish to defend a particular answer to these questions. But I have a few comments that are intended to fill what strikes me as a lacuna 9 The discussion of this topic has a long history. According to Frege, ‘even the proper names in the drama, though they correspond to names of historical persons, are mock proper names’ (Frege 1897: 130). General consensus in more recent contributions seems to favour an opposite stance: ‘[We need an] account both of the meaning of expressions such as those intuitively lacking a referent, like “Leopold Bloom”, and of those intuitively having a referent, like “Dublin” . . .’ (Garcia-Carpintero 2015: 149; see also Kroon 1994b and Friend 2000). 10  Perhaps tellingly, the most often cited examples of alleged actual objects occurring in fiction involve famous exemplars—for instance, Napoleon and London, rather than Napoleon’s valet or a back alley near Paddington station. Also: ‘one might even identify the fiction with a sequence of propositions, [some of which are] about . . . nonfictional things, e.g. Scotland Yard’ (Salmon 1998: 301); and ‘we could have a fictional story about Napoleon. In that case there is no fictional character as Napoleon; it is rather that a real person is being written about, here in fiction’ (Kripke 2013: 75. See also Voltolini 2013, Motoarca 2014, Folde 2017, and von Solodkoff and Woodward 2017).

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78  Cat ’ s Cradle: Peripheral Importations in the current debate on this issue. Even if it is granted that Newport populates Cradle’s storyworld, so I am about to argue, the decision whether Vonnegut’s teller fictionally employs ‘Newport’, our actual name for Newport, depends on the tenability of the etymological view (and on certain further assumptions about Cradle’s periphery). An (as far as I know more or less historically accurate) hypothesis about ‘Newport’, the actual name for that city in Rhode Island, serves me well as pedagogical background. According to my sources, Newport was named by a committee including governors Nicholas Easton and Henry Bull, after an agreement for a new government had been signed in 1639. A name spelled as ‘Newport’ ensued from that event and was subsequently replicated throughout the last four centuries or so, before it eventually reached Vonnegut’s and my ears. And so, if etymology matters for identity, actual tokens of the name-type ‘Newport’ are exemplars of ‘Newport’, our name for Newport, only on the condition that they are appropriately related to that seventeenth-century launching episode. For instance, if the etymological view is anything to go by, your casual (that is, historically isolated) utterance of ‘hello Newport!’ in Newport launches a new name, and it does not replicate the homophonous and co-referential ‘Newport’ which we normally employ. Grant then that Newport populates Cradle’s storyworld, and that, fictionally, Vonnegut’s teller employs the name-type ‘Newport’ to refer to it. If the etymological view is right, the question whether Newport’s actual name echoes in his periphery will not thereby have been settled. In particular, it will not be answerable in the affirmative, in the absence of certain further assumptions about Cradle’s periphery: Cradle’s periphery includes tokens of our ‘Newport’ only if it also includes Easton, Bull, and their 1639 decree (and, presumably, much else besides). Note a discrepancy between peripheral metaphysics (of words) and storyworld metaphysics (of anything). People, I suppose, necessarily originate from their actual parents, so that, had Carlo Maria di Buonaparte and Maria Letizia Ramolino not existed, Napoleon would not have either. One could nevertheless not insist on their inclusion in Tolstoy’s storyworld, even after she granted that their arrogant son fictionally stands side by side with Bolkonsky and Rostov. After all, much happens in fiction that is metaphysically off the wall, or that is anyway properly treated with indifference. The issue with ‘Napoleon’ or,

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*4.4  Real Names in Fiction  79 returning to my previous example, ‘Newport’, is different, for it is at least in principle possible that at least one bit of actual metaphysics inevitably affects the periphery, namely the actual conditions for the occurrence of  ‘Napoleon’, our name for that man, or of ‘Newport’, our name for that  city. And so, if the actual metaphysics of words conforms to the etymological view, the thesis that ‘Napoleon’ and ‘Newport’, the actual names, occur in the periphery entails a very crowded periphery indeed. Carlo Maria and Maria Letizia, for instance, would inevitably enter the picture, not qua parents but in their role of baptizers. And Easton and Bull would inevitably linger in the background for Vonnegut’s teller, not because of their achievement as founding fathers of an urban dwelling, but because of their success as launchers of a name. Perhaps. Surely, it all depends on your sympathies for the etymological view and on your generosity when it comes to what to include in the periphery. As for my own views, I rest satisfied with a negative conclusion, aimed at preventing the conjunction of a barren periphery with the etymological view of names. The following, surely, will not do: metaphysical importation and the etymological view are on the right track, Cradle’s periphery has no room for Easton and Bull, but that periphery encompasses tokens of our ‘Newport’. Or, at least, it will not do if the motivation for this conjunction lies in the idea that peripheral tokens of ‘Newport’ replicate occurrences of ‘Newport’ in our actual history, and hence appropriately reach back to Easton, Bull, and their onomastic decree. The untenability of this motivation is not negotiable: notwithstanding my casual use of the genitive, Vonnegut’s teller is not one among that writer’s possessions, for he is nothing. And so, being merely fictional, neither he nor his tokens bear any relationships with our tokens, with Easton, or with Bull, for that which is nothing bears no relations to ­anything. Fiction, to coin a slogan, does not ‘spill out’ into reality. And with this I conclude my starred excursus on real names in fiction. What ended up being under consideration was a conditional with a rather rich antecedent, since I assessed the consequences of Radical Fictionalism against the background of metaphysical importation, of the etymological view, and of certain assumptions about the periphery. Since I did not wish to defend any particular position about any of these hypotheses, my comments remained irritatingly neutral. But, at least, they led me towards a negative conclusion to which I subscribe. I may have

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80  Cat ’ s Cradle: Peripheral Importations coined a ‘spilling out’ slogan for that conclusion, but my coinage was inspired by a homophonous catchphrase in a different debate, that about so-called ‘fictional languages’. I append some brief comments on this topic in a final starred section.

*4.5  Fictional Languages The etymological view has been introduced as (the sketch of) a metaphysical view of words. But what goes for words presumably also goes for whole languages, at least in a common understanding of ‘language’ as a ‘social phenomenon which is part of the natural history of human beings’ (Lewis 1975: 5). And so, according to the etymological view of languages, a distant isolated community may well exchange sounds with the same shape and meaning as those of English, but would not thereby speak English, the language spoken by those among us who intervene in a tortuous history dating back to the Early Middle Ages. Perhaps, then, much of what I have written in section 4.4 is applicable, mutatis mutandis, to the languages fictionally spoken in the periphery— to Cradle’s English, say, or to Italian in my translation of Vonnegut’s work. But the focus of this section is somewhat different. What I briefly discuss below is the issue of fictional languages, such as Bokononish in Cradle or Nadsat in Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange.11 Here is what strikes me as a plausible thing to say about these affairs: Bokononish and Nadsat are merely fictional languages, no more real than the made-up individuals who fictionally speak them. We do, at least to some extent, actually understand ‘them’, that is, we manage to derive actually negotiable content from the display of tokens that are fictionally tokens of Bokononish and Nadsat expressions. But if our exposure to certain passages in Cradle or A Clockwork Orange does at all elicit actual understanding, it does so only due to a variety of tacit assumptions regarding the similarities between ‘their’ types and ours. And so, we make the usual educated guesses, guided by fictional context, by actual common sense, and, occasionally, by the hints fictionally provided by 11  ‘Bokononish’ is my name for the language fictionally employed by the Bokononists, the fictional followers of Bokonon (Vonnegut 1965).

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*4.5  Fictional Languages  81 the tellers themselves. As for A Clockwork Orange, for instance, we rely on the fact that ‘there are [at most] a dozen words on every page of the novel that are non-English’ (Evans 1971: 406), we trust Dr Branom’s hint that, when it comes to these non-English words, ‘most of the roots are Slav’, and we accept Alex’s parenthetical explanations of his jargon: (4.11)  Pete had a rooker (a hand, that is) . . . and poor old Dim had a very hound-and-horny one of a clown’s litso (face, that is). (Burgess 1962)12 Similarly, when it comes to Cradle’s even more marginal intrusions, we trustfully accept what we are told about, say, ‘karass’: (4.12)  we Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon . . . (Vonnegut 1965). These rough approximations rely on wider interpretive issues, such as the assumption that an otherwise untrustworthy juvenile delinquent may be taken at his word when it comes to ‘rooker’ or ‘litso’, or that the arcane Bokononist conceptual scheme may smoothly be translated into English. But, even with these assumptions on board, what ensues are actual argots that are homophonic with Alex’s and the Bokononists’ fictional lingos. What we understand and, in our fanciful moment, attempt to reproduce may well be affairs that involve the characteristic shapes and sounds of Nadsat or Bokononish. Yet, those affairs are not identical with them, for the obvious reason that, not being endowed with any sort of existence, those merely fictional languages and their merely fictional historical backgrounds are not identical with anything. Or so one may conclude, on the basis of certain hypotheses about what is fictional, about the etymological view, and/or about peripheries and importation. Others may prefer an alternative. According to this alternative, it is Burgess and Vonnegut who invent actual languages and argots, or, at least, who do so to the extent to which any of us can. 12  The bit about Slav roots, incidentally, may well contribute to convey an artistic point: ‘there is a real sense in the novel in which, to borrow Marshall McLuhan’s terminology, the medium becomes the message. For the Anglo-American reader the Slavic words connote communist dictatorship’ (Evans 1971: 409).

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82  Cat ’ s Cradle: Peripheral Importations These actual made-up idioms are subsequently imported within their peripheries and storyworlds, where, fictionally, they occur as the lingo of a criminal gang or as the language of a Caribbean sect. And so, Alex fictionally speaks Nadsat, a language which he fictionally picked up from who knows where, and the Bokononists fictionally chat in Bokononish, a language that fictionally developed from some unspecified ancestry. Whereas, in reality, Burgess may have actually conversed to his acquaintances in Nadsat, the lingo he created, and Vonnegut may actually have indulged in Bokononish, the idiom he made up. And, if Burgess and Vonnegut did any of those things, those among us with the appropriate relations to those authors may presumably do so as well. Had we not better things to do, we could pick up those argots and employ them among ourselves. Maybe. I remain neutral when it comes to the choice between the alternatives mentioned above. But I cannot see any convincing third way, that is, I cannot understand anything fundamentally different from the ideas that either (i) merely fictional languages are fictionally spoken by juvenile delinquents or followers of a bizarre cult, or that (ii) there actually exist languages which are fictionally employed by violent youths or Caribbean sects. I do not, in particular, understand the possibility of fictional languages ‘spilling out’ of fictional peripheries or storyworlds and continuing their life among actual speakers, as in the following suggestion: less often remarked are the cases where objects that begin their existence in works of fiction . . . somehow manage to spill out into the real world. . . . A classic example of this is the Klingon Language of Star Trek fame. Klingon is a language that began as a reference to a fictional language spoken by a fictional extra-terrestrial race in a fictional universe. Yet, somehow, today there is a quasi-official Klingon language institute, people who speak Klingon almost exclusively, and alleged cases of persons who want to raise their children in Klingon-speaking households.  (Ludlow 2006: 162–3)

This will not do, or, at least, it will not do for anyone with a clear-headed attitude towards the idea of ‘objects that begin their existence in works of fiction’, since whatever stems from fiction is merely fictional, and what is merely fictional is nothing. Klingon may fictionally have begun

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4.6  Where Am I Now?  83 its  existence among fictional extra-terrestrials, and actual households may communicate in an actual language that has all the characteristic Klingonian flair, but that is nevertheless not Klingon. Or else, Klingon, an actually made-up lingo, entered the fictional dimension just as many other actual things do. Either way, no spillage is in sight.

4.6  Where Am I Now? In this chapter, I discussed some further aspects of Radical Fictionalism. In section 4.2, I introduced a theme that will recur in subsequent chapters: fictional peripheries, so I argued, are committed to the importation of actual linguistic (and especially semantic) regularities. In section 4.3, I moved on to the issue of translation, and I highlighted certain semantic consequences of my appeal to impartation and fictional telling. The first chapters of this book approached fictional discourse primarily from the authorial viewpoint. For instance, I began with some remarks about Doyle’s, Austen’s, and Vonnegut’s relationships to ‘Holmes’, ‘Emma’, and ‘Hoenikker’, and I continued with the analysis of the peripheries and storyworlds engendered by their fiction-making efforts. Yet, fictional names also occur outside of the fiction-making process. For instance, you and I freely token ‘Holmes’, ‘Emma’, or ‘Hoenikker’ during our discussions of Sign, Emma, or Cradle. In the next chapter, I turn to a Radical Fictionalist analysis of our talk about fiction, appealing to the concepts put forth in this and the previous two chapters: authorial displays, merely fictional names, fictional tellers, re-telling, deference, and fictional co-reference.

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5 An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge From Our Point of View

5.1 Preliminaries Too busy to double check with your copy of Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (Bierce 1890, hereinafter Occurrence for short), you turn to me for help. I oblige: (5.1)  Peyton Fahrquhar was a well to do planter. At least when it comes to ‘Fahrquhar’, my position is no better off than Bierce’s. For one thing, I am not in the business of launching a new proper name. But I am also not attempting to replicate any antecedent token of ‘Fahrquhar’ as a name: I neither intervene nor aim at intervening in any actual chain of transmission leading to someone’s baptism, or, for that matter, to some kind of hallucinatory launching that fails to secure a referent. After all, if anything could plausibly qualify as an apt precedent for my use of ‘Fahrquhar’, it would be an affair involving Bierce. And yet, for reasons that should by now be familiar, Bierce did not launch or replicate any (referring or empty) name whatsoever. Of course, my predicament with (5.1) is different from Bierce’s in many respects. For one thing, he made up a name, and he made fictional that the name-type ‘Fahrquhar’ names an Alabama planter and slave owner. I, on the other hand, did nothing of this sort. Conversely, although Bierce engaged in a more demanding creative enterprise than mine, it would seem that he had an easier task in certain other respects. After all, when he inscribed (5.1), he was making up a story according to his own whim, whereas I, in some sense, had to get things right. Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics. Stefano Predelli, Oxford University Press (2020). © Stefano Predelli. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854128.001.0001

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5.1 Preliminaries  85 These intuitive differences are undeniable. I keep them alive by appealing to an ad hoc terminology, and I distinguish between occasions of fiction-making, such as Bierce’s inscription of (5.1), and the sort of fiction-talk in which I engaged when I tokened that sentence-type. Similarly, when mention of a specific instance is of relevance, I particularize ‘fiction-talk’ as in ‘Occasion-talk’, or, as the case may be, ‘Emma-talk’ or ‘Sign-talk’.1 Although this terminology is stylistically heavy-handed, it has the advantage of informality. It is, in this sense, preferable to more technicalsounding locutions, as in the distinctions between ‘conniving’ or ‘non-conniving’ uses of language, or between ‘fictive’ and ‘metafictive’ statements. These dedicated labels inevitably allude to theoretical standpoints that I may not wish to share in all of their details. Often, in particular, they point towards a distinction between fiction-making and fiction-talk primarily concerned with issues of truth, as in the idea that, regardless of what Bierce may have been up to, my use of (5.1) aims at truly describing whatever ensued from his effort.2 And that, as I am about to explain, is not a conclusion that I am happy to share. I thus begin this chapter with mild-mannered doubts about the appropriateness of looking at the differences between Bierce and myself in terms of the divide between someone who makes up stories and someone who is after the truth. As an alternative, section 5.2 puts forth a Radical Fictionalist take on fiction-talk, the Way of Retelling, which 1  I shall not say much regarding the necessary and/or sufficient conditions for fiction-talk and for F-talk given some particular fiction F, since their identification is uncontroversially not a burden peculiar to my approach. Perhaps, I engage in talk about Occasion because I intend to do so, because of certain characteristics of the setting I inhabit, and/or because of my relationships to Bierce’s original manuscript. But any other reasonable story about any of this will do as a background for my discussion in this chapter. 2  The assumption of this duality seems widespread. According to Searle, for instance, ‘we need to distinguish not only between serious discourse and fictional discourse . . . but also to distinguish both of these from serious discourse about fiction. . . . taken as a piece of discourse about fiction, [‘Holmes never got married but Watson did get married’] is true because it accurately reports the marital histories of the two fictional characters Holmes and Watson. It is not itself a piece of fiction because I am not the author of the works of fiction in question’ (Searle 1975a: 329). For Currie, ‘in my mouth [‘Holmes was a pipe smoker’] is an assertion: something . . . which, in some sense or other, is true’ (Currie 1990 158). And for Peter Lamarque, ‘the sentence “Gregor Samsa awoke one morning . . .”, when uttered by Kafka telling the story proposes something imaginary and mysterious, but when uttered by a reader recounting the story, says something true’ (Lamarque 2009a: 176). Neither Searle nor Currie nor Lamarque, as far as I can tell, put forth any reason for these confident statements.

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86  An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge trades truth in favour of a distinct normative dimension, faithfulness. In section 5.3, I extend this viewpoint to a different kind of discourse about fiction, that exemplified by more explicit affairs such as (5.2) according to Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Peyton Fahrquhar was a well to do planter. My objections against the view that (5.1) is true are mild-mannered, and I flank the presentation of the Way of Retelling with a starred section devoted to an alternative development of Radical Fictionalism, the Way of Truth. In that section, I shall have a few things to say about this peculiarly gracious methodology. For the moment, I rest satisfied with an anticipation: for the reasons that I put forth in the main body of this chapter, the Way of Retelling is my favourite Radical Fictionalist account of fiction-talk. Yet, my true protagonist is not fiction-talk per se, but Radical Fictionalism. Accordingly, I concede that Radical Fictionalism, though sympathetic to the Way of Retelling, is not committed to it. Indirectly, of course, this strengthens the case in its favour. Those uncompromisingly committed to the Way of Truth may well join only part of my own personal journey; yet, a partially accompanied route is preferable to a solitary expedition, especially if our shared path continues to follow the milestones of the Radical Fictionalist framework. In addition, the discussion of the contrast between the Way of Retelling and the Way of Truth provides some of the conceptual background for my brief (and, perversely, deliberately frustrating) final starred section. There, I tackle another question which, perhaps more than fiction-talk, stimulates those who are after actual verdicts of truth and falsity, namely the age-old dilemma raised by so-called true negative existentials.

5.2  The Way of Retelling As mentioned, my token of the name-type ‘Fahrquhar’ in (5.1) is not the token of a proper name: ‘Fahrquhar’ is a merely fictional name, and a merely fictional name is not anything that I or you may token, for it is nothing. Accordingly, (5.1), as uttered by me, is not a sentence, and does a fortiori not encode a proposition. Not unlike Bierce’s token, however,

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5.2  The Way of Retelling  87 the occurrence of (5.1) within Occurrence-talk makes it fictional that someone employs that sentence-type as a sentence. And so, fictionally, a teller employs ‘Fahrquhar’ as a proper name and utters (5.1) as a proposition-encoding sentence. Clearly, this fictional employment of (5.1) does not stem from the efforts of Bierce’s teller, but rather ensues from the fictional tokens of what I call ‘my teller’, or, more appropriately, my reteller. Bierce’s fictionmaking efforts made it fictional that someone uses ‘Fahrquhar’ as a name and (5.1) as a sentence. Similarly, my Occurrence-talk makes it fictional that someone else uses ‘Fahrquhar’ as that name and (5.1) as that sentence—that is, it makes it fictional that a reteller tokens ‘Fahrquhar’ as a participant in the very same chain of transmission that lies behind the occurrence of ‘Fahrquhar’ in the mouth of Bierce’s teller. In this sense, then, my interaction with these sentence-types is parallel to Bierce’s, since what is actually at issue is the kind of engagement with expression-types that I have characterized in terms of display. As a result of Bierce’s display, for instance, it is fictional that someone uses ‘Fahrquhar’ as the name of a secessionist planter, and that his tokens of (5.1) encode a particular proposition. And, as a result of my display, it is fictional that someone uses ‘Fahrquhar’ as that name, and that his tokens of (5.1) encode that proposition. But that is not to say that the distinction between fiction-making and fiction-talk evaporates, since my reteller is fictionally at the mercy of Bierce’s fictional teller, and since, in a related sense, I am at the actual mercy of Bierce’s actual fiction-making whims. When I retell Occurrence, what I make fictional is something that reflects what Bierce made fictional when he authored that short story. The gaze of whoever inhabits my retelling’s periphery, then, is firmly directed towards Occurrence’s periphery, and that periphery alone. Fictionally, that is, my reteller is prevented from launching his tokens or from participating in whatever transmission that suits his fictional fancy. At least as far as ‘Fahrquhar’ is concerned, any reteller that fictionally emerges from actual Occurrence-talk keeps a deferential attitude.3 Importantly, this attitude extends over and above matters of fictional co-reference. In particular, if my aim is that of talking about Occurrence, 3  Here and elsewhere in this section, my discussion echoes the themes preliminarily introduced in my discussion in Chapter 4, in particular, fictional co-reference.

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88  An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge my reteller’s fictional sentences ought to provide a fictionally accurate depiction of Occurrence’s storyworld, that is, they ought to be fictionally true. I am, then, doubly at the mercy of Bierce’s fiction-making choices: my reteller’s fictional tokens of ‘Fahrquhar’ fictionally co-refer with those in Occurrence’s periphery, and, if all goes well, his fictional sentences fictionally truly describe Occurrence’s storyworld. The point, note, is not that, unlike my reteller, Occurrence’s teller is freed from fictional concerns of truth. After all, although he does get Occurrence’s storyworld right with (5.1), he may well have failed to do so. He does indeed fail to do so later on, when he reveals himself as a  prototypically unreliable narrator. As a result of Bierce’s display, for instance, it is fictional that he tokens (5.3)  Fahrquhar dived as deeply as he could, and that, in doing so, he mis-describes his storyworld.4 Still, we do make a distinction between Bierce’s display of (5.3) and the predicament in which I would have found myself, had I ventured (5.3), or, for that matter (5.4)  Fahrquhar was a destitute peasant as part of my Occurrence-talk. Indeed, the token of (5.3) in Occurrence is among the sort of evidence that prompted Vera Nünning and other ­narratologists to issue a verdict of unreliable narrative (Nünning 2015). But, in my mouth, (5.3) or (5.4) would simply . . . get things wrong. From my viewpoint, this distinction is obvious, since it is grounded on the clearest divide that I can think of, that between the fictional and the actual. Fictionally, there are no momentous distinctions to be drawn, since both Occurrence’s teller and my reteller speak truly with (5.1), but they fictionally utter falsehoods if they opt for, say, (5.3) or (5.4). But actuality makes a difference. It does so because, in actuality, Bierce the fiction-maker is not guilty of mistakes, or of any sort of deviation from the norms of fiction-making. In fact, far from being actually 4 In Occurrence’s storyworld, Fahrquhar did not dive as deeply as he could, for, at that point, he was dead.

