Nele Van de Mosselaer is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Her research focuses on how the boundaries between reality and fiction are blurred in our interactions with virtual media. Here you can see her during a mid-pandemic visit to her jokester grandfather.
A post by Nele Van de Mosselaer
My grandfather likes telling jokes and funny stories. He is also exceptionally proficient at incorporating these seamlessly in already occurring conversations. Moreover, he has the habit of vividly narrating them in the first person, so that they take the shape of long-winded, autobiographical narratives. These narratives tend to fall into one of two categories. They are either descriptions of funny situations he actually encountered sometime in his 89 years of life experience or shameless adaptations of the joke he discovered on that day’s calendar page. For this blog post, I want to investigate a particular effect that these stories have on me. Very often, and for long periods of time, I am unable to figure out whether my grandfather is telling a fictional or a non-fictional story. And many times, I have found myself laughing at the story before tentatively asking whether the situation I just laughed at actually happened or not, to the great amusement of my grandfather.
My grandfather’s jokes came to mind when I was reading Stefan Iversen’s discussion of metanoic reflexivity, which he defines as a reading effect that is produced when textual and/or paratextual markers defamiliarize the act of ascribing fictionality or non-fictionality to a cultural artefact (2019, 192). He distinguishes between three types of metanoic reflexivity: “one, where fiction turns out to be non-fiction; a second where non-fiction turns out to be fiction; and a third that keeps the doubt open indefinitely” (2019, 192). The first two describe processes that Iversen respectively calls defictionalization and defactualization, in which a reader realizes having made a mistake with regard to a story (as a whole) being fictional or not. It’s the third one that piqued my interest, however, as it does not involve the appreciator merely transitioning from believing a representation’s content to imagining it, or vice versa, but rather indefinitely suspending all judgement concerning its (non)fictional status.
Currie writes that “[t]here can hardly be a more important question about a piece of writing or speech than this: Is it fiction or nonfiction? If the question seems not especially important, that’s because we rarely need to ask it” (1990, 1). He adds that, if we did not know whether a story is fiction or nonfiction, we “would not know whether, or in what proportions, to be instructed or delighted by it. No coherent reading of it would be possible” (1990, 1). As Friend writes, whether or not we agree with Currie, “the classification of a text as fiction or nonfiction can certainly make a difference to how we respond to it” (2008, 150). Yet, Iversen refers to the existence of situations in which the appreciation of a representational work involves a “deferred or obstructed judgement of whether something is fictional or not” (2019, 200).
My grandfather’s jokes might be a very specific example of a situation in which the (non)fictionality of a story cannot simply be inferred. But I believe that there are more examples to be found. When scrolling through endless memes, tweets, and tumblr posts during lockdown, for example, I found many similar funny stories, typically offered to me without any context. These stories about people’s embarrassing or tragicomic experiences often left me wondering whether they were specifically made up to achieve funny results, or genuine reports of real-life events. A similar feeling overcame me when watching those strange documentaries (mockumentaries?) which, in a seemingly dead serious manner, show interviewees (either highly troubled people or very good actors) talk about their blood-curdling encounters with the Bigfoot, or give detailed accounts of the time they were abducted by aliens.
Finding out whether the appropriate way of reacting to these stories was belief or imagination regularly made me enjoy them considerably less. After all, definitively treating them as fictional would often turn them into quite random, banal, and flawed stories or silly mockumentaries (if they were made up in the first place, they could have easily been written better, or made funnier or more believable). Treating their content as non-fictional, on the other hand, could have the unpleasant side-effects of me feeling vicarious shame for the narrator or guilt for laughing at another’s actual misfortune or far-reaching delusions. I thus seemed to be enjoying these stories best when merely focusing on their content, without making any judgements on the truth or fictionality of it.
What I want to suggest here is this: sometimes, doubt or ignorance about a story’s status might be an inherent part of the appreciation of this story. But if this is the case, such narratives might present us with a definitional problem: how can we define them as either fictions or non-fictions, if we cannot figure out (maybe because context is missing, as is so often the case when stories are shared on the internet, or because they were specifically construed to obscure this) whether it was the author’s intention for us to imagine or believe their content? Moreover, we might ask what exactly appreciators do with the content of a story, when they are unable to discern whether it is fiction or nonfiction. Walton writes that “imagining aims at the fictional as belief aims at the true” (Walton 1990, p.41). But what mental state aims neither at the fictional nor at the true?
