Michel-Antoine Xhignesse is an instructor at Capilano University. His research focuses on a number of topics centering on art’s status as a social kind, including the explanatory role that intuitions play in grounding judgements about the ontology of art and social kinds, the constraining power of authorial intent, and the problem of truth in fiction. He is the author of the forthcoming Aesthetics: 50 Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments (Routledge 2023).
This week at The Junkyard we’re hosting a symposium on Patrik Engisch and Julia Langkau’s (eds.) recent book: The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition. On Monday, we began with an introduction from Patrik Engisch and Julia Langkau. Commentaries will appear Tuesday through Thursday. Today, Michel-Antoine Xhignesse comments on the papers in Part 1: Fiction and The Definition of Imagination.
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Blood and Phlegm: Deflating Fiction
The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition opens with a deflationary broadside against some well-loved (and well-worn) intuitions about fiction and the imagination.
Richard Woodward opens the volume by inviting us to reflect on what it means for us to treat something as fiction. Following Kendall Walton, it has become commonplace for philosophers to appeal to the imagination to draw the distinction between fiction and non-fiction: fictional works prescribe that we imagine some content, whereas non-fictional works do not.
But, Woodward argues, we should not forget the other Waltonian thesis (from Categories of Art): classification affects our engagement with a work. So, he asks, what is involved in treating something as a fiction? Ascriptions of fictionality and non-fictionality, he thinks, are expressive rather than descriptive: to say that ‘Robert Bakker’s The Dinosaur Heresies (1986) is non-fiction’ is not to describe its content as true or accurate, but rather to communicate how I plan to engage with it, the background expectations I will bring to my reading, and the evaluative criteria I will use to judge it.
Patrik Engisch follows up with a defence of Derek Matravers’s controversial claim that fiction is neither uniquely nor primarily characterized by the role of the imagination. Engisch argues that, contrary to our usual assumption, there is only a weak link between fiction and simulation; much of a fiction’s content, after all, is perfectly reliable (especially implicit content, but often much explicit content, too, as with historical fiction), while much non-fictional content is not (e.g. Bakker’s incorrect account of dinosaur extinction, or the speeches and military tactics reported by ancient historians such as Herodotus and Tacitus).
Engisch posits that engaging with narratives requires us to aim to develop a unified picture of the narrative being conveyed (‘narrative integration’). Achieving narrative integration does not require us to determine what is true in a story; it merely requires us to determine what the story’s claims are. This ‘narrative imagining’ is an ability which is not unique to fiction: we see it deployed in all our engagements with narrative representations, whether these be fictional or non-fictional, literary or pictorial, etc., and is especially informed by genre conventions. The fiction/non-fiction distinction does not seem to add anything much.
Derek Matravers returns to the polemical core of his 2014 book, Fiction and Narrative: it is a mistake to think that what is distinctive about fiction is the author’s prescription that we imagine her story’s content. According to Matravers, there’s nothing distinctive about our engagement with fictional narratives compared to non-fictional narratives: we engage with all narratives in the same ways.
Reading, he argues, requires us to construct a mental model representing a work’s content (e.g. Engisch’s ‘narrative integration’), which we update as we read on and more of the story’s content is disclosed to us, and which we keep compartmentalized from our broader beliefs. When I read Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad's The Viking Discovery of America: The Excavation of a Norse Settlement in L'Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland (1991), for example, I don’t just add all of their claims to my store of Viking knowledge; rather, I keep track of the Ingstads’s claims as claims in their book. I may subsequently export some or all of those claims to my general belief systems, but I nevertheless keep track of his book as a unified whole.
If they had written that Óðinn came to Helge in a dream and told him where to dig, well, that is a claim whose content I’d hesitate to export! Indeed, I’d deploy the same kinds of coping mechanisms to fit this claim into my mental model as I would to assess any strange or inconsistent claim I found in a work of fiction (rejection, reconciliation, weird world-ing, and disregarding). Believing that a particular narrative is fictional or non-fictional may increase the salience of some coping mechanisms, but it does not sort the world of coping mechanisms into two cleanly delimited sets, each appropriate only to a single kind of narrative.