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5.2  The Way of Retelling  89 blameworthy, he may well end up being praised for the intriguing use of a very actual and presumably interesting technique, unreliable narration. But when I display affairs such as (5.3) or (5.4), I end up actually being in the wrong, or, in the jargon that shall recur in what follows, I end up being unfaithful to Occurrence. So, my displays of (5.3), of (5.4), or, returning to the scenario from Chapter 2, of (5.5)  Sherlock Holmes never took a bottle from the corner of the mantle-piece are actually unfaithful to Occurrence or Sign, in the sense that, fictionally, my retellers’ propositions provide false descriptions of their storyworlds. Engrossed in those fictions, my audience may well protest ‘false!’, and it may do so with an actual enthusiasm that matches the fictional eagerness with which Fahrquhar or Watson would complain. Still, fictionally, Fahrquhar and Watson would have good reasons for their reactions, since, fictionally, those tokens amount to falsehoods. But my own actual audience would simply be caught up in the game, and their verdicts of falsehood should be taken with the same degree of caution with which we take their insistence that, say, a detective once inhabited Baker Street. The point, really, is fictional falsehood (or, as the case may be, truth), something that, to echo some remarks from Chapter  2, is as irrelevant to actual semantic theorizing as stage thunder is to actual meteorology. The following, then, are the core ideas in what I call the Way of Retelling. (i) Speakers engaged in fiction-talk display certain name-types and sentence-types, and thereby make it fictional that a reteller employs certain proper names and puts forth certain particular propositions. Merely fictional particular propositions ensue from an assumption of fictional co-reference. For instance, a reteller’s fictional use of ‘Fahrquhar’ emerges from the sort of fictional background appropriate for the periphery in Occurrence—that is, it emerges from a fictional state of affairs in which tokens of

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90  An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge ‘Fahrquhar’ qualify as names of a certain well to do planter. Fictionally, then, uses of ‘Fahrquhar’ by my reteller’s and by Bierce’s teller co-refer, and their uses of, say, (5.1) encode the same proposition. (ii) Not unlike Bierce’s teller, my reteller may fictionally get things right or wrong: fictionally, he may truly describe his storyworld, or he may fail to do so. Caught up in the story, we may well be inclined to characterize fiction-talk in terms of ‘true’ or ‘false’. Yet, in actuality, truth and falsehood are of no significance, since mere displays are not the kind of things to which these properties apply. (iii) Whatever makes it fictional that a reteller speaks truly or falsely is describable in terms of some sort of actual normative dimension: unlike fiction-makers, fiction-talkers may be faithful or unfaithful to the original tale. For instance, my display of (5.1) is faithful to Occurrence, in the sense that the peripheral use of (5.1) fictionally expresses a proposition that truly describes Occurrence’s storyworld. But my displays of (5.3) or (5.4) are unfaithful to Occurrence, since my reteller’s fictional uses of them turn out to be fictionally false. According to the Way of Retelling, then, everyday alethic-sounding verdicts remain understandable, notwithstanding their ultimate theoretical inappropriateness: we sometimes need to evaluate an utterance in terms of its fidelity to a tale . . . This is the basis of the (somewhat uncertain) intuition that [‘Holmes is a detective’] is true and [‘Holmes is a farmer’] is not. (Sainsbury 2005: 203)

The point, note, is not only that our everyday employment of ‘true’ or ‘false’ need not be taken as non-debatable theoretical bedrock, just like our dubious (if not outright inconsistent) marketplace uses of semantic sounding terms such as ‘refer’, ‘about’, or ‘designates’. What is also the case is that there are principled reasons for our alleged intuition and for its being ‘somewhat uncertain’: what we casually describe in terms of ‘true’ or ‘false’ is what is fictionally true or false.

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5.3  Prefixed Talk: The Unified Way of Retelling  91

5.3  Prefixed Talk: The Unified Way of Retelling Wishing to be painfully explicit, I sometimes leave aside a simple example such as (5.1), and I opt for (5.2), repeated here: (5.2) according to Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Peyton Fahrquhar was a well to do planter. At least preliminarily, it is convenient to distinguish these layouts from the simpler cases discussed in section 5.2. To this end, I reserve ‘fictiontalk’ for the display of affairs such as (5.1), and I describe my choice of (5.2) as an instance of prefixed-talk. There is an intuitive reason why prefixed-talk deserves independent attention: some of the expressions occurring in (5.2) straightforwardly refer to real life, actual items. For instance, ‘Ambrose Bierce’ is Bierce’s own name, and ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’ is a singular term that designates his best-known short story.5 More than that. These are not only actual individuals, but they are also, in a sense, merely actual individuals: unlike (perhaps) Napoleon in War and Peace or Newport in Cradle, neither Bierce nor Occurrence are inhabitants of Occurrence’s storyworld. As a result, prefixed-talk may seem to be a more obvious instance of plain vanilla straight talk than fiction-talk—that is, it may appear to be part and parcel of our assertoric, actuality-oriented way of talking. Accordingly, so one may conclude, it must be straightforwardly truth-apt, in the sense that what it says either does or does not provide a true description of how things actually happen to be with Bierce and his tale. The reason why I mention this initial inclination is that it may not seem to sit at all well with Radical Fictionalism. For me, ‘Fahrquhar’ is simply not a name, and is a fortiori not a name when it occurs in (5.2). As a result, so it would seem, that sentence-type may not be treated as a sentence and may not encode anything characterizable in terms of truth or falsehood. As I explain later in this chapter, appearances are misleading in this respect. In fact, a certain approach to ‘according to Occurrence’ is available, which is in the position of combining results of actual 5  Or so I suppose for simplicity’s sake, see Predelli 2017 for some comments on titles and complex proper names.

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92  An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge truth-value with the contention that ‘Fahrquhar’ is merely fictional. Yet, my official sympathies side with a different strategy, which challenges the intuition that (5.2) is truth-apt and which extends the guidelines of the Way of Retelling to prefixed-talk. The result is what I call the Unified Way of Retelling. I begin its presentation with a discussion of the distinctive item in (5.2), the prefix ‘according to Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’, or ‘according to Occurrence’ for short. By far the most popular approach to ‘according to Occurrence’ (or ‘in Occurrence’ or its cognates) interprets it as an intensional sentential operator. This analysis’ most influential proponent is Lewis: ‘in such-and-such-fiction’ . . . is an intensional operator that may be prefixed to a sentence S to form a new sentence.  (Lewis 1978: 37–8)

This idea has received a great deal of popularity, even though, as far as I can tell, Lewis’ only reason in its favour occurs in a short remark one page later: I have already noted that truth in a given fiction is closed under implication. Such closure is the earmark of an operator of relative necessity, an intensional operator that may be analyzed as a restricted universal quantifier over possible worlds.  (Lewis 1978: 39)

Lewis’ argument is, to put it mildly, compressed. The question whether it is a valid argument may however be set aside here, for it enthymematically takes on board an assumption which I do not accept. For Lewis, ‘according to such-and-such-fiction’ is an intensional operator because, given the assumption that it is one among the sentential operators, it displays features allegedly characteristic of a particular subclass of them, namely the subclass of intensional operators. And yet, according to my framework, ‘according to Occurrence’ cannot be a sentential operator of any sort, since, in the semantic sense of ‘sentence’, what occurs in its alleged argument position is simply not a sentence.6 6  As a matter of fact, were I to grant Lewis’ assumption, I would still be tempted to resist his conclusion: even if ‘according to Occurrence’ were a sentential operator, I doubt it would be appropriate to analyse it as an intensional operator (for reasons related to indexicality, see Predelli 2008b for comments). But never mind about that here.

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5.3  Prefixed Talk: The Unified Way of Retelling  93 For this reason, Lewis’ intensional-operator approach is only one among the victims of my views on fictional discourse. The problem lies not with intensionality per se, but with any compositional interpretation that evaluates (5.2) as the result of an operation on the semantic value of a would-be embedded sentence, in this case (5.1). What is not an option for me, in particular, is any treatment of (5.2) analogous to what is generally assumed to be appropriate for sentences such as (5.6)  according to Mark Twain, Shakespeare never wrote a play in his life, in Bill Kaysing’s We Never Went to the Moon, we never went to the moon. These are independently problematic sentences, whose analysis leads in the direction of one of the most debated phenomena in philosophical semantics, namely so-called propositional attitude reports such as ‘Twain said that Shakespeare never wrote a play in his life’ or ‘Kaysing claimed that we never went to the moon’. At least according to a popular view, these constructs encode a relationship between an individual and a proposition—in the examples in (5.6), a relationship between Twain and the proposition that Shakespeare never wrote a play in his life, and between Kaysing’s pamphlet and the proposition that we never went to the moon. But if that is the correct take on these exemplars, then their superficial similarities with (5.2) may not be taken on board without further ado: since (5.1), as embedded in (5.2), does not encode any proposition, Bierce and his novel would inappropriately be left without any suitable relatum. A parallelism other than that suggested by (5.6) provides more fertile ground from my viewpoint. Start, as an inspiration, with an adverbial rendering of (5.2), more or less as in (5.7)  fictionally (in Occurrence), Peyton Fahrquhar was a well to do planter, and consider, as a preliminary analogy, (5.8)  frankly speaking, he is not up to the task.

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94  An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge At least to my ear, (5.8) is truth-conditionally equivalent with ‘he is not up to the task’, and encodes the same proposition encoded in its shorter companion. ‘Frankly speaking’ is admittedly not a meaningless preliminary. But it is, in some vague sense, something that is not immediately concerned with encoded content, but with the manner in which that content is being conveyed. Saying ‘he is not up to the task’ makes the point about a certain individual’s shortcomings. Uttering the whole of (5.8) achieves that very same effect, and, in addition, describes itself as being an instance of frank speech.7 Or so I suppose without further ado, since the point about (5.8) is merely that of serving as a preliminary partial analogy with what the Way of Retelling would want to say about (5.2) or (5.7). Anyway, the analogy is indeed partial: what occurs after ‘frankly speaking’ in (5.8) is uncontroversially a proposition-encoding sentence, and is thus, for me, something fundamentally different from what is appended to ‘according to Occurrence’ in (5.2). Yet, though limited, the similarities are more promising than those with (5.6). Think, if you like, of ‘frankly speaking’ as a prologue to one’s forthcoming contribution. ‘I am about to speak sincerely and with no constraints’, I warn my audience. Ready? Here it goes: ‘he is not up to the task’. And, by analogy, think of (5.2) as a mise en scène of that sort. ‘I am not about to put forth anything with the earnestness and seriousness that characterizes actuality-concerned, proposition-encoding discourse’, I alert my interlocutors. ‘I am about to retell a fictional tale instead, that is, Ambrose Bierce’s Occurrence’. Ready? Here it goes: ‘Fahrquhar was a well to do planter’. On this view, then, the explicitness achieved by (5.2) over (5.1) is not the result of a speaker’s abandonment of the fictional point of view. It is, rather, the outcome of her declared intent to indulge in it. And so, consistently with its name, the Unified Way of Retelling achieves a reduction of sorts, since prefixed-talk turns out to be, at bottom, fiction-talk. As such, it inherits the latter’s characteristics. In particular, my display of, say, (5.1) as part of (5.2) makes it fictional that a certain sentence

7  For a small sample of sources in the extensive literature on these and related topics see for  instance Mittwoch  1977, Davison  1983, Fraser  1996, DeRose and Grandy  1999, and Siegel 2006.

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5.3  Prefixed Talk: The Unified Way of Retelling  95 encodes a true proposition, so that, as result, my actual speaking is faithful to Occurrence. The presumed truth of (5.2), then, is once again fictional truth, that is, no truth at all. The following, then, are the core ideas in the Unified Way of Retelling. (i) Speakers engaged in prefixed-talk display certain name-types and sentence-types in syntactic positions adjacent to prefixes such as ‘according to Occurrence’. (ii) These prefixes play roles roughly analogous to those of so-called speech-act adverbs such as ‘frankly speaking’ in (5.8). One way or another, these prefixes characterize a speaker’s contribution, without directly impacting on encoded content. As a result, (5.2) is, in many respects, on a par with its simpler companion, (5.1). Although both fail to encode any proposition, their occurrences make it fictional that a reteller employs ‘Fahrquhar’ as a name and (5.1) as a sentence. (iii) In either case, truth is fictionally achieved, since, in Occurrence’s storyworld, a bearer of ‘Fahrquhar’ was a well to do planter. Just like (5.1), then, (5.2) is faithful. The semantic details, of course, are still up for grabs. For one thing, what I vaguely described as a ‘prologue’ or a ‘characterization’ will have to derive its peculiarities from a compositional analysis of its components. For instance, ‘frankly speaking’ means what it does because of its relationship with the content straightforwardly encoded in ‘frankly’. Similarly, ‘according to Occurrence’ does its job because it involves ‘Occurrence’, rather than, say, ‘Emma’ or ‘We Never Went to the Moon’. Secondly, and equally importantly, whatever ensues from these analyses will need to be given an appropriate role in the study of (5.2) or (5.8), so as to ensure that certain results may eventually be achieved. I have my views on some of these subtleties (see for instance Predelli  2009a and  2017), but any decent alternative will do for the purpose of the Unified Way of Retelling. Being well disposed towards the Way of Retelling and the Unified Way of Retelling, I trust that, in cases of fiction-talk and of prefixed-talk alike, faithfulness provides an apt rendering of the normative dimension commonly expressed in terms of ‘true’ or ‘false’. I must concede that,

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96  An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge even at this stage, some unshakeable dissenters may insist that any decent analysis of fiction-talk and/or prefixed-talk must take at their word the alethic connotations of our casual semantic vocabulary. And so, for them, if Radical Fictionalism is not in the position of catering for these connotations, so much the worst for Radical Fictionalism. As far as methodological priorities go, I can only record my much less unshakeable trust for our everyday semantically-sounding talk. Yet, as far as Radical Fictionalism is concerned, I can directly reject the antecedent in my opponents’ conditional: Radical Fictionalism is in principle compatible with the notion that fiction-talk and prefixed-talk are true or false. I proceed to an explanation of this conceivable development of Radical Fictionalism in the next sections. These are starred sections, and they may be skipped by readers mainly interested in the positive view I  wish to pursue. But they do, in turn, lead to a brief discussion of another semantic quandary that is of independent interest, but that bears less direct relationships with Radical Fictionalism than it may at first appear, namely the issue of true negative existentials.

*5.4  The Way of Truth: Preliminaries Against everything that I have written thus far, suppose that fiction-talk accumulates actual proposition-encoding sentences. This much would not suffice to satisfy those stubbornly committed to truth-aptness since, understandably, what they require is not one truth-value or another, but the right truth-value. For them, in particular, the proposition allegedly at issue when I utter (5.1) ought to be evaluated as true, whereas the proposition allegedly encoded in (5.5) would have to turn out false. Of course, a similar attitude applies to examples utterly deprived of singular terms, that is, to instances that even I could recognize as fully-fledged proposition-encoding affairs. For instance, (5.9)  not so much as the barking of a dog suggested human habitation would have to be interpreted as true Occurrence-talk, whereas ‘the barking of dogs suggested human habitation’ would not.

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*5.4  The Way of Truth: Preliminaries  97 One does not gain any of these allegedly desired truth-values by taking the actual world into consideration. Whether, at the time of speaking, barking dogs did suggest anything about human habitation must surely be of no relevance when it comes to Occurrence-talk. Accordingly, those who sympathize with the Way of Truth must provide an explanation of why (5.1) or (5.9) are to be evaluated with an eye to Bierce’s storyworld, rather than by focusing on the actual state of affairs. A popular explanation of this alleged phenomenon appeals to the idea of ellipsis. In this view, when these sentences occur as Occurrence-talk (rather than as straightforward statements or as part of a fiction-making enterprise), they are elliptical for longer prefixed constructs, as in, say, (5.10)  according to Occurrence, not so much as the barking of a dog suggested human habitation. Thanks to the semantic workings of this unvoiced intruder, so this Ellipsis Hypothesis continues, actual truth (or, as the case may be, falsehood) is achieved. For instance, given how things went with Bierce’s fiction-making, it is indeed that case that, according to Occurrence, not so much as the barking of a dog suggested human habitation. As indicated in section 5.3, my favourite Unified Way of Retelling is, in a sense, responsible for the reduction of prefixed-talk to fiction-talk. When implemented along the lines of the Ellipsis Hypothesis, the Way of Truth proposes an opposite gambit: fiction-talk simply is prefixedtalk, albeit of a kind masked by our tendency to leave certain expressions unpronounced. This Ellipsis Hypothesis has accompanied much of the literature on fiction-talk, starting at least with Lewis’ interest towards ‘according to such and such fiction’. The passage I quoted in section 5.3 also boldly issues the following invitation: let us not take our descriptions of fictional characters at face value, but instead let us regard them as abbreviations for longer sentences beginning with an operator ‘in such-and-such-fiction . . . ’. Such a phrase is an intensional operator that may be prefixed to a sentence S to form a new sentence.  (Lewis 1978: 37­–8)

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98  An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge This invitation had casually been in circulation for a while. A few years earlier, for instance, Hartry Field already proposed that [‘Santa Claus flies reindeer’ is true] only when it is elliptical for ‘The story says that Santa Claus flies reindeer’.  (Field 1973: 471 n. 8)

Few, afterwards, dared to disagree: a statement about fiction is (usually) implicitly preceded by a fiction operator roughly paraphrasable by . . . ‘in fiction’.  (Devitt 1981: 172)

and [‘Holmes is a detective’ and ‘Holmes is a farmer’ can] be evaluated as respectively genuinely true and genuinely false, if they are seen as (implicitly) prefixed by an object language operator from the family ‘According to fiction’.  (Sainsbury 2005: 203)

Never, to my knowledge, has any argument been put forth in defence of the rather surprising claim that such a considerable amount of unvoiced syntactic material may be supplied to semantic interpretation. The situation is all the more surprising given that the alleged relationship between prefixed and un-prefixed exemplars hardly conforms to the dictates of ellipsis, in any syntactically dignified sense of this term. For one thing, (5.1) or (5.9) may occur discourse-initially, with no antecedent (or for that matter subsequent) material that could systematically be recovered in a process of ellipsis-unpacking. Relatedly, it is unclear why one choice of elided material ought to be preferred to others. For instance, if the point is that of achieving the allegedly intuitive conclusions of truth-value, there are no reasons why, say, (5.10) would do the job any better than ‘according to Bierce’s first novel, . . .’ or ‘according to that [pointing at a copy of Occurrence], . . .’. Yet, these sentences are surely not on a par when it comes to their ability to unpack the alleged ellipsis in (5.9), since, according to any reasonable semantic analysis, they are not even truth-conditionally equivalent.8 8  For arguments against the Ellipsis Strategy see also Bertolet 1984 and my Predelli 1997; further reasons against that hypothesis, having to do with temporal perspective, content intuitions, and speakers confused about the identity of the fiction, are put forth in Everett 2013: 46–53. The doubts I express in this chapter are inspired by familiar strategies against

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*5.4  The Way of Truth: Preliminaries  99 But I may be uncharitable here, and some watered-down sense of ‘ellipsis’ may perhaps be available, which provides a decent explanation for a hidden-prefixed structure.9 I, at any rate, need not insist on my scepticism towards the Ellipsis Hypothesis, since my aim is not that of defending the Way of Truth, but simply that of arguing for its compatibility with Radical Fictionalism. So, since the champions of the Way of Truth freely avail themselves of the resources of the Ellipsis Hypothesis, I can do so as well, at least when it comes to indicating a possible development of my framework according to which fiction-talk and prefixedtalk are true or false. Let us then admit the prefix and let us consider its consequences for the Way of Truth and for Radical Fictionalism. As mentioned in connection with my discussion of the Unified Way of Retelling, Radical Fictionalist may not analyse ‘according to Occurrence’ or its cognates as sentential operators, since the material to which they are appended is not a sentence. How, then, may truth be obtainable, if truth is indeed what one desires to derive? Once again, certain parallelisms with constructions such as (5.6), partially reproduced below, may provide a suggestive preliminary to the solution I entertain in the next section: (5.6)  according to Mark Twain, Shakespeare never wrote a play in his life. appeals to ellipsis in different areas in the philosophy of language (as in the considerable debate on domain restrictions, for a small sample see Wettstein  1981, Recanati  1996, and Neale 2000). 9  As far as I can tell, we do occasionally shorten our conversational contributions, especially when the need for speed trumps the demands of precision: ‘a world-famous topologist’, I may say, even if, had I had the patience, I would have chosen ‘there goes a world-famous topologist’, ‘she is a world-famous topologist’, or something in that vein. ‘Abbreviation’, ‘shorthand’, or ‘syntactic enrichment’ may perhaps be more appropriate than ‘ellipsis’ as descriptions of this presumed phenomenon, but one should not be too intransigent when it comes to terminology (see for instance Elugardo and Stainton 2005 and, for my views on this issue, Predelli 2011a). For the record, I am unhappy even with this diluted version of the Ellipsis Hypothesis, for reasons over and above the occurrence of ‘ellipsis’ in its moniker. In particular, the point with the topologist example had to do with pragmatic and unsystematic considerations. For instance, if any syntactic material could legitimately enrich my meagre ‘a word-famous topologist’, it will have to be chosen on the basis of my intentions and/or my audience’s expectations, according to some sort of ad hoc process of augmentation. Not so with the alleged relationship between (5.1) and (5.2), which should systematically apply across the board. For instance, if my tokens of (5.1) are at all analysable as in (5.2), then my tokens of, say, (5.3) ought to be unpacked as ‘according to Occurrence, Fahrquhar dived as deeply as he could’, in conformity to a unified strategy hardly parallel to the occasional enrichment appropriate for shorthand.

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100  An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge It seems clear that this sentence is in the business of truth, since it is true or false depending on Twain’s beliefs, actions, or attitudes. Yet, similar affairs appear to be equally deserving of a truth-oriented analysis, even if, perhaps unlike (5.6), they do uncontroversially not append a propositionencoding expression to ‘according to . . .’. For instance, the following seems true enough: (5.11)  according to Carroll, bandersnatches were frumious, as, incidentally, does ‘Carroll wrote that bandersnatches are frumious’. And yet, according to nearly everyone, there is no such thing as a bandersnatch, and, according to many, ‘bandersnatch’ has not even properly been introduced as a term. Or else, if bandersnatches bother you, consider (5.12)  according to Dr Seuss, there’s a jertain in the curtain, or, for that matter, ‘Dr Seuss wrote that there’s a jertain in the curtain’. At least in my everyday moments, I would unhesitantly accept utterances of these affairs as true, since Dr Seuss did indeed inscribe ‘sometimes I feel quite certain there’s a jertain in the curtain’ (Dr Seuss 1974). And yet, they would be true notwithstanding the uncontested fact that, as one may put it, ‘jertain’ is not even a word.10 All of this is cause for moderate optimism from the viewpoint of the compatibility between Radical Fictionalism and the Way of Truth. Indeed, even sentences superficially similar to those which, in section 5.3, I rejected as promising analogues of prefixed-talk do occasionally display a profile that comes sufficiently close to what I am after, namely apparent truth in the face of content-deprived components. As I explain in the next section, a possibility of this sort is what allows a Radical Fictionalist (though not my kind of Radical Fictionalist) to stubbornly persist in an assessment of fiction-talk as true or false.