It seems quite obviously wrong to assume that imagining exclusively aims at the fictional. If anything, it seems like the appreciation of the above-discussed ambiguous narratives inherently involves entertaining their content while suspending any judgements about their truth. And this is precisely how imagination is often understood: as entertaining something in thought “without commitment to its being the case” (Carroll 1990, 80), as a form of non-truth directed thought (cf. Picciuto and Carruthers 2016, 314), as a kind of “negative faith, which simply permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgement” (Coleridge, Biographia Literaria XXII).
Indeed, to me, it seems most logical to say that, even if we don’t know about their (non)fictionality, we imagine the content of these ambiguous stories. They are, first and foremost, representations and as Matravers says: “we are mandated to imagine all propositions that are the content of representations, whether these representations are fictional or non-fictional” (2014, 3). The relevant distinction, according to Matravers, is not that between fictions and non-fictions, but rather between representations (situations in which we are presented with something as happening at another time or place and towards which actions are impossible) and confrontations (situations in which something happens in our immediate, ego-centric environment and which afford the possibility of action) (ibid.). Instead of seeing imagination as the distinct mental attitude when it comes to appreciating fiction, we could then say that imagination is the default mental attitude for the appreciation of any representation, be it fictional, non-fictional, or unable to be categorized as either of those.
Even though this, to me, now seems to be the best solution for dealing with ambiguous narratives, I have two more concerns I would like to share. First of all, even though we might take imagination to be the distinctive mental state not for fiction, but rather for representations in general, there still seems to be an important phenomenological difference between experiencing something as fictional, or not deciding on its (non)fictionality at all. For me, this was made clear when my reception of the embarrassing tweets and tumblr posts decidedly changed when I eventually found out whether they were fictional or non-fictional. This means that there still seems to be a difference between how we approach fictional stories, versus how we deal with non-categorizable ones, at least when it comes to the accompanying mental states we form when appreciating these different kinds of stories. This difference might not be one that Matravers’ theory allows for, let alone clarifies.
Secondly, it seems perfectly imaginable that there are experiences that are similar to experiences of so-called “metanoic reflexivity”, but that do not just cast doubt on something being fictional or non-fictional, but about it being a representation or a confrontation. My doubt about whether I was watching a pre-recorded talk or rather a live presentation when tuning in late during a videoconference once suggests to me that such situations are not merely far-fetched science fiction scenarios. At the time, I was unable to discern whether I was merely looking at a pre-recorded representation, or whether I could unmute my microphone and start talking to this telepresent person. In fact, the development of virtual worlds is only further increasing the chances of such confusions between representations and confrontations happening. Scholars have often raised the question about the (non)fictionality of virtual worlds (cf. Aarseth 2007; Chalmers 2017; Wildman and McDonnell 2019), but now a further, more fundamental question is raised: how exactly should we distinguish between confrontations and representations in virtual environments?
In short, I have found myself (enjoying) being confused about the (non)fictionality of certain narratives. And then I found myself confused about what that confusion could, theoretically, mean for the way we think about experiences of fictions/representations and their link with imagination. I do hope, however, that this post does not merely confuse readers.
References
Aarseth, Espen. 2007. “Doors and Perception. Fiction vs. Simulation in Games.” Intermediality 9: 35-44.
Carroll, Noël. 1990. The Philosophy of Horror. Or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge.
Chalmers, David J. 2017. “The Virtual and the Real.” Disputatio 9.46: 309-352.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1984. Biographia Literaria, or, Biographical Sketches of my Literary Life and Opinions, edited by James Engell and Jackson Bate, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Currie, G. 1990. The Nature of Fiction. Cambridge, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.
Friend, S. 2008. “Imagining Fact and Fiction.” In New Waves in Aesthetics, 150-169. London: Palgrave.
Iversen, S. 2019. “’Just because it isn’t happening here, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening’: Narrative, Fictionality and Reflexivity in Humanitarian Rhetoric.” European Journal of English Studies 23.2: 190-205.
Matravers, D. 2014. Fiction and narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Picciuto, Elizabeth and Peter Carruthers. 2016. “Imagination and Pretense.” In Amy Kind (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination, London: Routledge, 314-325.
Walton, Kendall L. 1990. Mimesis as Make-Believe. On the Foundations of the Representational Arts. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Wildman, Nathan and Neil McDonnell. 2019. “Virtual Reality: Digital or Fictional?” Disputatio 11.55: 371-397.