Finally, Margherita Arcangeli argues that recreative imagination is an essential ingredient of creativity more generally. ‘Recreative’ imagination is the kind of imagination we use when we imagine what it would be like to be in a non-actual situation. The prototypical case of recreative imagination is engaging with a fiction, but we find ourselves deploying it in non-fictional contexts too, such as when we consider possibilities, entertain counterfactuals and thought experiments, imagine what’s it like…, etc. Arcangeli argues that, once we recognize that it is not limited to the act of adopting someone else’s (or some thing’s) perspective, recreative imagination suffices to do all of the relevant work we otherwise attribute to a separate, ‘creative’, species of imagination.
These deflationary arguments throw a bucket of cold water on the philosophy of literature. While these salvos may not sink pretence-theoretic or imagination-centric accounts of fiction, they’ve at least left them limping back into port. As these chapters are at pains to observe, it is certainly not wrong to think that the imagination is centrally involved in our engagement with fiction, but we should be careful about the inferences we draw from this fact.
It seems to me that one important lesson here is that we ought to be careful about the inferences we draw concerning the connection between imagination and a narrative’s content. It is very tempting to think that, where imagination is concerned, anything goes (or perhaps even that ‘anything goes’ is necessary to preserve an account of authorial creativity, a possibility which Arcangeli ably dismisses). But, as these chapters show, it seems instead that our acts of imagination are heavily circumscribed. Some of this circumscription is surely structural, which is to say that it depends on the nature of the imagination itself. According to architectural models of the imagination, for example, our imaginative processes will sometimes run into conflict with other mental processes (such as our belief-forming processes) and necessitate either resolution or aporia—the cases of imaginative resistance or of imagining logical contradictions might be two such cases.
But what these chapters make clear is that philosophers of literature have paid too little attention to the social constraints on narratives. Genre conventions are an obvious source of such constraints and, as Woodward and Engisch argue, they constrain both the storyteller and her audience. And as Matravers argues, we can—and do—deploy a number of coping mechanisms in response to what seems like deviant narrative content, independently of the fiction/non-fiction distinction. And here, I’m especially struck by how quickly philosophers of literature reach for the ‘weird world’ strategy. My suspicion—accusation?—is that the reason for this alacrity is an underlying commitment to the fiction/non-fiction distinction, which valorizes the author’s prescription to imagine and posits fiction as a realm in which ‘creative’ imagination is prioritized and has free rein.
Consider Hamlet (c. 1599-1601), in which Hamlet (and, indeed, Shakespeare himself) attributes Horatio’s good judgement to his balance of blood and phlegm. As far as Shakespeare and his contemporaries were concerned, this was a perfectly true explanation. But what should we imagine?
Philosophers of literature seem to prefer the weird world interpretation: Horatio has a good balance of blood and phlegm. This is, after all, what Shakespeare wrote, what he imagined, what he intended his audience to imagine, and what his audience did, in fact, imagine. But this seems wrong to me. After all, it means that I must imagine that Horatio—to say nothing of the other characters—is a fundamentally alien creature with non-human anatomy. And that, surely, is not what Shakespeare intended.
Instead, it seems far more parsimonious to cash out Shakespeare’s prescription as mandating that we imagine that Horatio and company are human beings just like us. This doesn’t mean that blood and phlegm drop out of the picture entirely, however, since it is a fact about the sixteenth century (Shakespeare’s period), as well as the fourteenth century (Hamlet’s setting)—that people believed in humorism. Following Shakespeare’s prescription to imagine requires us to imagine a story set in fourteenth-century Denmark, where belief in humorism was likewise ubiquitous. The result is that Horatio owes his good temperament to the very same factors that actually cause a good temperament (whatever they may be), but that everyone in the story ascribes it to his balance of blood and phlegm.
This has the virtue of ensuring that the author’s imaginative prescription stays the same over time, without devolving into a demand that we imagine strange humanoids. But notice—and this is the important point—that it requires us to accept certain limitations on what we imagine. In this case, the limits are the limits of the real world, because Hamlet is clearly supposed to be a story set in the real world, and so that’s how we should engage with it. Just which limitations are operative, however, may vary depending on the narrative in question, or even with the storytelling practices of the culture in which it is told.