10  This reaction is inspired by the television series Friends, season 4, episode 12, where Monica reacts to Rachel’s ‘Chandler is a transponster’ with ‘that is not even a word!’. Note incidentally our nonchalance with anaphoric pickings: ‘According to Rachel, Chandler is a transponster. But they do not exist.’

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*5.5  The Way of Truth: The Paratactic Hypothesis  101

*5.5  The Way of Truth: The Paratactic Hypothesis In a series of influential essays, Donald Davidson defended a so-called paratactic approach to phenomena such as attitude reports, illocutionaryforce-indicating-devices, and pure quotation (Davidson  1968,  1979a, and 1979b). As an analysis of these phenomena, Davidson’s proposal is controversial. Further important shortcomings apparently beset the paratactic gambit, when it is interpreted from the methodological viewpoint that Davidson seems to have been pursuing, that of eschewing any commitment to propositions, meanings, and the like.11 My ambition here is more limited. I have no bones to pick with propositions or meanings, and I shall not say much about quotation marks or propositional attitudes. Yet, as I explain in what follows, regardless of its applicability to those lofty philosophical quandaries, the paratactic strategy serves me well as a concession to the Way of Truth. According to the paratactic approach, certain sentential constructs are profitably analysed on the basis of the properties of a peculiar twopiece affair. For instance, in that approach, the semantic profile of the sentence ‘ “Alice swooned” is a sentence’ is more perspicuously unveiled by ‘that is a sentence’, flanked by the display of the syntactic material in ‘Alice swooned’, as in (5.13)  Alice swooned. That is a sentence. In this two-fold layout, the semantic burden falls entirely on the sentence on the right-hand side, in this case ‘that is a sentence’, whereas the material on the left-hand side occurs as the target for ‘that’. This, of course, is it should be: ‘ “xyz” is not a sentence’, that is, (5.14)  xyz. That is not a sentence is clearly interpretable (it is, indeed, true), even though the quoted string, ‘xyz’, is not a suitable object of semantic interest.12 11  For discussions see Rumfitt 1993, Frankish 1996, Ludwig and Ray 1998, and Dahllöf 2002. 12  There are many subtleties that I simply leave aside for the sake of clarity—for one thing, Davidson’s chosen analysans is ‘the expression of which this is a token is a sentence’, rather than my simpler ‘that is a sentence’ (Davidson 1979b: 91). For a discussion of many details in the

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102  An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge In the foregoing paragraph, I characterized the paratactic theory in terms of the proposal to focus on a two-part layout, in which an interpretable locution is flanked by the display of additional material. I chose this vocabulary with a transparent aim, that of indicating how a wellformed affair may be interpreted and evaluated, notwithstanding the occurrence in it of items that may not. Anyone interested in the Way of Truth is bound to find this possibility particularly promising, since, according to my framework, (5.2), repeated and abbreviated here (5.2)  according to Bierce’s Occurrence, Peyton Fahrquhar was a wellto do planter, includes an uninterpretable name-type, and yet, according to the Way of Truth, it must come out as true. This, then, provides at least a first stab in the semantic analysis of prefixed-talk, and hence, if the suggestions reported in section 5.4 are taken on board, of fiction-talk. So, (5.2), and, elliptically, (5.1) turn out to be perspicuously analysed as (5.15)  Peyton Fahrquhar was a well to do planter. That accords with Bierce’s Occurrence. In this layout, the object of semantic interpretation is the sentence on the right-hand side. And that, at least for my purposes here, may well straightforwardly be associated with particular truth-conditions: truth is being achieved exactly on the condition that what is being demonstrated accords with a certain short story authored by Bierce. In turn, ‘accordance’ may be spelled out along alternative lines. But, as far as I can tell, there are no reasons for the Way of Truth not to appeal to an idea that I originally introduced in the presentation of the Way of Retelling, namely faithfulness. So, x accords with y iff x is faithful to fiction y, and x is faithful to y iff (roughly) occurrences of x in a retelling of y make it fictional that someone speaks truly. So, (5.2), analysed as in

paratactic approach to pure quotation see among many Caplan  2002 and Cappelen and Lepore  2007; for my own views on the paratactic theory of quotation see Predelli  2008a and 2013.

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*5.6  ‘ Does Not Exist ’   103 (5.15), turns out to be true, since ‘Peyton Fahrquhar was a well-to do planter’ is faithful to Occurrence. The parenthetical ‘roughly’ was in order. For one thing, I heavily relied on my reader’s charitable attitude, mostly in order to keep my exposition less than mind-numbingly tedious. For instance, here as before, the idea of a display and the suggestion that certain portions of (5.15) are semantically inert will have to be taken with a grain of salt. As usual, what is of interest for me is that merely fictional harbinger of particularity, ‘Fahrquhar’, rather than the interpretable ‘was a well to do planter’. Similarly, much of what I wrote about the paratactic analysis of pure ­quotation and/or its extension to prefixed-talk remains in dire need of further analysis, in particular when it comes to certain well-known sources of semantic pressure. Yet, here as elsewhere in this book, my aim is not that of tackling the technicalities of natural language semantics head on. My attitude is even more nonchalant in this section, where my aim is not that of defending the Way of Truth, but merely that of showing its prima facie compatibility with Radical Fictionalism. In this respect, a note of optimism is justified. Those unshakably committed to the idea that prefixed-talk is truth-apt may embrace the framework from chapters 2 and 3, thereby ending up in a position that is at least no worse off than an influential approach to pure quotation and a few other phenomena. And those equally unshakeably devoted to the truth-aptness of fiction-talk will find themselves in an analogous position, once they accept the sort of Ellipsis Hypothesis to which they remain independently committed.

*5.6  ‘Does Not Exist’ It may seem odd that so-called true negative existentials end up being addressed in a short starred section at the end of this chapter. After all, sentences such as (5.16)  Fahrquhar does not exist prima facie exemplify one of the most urgent semantic quandaries related to the fictional dimension—indeed, one of the most venerable sources of semantic befuddlement, the alleged possibility of talking

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104  An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge about that which does not exist. I do not demure. Apparently true ­negative existential statements are worrisome independently of the peculiarities of fictional discourse, and, more importantly, they remain a delicate business from the viewpoint of any theory of fiction and singular terms currently on the market. Paraphrasing Kripke’s remarks about the ‘Frege-Russell theory’ of proper names, if [any theory of fiction alternative to mine] does not give an account of the problems of existence . . . that is intuitively correct, then these problems do not, in themselves, argue in favour of their theory [and against mine].  (Kripke 2011: 57)

I start my brief and tentative excursus on ‘does not exist’ with assumptions that, though independently controversial, may be taken on board without further ado for my purposes. First and foremost, I take existence to be a relatively straightforward property, one among the properties that everything possesses. Accordingly, I take run-of-the-mill occurrences of ‘exist’ as occurrences of a one-place predicate that semantically encodes that property, that is, as roughly equivalent to ‘being identical with something’. So, for me, ‘Obama does not exist’ is false, since Obama, the referent of ‘Obama’, is something rather than nothing. And (the oddsounding) ‘Obama exists’ is true, since it is equivalent to the negation of a false sentence.13 By the same token, (5.17)  in 1912 Obama did not exist in 2080 Obama will not exist if his parents had never met, Obama would not have existed are straightforwardly true: Obama, something that is endowed with the property of existence, did not possess that property in 1912, will not possess it in 2080, and would not have possessed it if his parents had never met. Unlike cases involving referring names such as ‘Obama’, instances with empty names provide fertile ground for apparently true simple denials of 13  Odd sounding indeed. ‘Exists’ and its relationships with ‘there is’ and cognate locutions have ‘hardly been a subject of study in linguistic semantics’ (Moltman 2013: 32).

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*5.6  ‘ Does Not Exist ’   105 existence of the form ‘n does not exist’. Recall the case of ‘Casper’, the empty name that I introduced by means of a hallucinatory baptismal ceremony. ‘Casper’, so I conceded in Chapter 1, is a name all right, but it is an empty name, and the sentences in which it occurs express gappy propositions. Gappy propositions are rather odd companions of plain vanilla propositions and deserve some sort of special treatment within everybody’s semantic framework. Yet, one may do worse than to recommend that atomic gappy propositions are false, and that, as a result, their negations are true. So, in this view, ‘Casper does not exist’ turns out to be true—not, mind you, because the contribution of ‘Casper’, namely the gap, is itself nothing, but because that is the role for this extraordinary object within semantic theorizing.14 Or so I presume. I can safely move swiftly, since nothing in the foregoing paragraphs is intertwined with the characteristic tenets of my views about fiction—unsurprisingly, since ‘Obama’ ensues from someone’s baptism and ‘Casper’ emerges from a mistake, but neither of them is a fictional name. So, what I just put forth is not part of my view, but it  is rather a term of contrast for what interests me, merely fictional names.15 And when these expression-types take pride of place, none of my concessions thus far seem to be of much help. Indeed, according to a straightforward application of Radical Fictionalism, (5.16) is not a sentence, and is thus prevented from encoding anything at all, be it a  standard affair or some sort of gappy eccentricity. A fortiori, it is prevented from encoding anything true, or, for that matter, false. And 14 Incidentally, the methodological point with these concessions echoes the divide-andconquer strategy in Salmon 1998, where different solutions are proposed for ‘Socrates does not exist’, for names from fiction, and for ‘rare and bizarre’ thoroughly nonreferring names, as in his ‘Nappy’ scenario (Salmon 1998: 307). Salmon’s treatment of the fictional case is fundamentally different from Radical Fictionalism: according to him, ‘we sometimes use ordinary names . . . in various descriptive ways, as when it is said that so-and-so is a Napoleon . . . I submit that, especially in singular existential statements, we sometimes use the name of a fictional character in a similar way . . . This is not a use of “Holmes” as a thoroughly nonreferring name, but as a kind of description . . .’ (Salmon 1998: 303–4). 15  Since, for me, existence in unproblematically a property, existence attributions escape the domain of fictional discourse (or, at least, they do so in the absence of independent arguments to the contrary). The view I sketch in what follows is thus importantly different from Walton’s ‘extended fiction’ strategy. Walton proposes a complex account of negative existentials which rejects the assumption that their utterances are instances of non-fictional talk: for Walton, there is ‘an unofficial game in which one who says [‘Gregor Samsa is a (purely fictional) character’] speaks the truth, a game in which it is fictional that there are two kinds of people: “real” people and “fictional characters” ’ (Walton 1990: 423, see also Kroon 2000, Walton 2000, and Everett 2013).

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106  An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge yet, (5.16) would seem to be as truly utterable as the examples in (5.17). It can, for instance, be uttered so as to counter someone’s mistaken impressions that, say, Bierce was in the journalism business and that his tokens of ‘Fahrquhar’ aimed at replicating someone’s name. Note that this problem is of apparently greater urgency than the superficially parallel issues engendered by fiction-talk. Take for instance the Way of Retelling from section 5.3. This hypothesis explains a case of Occurrence-talk such as (5.1) by appealing to the distinction between fictional truth and actual faithfulness: fictional uses of (5.1) in Occurrence’s periphery truly describe its storyworld, and, as a result, actual tokens of that sentence-type are faithful to Occurrence. Yet, regardless of one’s views about the Way of Retelling, or for that matter about any other account of fiction-talk, nothing of this sort seems to be of much help when it comes to (5.16), for the reason that fiction-talk is presumably not what is at issue on this occasion. In a nutshell, the point with intuitively true utterances of (5.16) is arguably directed towards actuality, with no relevant relation to fiction and fictional discourse. Seriously, in reality, such and such happens not to be the case.16 That is a pickle all right, but it is not directly a problem for my framework. For one thing, as mentioned at the beginning of this section, it is a problem that causes considerable agitation from the viewpoint of pretty much any theory of proper names, existence-attributions, and/or fictional discourse that I know of. Moreover, and more interestingly, the application of my framework to (5.16) may well seem to yield certain puzzling commitments, such as the admissibility of true utterances of sentence-types that do not encode any proposition whatsoever. Yet, parallel outcomes also ensue for cases that have nothing to do with name-like expressions, or with anything in their vicinity. I turn to these cases in the

16  ‘The denial of Snow White’s existence . . . is in discourse about actuality, while the statement that she enraptured a prince is in discourse about fiction. (If the question of existence arose in discourse about fiction alone, Snow White existed, whereas Hamlet’s father’s ghost . . . probably did not)’ (Donnellan  1974: 6, footnote 9). Keith Donnellan’s position is intriguing: ‘if a child says “Santa Claus will come tonight” he cannot have spoken the truth, although, for various reasons, I think it better to say that he has not even expressed a proposition’ (Donnellan 1974: 20–1). I agree, but Donnellan’s reasons seem to be different from mine: his ‘Santa Claus’ has ‘a history’, albeit one that ends in a ‘block’ (Donnellan 1974: 23) and is thus presumably an empty name.

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*5.6  ‘ Does Not Exist ’   107 next paragraphs, before proceeding with a tentative assessment of their significance for (5.16) and its ilk. My cases echo those brought up in my discussion of the Way of Truth. So, wondering about what lies behind the curtain, a sufficiently confused speaker may sincerely and seriously venture ‘there is a jertain in the curtain’ (see 5.12 above). We, who are not at all confused, may retort: ‘there is no jertain in the curtain, for there is no such thing as a jertain’ or ‘there are no jertains in the curtain, since jertains do not exist’. At bottom, these retorts may well stem from some sort of metalinguistic stance, as testified by the acceptability of a pause, a particular stress, or, in the case of written language, certain punctuation devices, as in ‘there isn’t . . . a jertain’ or ‘there isn’t “a jertain” ’. But pauses, special intonations, or scarequotes are not necessary, and are surely not a customary requirement when it comes to our concluding glosses: ‘there is no such thing as a jertain’ and ‘jertains do not exist’ naturally occur with no further dramatic involvement on the speaker’s side.17 Kripke makes a similar point: if there isn’t some kind of possible animal which is being asserted not to have instances [in ‘There are no unicorns’] in the actual world, what does one mean when one says ‘There are no unicorns?’ This is a problem. But it shouldn’t lead to resistance to my view of unicorns. For it is surely just as legitimate to say ‘There are no bandersnatches’. . . . But here on almost anyone’s picture . . . there is no definite kind of animal called ‘the bandersnatch’ which is being asserted not to have instances in the actual world.  (Kripke 2013: 144)

Something is happening here and I don’t know what it is. As a very tentative first approximation, some of the ideas introduced at the beginning of this book may in the end be fruitfully applied to (5.16) and, for that matter, to Kripke’s bandersnatches or to the ‘jertain’ examples. So, (5.16) fails to encode a fully-fledged proposition, and flanks a propertyencoding predicate of existence with a semantically inert name-type. As a result, in the economy of communication, our focus shifts in the 17  The echoic features of typical negative existential statements are noteworthy. Donnellan seems to recognize them in his fundamental principle (R): ‘if n is a proper name that has been used in predicative statements with the intention to refer to some individual, then “n does not exist” is true if and only if the history of those uses ends in a block’ (Donnellan 1974: 25).

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108  An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge direction of  by now familiar impartations: there is no bearer of ‘Fahrquhar’, or, at least, no bearer of ‘Fahrquhar’ as it occurs on that occasion.18 Maybe that is a start, though more satisfactory developments of it will  obviously need to confront a variety of important problems. (For me, here’s one: utterances of ‘Santa Claus could have existed’ should presumably come out false, since there is no possible world in which ‘he’ exists. Yet, the impartation that there could have been a bearer of ‘Santa Claus’ would seem to be true.) And so, officially, I do not claim that Radical Fictionalism hints in the direction of any particular analysis of (5.16). For, surely, if anything in the foregoing paragraphs is on the right track, it is so because of certain obvious properties of actual impartations, rather than because of the particular role that impartations play in the Radical Fictionalist take on fictional discourse. Maybe there is something related to impartation that matters for the intuition that (5.16) may be uttered truly. But then again, maybe there is not that much. And yet, whatever comes to the foreground with (5.16) raises independent problems, whose presumed intractability is of no greater significance for Radical Fictionalism than for any other theory of fiction, fictionalnames, and fictional-discourse.

5.7  Where Am I Now? In my introduction to Radical Fictionalism in chapters 2 and 3, I focused on fiction-making efforts and on the results achieved by authorial display. In this chapter, I extended the Radical Fictionalist picture to our fiction-directed talk, with particular attention to occurrences of fictional names such as ‘Fahrquhar’ in fiction-talk and prefixed-talk.

18  Note that this is not a theory of ‘semantic ascent’, for the fundamental reason that it is not a semantic theory about anything. Among other things, then, it remains indifferent to the (plausible) principle that a sentence and its literal (i.e., proposition-preserving) translations agree in truth-value: that uses of ‘Santa Claus does not exist’ and ‘Père Noël n’existe pas’ impart different propositions is as unsurprising as the fact that ‘London is pretty’ and ‘Londres est jolie’ do. For semantic ascent analyses of negative existentials see perhaps Frege  1895 and Frege  1906; for criticisms grounded in issues of translation see Donnellan  1974, and Salmon  1998 and  2014: for related doubts grounded on the idea of compositionality see Stanley 2002 and Kripke 2013.

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5.7  Where Am I Now?  109 This chapter’s official outcome is what I called the Unified Way of Retelling, where fiction-talk and prefixed-talk are analysed in terms of fictional retelling and of faithfulness (or, as the case may be, unfaithfulness) to the original tale. Still, as indicated in my starred sections, neither the Unified Way of Retelling nor its more modest companion, the Way of Retelling, are entailed by Radical Fictionalism, a position that remains in principle compatible with an alternative account of fiction-talk and prefixed-talk, namely the Way of Truth. My concern with what we understand, appreciate, or evaluate continues to characterize my next chapters. There, I pay particular attention to readers, consumers, and interpreters of fiction, and eventually to those who make fiction their business, namely critics. Chapter 6 begins with a medley of interpretive issues, which I approach from the viewpoint of a Radical Fictionalist take on storyworlds and peripheries.

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6 Reflex and Bone Structure Periphery and Interpretation

6.1 Preliminaries In chapters 3 and 4 I went on for a while discussing the peculiarities of the periphery. This, for a Radical Fictionalist, is as it should be: peripheral telling, that is, the fictional use of sentence-types by a fictional inhabitant of the periphery, is the site for the delivery of the contentful outcomes we derive from reading fiction. So, it is by virtue of the peripheral occurrence of, say, ‘Emma Woodhouse united the best blessings’ that, given what I have written about peripheral telling, we absorb the information that a particular bearer of ‘Emma’ united the best blessings of existence. Yet, my obsession with narrative peripheries may seem peculiar. After all, it is not the periphery but the storyworld that most immediately catches our attention—the fictional romantic engagement of that handsome young lady, say, rather than the fictional voice that describes it. What often seems to matter, then, are not the teller’s pretensions and his impartations, but the extent to which they paint a storyworld, in the aforementioned case a storyworld in which a bearer of ‘Emma’ did this and that. As already noted, this tension is only superficial. Our gaze may well typically be directed towards storyworlds, yet, for a Radical Fictionalist, our only access to them is mediated by what fictionally takes place in the peripheries. We envision a storyworld only on the basis of what we fictionally perceive to echo in a periphery concerned with describing (or, as the case may be, mis-describing) it. Accordingly, I devote this chapter to the aspects of the storyworld-periphery relationship that most immediately matter from the viewpoint of our storyworld-directed concerns: the extent to which peripheral telling may be trusted, whether it may Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics. Stefano Predelli, Oxford University Press (2020). © Stefano Predelli. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854128.001.0001

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6.2  Inconsistent Fictions  111 sometimes depict inconsistent storyworlds, and whether it paints a storyworld-picture on the basis of peripherally unstated content. My views here are not only consistent with Radical Fictionalism, but  they also strike me as interesting developments of the Radical Fictionalist distinction between storyworlds and periphery, and, to a large extent, of the Radical Fictionalist take on peripheral importation. None of this means that my hypotheses are the prerogative of Radical Fictionalism: in its general form, the storyworld-periphery duality is available also to those who disagree with the basic semantic tenets from chapters  2 and  3. Yet, what follows enriches my picture of Radical Fictionalism with theses which are not only its natural companions, but which, their brevity notwithstanding, strike me to be at least on the right track. In section 6.2, I begin my discussion with some comments on socalled inconsistent fictions, that is, on storyworlds allegedly peripherally truly described by a sentence and its negation. In sections 6.3 and 6.4, I move on to some further aspects of peripheral importation: section 6.3 discusses narrative unreliability, and section 6.4 addresses certain related aspects of storyworld-importation, with special attention to Lewis’ ‘Truth in Fiction’ (Lewis 1978). I conclude with a section on narrative closure (with some further comments on Lewis) and with a starred section on narrative levels.

6.2  Inconsistent Fictions The idea of inconsistent fictions has received a great deal of attention in the philosophical study of fictional discourse, probably due to the influence (and the limits) of possible-world approaches to storyworlds. In this section, I have no particular qualms with the very idea of inconsistent fiction. Rather, I aim at questioning a widespread casual attitude towards its nature and towards the facility with which it is allegedly generated.1 In order to simplify my presentation, I adapt Lewis’ informal distinction between blatant and venial storyworld inconsistencies (Lewis 1978). 1  For a small sample of the debate on inconsistent fiction see Lewis  1978, Currie  1990, Walton 1990, Byrne 1993, Alward 2012, Everett 2013, and Bourne and Caddick Bourne 2016.

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112  Reflex and Bone Structure I do so without further ado and with no attempt at sharpening that division, since my point is that of setting aside what are generally taken to be more easily tractable instances, namely venial cases such as the notorious location of Watson’s unique war wound. Watson’s injury is particularly venial, since the incompatibility in question ensues across different stories.2 Yet, I suppose, any sufficiently distant and not too crucial discrepancy may well end up being equally inconsequential for our understanding of fictional storyworlds, such as the inconstant number of Pozdnysheva’s children in different chapters of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata. (Or so I assume, as usual, change the examples if you disagree.) Let me then move on directly to apparently blatant scenarios. ‘There is nothing to stop anyone from telling a story about an elf who squares the circle’, declares Walton (Walton 1990: 64). In some sense, he must be right, since nothing stopped me from authoring the following Alphie the Elf short story: (6.1)  Alphie was an elf who squared the circle. The End. Yet, for a Radical Fictionalist, what nothing stopped me from doing was to author a story such that, fictionally, someone peripherally tokens the sentence-type ‘Alphie was an elf who squared the circle’, someone imparts that a bearer of ‘Alphie’ squared the circle, and all the rest. Something of this sort, far from being inconsistent, may even find actual reflections in actual everyday conversations. ‘The square of the hypotenuse is less than the sum of the squares of the other sides’, someone says; ‘yeah right, and I squared the circle’, I reply. Alphie’s teller may not even need to be such a sarcastic wise guy. He may sincerely have got his geometry mixed up, for instance. Indeed, Alphie the Elf will immediately be accepted as an exemplar of so-called inconsistent fiction only among philosophers, and only when it occurs, as it just did, as part of a philosophical discussion. That is, it will readily be taken at face value only when it is heard as the invitation to entertain 2  Inconsistency may most easily arise in cross-work comparisons, that is, in the case of what Walton calls ‘unofficial’ make-believe scenarios: ‘in the Odyssey, Odysseus . . . returns home. In the Inferno he does not. . . . We may take it to be fictional that a person speaks truly if he says “Odysseus . . . both did and did not return home” ’ (Walton 1990: 408). I leave aside this independently interesting phenomenon (and, for that matter, remotely related issues, such as the infamous ‘Holmes was smarter than Poirot’) throughout most of this book.

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6.2  Inconsistent Fictions  113 an inconsistent set of actual propositions, rather than as the peripheral discourse of a fictional teller. This is so because peripheral discourse may not passively be accepted as a description of its storyworld. Whenever its would-be storyworld seemingly turns out to be inconsistent, then, considerable pressures on peripheral telling are inevitable: our interpretation of fiction generally takes inconsistent telling as evidence of unreliability, rather than as an indication that what is fictionally being described falsifies the principle of non-contradiction.3 I do not wish to push this presumption to the status of inevitability, that is, to the status of a principle applicable to all sorts of superficially blatant inconsistencies. At least, I do not wish to do so before I spend a few additional words about exemplars of alleged inconsistency that are not mere philosophical concoctions or simple affairs such as my Waltoninspired Alphie. In this respect, whenever the students of allegedly inconsistent storyworld bother to confront actual manifestations of fiction, what appears to be an almost inevitable source of exemplars is postmodernist literature, of the kind that I am about to address. Moving then to an actual exemplar, can it be the case that (6.2)  Dale was standing at that door and (6.3)  Dale was not standing at that door both provide fictionally true descriptions of the storyworld in Clarence Major’s postmodernist Reflex and Bone Structure (Major 1975: 21)? That is, can it be the case that, in that storyworld, a bearer of ‘Dale’ was standing at a certain door, and, at the same time, that the same bearer of ‘Dale’ was not standing there? The ‘change of dominant from modernist to postmodernist fiction’, so we are told, consists in the fact that ‘intractable epistemological uncertainty becomes ontological plurality’ (McHale 1987: 11). Brian McHale does not provide clear hints about his understanding of ‘ontological 3 This suggestion echoes Derek Matravers’ ‘rejection strategy’, whereas my dismissal of venial inconsistency is consonant with his ‘disregarding strategy’ (Matravers 2014: 131).

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114  Reflex and Bone Structure plurality’. Be that as it may, any such plurality must uncontroversially be merely fiction, since the actual world is what it is and not something else. Still, metaphysical oddities may presumably be in place in fiction, and the notion of an ontologically disjoint storyworld may well instigate fruitful or at least entertaining musings: Dale was standing at the door in that one reality, a postmodernist may happily feign, but not in that other one.4 Let it then pass that Reflex’s storyworld is representable as two incompatible fictional realities. That is, for those who (unlike me) like to think of stories in terms of possible worlds, let it pass that Reflex’s storyworld is representable as the juxtaposition of two sets S1 and S2 of possible worlds, such that, for all worlds in S1, Dale was standing by the door, and, for all worlds in S2, he was not. If fictional actuality splits, so does fictional truth: (6.2) is fictionally true1 but (6.3) is fictionally true2, say. And, at least with proper indexing in place, the conjunction of (6.2) and (6.3) may well be true, in the sense that one conjunct is true1 and the other is true2. Traditionally and boringly, ‘postmodernist fiction does hold the mirror up to reality’. It is just that ‘reality, now more than ever before, is plural’ (McHale 1987: 39). And so, a rough threefold distinction of much that passes for inconsistent will serve as a motivation for my moderate scepticism about inconsistent storyworlds. (i) Distant and inconsequential peripheral clashes may be forgotten or simply left aside in our readings. We may hear that Watson’s unique wound was on his left leg, and, later on, that it was on his

4  The idea that fictional storyworlds may be characterized by what I call ‘metaphysical oddities’ is widespread. I take it on board without further ado, mostly as a term of contrast for my main topic in this section, namely prima facie storyworld-inconsistencies. Still, there are dissenters. Craig Bourne and Emily Caddick Bourne, for instance, provide a spirited defense of metaphysical constraints for storyworlds, mostly with an attention to matters of time in cinema (Bourne and Caddick Bourne 2016). Their interpretations of prima facie metaphysically deviant fictions are inventive and intriguing (I, for one, found their reading of Funny Games particularly suggestive, see Bourne and Caddick Bourne 2016: 84–9). But I am unsure about the reach of their argumentative strategy. Some interpretations of some fictions may well do away with violations of metaphysical dictates, but a stronger case needs to be mounted for the conclusion that no alternatives are admissible—or, at least, a non-question begging case needs to be made, that does not rely on the antecedent assumption of their possible world approach to fiction. An aside: Bourne and Caddick Bourne do not provide explanations for their take on particularity. From my viewpoint, their assumptions (such as that ‘Monk is a detective’ is true by virtue of ‘the activities of Adrian Monk in the world he inhabits’, Bourne and Caddick Bourne 2016: 17) are clearly incompatible with Radical Fictionalism.

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6.2  Inconsistent Fictions  115 right leg, without thereby concluding that Holmes’ storyworld is logically inconsistent—or, for that matter, without thereby concluding that it is metaphysically disjointed. Veniality is simply dealt with by leaving it aside, that is, by a process that Chapter 7 shall classify under the label of underreading. (ii) Blatant prima facie logical impossibilities such as the blunt affair in (6.1) may well be taken at their inconsistent face value by the gullible reader, but they will leave most of us with the unmistakable aftertaste left by lies and nonsense, that is, they will be approached by most of us as exemplars of unreliability. Anyone who reads between the lines, busies herself with the search for interesting hypotheses, or anyway attempts at a decent interpretation of Alphie will inevitably encounter a tantalizing alternative to blatant defiance of consistency: a clear, intelligible, and even easily imaginable storyworld may be represented from the equally understandable viewpoint of a confused, deceiving, or ignorant teller. (iii) In the case of Reflex, finally, blatancy is undeniable, and is sufficiently prominent to instil the suspect that it is not to be swept under the carpet. To boot, it characterizes an actual work of fiction, rather than an exemplar concocted to make a philosophical point—indeed, it ensues from a work of postmodernist fiction, that is, the sort of fiction that many cite as a real-life, non-artificially constructed collection of fictional inconsistencies. They have not, I dare say, got the point of that enterprise. In fact, postmodernist ontological plurality is the guardian of logical consistency in the face of superficial clashes. If Dale looked like standing by the door and not standing by the door, that is not because of an inconsistent storyworld, but because Reflex’s storyworld is fragmented into a multifaceted prism of different realities. Strange and, of course, merely fictional. But not inconsistent. The modesty of my conclusion should not go unnoticed. For one reason or another, some fictions may perhaps involve logically inconsistent storyworlds—because, say, that is what their authors intended, or because doing so makes for an exciting read, or because . . . (fill the dots

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116  Reflex and Bone Structure with your favourite theory of interpretation).5 Perhaps. Yet, at least in the absence of explicit authorial decrees or easily excitable audiences, further interpretive options are inevitably brought to light by the divide between my two fictional dimensions, namely storyworlds and peripheries. In a nutshell: anyone who follows Radical Fictionalism in accepting a two-fold fictional domain has at her disposal strategies that, at least in principle, allow for a flexible and negotiable approach to prima facie clashes with logic and common sense.

6.3  Reliability: Peripheral Lying In section 6.2, I already mentioned the possibility of peripheral unreliability. The term ‘unreliable narrator’ has been widely discussed and reinterpreted since its introduction by Wayne Booth (Booth 1961).6 My aim here is not that of participating in the narratological debate about this issue. As a result, I must candidly recognize that some of the issues that I collect in this section remain independently in need of more careful assessment and consideration. I do, in particular, keep my presentation concise by speaking of unreliable tellers as liars, even though many unreliable witnesses may honestly misrepresent their topic, in fiction to no lesser extent than in reality. Unreliability, I suppose, is unintelligible in the absence of the distinction between storyworld and periphery. Indeed, the point of unreliable telling seems to be precisely that of bringing that distinction to the foreground, and, as a result, to lessen the primacy of the storyworld to our interests. A peripheral liar, so narratologists tell us, ‘refocuses the 5  The number of sources on literary interpretation is arresting. I mention two (now slightly outdated) collections of essays as symptomatic of various philosophical approaches to this issue, Iseminger 1992 and Krausz 2002a. 6  Booth’s definition inherits the problematic nature of the concept of an implied author: ‘I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say the implied author’s norms), unreliable when he does not’ (Booth 1961: 158–9). See also Prince 1987, Toolan 1988, Currie 1995 and 2004, Phelan and Martin 1999, Cohn 2000, Porter Abbott 2002, Phelan 2007, and Fludernik 2009. Different types of unreliability have been distinguished in the narratological literature; see Lanser 1981 for the duality between unreliable and untrustworthy narrators, Nünning  1999 for the distinction between ‘moral and epistemological’ versions of unreliability, Olson 2003 for the contrast between fallible and untrustworthy narrators, and Phelan  2005 for a distinction between ‘reporting’, ‘interpreting’, and ‘evaluating’ tellers.

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6.3  Reliability: Peripheral Lying  117 reader’s attention on the narrator’s mental processes’ (Wall 1994: 23) and contributes to ‘characterizing a particular consciousness’ (Shen  1989: 309).7 In previous chapters, I emphasized the storyworld-periphery duality by speaking of peripheral tellers as disembodied, genderless, and ageless voices. I already began to soften this rhetorical emphasis when I started approaching the periphery not only from a semantic viewpoint, but also with a concern for fictional telling per se. Now, unreliability serves me well as an example of our reconstruction of an expressive voice, that is, as an example of our sense of peripheries as fictional domains occupied by minded, individual, temperamental, or unpredictable tellers—in Dan Shen’s words, as provinces inhabited by a ‘particular consciousness’. In actuality, there need be no overt signs of lying. Yet, in actuality, liars may and often do betray themselves. For instance, they sweat and blush, they too insistently protest their honesty, and/or they exaggerate inconspicuous details. Peripheral importation, an idea that I introduced in Chapter  4 with particular attention to matters of semantics and language use, smuggles in much of this as part of the teller’s psychology. Fictionally, just as in reality, liars may (though, alas, need not) leave clues. The ‘disembodied voice’ metaphor still partially applies: we do not, and cannot witness a peripheral teller’s blushing, for, even fictionally, there are no cheeks to go red. But we nevertheless fictionally witness a not so ‘disembodied’ speech, a psychology that insists, hesitates, or digresses.8 ‘Throughout Humbert’s narrative, alliteration abounds, often to comic effect’, notes a reader of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (Riggan  1981: 90). And a study of that other prototypical exemplar of unreliability, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, stresses how Stevens’ discourse shifts [from the formal ‘a certain degree of sorrow’] to the frank, plainspoken acknowledgment, ‘indeed—why should I not admit it?—at that moment my heart was breaking’.  (Phelan and Martin 1999: 98)

7  Phelan and Martin  1999 discusses unreliability in terms of the ‘distinction between experiencing-I and narrating-I’ (Phelan and Martin 1999: 89); see also Riggan 1981. 8  Ansgar Nünning writes of ‘implizite Zusatzinformationen’ (Nünning 1998: 6) and Bruno Zerweck speaks of ‘the narrator’s unintentional self-incrimination’ (Zerweck 2001: 156).

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118  Reflex and Bone Structure But it is not only a matter of style, as in one’s choice of register or rhythm, but also a question of what, fictionally, is being said. In Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, ‘Mick Carraway’s assertion of his honesty, after it is made several times, becomes suspect’ (Wall 1994). On other occasions, ‘the issue most central or relevant is passed in silence . . . while side-issues receive liberal commentary’ (Yacobi 1987: 34). In fiction to no lesser extent than in reality, some liars are excellent liars. Conversely, the most truthful and truth-telling speakers may, for whatever reason, blush, itch, or liberally comment on side-issues. The peripheral clues, if there are any, are thus defeasible: ‘there is no automatic linkage between textual incongruities and narratorial unreliability’, because ‘the same perceived tensions are always open to alternative principles or mechanisms of integration’ (Yacobi 2005: 110).9 Still, regardless of whether sufficiently dependable conclusions may or may not be reached, the proper site for debate remains shaped by actual psychology and/or pragmatics. If comic alliterations or insistent protestations strike you as worthy of consideration when it comes to Lolita or The Great Gatsby, it is because they are worthy of consideration when it comes to our actual assessment of a reporter’s trustworthiness—because, that is, actual psychology typically, though admittedly not inevitably, makes us speak that way when we lie. Indeed, part of the way in which we arrive at suspicions that the narrator is unreliable . . . is through the process of naturalizing the text, using what we know about human psychology and history to evaluate the probable accuracy of, or motive for, a narrator’s assertions.  (Wall 1994: 30)

Naturalization, a concept that Kathleen Wall borrows from Culler (Culler 1975a), is indeed an apt terminological choice. I take it to be synonymous with the peripheral importation of the psychology of speaking.

9  For analyses of unreliability in a reader-response framework see Fludernik 1993 and 2009, Nünning 1999, and Nünning 2005. In this framework, ‘there are no package deals in narrative, least of all between surface forms or features and their effects’ (Yacobi  2001: 223), and ‘the judgment of a narration as unreliable—or otherwise—is always an interpretive, hypothetical move’ (Yacobi 2001: 224).

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6.4  The Excesses of Storyworld Importation  119 And so, is Humbert Humbert a self-serving liar? Maybe the truth of the matter supports a negative answer—because Nabokov intended him to be a committed teller of his romantic tale, or because it is fruitful to take him at his word, or for some other reason entirely. But that is not the point here, since my concern is not literary criticism but a question of principle. In either case, the Radical Fictionalist appeal to peripheral importation makes its voice heard: if that is how the story goes, then some sort of explanation for his peripheral tone will need to be provided because, at least superficially, his manners are those of an actual inveterate deceiver.

6.4  The Excesses of Storyworld Importation In the last two chapters and in the previous section, I insisted on certain aspects of peripheral importation: a teller’s discourse inevitably peripherally conforms to certain actual semantic and pragmatic regularities, and, at least by default, reflects the psychological characteristics of actual speakers. In the current philosophical debate on fiction, an issue that has received a great deal of attention has to do not with peripheral importation but with storyworld importation. The idea is that storyworlds must inevitably be characterized by ‘content that is not there explicitly but that comes jointly from the explicit content and the factual background’ (Lewis 1978: 268). For instance, on this view, according to Sign Holmes lives nearer to Paddington than to Waterloo, even though ‘it is never stated or implied in the stories themselves’ that Baker Street fictionally bears the same spatial relations to London’s stations that it bears in actuality (Lewis 1978: 268). Lewis and common consensus agree that, if storyworlds are at all representable within a modal framework, they must be modelled as collections of possible worlds. As a result, certain questions turn out to be silly. For instance, asking ‘what is inspector Lestrade’s blood type?’ is silly because it is answered differently with respect to different candidates among ‘the worlds of Sherlock Holmes’ (Lewis  1978: 270). That is, in Lewis’ modal jargon, Holmes’ storyworld is compatible with possible worlds in which Lestrade’s blood is A positive and with possible worlds

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120  Reflex and Bone Structure in which it is of some other type. Independently, of course, there is nothing at all silly in the study of a policeman’s medical records, neither in actuality nor in many storyworlds. What is silly, for Lewis and for common sense alike, is not only a question that receives no answer from what is ‘stated or implied’ in the text, but also a question whose answer plays no role when it comes to Holmes’ or Lestrade’s adventures. The issue, to use a vague but serviceable term, is silly also because it is irrelevant. Yet, if relevance is what matters, it could well turn out that the relative locations of Baker Street, Paddington, and Waterloo must also be negotiated differently in what Lewis calls ‘the worlds of Sherlock Holmes’. That is, it could turn out that Sign’s predicament with railway stations is one of indeterminacy rather than importation, and that the quest for determinacy is simply silly. Whether this is the case is a matter to be assessed by a careful reading of Sign, rather than by philosophical investigation. For all I know, where Paddington happens to be may indeed turn out to be very much salient for our understanding of what we are fictionally told about Holmes’ exploits. Yet, my point is not directed towards Lewis’ choice of example, but towards a general assumption in his treatment of storyworld importation. The point is that, regardless of what is actually true, of what Doyle actually believed, or of what the Victorians actually took for granted, the relative location of Paddington and Baker Street may well remain unsettled.10 And in that case, in Lewis’ possible world jargon, some of the members in Sign’s storyworld are possible worlds in which Paddington is closer to Baker Street than Waterloo, and some are not. I shall not say more about relevance, or about what is relevant in Doyle’s stories. What is more interesting at this stage is not relevance per se, but rather the unquestionable role it, or at least something in its vicinity, plays in the economy of (actual and fictional) conversation. Take something that, when it comes to Sign, should not follow the destiny of Lestrade’s blood type or, for me, of much in London’s geography, that

10  My mention of truth, authorial belief, or widespread opinion is an allusion to Lewis’ alternative principles of importation (Lewis  1978; see also Walton’s contrast between the Reality Principle and the Mutual Belief Principle in Walton  1990). For discussions of related issues see among many Phillips 1999, Woodward 2011, and Friend 2017.

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6.4  The Excesses of Storyworld Importation  121 is, take something that is not ‘there explicitly’ but that is nevertheless relevant, in some intuitive sense of the term. Take, say, the fact that human beings do not fly, an actual fact that I suppose should be taken on board in order to understand Holmes’ movements in Sign’s storyworld. That people do not fly is, for very good reasons, not part of the content fictionally encoded in any of Watson’s sentences. For all I know, it is also never part of anything that, fictionally, is merely hinted or somehow indirectly conveyed by Watson’s use of language. But, in Watson’s fictional recollections to no lesser extent than in my actual reports about my everyday journeys, it is something that is relevantly presupposed. I devote the final paragraphs of this section to the discussion of this idea and of its significance for the issue of storyworld-importation. It goes without saying that sheer explicitness or lack thereof are not what lies at the bottom of the issues introduced above. As Lewis rightly notes, if anything needs to be imported, it should be something that is ‘never stated or implied in the stories themselves’ (Lewis 1978: 268, my italics). ‘Implied’ is appropriately vague. Still, if Lewis’ implied material includes, as it surely should, all that goes without saying, it is by no means obvious that the stories themselves do not imply that people do not fly, whereas it is questionable whether they imply anything about Paddington, and it is clear that they do not imply anything about blood types. Indeed, at least for me, the opposite is the case (as usual, substitute the example if you disagree with mine): something is presupposed in all of Watson’s telling, which clearly includes that human beings do not fly in the absence of mechanical aids. It is so at least in the sense that, fictionally, the good doctor would violate the restrictions on asserting that which is already conversational common ground, were he to append ‘not by autonomously flying’ to his descriptions of Holmes’ travels.11 And so, nothing needs to be imported within the storyworld that appeals to sources other than what is ‘stated or implied’. That is, the issue has to do not with Lewis’ principles of storyworld importation, but with the regularities that, in actuality to no lesser extent than is fiction, govern cooperative conversational exchanges.

11  My terminology is a deliberate allusion to (at least the bare bones of) Robert Stalnaker’s influential account of conversation (Stalnaker 1972, 1978, 2002, and 2014).

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122  Reflex and Bone Structure I should not make too much of these few stabs at Lewis, since most of what he writes about storyworld importation remains of independent interest, albeit from the viewpoint of Watson’s ‘implied’ or ‘unstated’ background assumptions. Why, for instance, take on board a human being’s inability to fly, when this is something that is clearly not part of the fictional common ground in a variety of other cases (magical tales, say, or science fiction)? Lewis’ alternative proposals may well continue to catch our attention, side by side with other alleged sources of importation, such as actual truth, actual authorial beliefs, or matters of genre and tradition. Still, from the viewpoint of Radical Fictionalism and of its approach to the storyworld-periphery divide, the point with all of the above is not what should be added on to Holmes’ storyworld, over and above Watson’s explicit or implied descriptions. It is, rather, another facet of peripheral importation, that is, importation in the fictional site of discourse, rather than in the equally fictional location of the events it describes. As Alex Byrne concisely puts it, ‘the principles that govern conversation contain the truth in fiction’ (Byrne 1993: 35). As repeatedly stressed, all of my examples are negotiable. But let it pass that, due to Doyle’s intentions, my interests, or whatever else may be of significance in this respect, it is unquestionably fictionally the case that, in Sign’s storyworld, human beings do not fly. The issue, I suggested, need not be a question of storyworld-importation, that is, an enrichment of whatever a reliable teller ‘states or implies’ with content derived from this or that actual source—Doyle, common sense, actual fact, or what have you. Once again, the issue primarily pertains to the fictional characteristics of peripheral telling, rather than, as with Lewis, to storyworld-fictional truths. I, for one, came to the conclusion that Holmes had to travel by horse or train because, in my view, Watson’s telling presupposed that he could not fly. And I came to this conclusion because it seemed to me that his discourse took on the actual characteristics of a certain type of report, one in which explicit mention of Holmes’ inability to fly would result in spectacular violations of obvious conversational principles. I may in the end be wrong about this. But the type of evidence to which I appealed, namely the (peripherally importable) properties of actual discourse, remains appropriate.

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6.5  Russell Vipers and Closure  123

6.5  Russell Vipers and Closure Actual discourse is generally not a collection of unrelated utterances: ‘London is in England, propositional logic is decidable, and hydrogen is an element’, though syntactically well-formed and semantically true, is unlikely to strike us as a typical conversational contribution. Much of fictional discourse follows suit. It does so, in particular, when it comes to  narrative fiction. Without wishing to intervene in the surprisingly crowded debate about narrativity, in this section I rest satisfied with noting certain characteristics of at least some instances of fictional discourse, this time with attention to their discursive structure: narratives ‘go somewhere’, or, at least, they do so by default. A widely used term for at least some aspects in this metaphorical sense of direction is closure. How stories close is an interpretive issue which, here as before, may depend upon authorial intentions, readers’ expectations, genre, or tradition. Still, regardless of what closure exactly amounts to, it seems fairly clear what it entails in scenarios such as Sign or Adventures of the Speckled Band. There, fictional discourse closes only if it reliably identifies the perpetrator and her methods and motives.12 Armed with these vague but workable preliminaries, I proceed once again to the discussion of Lewis, this time with a focus on his analysis of the following literary digression in an article about snakes: in The Adventures of the Speckled Band, Sherlock Holmes solves a ­murder mystery by showing that the victim has been killed by a Russell’s viper that has climbed up a bell-rope. What Holmes did not realize was that Russell’s viper is not a constrictor.  (Gans 1970: 93)

Lewis officially announces that he shall ‘keep neutral’ about Carl Gans’ (facetious, I suppose) suggestion that, according to Speckled Band, Holmes reaches a mistaken conclusion and ‘the case remains open’

12  On closure see Kermode 1966, Rabkin 1973, Torgovnick 1981, Reising 1997, and Porter Abbott 2002; see also Girard 1965 and Friedman 1966.

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124  Reflex and Bone Structure (Lewis 1978: 271).13 (Incidentally, he also declares his neutrality when it comes to what he takes to be a ‘more important example’ of the same phenomenon, namely the ‘psychoanalysis of fictional characters’. I disagree with Lewis’ sense of analogy here, but I postpone my reasons about this to Chapter 7.) Lewis’ declared commitment to neutrality is tongue in cheek: as he concedes, ‘we may well look askance at this reasoning’, and Gans’ argument, if taken seriously, would ‘arise vigorous objections’. These are more than reasonable admissions, since spectacular counterevidence (derived from any of the other sources I mentioned thus far, and probably from many others I did not cover) would be needed for the surprising conclusion that, according to Speckled Band, Holmes got it wrong. For Lewis, the key step in the rejection of Gans’ argument involves a principle of storyworld importation other than his original Analysis 1: rather than actual fact, so he hypothesizes, the untold that characterizes a storyworld relies on ‘the beliefs that generally prevailed in the community where the fiction originated’ (Lewis 1978: 272). Since the Victorians believed that Russell’s vipers actually climb, so Lewis reasons, it is fictionally the case that the snake did indeed climb the rope, and hence that, according to Speckled Band, the case was solved. I already mentioned something related to this principle and to Lewis’ other Analyses in section  6.3, where I spoke of peripheral presuppositions. In what follows, I continue with my discussion of storyworlds from the peripheral viewpoint. Pace Lewis, so I argue, it is not at all the prevailing zoological beliefs of Victorian England that spell trouble for Gans’ hypothesis. Neither, for that matter, are actual truths or Doyle’s beliefs. What matters are not actual factors that ought to be imported within Speckled Band’s storyworld but, rather, a characteristic of Watson’s peripheral discourse, namely its closure. My discussion proceeds in two stages. The first returns to a theme that I already introduced a few paragraphs ago, and that I will continue to discuss in Chapter 7: the idea of underreading, and its related appeal to what is relevant and what may be left on the backburner whenever we ‘read for the plot’. Imagine then that the actual anatomy of Russell’s 13  Note that, oddly, Gans’ passage begins with the intimation that, according to Adventures, Holmes solves a murder mystery, but never mind about that here.

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6.5  Russell Vipers and Closure  125 vipers is a widely known fact, that it was known to Doyle, and that it was known since long before Doyle’s time. Is any of this sufficient for the conclusion that Watson had fictionally been recounting one of Holmes’ rare failures? It is not, for the same reason why, shifting to a notorious example, Knightley and Harriet lead the way during an outing in June, even though Emma’s teller describes ‘the orchard in blossom’ at that time. Tellers, just like us, may get it wrong, and, I suppose, Emma’s teller did indeed get it wrong in this case, since the English orchards have long ceased to blossom at the beginning of summer. Or else, more promisingly for the cases of both Speckled Band and Emma, they, just like us, casually add a bit of colour to their speeches with details that do not make a storyworld point. Actual speakers may do something not that different. You know the type: ‘we climbed up Filippo Brunelleschi’s dome’, they say. To inform us that they climbed up the dome may well have been their main point, but part of their aim was to show off their Italian pronunciation or their artistic education. Neither Emma’s teller nor Watson are such fictional show offs. Still, they may feel justified to intersperse their discourse with material that, not unlike mention of the dome’s architect, has more to do with them and their peripheries, rather than with what they fictionally describe. From the actual authorial viewpoint that designs their fictional speech, this much covers a terrain that ranges from so-called effete-du-reel to plain allegorical colour.14 So, the rope-climbing perpetrator is not just ‘some sort of snake’, since calling it a Russell’s viper makes the point more vibrantly, and it brings to the periphery the tone of someone who knows. And the orchards are alleged to bloom because it is peripherally apt to say that they do. The small green apples of late June would matter as little for that storyworld stroll, but they would colour it with different overtones. All of this, at this stage, is just to say that the snake’s species and the late blossoms could at least in principle be glossed over without much fuss. But, when it comes to Holmes’ viper in particular, there is a further reason for thinking that it should be left aside—that is, a reason why Watson’s zoological allusion (and Holmes’ ensuing failure) ought not to 14  Effete-du-reel, for Roland Barthes, concerns ‘notations with no function (not even the most indirect)’, a kind of ‘narrative luxury’ (Barthes 1986: 141).

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126  Reflex and Bone Structure be incorporated within Speckled Band’s storyworld. That reason has to do with the phenomenon mentioned above, namely closure. So, the case with Emma’s orchard may perhaps remain debatable, and, with the lighthearted tone appropriate for these minutiae, it has indeed been debated (Sutherland 1996). The diatribe about the incriminated snake, though, encounters non-negotiable bedrock: if that reptile had indeed been unable to climb the rope, Watson’s narrative periphery would have remained unclosed. And I, for one, would need much more than actual zoology or prevailing beliefs in order to fall for an open ending of this sort. As usual, authorial intentions, the intriguing features of some alternative reading, or any other interpretive hypothesis may in the end push towards conclusions of a different sort. Yet, here as before, my point has to do not with the nitty-gritty of this or that particular example, but with the methodological primacy of peripheral considerations. And so, the normal course of events in Speckled Band’s storyworld surely envisions the possibility that some crimes occasionally go unsolved, and that they may go unsolved even when Holmes is involved. But the normal structure of Watson’s peripheral telling does not allow for failures of this sort. His kind of telling is in principle something that ‘goes somewhere’, that is, in this case, something that concerns itself with yet another successful conclusion. There is much in all of the above that remains unanalysed, first and foremost the idea that the fictional narration of Holmes’ failure would remain unclosed. The reasons why this is so may well have to do with important aspects of actual fiction-making that I do not attempt to approach in this book, such as the questions of genre or tradition. So, as one may casually put it, a disappointing failure may perhaps appropriately close a modernist novel of the coming-to-age genre, but it would be out of place in a detective story. Perhaps. The modest point, for me, is that if, for one reason or another, the solution of the crime is what fictional telling ought to address, it behoves to Watson, the peripheral teller, to let us know. And it seems clear that, for one reason or another, finding out who did it and how is part and parcel of the whole enterprise with Speckled Band. Here as before, then, the issue has to do with that inevitable companion to Radical Fictionalism, namely the periphery and all that comes with it. In this case: fictional discourse eventually closes.

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*6.6  Quoted Discourse and Narrative Levels  127

*6.6  Quoted Discourse and Narrative Levels It is fictionally true in The Brothers Karamazov’s storyworld that Ivan utters (6.5)  listen, Alyosha and (6.6)  the Grand Inquisitor passes by the cathedral, because Dostoevsky’s teller fictionally inscribes (6.7)  ‘listen, Alyosha’ and (6.8) ‘the Grand Inquisitor passes by the cathedral’ (Dostoevsky 1880) and because, as far as I can tell, he is a reliable reporter of other people’s speech. Peripherally, then, the quotational terms in (6.7) and (6.8) are fictionally being employed by the teller, and, as a result, certain types, those in (6.5) and (6.6), are fictionally being tokened within the storyworld. (Leave aside once and for all the issues related to the fact that, not knowing Russian, I am not appealing to Dostoevsky’s text but to its English translation, see Chapter 4). In Karamazov’s storyworld, (6.5) and (6.6) are tokened in relative proximity, as parts of Ivan’s conversation with Alyosha. Yet, fictionally, they are not on a par. And, as a result, they are not on a par for us: (6.6), but not (6.5), is part of a nested (or ‘embedded’) narrative. It has been suggested that one could . . . label any character whose direct discourse is presented a  narrator. One definition of ‘embedded narrative’ would then be ‘­character’s discourse’.  (Nelles 1997: 122)

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128  Reflex and Bone Structure Yet, surely, this misses the point of nesting. As Mieke Bal remarks in relation to a different example, ‘though Ottiline at least temporarily speaks, she does not narrate: what she says is not a story’ (Bal 1985: 135).15 Similarly, it is fictional that Ivan engages in plain discourse when he tokens (6.5), but it is fictional that he does not do so when he tokens the types in (6.6). There, he fictionally narrates, that is, he tells a story. Throughout this book, I do not confront the necessary and sufficient conditions for fiction-making. For one reason or another, so I assumed, Dostoevsky engaged in fiction-making when he authored Karamazov, but not when he wrote journalism or when he signed a check. At least when it comes to Ivan’s predicament, fiction follows suit: due to his intentions, his relationships with certain practices, or what have you, Ivan fictionally puts on his fiction-making hat when he tokens (6.6). At the very least, all of the usual clues seem to indicate that he does so. There is, for one thing, fairly explicit storyworld evidence: ‘I made up this poem in prose’, Ivan tells his younger brother. And there is, in this case, the non-insignificant fictional size of the passages that include (6.6): whereas (6.5) occurs as a short snippet in a conversational exchange with Alyosha, (6.6) is part of a long, almost uninterrupted tirade.16 Paratextual hints also do their work. In this case, we even have a fictional title for Ivan’s fiction-making outburst, ‘The Grand Inquisitor’. Given all of this, it is a result of Ivan’s token of (6.6) that, fictionally, someone tells a story about a cardinal by the name of ‘Grand Inquisitor’ who sends almost a hundred heretics to their death. That is, according to the Radical Fictionalist approach, it is fictional in Karamazov that Ivan displays ‘Grand Inquisitor’ as a name-type and that he displays (6.6) as a sentence-type, but it is not fictional in Karamazov that he thereby employs a name and a sentence. When Ivan fictionally engages in straight talk, he bears all the responsibility of any old speaker and user of names. When he fictionally tokens (6.5), for instance, he fictionally encodes a proposition by virtue of his role in a chain of transmission leading back to his brother’s baptism. And yet, he remains blissfully unrelated to any launching or transmitting episode that would fictionally make his token

15  On embedded fictions and possible world accounts see Le Poidevin 1995; for interesting comments about fiction within fiction and modal logic see Hayaki 2009. 16  See for instance Moger 1985 and Kozloff 1988.

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*6.6  Quoted Discourse and Narrative Levels  129 of ‘Grand Inquisitor’ a token of a proper name. Fictionally, (6.6) is a mere sentence-type, and, fictionally, it is only fictional that it is a sentence. A couple of comments about all of this are appropriate from the Radical Fictionalist viewpoint. The first has to do with a distinction that, as I explain below, is not clearly highlighted in the current debate on nesting and embedded narratives. It is, furthermore, a distinction that contrasts cases of embedding with a phenomenon upon which I shall briefly return in Chapter 7, where I elect Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (James 1898) as my guiding exemplar. The phenomenon in question has to do with the fact that James’ novella is a so-called framed narrative. And the distinction to which I just alluded has to do with the fact that nesting and framing are different phenomena. My polemical tone in the foregoing paragraph must be tempered by the fact that ‘the term “frame” is currently used in many different ways in the discussion of narrative’ (Porter Abbott 2002: 29). Still, at least in introductory and popular accounts, classic exemplars of nesting such as One Thousand and One Nights appear side by side with framed tales such as Turn. If there is a contrast, in those accounts, it is grounded on an idea of interpretive importance: on the one hand, there are framing narratives like those in The Decameron and the Thousand and One Nights that have little impact on the embedded narratives they frame and, on the other hand, [there are] framing narratives like that of The Turn of the Screw that can have a significant effect on its embedded narrative.  (Porter Abbott 2002: 29)

In The Turn of the Screw, the frame’s narrator (the first-person voice that James presents in his Prologue) goes to some lengths to describe Douglas’ recovery of a manuscript ‘in a locked drawer’ (James  1898). We have, here, all the clues of fictional reporting, rather than fictional storytelling: what the manuscript contains may perhaps be the outpouring of a deranged and unreliable mind, but, in Turn’s storyworld, it is not fiction. As a result, when Douglas fictionally reads that document with his characteristic ‘fine clearness’ (James 1898: 14), he and his audience fictionally pick up ‘Flora’ and ‘Miles’ and all the rest, and they are thus in the fictional position of employing those name-types as proper names. Not so with Alyosha and his brother’s tale (or, in that other classic instance of

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130  Reflex and Bone Structure nesting, with Scheherazade). Fictionally, ‘Grand Inquisitor’ is not a proper name since, fictionally, Ivan is, at that juncture, a fiction-maker, not a reporter. And, fictionally, Alyosha (or Dmitri, or Ivan) bear no more semantically interesting relationships to ‘Grand Inquisitor’ than we actually bear to ‘Alyosha’, ‘Dmitri’, or ‘Ivan’. In a nutshell, the telling of the main events in The Turn of the Screw is merely framed. What occurs as part of Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor speech, on the other hand, is a story within a story, a prototypically nested affair.17 A related query arises in relation to true nesting, in my sense of the term. In my presentation of Radical Fictionalism, I occasionally stressed the merely fictional nature of much that is fictional: in these cases, being fictional is not a particular way of being, but simply amounts to nothing. Accordingly, I sometimes objected to those who hypothesize that the merely fictional may ‘spill out’ onto actuality, as in the view of allegedly merely fictional languages that I rejected in Chapter 4. Still, in the case now under discussion, the ‘spilling out’ metaphor may once again raise its ugly head. The Grand Inquisitor, so I argued, ensues from Ivan’s merely fictional fiction-making efforts, and is thus a merely fictional fiction. And yet, The Grand Inquisitor may seem to be a very actual piece of fiction-making, authored by an equally actual author—to boot, the very same actual individual who also authored the much larger novel The Brothers Karamazov. This temptation should be resisted as a matter of metaphysics and of interpretation alike. Metaphysically speaking, Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor is not Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, since the former is the result of a merely fictional-making effort, whereas the latter ensues from a fleshand-blood Russian writer. Similarly, from the viewpoint of what is fictional, Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor is not Dostoevsky’s because, colourfully speaking, Ivan’s fictional teller starts with a word, whereas Dostoevsky’s teller begins with a quotation mark. That is, fictionally, Ivan spins a tale, whereas, as a result of Dostoevsky’s display, a teller fictionally tells the tale of Ivan’s spinning. And this difference shows. Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor is the fictional outburst of a fictionally opinionated, scepticism-prone middle son, and all of this presumably matters when it comes to that 17  On nesting and the related issue of metalepsis see for instance Herman 1997, Malina 2002, Fludernik 2003 and 2009, and Pelletier 2003.

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6.7  Where Am I Now?  131 tale’s merely fictional significance. But Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor is the product of a Russian intellectual with an interest in human psychology, and its actual interpretation does not ensue from Ivan’s fictional words, but from the peripheral reporting of Ivan’s fiction-making effort.

6.7  Where Am I Now? The Radical Fictionalist picture from chapters 2 and 3 put a particular emphasis on the distinction between storyworlds and periphery. Accordingly, in the chapters that followed, I explored the Radical Fictionalist approach to fictional language by paying particular attention to that divide, and by repeatedly stressing the significance of peripheral telling. Peripheral telling continued to be prominent in this chapter, where I discussed a few aspects of narrative fiction from its viewpoint. Some (though not all) of my conclusions are neither inevitable outcomes of Radical Fictionalism nor its prerogatives. And so, Radical Fictionalists may resist some of what I have proposed, and readers sympathetic to my  comments on peripheral lies, postmodernist pluralism, or nesting may refuse to subscribe to the Radical Fictionalist framework that I employed. Still, if I got things right, what I suggested is not only consistent with Radical Fictionalism, but it is also in an independently better shape than other views currently on the market. Side by side with my hypotheses about fictional inconsistency, unreliability, and all the rest, this chapter also provided a few initial hints about a kind of discourse directly responsible for a fuller analysis of these topics, namely critical discourse. I turn to a Radical Fictionalist analysis of it in the next two chapters.

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7 The Turn of the Screw Critical Discourse

7.1 Preliminaries During a conversation about Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw (hereinafter Turn for short), you inquire about the domestic arrangements at Bly before the governess’ arrival. (7.1)  Mrs Grose had been placed at the head of Bly, I reply. (7.1) is, I suppose, faithful to Turn. After all, Turn’s teller ­fictionally reports that (Douglas reports that) the children’s guardian ‘had placed at the head of their little establishment an excellent woman, Mrs. Grose’ (James 1898: 12). There is much that lies behind my confidence, over and above the evidence provided by James’ display. Assumptions about reliability, directness, or presupposition may well have had a role to play.1 And yet, when it comes to (7.1) and many other questions of faithfulness, the general consensus among casual readers is remarkably solid. At least in part, our agreement ensues from peripheral importation. And so, given certain shared assumptions about language, psychology, or common sense, you, I, and, I suppose, James concur that, in Turn’s storyworld, a bearer of ‘Grose’ performed the sort of tasks appropriate for the maintenance of an old country mansion. 1  Already at this stage, their mutual relationships may result from an interpretive balancing act: ‘It is time to expose the fiction that there must necessarily be a core to support the superstructure. The various fictional truths generated by a work may be mutually dependent, none of them generated without assistance from others. There may be no primary fictional truth. . . . The interpreter must go back and forth among provisionally acceptable fictional truths until he finds a convincing combination’ (Walton 1990: 174). Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics. Stefano Predelli, Oxford University Press (2020). © Stefano Predelli. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854128.001.0001

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7.1 Preliminaries  133 These conclusions do not apply only to explicit retellings such as my display of (7.1). They also characterize that form of silent retelling which we commonly describe by an appropriately ambiguous expression: our reading of, say, Turn. Our reading, in the sense of the process by which we follow and decipher the tokens on the page, is also a reading in the sense that it takes place against the hypotheses to which I have alluded, and engenders an (in this case relatively uncontroversial) picture of Turn’s storyworld. And so, my, your, and in all likelihood James’ readings of Turn converge on (7.1), in the sense that, were we to display that sentence-type as part of Turn-talk, we would agree that we had spoken faithfully. Still, there are at least two reasons why this optimism is not the last word on the matter. The first ought to be obvious from my choice of Turn: widespread consensus does not amount to universal agreement, as  witnessed by the notorious crux that, for casual readers, seems to exhaust the ambiguities in James’ novella.2 The second has to do with the fact that, one way or another, not all of us rest satisfied with the uncritical acceptance of matters that everyday reading happily takes as settled. For these reasons, fiction (and literary narrative fiction in particular) is accompanied by a noteworthy type of ancillary discourse, namely critical discourse. The protagonists of this chapter are the aspects of critical discourse that, in my view, benefit from a Radical Fictionalist analysis. But first, mostly as a term of contrast, I begin in section 7.2 with an independent type of critical concern, which I subsume under the label of educated naturalization. To a large extent, educated naturalization interacts with what I called ‘everyday reading’, and busies itself with the sort of lingering disagreements that persist even among moderately intelligent readers, such as the diatribe between apparitionist and non-apparitionist readings of Turn. Its focus is, in a sense, the source of peripheral importation, that is, the actual aspects of history, language, or human psychology which we deem worthy of significance within this or that fictional periphery. 2  The crux in question has to do with the choice between so-called ‘apparitionist’ readings, according to which ghosts appear (and hence exist) in Turn’s storyworld, and ‘non-apparitionist’ interpretations, according to which the governess hallucinates—see later for further details.

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134  The Turn of the Screw: Critical Discourse So, in and of itself, much of literary criticism falls within the province of straightforwardly factual discourse, and hence outside the remit of Radical Fictionalism. Not all of it, though. As I explain in section 7.3, critics ostensibly in pursuit of educated naturalization occasionally abandon fully propositional, factual talk and engage in what I call critical retelling. From a Radical Fictionalist perspective, then, some of their contributions constitute a kind of retelling that is in some respects parallel to my display of (7.1) as part of Turn-talk. But only ‘in some respects’. Much that I discuss under the label of ‘critical retelling’ may well manifest a concern for faithfulness, but not all. Unlike plain vanilla retelling, some forms of critical retelling pursue an agenda other than faithfulness, and, as a result, they promote readings that common sense and everyday consensus may find surprising, if not utterly preposterous. I discuss them in section 7.4, where I describe the relevant aspects of critical discourse in terms of biased retelling.

7.2  From Educated Naturalization to Critical Retelling Having been exposed to the academic literature in semantics, I have become accustomed to speaking of interpretation when it comes to utterly unremarkable conversational circumstances, as when I say that I interpret my neighbours’ remarks about gardening. But that is quasitechnical jargon, and, normally, ‘we should note how odd it is even to speak of interpretation in a conversational context’ (Lamarque 2002: 288). By the same token, it would be stretching everyday terminology to express my commitment to, say, (7.1) by labelling it as the result of my interpretation of Turn. The adequacy and relevance of (7.1), after all, may well be too central to so-called normal reading to deserve that lofty connotation. As mentioned, the point of choosing Turn as my exemplar has to do with the fact that it invites interpretive issues that are likely to catch the attention of even moderately attentive casual readers. The crux is notorious: does the governess hallucinate when she reports seeing Quint and Jessel, or does she reliably describe the whereabouts of supernatural

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7.2  From Educated Naturalization  135 apparitions? So, although I would resist describing (7.1) as my interpretation of Turn, I would not object to such a characterization of, say, (7.2)  the governess thought that she saw a man on the tower, but nobody was on the tower at that moment. In and of itself, this widely cited exemplar of contested interpretation is unexciting, at least in the sense that it remains in the tame vicinity of everyday reading. It is, in particular, a crux that is generally answered on the basis of the same type of considerations that steer our less daring commitment to (7.1). And so, this or that detail in Turn is being highlighted, which allegedly guides the everyday criteria of importation in the directions of apparitionist, or, as the case may be, non-apparitionist readings. Much of so-called secondary literature follows suit and aims at promoting the sort of educated naturalization towards which I gesture in the following paragraphs. Fictions are intentional, cultural, and historical products, and I see no principled obstacles in approaching them partly from the perspective of the actual minds that concocted them, and of the actual background against which they emerged.3 And so, James’ actual inspirations may help us to detect hints we had not noticed before. For instance, his declared predilection for the ghost story, flanked by the intriguing resemblances between Quint’s phantom and end-of-the-century paranormal lore, may give the apparitionists reasons to rejoice.4 But it is James’ display that catches most of the critics’ naturalizing attention. It does so because that display provides the primary material for the interpretation of Turn’s periphery and, eventually, of its storyworld. 3  I see no principled obstacles even from the viewpoint of anti-intentionalist and/or relativist takes on interpretation. Even if, in the end, the best available interpretation is the one that serves you best, you would be ill-advised to simply dismiss the views of someone of James’ stature—just as, say, you would not want to disregard the enologists’ recommendation when choosing the wines for your dinner party. 4  Regarding James’ liking of supernatural tales, see James 1917: xvii. As for James and paranormal literature see Roellinger  1949, Sheppard  1974, or Beidler  1989. Biographical (Wilson 1934, Cargill 1956) and/or historical evidence (Cargill 1956, Cranfill and Clark 1965) should nevertheless temper the apparitionists’ confidence. For comparisons of Turn with other sources from actual literary history see also Feuerlicht 1959 or Heilman 1961; for a useful guide to the history of interpretations of Turn see Parkinson 1991.

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136  The Turn of the Screw: Critical Discourse A convinced apparitionist may then note how, in using words such as ‘atonement’, James’ teller ‘is attaching to the governess the quality of saviour’ (Heilman 1948: 184). Others may focus on structural features of peripheral telling, such as Turn’s paragraph breaks or certain aspects in its framed organization.5 Plain textual ambiguities also inevitably catch the critic’s attention: ‘No more, no more, no more! I shrieked to my visitant as I tried to press him against me . . .’ What does she mean by ‘him’? Miles or her ‘visitant’?  (West 1964: 286; see also Rubin 1964).6

Name-types, with their actual origins and reverberations, often come to the fore. So, for Robert Heilman even the names themselves have a representative quality, as those of James’ characters often do: Miles—the solder, the archetypical male; Flora—the flower, the essential female . . .  (Heilman 1948: 178–9)

And, for Eric Solomon, the housekeeper’s fictional name is no exception: someone, the governess thinks, is practising upon her. But who? She does not know. ‘There was but one sane inference: someone had taken a liberty rather gross’. Even Dr Watson would catch the clue. (Solomon 1964: 240)7

Note how the critics’ discourse largely proceeds with the straightforwardness and directness apt for academic discourse: James, his background, and his text interact with peripheral importation, and eventually yield interesting hypotheses about his storyworld and periphery. Whenever this exercise moves beyond the trivialities of everyday reading, it steers the reader’s attention towards less manifested portions of 5  On the role of James’ frame, see Stoll 1948 and Beidler 1993. On the organization of chapters in Turn see Costello 1960. 6  See also the analyses of the different editions of Turn in the essays in Kimbrough 1966. 7  Also ‘Mrs. Grose—whose name, like the narrator’s title, has virtually allegorical significance—is the commonplace mortal’ (Heilman 1948: 175).

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7.3  Critical Retelling and Underreading  137 the periphery, that is, towards presumably relevant features that are likely to go unnoticed. This feature of critical discourse has aptly been described by Frank Sibley in his discussion of pictorial interpretation: sometimes . . . we are drawing attention to features which may have gone unnoticed by an untrained or insufficiently attentive eye or ear: . . . ‘Did you notice the figure of Icarus in the Breughel? It is very small’ . . . ‘Notice how much darker he has made the central figure . . .’  (Sibley 1959: 443)

In our case: notice how the teller uses ‘atonement’ and notice how ‘Miles’ has martial overtones. And also: observe that there is never any evidence that anybody but the governess sees the ghosts.  (Wilson 1934: 387)

pay attention to the ‘eccentric nature’ of the governess’ father (Goddard 1957), and do not dismiss the fact that ‘it is [the governess]—always she herself—who sees the lurking shapes’ (Kenton 1924: 252). As mentioned, then, critical discourse often happily conforms to the dictates of plain factual speech, and hardly gives Radical Fictionalism any reason for excitement. Indeed, much of what I have mentioned pertains to James, the paranormal lore, or, at most, those portions of his periphery that are naturally assessed by appealing to James’ display. Yet, even the relatively tame snippets that I have cited in this section contain elements of a different mode of critical discourse. I call it ‘critical retelling’, and I propose a Radical Fictionalist analysis of it in the next section.

7.3  Critical Retelling and Underreading Here are two examples from the critical literature on James that highlight with shameless clarity the retelling mode of critical discourse: Mrs Grose has already risen from maid to housekeeper—why not to governess? Her obstacle is this young lady . . . [Mrs Grose’s] curtsy is ironic.  (Solomon 1964: 238–9)

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138  The Turn of the Screw: Critical Discourse and so she goes down to Bly, this slip of a girl, and finds herself no longer a  poor parson’s daughter but the head of a considerable country establishment.  (Goddard 1957: 7)

This is academic literary criticism, since neither Solomon nor Goddard were in the business of fiction-making when they wrote these passages. Still, although their eventual aim was that of making serious comments about Turn (and perhaps to indirectly assert some proposition or other about that novella), their discourse in these passages parallels the retelling in which I engaged when I tokened (7.1), or, for that matter, when I ventured (5.1) as part of my report on An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge in Chapter 5. And so, in accordance with the Radical Fictionalist take on these examples, Solomon does not put forth any proposition in the passage above, since (7.3)  Mrs Grose had already risen from maid to housekeeper is not a sentence and encodes no proposition whatsoever. Rather, he pursues his interpretive agenda by making it fictional that someone employs ‘Grose’ as in Turn’s periphery, and by making it fictional that he thereby puts forth a true proposition about the bearer of that name. In Chapter 5, I characterized this sort of retelling as doubly deferential. For one thing, a reteller’s tokens of ‘Grose’ fictionally intervene in a chain or transmission that originates with James’ teller, and thereby achieve a fictional effect of co-reference. For another, deference characterizes the reteller’s commitment to a fictionally truthful description of the storyworld. As a result, if Solomon is on the right track, his reteller fictionally puts forth a true proposition about a certain woman, namely the proposition that she had risen from maid to housekeeper. In the ­terminology from Chapter 5, if Solomon’s reading is at all worthy of consideration, that is because his display of (7.3) is faithful to Turn. The boundaries of this critical retelling may well be a vague affair. For one thing, much of what I cited in section 7.2 smuggles bits of retelling side by side with straightforwardly proposition-encoding affairs. For another, explicit forms of retelling, as in many so-called ‘critical

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7.3  Critical Retelling and Underreading  139 introductions’ to the classics, often come so close to everyday readings as not to deserve the highbrow connotations that characterize critical interpretations. Yet, when it comes to Solomon’s and Goddard’s suggestions, something over and above plain summary lies behind their efforts. As I explain below, their retelling still pursues a Sibleyan programme, albeit in a form different from what Sibley envisioned. I rest satisfied with a few relatively common-sense remarks about the reasons for critical retelling. For one thing, some fictions are complex and lengthy affairs. For another, everyday reading is often, and perhaps inevitably a somewhat distracted affair, so that ‘it is not uncommon for large parts of a novel to go virtually unread’ (Kermode 1983: 138). The result is what has been described by a label with intriguing connotations: common reading often results in underreading (Porter Abbott  2002: 79–81). Critical retelling plays an informative role when it compensates for our lack of attention, and when it makes us observe. Note how the governess is suddenly burdened with considerable responsibility, and note how Grose has reasons for resentment, the critics intimate. But, in this case, they do so not in the form of explicit exhortations, but by mentioning this or that fictional feature, and by making it a prominent part of their retelling. ‘Prominent’ is appropriate: part of the point with critical retelling lies in its raising to salience that which we may have considered to be marginal. And so, fictions are complex affairs not only in the sense that they fictionally provide a wide variety of details, but also in the sense that what is fictionally told may be of more or less immediate relevance for what Peter Brook’s describes as ‘reading for the plot’ (Brooks 1992). Everyday reading is a process that accepts this but distrusts that, and that focuses on this but easily passes over that. In our underreading, we skip the description of the weather or the most tedious depictions of interior detail, and we move on to what we take to be the storyworld’s core.8 In doing so, we may miss important clues: fictions which, on a casual 8  The contrast between cores and margins is widely discussed in the narratological literature, as in the distinctions between ‘nuclei’ vs ‘catalyzers’ (Barthes 1974), between ‘subsidiary’ and ‘structuring’ elements (Culler 1975b), or between ‘constituent’ and ‘supplementary’ portions (Chatman 1980). See also the discussion of the ideas of ‘story skeleton’ (Shank 1996) and of ‘masterplot’ (Porter Abbott  2002: 42–6). These distinctions may bear a relation with the vague ideas of ‘adaptations’ and ‘versions’ (in turn related to classic narratological ideas such as the structuralists’ fabula, see for instance Herrnstein Smith 1980, Culler  1981, Bal  1985,

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140  The Turn of the Screw: Critical Discourse reading, appear indifferent with respect to issues as important as the status of the governess’ visions, may in fact contain the key to their resolution. Critical retelling, then, makes us notice by making prima facie marginal details sufficiently prominent. It does so in any of the ways in which actual discourse may achieve rhetorical effects of that sort—by repeating the point, say, or by making it explicit. The workings of actual Quality and Relevance (in the sense of Grice  1999) do the rest. In Solomon’s case, for instance, if Grose’s career ambitions are at all worthy of mention, that must be because they lie at the root of a fictional explanation of her relationships to the governess. Similarly, some of the passages which (for different reasons) I cited in section 7.2 retell Turn by noting the ‘eccentric nature’ of the governess’ father, and by stressing that only she ‘sees the lurking shapes’. Even Dr Watson would catch the clue: the governess hallucinates, and Turn is not a ghost story. Critical retelling, then is concerned with unveiling the virtually unread, that is, with revealing what we may sloppily describe as being ‘there’, but as being not obviously so. In Radical Fictionalist terms, then, it is concerned with faithfulness. Indeed, the point of much of critical retelling is to pursue the faithfulness agenda much further than casual reading: you may not have noticed it, so the critic points out, but displays of ‘only the governess sees the ghosts’ are faithful to Turn. And that much, so the critic continues, is informative, surprising, or anyway interesting for further possibly unnoticed consequences. From the semantic viewpoint, then, critical retelling breaks away from the plain, content-encoding delivery characteristic of other parts of critical discourse. Still, in different ways, the critical contributions mentioned thus far continue to pursue the same aim as everyday reading, namely faithfulness. I may explain my reasons for my favourite reading by mentioning bits of history and human psychology, or else I may do so by proposing intriguing and hopefully illuminating retellings. Yet, in either case, the point is the presentation of what I take to be a faithful reading of the work. At other junctures, however, criticism takes on a different retelling posture. This mode of critical discourse distinguishes Fludernik 2009, and Porter Abbott  2002). Relatedly, see also the idea of effet de reel in Barthes 1974, Genette 1980, and Fludernik 2009.

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7.4  Biased Retelling and the Canon  141 itself from both educated naturalization and straightforward retelling, in that it abandons its concern for faithfulness, or at least it tempers it with an interest in another normative dimension. I call this mode of critical retelling biased retelling, and I refer to its regulatory ideal in terms of canonicity, that is, of conformity with the critical canon. I devote the next section to the discussion of these ideas.

7.4  Biased Retelling and the Canon As far as I can tell, Solomon’s and Goddard’s retellings, and for that matter the snippets of retelling embedded in many passages from section  7.2, keep sufficiently close to everyday retelling’s esteem for faithfulness. For instance, if Solomon is correct, then ‘the governess is an obstacle to Mrs Grose’s ambitions’ may be displayed as part of a faithful retelling of Turn. And yet, in much of critical discourse, things take a different turn. There, the critic’s intentions (or the practices in which she intervenes, or whatever else may matter in this respect) incite a somewhat peculiar form of retelling, where faithfulness may be partially sacrificed in favour of other normative ideals. At those junctures, then, the critic’s point is no longer summary or elaboration but something close to its opposite—not a brief digest for those who did not read the text or a hint for those who did not read it carefully enough, but a supposedly informative recital for those who did. The result is a form of retelling that is biased, in a sense that I am about to discuss. In section 7.3, I stressed how part of the point of critical retelling (and, in a different sense, of educated naturalization) is that of bringing to the foreground fictional features that are important, but that may have gone unnoticed by the casual reader. You may not have noticed it, but the only evidence for the apparitions lies in the governess’ report, Edmund Wilson points out. And, he implicitly continues, this is worthy of being noticed, since it is a fictionally very salient fact indeed. The abandonment of this concern for fictional salience is one of the characteristics of biased retelling: when engaged in biased retelling, the critic lingers on details that do not matter for our understanding of storyworld events, or for our perspective on peripheral telling. As I explain in what follows, she does so because her final aim is not faithfulness, but something else.

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142  The Turn of the Screw: Critical Discourse One of the characteristics of biased retelling lies in an attention to minutiae that ostensibly clashes with the everyday sense of salience and with simple Sibley-style noticing. What is now at issue is not the sort of detail to which an expert reader may want to call our attention. It is, rather, ‘concentration of interpretable material that has nothing to do with clues and solutions’ (Kermode 1980: 87), that is, with the structure of ‘the plot’.9 In Heilman’s retelling of the frame in Turn, for instance, much is made of the fact that the reading takes place during the Christmas season (Heilman 1948: 186), even though nothing of particular relevance for peripheral telling or storyworld events would be sacrificed, if that frame had been concerned with a gathering in late January. Similarly, for Wilson, ‘the fact that the male figure first appears on a tower’ is of primary significance (Wilson 1934: 387), even though neither storyworld nor periphery would have displayed significantly different features, if Quint’s shape had first materialized by the lake. Among other things, surprising saliences carry with themselves what would normally appear to be a cavalier attitude towards faithfulness in general. For instance, once the tower is elevated to a status that it does not appear to have (in either storyworld or periphery), much in all the rest may take on equally unexpected properties. The abandonment of faithfulness as a normative ideal may then become blatant. What Flora inserts in the ground is not a mere piece of wood. Instead, Rictor Norton contends, (7.4)  Flora inserts a phallic stick into a yonic hold and thereby assumes ‘a male role’ (Norton  1971: 389). Or else, for Heilman, what ends Miles’s young life is not the governess’ suffocating embrace, but religious anguish: (7.5)  Miles’ face gives . . . a prayer for and to Quint, the demon who has become his total deity. But the god isn’t there, and Miles despairs and dies (Heilman 1948: 184).

9  Novitz calls this type of interpretation ‘elaborative’ (Novitz 2002: 105) and claims that it is ‘not designed to secure understanding’ or to elicit ‘questions about truth’ (Novitz 2002: 106); see also Culler’s aptly titled ‘Defence of Overinterpretation’ (Culler 1992).

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7.4  Biased Retelling and the Canon  143 As usual, my choice of examples is negotiable. Perhaps, deep down, due attention to Christmas or towers does promote a particular understanding of storyworld events or of peripheral psychology, and, to boot, one at the service of fictional salience and faithfulness. The point remains that it need not. I, for one, could not find any reason for thinking that those aspects in Turn are anything more than accidental asides—that, say, they occur merely as additional details that make the teller’s peripheral speech a bit closer to meticulous everyday reporting, at the service of Barthesian effet de reél. And, after rereading James’ text, I could not find any explicit, implicit, or even remotely presupposed hint about the exact shape of Flora’s piece of wood and of the indent it produced in the ground. Still, although I could not find any such reasons or hints, I did not thereby conclude that Heilman’s, Wilson’s, or Norton’s suggestions were uninteresting and out of place. I, you, and for all I know James, may well have relegated Christmases and towers to a merely tangential role, and Flora’s phallic sticks may well have ensued entirely from Norton’s creative mind. Yet, the results are interesting and intriguing, that is, they are interesting and intriguing instances of biased retelling, rather than faithful exemplars of everyday retelling. My sympathies are not uncontroversial, and biased retelling is the target of familiar complaints. Many, for instance, lament how fictional biographies are freely enriched, as in inquiries ‘into the previous history of Falstaff or Hamlet, or the heroines or the Macbeths’ (Stoll 1948: 230). Others openly declare their bewilderment: to my astonishment, literary critics have sometimes actually wondered about such things. Ellen Terry, in her lectures on Shakespeare, wonders where the boy in Henry V learned to speak French . . . (Deutsch 2000: 153)

And many chastise literary criticism for its apparently unconstrained appeal to methodologies which arbitrarily bring into the picture the critic’s pet theory—in the case of Norton’s phallic sticks and of Wilson’s towers, psychoanalysis. Yet, this dismissive attitude must surely be out of place from the viewpoint of anyone interested in respecting and understanding an important and culturally dignified portion of current critical practice. In particular, that practice appears to be unconstrained

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144  The Turn of the Screw: Critical Discourse and arbitrary only to detractors unwilling to investigate it with an open mind. As I am about to explain, the case of psychoanalysis is particularly apt in this respect, since it provides a fruitful background for my take on the normative dimensions governing biased retelling. I approach them with yet another confrontation with that paradigm of philosophical meta-criticism, Lewis’ ‘Truth in Fiction’ (Lewis 1978). In Chapter  6, I mentioned Lewis’ alternative sources of storyworldimportation, namely actual truth, authorial convictions, or the beliefs that were widespread in the author’s community. My aim, in that chapter, was to lessen the primacy of Lewis’ criteria, and to highlight the importance of certain features of peripheral discourse, such as its presuppositions or its closed architecture. I now return to Lewis with a different focus. One of Lewis’ examples, which I mentioned in a parenthetical remark in Chapter 6, is of particular interest: psychoanalysis of fictional characters provides a more important example [than the Russell-viper conundrum]. The critic uses (what he believes to be) little-known facts of human psychology as premises, and reasons to conclusion that are far from obvious about the childhood or the adult mental state of the fictional character. (Lewis 1978: 43)

For Lewis, this critical procedure may be justified ‘under Analysis 1’, that is, under an analysis of what is fictionally true that appeals to ‘facts of human psychology’. Yet, for Lewis, it would not be appropriate with respect to another analysis, namely one that appeals to ‘the beliefs that generally prevailed in the community where the fiction originated’ (Lewis 1978: 44), at least on the assumption that neither Doyle nor the Victorians had any exposure to psychoanalysis. In his parenthetical remark on behalf of Analysis 1, Lewis mentions ‘what the critic believes to be’ a fact about human psychology. For me, the example of psychoanalysis is particularly apt, since (perhaps wrongly) I happen to consider psychoanalysis as an unfounded hodgepodge of pseudo-scientific concoctions. And so, if psychoanalytic explanations are at all relevant for Turn or Doyle’s stories, they cannot be so on the basis of importation of actual psychological fact. But of course, for me and for anyone else, psychoanalysis did not prevail in James’ community,

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7.4  Biased Retelling and the Canon  145 was probably not even anticipated when Doyle penned his Russell-viper tale, and was undoubtedly not in circulation at the time of that other infamous case of psychoanalytic criticism: Hamlet’s second guilty wish had also been realized by his uncle, namely to procure the fulfilment of the first—the possession of the mother—by a personal deed, in fact by murder of the father. (Jones 1949: 83)10

So, at least as far as I am concerned, neither actual truth nor prevailing beliefs, that is, neither of Lewis’ alternative analyses, do the job. And yet, there is nothing that inclines me towards a rejection of any of that intriguing, entertaining, and often revealing psychoanalytic business. Indeed, at least as far as phallic toys or patricidal urges are concerned, Norton (with Turn) and Ernest Jones (with Hamlet) do rather well what critics are supposed to do: they flank faithfulness with the equally pressing criteria of a theoretical apparatus of a special kind, in this case, the psychoanalytic theory of the mind (or, in Heilman’s study of Turn, some religious variation of existentialism). I have no arguments for my enthusiasm towards this sort of biased retelling, with the exception that any opposing attitude would make utter nonsense of much that goes by the name of literary criticism. Regardless of what I believe about psychoanalysis and its historical prevalence, and even regardless of what I believe about Jones’ or Norton’s own beliefs, I (and most literary critics) value their enterprises.11 I do so not because of their faithfulness or because of their adherence to any of Lewis’ analyses, but because a characteristic normative dimension governs this sort of discourse. As I briefly suggest in what follows, what (together with other criteria) guides our assessment of biased retelling is its adherence to the critical canon, that is, for want of a better term, what I call its canonicity.

10  As for James, ‘Freudian psychology was something Henry James could not have been conscious of dealing with’ (Fagin 1941: 198). 11 In the domain of performative arts, ‘directors don’t have to be Freudians to put on Freudian interpretations of Hamlet. They may do so for other reasons—for example, the fact that, true or not, such interpretations manage to make sense of the play’ (Thom 2000: 94).

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146  The Turn of the Screw: Critical Discourse I also have no theory about what the critical canon contains, and, most importantly, about the reasons for its current shape. For that matter, I have no theory about what the literary canons include, and about the procedures for a work’s enshrinement in them.12 But I have at least a decent preliminary idea about their undisputed cores. In the case of the classic Western literary canon, Shakespeare and Austen are in, but I and David Lewis are not. Similarly, cursory familiarity with literary criticism suffices as a vague idea of the current shape and historical evolution of  the critical canon, or, at least, of a familiar sort of critical canon. Marxism, psychoanalysis, existentialism, and deconstructionism are canonical, whereas Keynesianism, cognitive psychology, and epiphenomenalism are not. And once this theoretical baggage is taken on board, some literary criticism hits the canonical (though possibly unfaithful) mark, whereas some does not: certain interpretations can be recognized as unsuccessful because they are like a mule, that is, they . . . cannot be confronted with the traditions of the previous interpretations.  (Eco 2008: 150)13

Starting with Chapter  4, I pursued the Radical Fictionalist idea of peripheral importation, and I assessed its significance for our understanding of fictional peripheries and storyworlds. And so, we import obvious actual facts, and we conclude that a certain lady from Newport had exactly two nostrils. More importantly from the Radical Fictionalist viewpoint, we also inevitably import actual facets of language, as in the idea that ‘Newport’ is a Millian name in Vonnegut’s periphery, or in the notion that liars betray themselves with insistent protestations of innocence. In a sense, importation continues to be the name of the game also when it comes to biased retelling. But, if it is at all deserving of the label of ‘importation’, it is a special type of importation: its source, now, is not actuality (or common belief), but a canonical theory. From the viewpoint of everyday readings, of educated naturalization, or of plain critical retelling, then, Flora does nothing more than to stick

12  On the idea of a literary canon see for instance Bloom 1995. 13  See also Thom 2000 and, on related issues, Goldman 2002, Krausz 2002b, Lamarque 2002, Percival 2002, Petterson 2002, and Stecker 2002.

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7.5  Where Am I Now?  147 a piece of wood into the ground. And, in this perspective, Quint appears on a tower merely because he has to appear somewhere, and because mentioning a particular location seems to be the conversationally normal thing to do. Yet, for the purpose of critical retelling, something else characterizes James’ fictional periphery and storyworld—something that is most definitely neither explicit nor implied in Turn, but that is directly imported from the canon. Unfaithfully but canonically, Flora inserts a phallic stick into a yonic hold and, in Hamlet’s case, that generally hesitant prince delays killing Claudius not simply because he hesitates, but because, deep down, he admires his father’s murderer. Of course, these distinctions among different ways of retelling are, in  a sense, internal to Radical Fictionalism. According to the core of Radical Fictionalism, my commitment to (7.1), a non-apparitionist reader’s faith in (7.2), or Norton’s use of (7.4) are semantically on a par, since we all display sentence-types with the aim of retelling James’ story. Yet, the Radical Fictionalist approach indirectly unveils the viewpoint against which their differences emerge, that is, the viewpoint of faithfulness. And so, (7.1) is relatively uncontroversially faithful, the faithfulness of (7.2) is a matter of dispute, and, as far as I can tell, (7.4) is simply off the wall. From the canonical viewpoint that guides biased retelling, they are nevertheless dissimilar for very different reasons: both (7.1) and (7.2) are too tame to be worthy of mention, whereas (7.4) makes an interesting point.

7.5  Where Am I Now? According to Radical Fictionalism, cases such as (7.1) do not encode propositions, but they provide accessible contentful contributions through the impartations fictionally engendered by a teller. As a result, Radical Fictionalism entails a particular approach to fictional telling or, as the case may be, fictional retelling, with the ensuing storyworldperiphery divide and the related distinction between truth and faithfulness. In chapters  2 and  3, I developed these ideas with a focus on authorial displays, and, in Chapter 5, I adapted them to fiction-talk and prefixed-talk. This chapter applied my main Radical Fictionalist themes to critical discourse.

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148  The Turn of the Screw: Critical Discourse I began by highlighting how, from the Radical Fictionalist viewpoint, important portions of critical discourse do not encode propositions, and should rather be understood as instances of fictional retelling. And I  proceeded by discussing the relationships between different types of critical discourse and the characteristic normative dimension for retelling, namely faithfulness. The result was a Radical Fictionalist exploration of educated naturalization, of plain-vanilla faithfulness, and of biased retelling. In the foregoing paragraph, I described this chapter as an exploration of ‘different types’ of critical discourse. I clearly did not aim at exhaustiveness, and other portions of literary criticism may well remain outside the remit of my considerations. One further type deserves at least some attention, for two reasons. For one, it is at the centre of a lively and interesting debate in the current literature on the semantics and metaphysics of fiction. For another, it occupies a rather distinctive position when it comes to Radical Fictionalism and its commitments. What I have in mind is discourse apparently concerned with what are commonly called ‘literary characters’. I turn to a discussion of some aspects of this topic in the next chapter.

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*8 Tess of the D’Urbervilles Literary Characters

8.1 Preliminaries In the previous chapter, I discussed three types of critical discourse: I started with a brief introduction to educated naturalization, and I continued with the types of critical discourse most directly amenable to a Radical Fictionalist analysis, namely critical retelling and biased retelling. When in these retelling modes, the critics engage in the display of sentence types, just as I did in Chapter  5 when I retold Fahrquhar’s ­predicament by means of displaying (5.1). In their case, they display sentence-types with the aims of faithfulness or canonicity: plain critical retelling aims at highlighting this or that noteworthy storyworld feature, whereas biased retelling aspires to reconstruct a canonical reading. Yet another kind of critical discourse deserves some consideration, due to its philosophical implications and, for me, its reverberations on semantic matters. I call it character-oriented discourse, of which these are prototypical exemplars: (8.1)  Hardy’s Tess is the all-purpose heroine (Moers 1960), Holmes symbolizes mankind’s ceaseless striving for truth (Lewis 1978: 38), Mrs Gamp is the most fully developed of the masculine antiwoman visible in all Dickens’s novels.  (van Inwagen 1977: 301)1 1  Van Inwagen attributes this sentence to Manning 1971: 79. See, among many, Recanati: ‘in contrast [with examples such as ‘Holmes lit his pipe’, these sentences are] true or false’ (Recanati 2018: 26; note however that, in Recanati’s view, the case of ‘Holmes lit his pipe’ is a case in which ‘the name does not refer’ and is ‘empty’, Recanati 2018: 26).

Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics. Stefano Predelli, Oxford University Press (2020). © Stefano Predelli. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854128.001.0001

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150  Tess of the D ’ Urbervilles: Literary Characters According to some, these examples are most naturally interpreted as fully-fledged, actuality-oriented sentences, rather than as preposterous or clearly unfaithful retellings of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, of Doyle’s stories, or of Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit. And so, although the fictional bearer of ‘Tess’ is fictionally anything but allpurpose or heroic, her character may well be described as a generic female protagonist vis à vis the standards of Western narrative literature. Or else, although Holmes hardly serves as an exemplar for his fictional fellow Londoners, his character may be interpreted as an actual symbol of that equally actual wonder, humankind’s striving for truth. In this chapter, I happily take this attitude on board. But I distance myself from a metaphysical query that often accompanies it, namely the question of whether so-called ‘fictional characters’ exist. For what it is worth, I look sympathetically at things of that sort. For me, characters clearly exist, or at least they do so to the extent to which other cultural abstracta do: if, deep down, there really are no characters, that would be so because of metaphysical arguments that also apply to plots and subplots, to novels and literary traditions, or, for that matter, to symphonies and nations. Be that as it may, my point is not metaphysical but semantical. According to the hypothesis I entertain in this chapter, what appears in (8.1) are actual sentences, and the occurrences in them of the nametypes ‘Tess’ or ‘Holmes’ or ‘Gamp’ are occurrences of genuine proper names. And so, those who share my metaphysical liberality may conclude that these names refer and that these sentences are true or false, whereas those in a less generous mood will insist that they are empty-names and that the sentences in which they occur encode gappy propositions. The point remains that, according to my hypothesis, (8.1) is not in the fictional retelling business that excites the Radical Fictionalist semanticist. It is, rather, something utterly outside of Radical Fictionalism’s remit. This entire chapter, then, is starred: Radical Fictionalists need not go my way when it comes to the metaphysics of characters or, more im­port­ ant­ly, when it comes to the semantics of ‘Tess’ or ‘Gamp’ in (8.1). Still, what I say about (8.1) is relevant for Radical Fictionalism because it helps to unveil its relationships with certain other issues related to fiction, narrative discourse, and all the rest. At the very least, it clarifies the sense in which Radical Fictionalists may afford a straightforward, not at all fictionalist take on (8.1). And, indirectly, it clarifies the sense of

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8.2 Other ‘ Characters ’   151 ‘character’ that matters for me, and it explains how none of my views in this chapter are a retreat to what are traditionally called realist stances on fiction. I thus begin with a distinction between my understanding of ‘character’ and certain other common senses of that term in the next section.

8.2  Other ‘Characters’ The everyday term ‘character’ is uncontroversially ambiguous. The Oxford English Dictionary includes six non-figurative entries, covering various psychological and typographical senses, and, incidentally, excluding the technical sense of ‘character’ common in the semantic literature on indexicality. In contexts related to fiction, the term ‘character’ is generally understood in the sense appropriate for its occurrence in a ‘list of characters’, as it appears at the beginning of some literary works and of many theatrical scripts. In the latter case, these lists give relatively re­li­ able indications of the number and type of actors on the payroll. And so, in this sense, characters are fictionally human or human-like individuals that are typically represented on stage by actual men and women. This everyday use of ‘character’ also occurs in contexts more directly concerned with narrative fiction. If asked to list the characters in Thomas Hardy’s Tess (Hardy 1891) or in James’ Turn, most of us would in all likelihood begin with Tess or Flora, that is, with prototypical exemplars of what is fictionally human in those works.2 Yet, this focus is of little principled significance for literary criticism and philosophical analysis alike. In much of the type of fiction that most readily comes to mind, fictional people admittedly occupy positions of particular interest from the viewpoint of plot, storyworld, and periphery. But they are surely not alone in this respect, and they often share pride of place with fictional locations, inanimate objects, or non-anthropomorphized animals. More importantly, fictional human-hood would anyway be of little interest for the philosophical issues related to characters, first and foremost the debate about their presumed metaphysical rank: if fictionally 2  For instance, ‘a character is the effect that occurs when an actor is endowed with dis­tinct­ ive human characteristics’ (Bal 1985: 115).

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152  Tess of the D ’ Urbervilles: Literary Characters human Ahab (Melville 1851) is endowed with some sort of ontological status, it would surely be bizarre to deny a similar standing for fictionally non-human (and most definitely non-anthropomorphized) Moby Dick. Other fictional properties, such as the frequently mentioned property of fictionally bearing a name, hardly fare any better when it comes to the sense of ‘character’ that interests me.3 Surely, at least in a relatively common sense of ‘character’, if Moby Dick is a character, so are the fictionally unnamed king in Snow White and the fictionally anonymous monster in Frankenstein. And so, neither fictionally being human nor fictionally bearing a name have any particularly interesting role to play for my purposes. The point generalizes: I am suspicious about the idea that characters, if any such things actually exist, do so because of any allegedly noteworthy storyworld attribute, such as their being fictional people, their fictionally bearing a name, or their fictionally doing this or that. And so, characters, in the sense of ‘character’ that interests me here, are neither people nor fictional people, they are neither handsome nor fictionally handsome, and they are neither fictionally tall nor fictionally short. Indeed, the character of Tess does not roam the English countryside and the character of Holmes does not investigate, since the former is an all-purpose heroine and the latter a symbol of human curiosity, and since, in reality or in most fiction, neither all-purpose heroines nor symbols of curiosity roam or investigate. As I explain in the remainder of this chapter, these characters are something else entirely, albeit ­something that remains of interest from the viewpoint of the Radical Fictionalist take on fictional discourse. I start my exploration of my sense of ‘character’ with a cursory look at a recent debate about fictional and actual identity, ostensibly concerned with the thesis that characters are actual abstract artefacts.4 I mention 3  It may well be the case that ‘what gives the illusion that the sum [of attributes] is supplemented by individuality is the Proper Name’ (Barthes 1974: 191, my italics; see also Frow 1986). Some have tentatively settled for mere sufficiency: ‘for an author to create a fictional character [it] is clearly sufficient that she write a work of fiction involving names not referring back to extant people or characters of other stories, and apparently describing the exploits of in­di­vid­ uals named’ (Thomasson 2003: 148), and ‘a fictional character is an individual (or role) picked out by a name or description which (i) is first introduced in a work of fiction, and (ii) does not pick out a concrete individual in the actual world’ (Brock  2002: 1, see also Schiffer  2003, Brock 2010, and Recanati 2018). 4  This comprises a variety of related but distinct metaphysical and semantic theses; see, among many, Salmon 1998, Thomasson 1999, 2003, and 2010, and many of the other sources mentioned below; for a sample of my own short-lived attraction to this view see Predelli 2002.

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8.2 Other ‘ Characters ’   153 this debate not because of my independent interest in these questions or in that thesis, but because it evidences a sense of ‘character’ that dom­in­ ates this, and for that matter many other philosophical diatribes. And I care about this evidence because that is not the sense in which ‘character’ occurs in my tentative approach to character-directed discourse. At a central juncture in his attack against so-called ‘fictional realism’, Anthony Everett writes: I suggest that the following principles have a near platitudinous status: (P1) If the world of a story concerns a creature a, and if a is not a real thing, then a is a fictional character. (P2) If a story concerns a and b, and if a and b are not real things, then a and b are identical in the world of the story iff the fictional character of a is identical to the fictional character of b.  (Everett 2005: 627)

That these conditionals reflect central features of the philosophically contested idea of character is confirmed by their uncontested ‘nearly platitudinous’ status. Indeed, Everett’s critics willingly subscribe to at least their spirit. So, for two defenders of fictional realism, ‘it is hard to see what truths in a fiction might ground the identity or non-identity of  fictional entities, if not truths about identity’ (Schnieder and von Solodkoff 2009: 138). And, according to Robert Howell, we talk . . . about the character who is the woman, Anna Karenina . . . So our concept of a character, even on the realist view, ought to maintain, for characters as abstract objects existing in the actual world, the identity or distinctness relations that hold or don’t hold among the characters as persons in the fictional worlds.  (Howell 2010: 170)

Principles such as Everett’s conditional generate a prima facie problem for realism: if actual characters depend on fictional truths of identity and existence, so the argument goes, an undesirable proliferation ensues. The example of the policemen in Tess has become commonplace: in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Tess is arrested at Stonehenge by sixteen policemen, who are not otherwise distinguished. Are there sixteen fictional characters?  (Friend 2007: 149)

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154  Tess of the D ’ Urbervilles: Literary Characters Similarly, intuitively extraneous matters of detail seemingly remain out of control: as long as some sentence with the right existential implication [having to do with the shoe lace on the shoe that Holmes was wearing when confronting Moriarty for the first time] . . . [the realist] argument will go through in favor of the existence of that fictional individual. (Yagisawa 2001: 162)

Or else, returning to Tess, if Tess and Angel are at all actually existing characters, so would be all the villagers in Marlott, their toes, or, if you prefer explicitly mentioned fictional material, the red ribbon that Tess wore as she walked by The Pure Drop Inn. Is this proliferation that bad? Is any of it really a consequence of Everett-style platitudes? And are those platitudes something to which the realists are inevitably committed? I happen to be inclined towards a  positive reply: Everett has a good point, and the realists have cause for  concern. But I remain officially indifferent to all of this, primarily because, as pointed out, Everett’s platitudes do not affect the sense of ‘character’ that interests me at this stage. And, relatedly, because, in any sense of ‘fictional realism’ targeted by the arguments summarized thus far, I am most definitely not a fictional realist. Although my focus has been on the merely fictional status of ‘Holmes’ or ‘Tess’, I take it to be by now amply clear that, for me, Holmes the detective, Tess the woman, and their shoelaces and ribbons are nothing at all. And so, if that is what one means by the thesis that there are fictional characters, then, for me, there are no more fictional characters than there are imaginary friends or make-believe princesses. Yet, as announced, I would not want to flatly assert that there are no characters. Indeed, in a sense, I do want to suggest that there are, or at least there may well be literary (or, as I occasionally call them, ‘critical’) characters. Since I remain sensitive to blatant contradictions, I must have in mind an understanding of ‘character’ other than the senses that have emerged in this section. I turn to this sense and to its relevance for critical discourse in the next section.

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8.3  Critical Characters  155

8.3  Critical Characters Take again the conditionals from section 8.2. As mentioned, they provide a perspicuous approach to a common and widespread sense of ‘character’, and they strike me as appropriate preliminaries for Everett’s attack against fictional realism. The difference between what Everett ­discusses and the sense of ‘character’ in which I am interested may then profitably be highlighted by stressing his conditionals’ inadequacy when  it comes to an equally widespread usage of that term. At least three families of exemplars are significant in this respect: cases related to fictional identities, instances of nesting, and examples of cross-fictional comparisons. I start with fictional identities, that is, with storyworld scenarios in which, fictionally, a certain individual a and a certain individual b turn out to be one. For instance, at least according to a common reading, it is fictional in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (Stevenson  1886) that, as we would commonly put it, Jekyll and Hyde are the same man. And yet, for me just as for many users of ‘character’ in standard critical settings, it is most definitely not the case that Jekyll and Hyde are one and the same character, since the character of Hyde symbolizes ‘the fleshy aspect of man’ and ‘represents the embodiment of pure evil’ (Roberts 2017), say, but the character of Jekyll does not.5 Nested tales provide further examples of a sense of ‘character’ other than that reflected in Everett’s principles. For me and for pretty much anybody I have consulted, the Grand Inquisitor is a character from The Brothers Karamazov, a powerful symbol of existential Verfallen. Yet, it is  not Karamazov-fictional that the Grand Inquisitor exists since, in Karamazov’s storyworld, the Grand Inquisitor is a mere figment of Ivan’s imagination. Or else, moving on to cross-fictional comparisons, it is clearly not the case that, in my sense of the term, ‘the Ulysses of Dante’s Inferno is the same character as the Odysseus of Homer’s Odyssey’ 5  For comments and discussions of related issues see for instance Brock 2010, Voltolini 2010, Caplan and Muller 2014, and Woodward 2017.

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156  Tess of the D ’ Urbervilles: Literary Characters (Friend  2007: 149). The former, for instance, embodies the sins of ­cunning and evil counsel, but the latter does not. And yet, for all I know, it may well fictionally be true (in some sort of extended storyworld that encompasses Homer’s and Dante’s storyworlds, say) that the very same man who married Penelope is later turned into a burning flame. My intuitions, I suppose, ensue from an intelligible and widespread sense of ‘character’. It is, however, a sense importantly different from anything to which Everett’s conditionals may apply and, if Everett’s polemics is on the right track, to anything which fictional realists may have in mind when they assert the existence of characters. Tellingly, as I am about to explain, my sense of ‘character’ is more closely related to actual criticism than to fictional discourse. Here is how literary critic John Frow thinks of characters: etymologically the lexeme [‘character’] derives from the Greek kharattein, ‘to make sharp, cut furrows in, engrave’, and it yields two primary ‘literal’ senses in English: that of mark or stamp, and more specifically that of a significant mark.  (Frow 1986: 227)

In much of criticism and narratology, connotations of ‘character’ along the lines of Frow’s idea of significance are recurrent. They are, for one thing, at the basis of notions as diverse as Algirdas Julien Greimas’ actants (Greimas 1987) or Gerald Prince’s foregrounding: for a logical participant to function as a character, it must be foregrounded at least once in the narrative rather than relegated to the background and made part of a general context or setting. (Prince 1982: 71)

I do not take Frow’s, Greimas’, or Prince’s frameworks as crucial for the definition of ‘character’ that I have in mind. Yet, as I am about to explain, their emphases are of interest: what matters for the identification of characters are rankings of significance or foregrounding that derive from a reasoned critical assessment of peripheral discourse, rather than from the common-sense judgment of what fictionally matters in the storyworld. Surely, any decent understanding of the kind of significance that Frow or Prince have in mind does not reduce it to anything resembling

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8.3  Critical Characters  157 fictional storyworld relevance. An inebriated John Durbeyfield did not stand out from the crowd at The Pure Drop Inn, and nothing in Tess’ fictional biography makes her much more noticeable than any of the policemen who arrest her. Yet, John Durbeyfield and Tess are surely characters from Tess, but, for me, the crowd and the policemen are not.6 Foregrounding, in any interesting sense of that term, is in order in either case. But it is not a kind of foregrounding that derives from the fictional roles that those fictional men and women play in their fictional surroundings—their fictionally being human, bearing a name, or being exceptionally tall, say. It is rather a sort of foregrounding that ensues from the role played within the periphery by discourse fictionally concerned with them. The reason why this idea of character has to do with literary criticism is related to its concern with what I vaguely indicated as the ‘role’ of ­certain portions of peripheral discourse. Sheer frequency may well often be a reliable indicator of significance and foregrounding—after all, Tess, the fictional woman, is mentioned much more extensively in Tess’s periphery than any of the policemen. Yet, I suspect, frequency is neither necessary nor sufficient. I cannot venture a more precise thesis about what is criterial in this respect, but I know where to look in my search for alternative hypotheses about what counts. I consult competent literary critics’ identification of a work’s main characters, of its protagonists and antagonists, and all the rest. I rejoice at their relatively solid consensus on standard cases, and I look with interest at their disagreements on others. Sometimes, I even venture my own two cents of critical wisdom: the protagonist in Tess is not Tess but the English countryside, Parson Tringham is too flat and conventional to count as a character, and John Durbeyfield symbolizes the inauthenticity of human existence.7 6  Or, at least, they are not in my (and, as far as I know, most people’s) reading of Tess, in the sense of ‘reading’ from Chapter 6. 7  Incidentally, a surprisingly considerable portion of the current philosophical debate about so-called ‘fictional characters’ is devoted to the issue of their coming into existence (see Deutsch 1991, Yagisawa 2001, Brock 2010 and 2018, and Friedell 2016). The question about the creation of critical characters, in my sense of the term, does not seem to have a clear-cut answer (on a par, for that matter, with the question about the coming into existence of England, or with the sense in which Margaret Thatcher may have created contemporary Britain). A related surprisingly populated niche in the philosophical diatribes on fictional characters focuses on the question of identity (of fictional characters) across works, see Caplan 2014, McGonigal 2013, and Walters 2015 and 2017.

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158  Tess of the D ’ Urbervilles: Literary Characters There is much in all of this that is unforgivably vague. Yet, as evidenced by my stabs at the narrative structure in Tess, I am not a critic, and I am also not interested in the philosophy of criticism. As a result, I am neither willing nor able to provide a clear-cut definition of many of the concepts that I have introduced—the sense in which a character’s properties derive from this or that aspect of the periphery, the sense in which characters may come into existence out of authorial displays and criticism, the sort of things they are, and much more besides.8 Yet, for that matter, I am neither willing nor able to provide a clear-cut definition of many other ideas of uncontroversial significance for criticism, such as subplots, digressions, episodes, or recurrent patterns of imagery. Still, I have an idea of what is relatively uncontroversial: Tess, the Grand Inquisitor, and Frankenstein’s monster are most definitely literary characters, Jekyll and Hyde are different (in fact, antagonistic) characters, and Tess’ policemen or the villagers in Marlott are no characters at all.9 In the foregoing paragraph, I mentioned the analogies between literary characters and other critical affairs such as subplots or patterns. These analogies should not come as a surprise to anyone interested in the phil­ oso­phy of fiction: in a justly influential paper, Peter van Inwagen noted that characters belong to a broader category of things I shall call theoretical entities of literary criticism, a category that also includes plots, subplots, novels, . . .  poems, meters, rhyme schemes, borrowings, influences, digressions, episodes, recurrent patterns of imagery, and literary forms . . . (van Inwagen 1977: 302–3)

Van Inwagen’s allusion to theoretical entities provides a profitable bridge towards the metaphysical query mentioned at the beginning of 8  My allusion to the ‘derivation’ of a character’s properties (symbolizing curiosity, say) from the fictional attributes of a storyworld participant (being curious, say) conceals an issue of considerable (non-semantic) interest, possibly having to do with the status of characters as dependent entities: ‘a fictional character . . . is an abstract entity. It exists in virtue of more concrete activities of telling stories, writing plays, writing novels, and so on . . .’ (Kripke 2013: 73). 9  See Taylor 2014: ‘I acknowledge that when one creates a work of fiction, one does thereby usher at least one new object—the work of fiction itself—into existence’ (Taylor  2014: 186). Surprisingly (and with no explanation) Taylor resists extending his acknowledgment to the case characters. Tellingly, however, he bases his conclusion on an attitude which I share, namely his unwillingness to accept an ‘ontology of fictional objects’ (Taylor 2014: 188).

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8.4 Character-Names  159 this chapter, namely the question whether there are characters. In my sense of ‘character’, the answer will be consonant with whatever one deems to be appropriate for parallel queries: are there plots, subplots, or rhyme schemes? Officially, I take a neutral stance on this, as, incidentally, does van Inwagen (‘this category includes such things as these if there are such things as these’, van Inwagen 1977: 303). Unofficially, I happily speak with common sense: of course characters, plots, or novels exist, since they are something rather than nothing. And, of course, Tess, the fictional woman, is simply nothing, but Tess, Hardy’s protagonist, is an inhabitant of the actual world, side by side with Tess, with the Victorian novel, and with Hardy’s England. My colloquial style in all of this is a long way away from the rigour required from informative philosophical writing. Yet, it nicely leads me to a topic that, for my aims, is of more immediate interest than the existence of characters, namely our discourse about them. I turn to this topic in the next section.

8.4 Character-Names Here’s a brief recap: characters, in the sense of ‘character’ that interests me, are not what I would characterize as merely fictional people, merely fictional bearers of names, or anything of that sort. Rather, characters are (presumed) objects of criticism, and are identified on the basis of certain properties of peripheral discourse, perhaps together with other considerations of critical significance. These preliminaries provide the background for the presentation of my hypothesis, namely the idea that, unlike authorial display, plain retelling, or much of critical discourse, character-talk encodes fully-fledged propositional content. When it comes to this idea, it shall not come as a surprise that Radical Fictionalism focuses its attention on the singular terms occurring in cases such as those in (8.1). But first, a few remarks on their predicates are in order. For me, the properties appropriate for characters are of a rather special and limited nature. Characters embody, symbolize, or represent. They are flat, well-developed, or secondary. They catch our attention or leave us indifferent. But they do not inhabit two-pronged flames (as Dante’s Ulysses fictionally does), they do not work as milkmaids (as Tess

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160  Tess of the D ’ Urbervilles: Literary Characters fictionally does), and they do not hallucinate ghostly presences (as, for some, James’ governess fictionally does). Characters, that is, possess only (a) ‘logical’ or ‘high-order’ properties like existence and selfidentity, (b) properties expressed by what I have called ‘literary predicates’—being a character in a novel, being introduced in chapter six, being a comic villainess, . . .  (van Inwagen 2003: 146)

At least when the predicate contributes one of these affairs, then, the task for compositional analysis seems straightforward. For instance, the first of the examples in (8.1), namely Moers’ (8.2)  Hardy’s Tess is the all-purpose heroine, attributes the property encoded in the predicate ‘is the all-purpose heroine’ to whatever is contributed by the character-name ‘Tess’, and is thus true iff that thing possesses that property. Officially, then, the Radical Fictionalist focus on the name occurring in (8.2) is out of place. Nothing is of interest here, over and above ­anything that is of interest for proper names in general: a name, ‘Tess’, is employed so as to designate an individual, here, a character. And so, utterly independently of Radical Fictionalism, either that name refers and (8.2) encodes a true or false proposition, or it does not and (8.2) encodes a gappy content. Still, as I explain in what follows, there is something in all of this that ought to catch the Radical Fictionalist’s attention. There is surely something noteworthy with ‘Tess’, the character’s name: it is spelled and pronounced in accordance with the spelling and pronunciation of the fictional name which, in Hardy’s novel, names a troubled young woman. So, fictionally, a woman bears a name spelled and pronounced as ‘Tess’, and, in actuality, a certain critical character bears a proper name with that same shape and sound. Crucially, this much is not accidental, since it generalizes. Fictionally, a certain fleshand-blood detective bears ‘Holmes’ as his name, and, in actuality, the character whose properties depend on that fictional man’s characteristics is designated by uses of a homophonic actual name. Or else, fictionally, a

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8.4 Character-Names  161 bearer of ‘Hyde’ roams the streets at night, whereas, in actuality, a bearer of that very same six-letter name-type symbolizes the fleshy aspect of man. Some regularity must surely lurk in the background. That regularity is pre-semantic, that is, it is a regularity of launchings. In Chapter  1 and afterwards, I elected a certain pedagogical model as my exemplar of a launching: an attentive and properly attired namer targets a suitable individual while solemnly tokening a name-type. That, of course, was a caricature. Some names, in particular, come to life without any such explicit engagement, and rather emerge from pre-existing automatic procedures. The hypothetical case of a recursive patronymic system has served well as an example of automatic launching in my previous study of naming (Predelli 2017). So, i’s first son inevitably bears a name that is spelled and pronounced as the expression that results from appending ‘son’ to i’s name, as in the injunction that Johnson’s son be named ‘Johnsonson’. Less hypothetically, among the Sironò Indians (before the 1950s), when the parturient mother goes into labor, the father leaves to hunt and the child is born while he is hunting. When the father returns the child is given the name of whatever animal the father has killed. (Priest 1964: 1150)

And so, with nobody’s particular effort, a child is named ‘Hare’ or ‘Deer’ or whatever his male parent happened to kill on that occasion. Some sort of automatic regularity, I suggest, also governs the naming of critical characters. It does so for fairly obvious practical reasons: more often than not, characters take on as their names the name-types that are familiar to anyone exposed to authorial displays. And so, ‘Holmes’, ‘Tess’, or the name-types that fictionally name certain appropriately foregrounded individuals are adopted as the actual names of the cor­re­ spond­ing characters. More often than not, but not inevitably. Just as an occasional rebellious Sironò may have ventured ‘Ted’ as his son’s name, some characters take on ad hoc name-types. This is often the case for characters related to fictional individuals that are fictionally nameless, the protagonist in Turn being a case in point. We may, on these occasions, retort to descriptive connotations, as in our common use of

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162  Tess of the D ’ Urbervilles: Literary Characters ‘the  character of the governess’. More interestingly, we may launch a name on the spot, in this case by letting our description grow capitals: the Governess is the only character we can really sink our teeth into in this story, and boy, is it worth it.  (Shmoop 2018)

The first occurrence of ‘it’ (rather than ‘she’) in this passage will surely not have gone unnoticed. I will not, then, ask you to notice it.10 Here, then, are the few bits that have emerged thus far. When critics engage in character talk, they produce run-of-the-mill propositionencoding sentences. These propositions attribute (or attempt to attribute) certain properties to literary characters, on the basis of features of peripheries and storyworld that I have not bothered to analyse. So, for one reason or another, the tragic story of a handsome young woman engenders an all-purpose protagonist, the intriguing tale of a neurotic de­tect­ ive generates an emblem of curiosity, and the fictional adventures of a doctor yield a representation of the fleshy side of man. These characters are picked out by names homophonic with those fictionally employed in the periphery: when occurring in character talk, ‘Tess’, ‘Holmes’ and ‘Hyde’ are character-names launched according to regularities conforming to those sketched above. The result, as I am about to explain, is an interesting duality in our interaction with those name-types.

8.5 ‘Homonymies’ As the attentive reader will have noticed, ‘Radical Fictionalism’ has not made much of an appearance in section  8.4. This is not accidental. According to the view from section 8.4, character-oriented discourse is run-of-the-mill actual discourse, and character-names are fully-fledged proper names. These ideas are thus independent of the main tenets of  Radical Fictionalism and have accordingly been flagged merely 10  Does ‘it’ rather refer to the act of sinking one’s teeth in? No matter, for it need not. A partially sympathetic idea: ‘something counting as a baptismal ceremony can be performed by means of writing the words in the text . . . Perhaps the most typical case of naming a fictional character . . . is the case wherein an author names her or his character in the text in which he or she appears’ (Thomasson 1999: 47). But I remain suspicious of Thomasson’s coda: characters do not appear in texts or in literary works. If they exist, they do so here, in actuality, for actual existence is the only existence there is.

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8.5  ‘ Homonymies ’   163 as  ­negotiable hypotheses. And so, those unsympathetic to Radical Fictionalism may independently support some sort of semantic distinction between different occurrences of ‘Tess’, whereas adherents to Radical Fictionalism may consistently disagree with my views on character-oriented discourse. Still, some noteworthy consequences emerge from my suggestions about characters and their names, when they are conjoined with the Radical Fictionalist stance from the rest of this book. What deserves at least some discussion, in particular, is the ex­plan­ ation of a ‘homonymy’ that ensues from that conjunction and, equally importantly, of the reason why ‘homonymy’ should remain in scare quotes. The presumed homonymy of fictional individuals and actual characters has been noted by philosophers of otherwise different semantic persuasions. For Michael Dummett, for instance, the use of a name in literary criticism to refer to a fictional character differs again from its use in fiction, for here . . . the reference does not fail. (Dummett 1973: 160)

At least according to some interpretations, Kripke subscribes to a similar outcome: according to Kripke, as the name ‘Sherlock Holmes’ was originally introduced and used by Conan Doyle, it has no referent whatsoever. It is a name in the make-believe world of storytelling . . . It is only at a later stage when discussing the fictional character from a standpoint outside of the fiction . . . that the language makes a second move . . . giving the name a new, non-pretend use as a name for the fictional character. (Salmon 1998: 294)11

As a Radical Fictionalist, I have some qualms with these ways of putting things. Dummett, for one, seems to intimate that, when it comes to uses 11  Gareth Evans distinguishes these modes of discourse along Gricean lines (Evans  1982: 359). For the record, I am unsure about the correctness of Salmon’s description of Kripke’s position. For Kripke ‘there is a confusing double usage of predication . . . one can say “Hamlet has been discussed by many critics”, or “Hamlet was melancholy” . . . These two predicates should be taken in different senses. The second predicate . . . has attached to it the implicit qualifier fictionally . . .’ (Kripke 2013: 74). It is then unclear why someone willing to recognize the homonymy with ‘Holmes’ would feel the need for this sort of predicate-ambiguity (or for any appeal to ‘implicit qualifiers’); see also Manning 2014 and Thomasson 2010.

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164  Tess of the D ’ Urbervilles: Literary Characters in fiction, ‘the reference fails’, and hence that, in those contexts, ‘Holmes’ is an empty name, rather than a merely fictional name. What Salmon attributes to Kripke is similarly equivocal: ‘Holmes’ is ‘a name in the make-believe world’, i.e., a merely fictional name, and yet it is also a ‘name originally introduced by Doyle’, that is, presumably, a real name. Be that as it may, for a Radical Fictionalist well disposed towards the hypotheses in section  8.4, the matter is clear: fictionally, and only fictionally, a name spelled as ‘Holmes’ names a detective, and, in reality, a name with that spelling names a character. In the normal sense of ‘homonymy’, then, ‘Holmes’ is not at all homonymous: leaving aside the surname of actress Katie Holmes or the name of a certain village in Lancashire, there is only one name spelled and pronounced as ‘Holmes’, namely the name of a character. Yet, with scare quotes in place, the ‘ambiguities’ that emerge from run-of-the-mill homonymy remain detectable. For instance, (8.3)  Raskolnikov is influential fictionally falsely portrays a storyworld in which a destitute and not at all influential student gets in trouble with the law—in the sense that the display of (8.3) is unfaithful to Crime and Punishment (Dostoevsky 1866). Or else, it truly describes the significance of that literary symbol of human alienation—in the sense that its assertion would get things right when it comes to actual criticism. By the same token, speaking with the vernacular, (8.4)  Tess is loved by many may well be both fictionally and actually true, but, if it is, it is so for different reasons. Fictionally, a bearer of ‘Tess’ enjoys the popularity of those with ‘bouncing handsome womanliness’, and, in actuality, a bearer of ‘Tess’ is one of the most treasured characters in English literature. That is, the occurrence of (8.4) as part of Tess-talk is actually faithful, whereas its occurrences as part of character-oriented discourse is actually true.12 12  The ‘ambiguities’ in (8.3) or (8.4) ought to suffice as a reply to David Braun’s worry: ‘there is little or nothing in speakers’ thoughts and intentions that indicates that the name “Holmes” is ambiguous in their mouths’ (Braun 2005: 613).

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8.5  ‘ Homonymies ’   165 As mentioned, these ‘homonymies’ are hardly as accidental as the actual homonymy of, say, ‘Holmes’, as in Katie Holmes and Holmes, Lincolnshire, or, for that matter, as the trans-fictional homonymy of ‘Angel’ in Tess and in the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Rather, ‘Holmes’, ‘Tess’, and all the rest serve as names of literary characters because these characters’ actual properties depend upon the fictional attributes of fictional bearers of those name-types. This systematic relation indirectly provides an explanation of the facility with which casual discourse moves across the divide between actuality-oriented talk and fictional re-telling. And so, with no superficial appearance of zeugmatic effects, we venture that (8.5)  Tess, a troubled young woman, is Hardy’s best-known character, that ‘Holmes, a cocaine-addicted detective, symbolizes mankind’s ­striving for truth’, or, in agreement with van Inwagen, that ‘Mrs Gamp is the most fully developed of the masculine anti-woman visible in all Dickens’s novels’. Which leads me nicely to a coda pertaining to what is commonly called co-predication. Appeals to co-predication have gained some popularity among philosophers ill-disposed towards appeals to ambiguity in general. In particular, according to some, examples such as (8.5) indicate that their predicates attribute certain properties to one and the same thing, in this case, the object to which ‘Tess’ refers. Hence, so they conclude, the contribution of ‘Tess’ must be univocal, against any proposal interested in homonymies or, as the case may be, ‘homonymies’. And so, co-predication seemingly provides the spark for an argument against my conjunction of actual character-talk and Radical Fictionalism, one which deserves at least a few words of reply. My reply in what follows concedes that co-predication raises difficult issues, but insists that those are . . . problems for anyone, and that they hardly tell against the conjunction of Radical Fictionalism and my views about character-names.13 13  For a sample of the semantic literature on co-predication see Pustejovsky 1995, Luo 2010, Asher  2011, and Gotham  2016. For appeals to co-predication in relation to fiction see for instance von Solodkoff and Woodward 2017 (especially section 5, mostly against van Inwagen’s alleged distinction between having and holding properties, van Inwagen  2003); for my own

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166  Tess of the D ’ Urbervilles: Literary Characters The first thing to note is that no decent univocal approach to ‘Tess’ suffices when it comes to a natural understanding of (8.5), given that, presumably, no unique object may be both a troubled woman and a critical character.14 It is then natural (though admittedly not inevitable) to locate the crux of the problem in co-predication itself, rather than in any particular account of names or name-types. And when it comes to so-called co-predication, what requires independent attention is the idea, implicit in the argument from the foregoing paragraph, that ex­amples such as (8.5) attribute the properties designated by their predicates to a unique, simple object. That idea strikes me as dubious. We say ‘that leather bound book is Aristotle’s masterpiece’ or ‘the lunch, which was delicious, lasted an hour’, without doubting that what is leather bound is a physical object (my copy of the Nicomachean Ethics, say) but what is a masterpiece is an abstract item (the Nicomachean Ethics, the treatise of which you and I own a copy); or that what is delicious is a thing (the  food), whereas what lasts an hour is an event (the event of consuming it). And so, identity may be too strong a demand, and some sort of intimate relationship may suffice: what is leather bound is an object which bears an appropriate association with a different thing, that which is described as being a masterpiece, and what lasts an hour is an episode that is relevantly related to something else, namely a delicious entity. There are surely differences between the examples from the foregoing paragraph and (8.5). For one thing, the former involve genuine expressions (‘the book’, ‘the lunch’) which apparently provide different but closely related semantic contributions (volumes and information content, or dining events and dishes). Yet, for me, (8.5) is to be analysable along lines eventually invoking a non-ambiguous expression together with short-lived attraction to simple-minded co-predication arguments (in cases of discourse about music) see Predelli 2011b. 14  Presumably. The only view I know which approaches copredication with a straight face is the rather incredible-sounding idea that, say, ‘Ulysses misrepresents an abstract artefact as a flesh and blood human being’ (Yablo  1999; the view is attributed to Amie Thomasson). For criticisms of appeals to co-predication (and anaphora, as in ‘Holmes is a fictional character created by Doyle . . . he is a detective . . .’), for mentions of the ‘lunch’ example, and for discussions of so-called ‘dot-object’ strategies see Recanati 2018; for an overview of related tests of polysemy and/or ambiguity see Zwicky and Sadock 1975 and Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk 2012.

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8.6  Where Am I Now?  167 the  display of a name-type: the character named ‘Tess’ is well-known, whereas, fictionally, ‘Tess was a troubled young woman’ is faithful. The onomastic relationship between the two is promising, but, un­ques­tion­ ably, more needs to be said for a fuller resolution of the intricacies of ­co-predication. And yet, at this stage, there is no cause for alarm. At the very least, co-predication, or for that matter those other ‘problems for everyone’ such as the true negative existentials from Chapter 5, should independently keep all of us awake at night. Let the lack of closure in my story serve as the promise that, if one day those issues are no longer a problem for me, I will be back with more.

8.6  Where Am I Now? This chapter concludes my presentation of Radical Fictionalism by flanking it with an independent hypothesis about critical discourse. That hypothesis remains in need of further justification, and it may justifiably be defended only after a more precise solution to certain prima facie tensions, first and foremost the presumed evidence provided by so-called co-predication scenarios. Yet, my discussion of the resulting scare-quote homonymies helped unveil further facets of Radical Fictionalism, having to do with its relationships to various versions of what commonly goes under the name of fictional realism. And so, occurrences of ‘Tess’ or ‘Holmes’ may well occasionally aim at referring to actual critical characters, in the sense of ‘character’ described above. Yet, this does not entail that occurrences of homophonous name-types in authorial displays, in everyday retellings, and in important portions of critical discourse are anything but occurrences of merely fictional names, properly analysed along Radical Fictionalist lines.

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Conclusion This book described Radical Fictionalism, a theory of fictional discourse. According to the central tenet of Radical Fictionalism, fictional names are only fictionally names: authors of fiction engage in the display of name-types, and thereby make it fictional that those types are the names of a handsome young woman, of a neurotic detective, or of some other fictional individual. Accordingly, the sentence-types displayed in works of fiction only fictionally express particular propositions. Rather, the contentful effects derived from the consumption of fiction are obtained by impartation (with an ‘a’), a phenomenon that affects fictional telling to no lesser extent than actual discourse. In the first chapters of this book I faced the consequences of the Radical Fictionalist approach to authorial outputs, paying particular attention to the distinction between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narratives, and to the ensuing storyworld-periphery distinction. In Chapter  4 I discussed some consequences of this distinction with a focus on peripheral importation (with an ‘o’). In Chapter 5, I extended Radical Fictionalism to my favourite take on retelling, as in our (simple or prefixed) talk about fiction. The final chapters of this book were devoted to a Radical Fictionalist analysis of topics in philosophical semantics, in narratology, and in the  philosophy of literature. In Chapter  6 I ventured some Radical Fictionalist hypotheses about inconsistent fictions, unreliability, storyworld importation, and nesting. In Chapter  7, I moved on to different modes of critical discourse and I paused on those that are of particular significance for Radical Fictionalism, namely critical and biased retelling. Chapter 8 concluded with a tentative hypothesis about yet another mode of critical discourse: character-directed discourse. There, I put forth my (negotiable) analysis of character-talk as straightforwardly actualitydirected discourse, I discussed the relationships between this hypothesis Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics. Stefano Predelli, Oxford University Press (2020). © Stefano Predelli. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198854128.001.0001

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Conclusion  169 and Radical Fictionalism, and I concluded with a commitment to (scare-quote) ‘homonymy’. Much remains to be said if Radical Fictionalism is to grow into a fullyfledged theory of fictional and critical discourse. In particular, the big issues that remained on the side-line throughout this book are still in need of independent attention. Surely, negative existentials, co-predication, and a variety of those other ‘problems for anyone’ hardly received the attention that they deserve. Their conceptual independence is nevertheless a source of optimism from the Radical Fictionalist viewpoint: the shortcomings of its coverage are not the trademark of an ill-developed idea, but the symptoms of a theory properly focused on a definite area of investigation, namely fictional discourse and its manifestation in fictional narratives, in criticism, and in our everyday engagement with them.

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Index Beardsley, M.  7n1 Booth, W.  116n6 Bourne, C.  114n4 Caddick Bourne, E.  114n4 canonicity  140–1, 145–7 character-names  3, 159–67 character-oriented discourse  149–69 closure  3, 123–6, 144 co-reference  65, 68–70, 74–5, 87–90, 138 critical discourse  3, 131, 133–62 Culler, J.  57 Currie, G.  31

Howell, R.  31 impartation  15–18, 21, 28–34, 43, 45–53, 62–6, 72–5, 108, 112, 147, 168 implied author  36n11 importation, peripheral  2, 63, 65–9, 75–83, 111, 117–18, 122, 132–3, 136–7, 146, 168 importation, storyworld  3, 65–71, 81–2, 119–22, 124, 135, 168–9 inconsistent fiction  3, 112–16, 168–9 indexicality  9, 33, 66, 151 Kripke, S.  21–2, 66, 107, 163–4

Davidson, D.  101–3 display  25–7, 35–9, 43, 59–60, 87–90, 102–3, 135–7, 141, 149, 158–9, 166–8 Donnellan, K.  106n16

Lewis, D.  4–5, 51–2, 85, 92–3, 97, 119–24, 143–5 literary canon  3–4 literary character  3, 148, 150–1, 154–9

educated naturalization  133–7, 141, 146–9 Ellipsis Hypothesis  97–9 Everett, A.  153–6

name-type  10, 17–20, 25, 28–30, 43, 45, 52, 66–7, 84, 89–90, 95, 128–9, 136, 161–2, 166–8 name, empty  2, 11–14, 23–4, 84, 104–5, 150, 163–4 name, fictional  1, 6–7, 24, 27, 43, 45, 47, 64–72, 77–8, 83, 86–7, 136, 160–1, 168 name, real in fiction  2, 75–80 name, launching  10–13, 17–20, 53, 55, 74–5, 84, 87, 161–2, 67n2 name, replicating  11, 17–20, 26, 45, 53–5, 84 narrative levels  3, 127–31 narrative time  47, 56–62 narrative, framed  129–30, 135–6, 142

faithfulness  85–6, 88–90, 95–6, 102–3, 106, 109, 132–4, 138, 140–5, 147–8, 164 fiction-talk  2, 85–103, 106, 108–9, 147, 168 fictional languages  80–3 Frege, G.  22, 24n4 gappy proposition  13–14, 23, 33–4, 104–5, 150, 160 Garcia-Carpintero, M.  34n7

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184 Index narrative, homodiegetic/heterodiegetic  46–7, 49–50, 52–3, 62–3, 66–7, 168 negative existentials  86, 88–9, 96, 103–8, 169 nested narrative  127, 129–31, 155–6, 168–9 peripheral launching  55, 62–3 periphery  2–3, 48–57, 59–60, 62–5, 71, 76–80, 87, 89–90, 110–13, 116–19, 124–6, 131, 135–8, 142–3, 146, 151–2, 156–9, 162, 168 Perry, J.  34n7 Pragmatic Millianism  32–3 Prefixed-talk  2, 91–7, 100, 103, 108–9, 147, 168

106–7, 110, 112, 128–9, 133, 147, 149, 168 Sibley, F.  136–9 Speech-acts  21, 37–43 storyworld  2, 46–57, 59–60, 62–5, 76–8, 87–8, 90, 97, 110–22, 125–7, 129–33, 135–6, 138–40, 142–3, 146, 149, 151–2, 155–7, 162, 164, 168 Taylor, K.  34n7 tellers, fictional  2, 26–31, 43, 46–8, 50–4, 56, 61–2, 64, 67–8, 70–2, 74–5, 79–81, 83, 88–9, 110, 116–22, 124–31, 135–6, 143–4, 147 Thomasson, A.  32 translation  2, 50, 63, 65, 70–5, 83, 127

referential permeability  53–6, 62–3 retelling  87–95, 109, 133–4, 137–49, 159, 168 retelling, biased  134, 140–9, 168–9 retelling, critical  3, 134, 137–47, 149, 168–9

underreading  114–15, 124–5, 139–40 unreliable narrator  3, 88, 112–13, 115–19, 132, 134–5, 168–9

Sainsbury, M.  21–2, 98 Salmon, N.  105n14, 163n11 Searle, J.  5, 39–43, 43n15 semantic ascent  33–5 sentence-type  8, 20, 25–6, 28–9, 33–4, 39, 45, 64, 86–7, 89–90, 95,

Walton, K.  1, 4, 4n4, 7n1, 31, 85–6, 105n15, 132n1 Way of Retelling  85–92, 94–6, 106, 109 Way of Retelling, Unified  91–7, 99, 109 Way of Truth  86, 96–103, 107, 109

van Inwagen, P.  31 Van Inwagen, P.  158–9