Paloma Atencia-Linares is an Associate Professor in the Department of Logic, History and Philosophy of Science at UNED, Madrid. Her research focuses in the intersection between Aesthetics, Philosophy of Art and Philosophy of Mind. She’s co-editor of the British Journal of Aesthetics.
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 follow Tuesday through Thursday. Today, Paloma Atencia-Linares comments on the papers in Part II: Imagination and Engagement with Fiction.
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Part II of Engisch and Langkau’s Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition reminds us that the interest in the topics that occupied pioneers of the field has not faded. The five papers included in this section vindicate or reject familiar intuitions and/or present nuanced defenses of contested views on different topics related to our engagement with fiction. I will discuss only two of these papers but let me briefly give you an idea of what the others are about. They’re certainly worth your while!
In a beautiful paper, Anna Christina Ribeiro forcefully rejects the received view that urges us to identify the voice of the speaker in lyric poetry with a ‘poetic persona’. While she admits there are exceptions, Ribeiro defends the claim that lyric poetry does express ‘its author’s thoughts and feelings’. Manuel García-Carpintero, in turn, defends the view that literary fictions, by default, involve covert narrators—a contentious view that is more naturally associated with those who claim that fictions are constituted by pretended speech acts—a view that García-Carpintero himself rejects. Fiora Salis revisits the paradox of fiction and vindicates a new version of broad cognitivism providing a psychological theory of our emotional engagement with fiction that allows for imagination to be a source of justification for emotions. Finally, both Eileen John as well as Julia Langkau and Magdalena Balcerak Jackson (L&BJ), defend long standing intuitions regarding purported distinctive features of fiction: John vindicates the lapse of the fidelity constraint (FC) as a necessary condition for fiction and proposes three experiential features she claims derive from such condition; L&BJ, in turn, hold that imagining is indeed a necessary condition for (literary) fiction, but the relevant kind of imagining is not propositional, but experiential. My discussion below will address these two last articles (although Ribeiro’s views will play some role in it).
Departing from her reflection on two non-fictional books and their respective film adaptations—Janet Frame’s autobiographies vs Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table; Michael Lewis’ The Big Short vs its film adaptation by Adam McKay—Eileen John identifies three experiential features she takes to be characteristic of our engagement with fiction: (1)‘Representativeness’: the tendency to experience individuals depicted not so much as actual particulars but as representative of a kind or embodying certain universal significance. (2) ‘Minimal epistemic-aesthetic interest’: the experience of being drawn by the information we get from the narrative without “any concern for why it’s worth knowing” (130); and (3) ‘Evaluative open season’: the disposition to unleash our evaluative impulses without any moral reticence or prudential consideration.
According to John, these experiential patterns don’t settle the status of the work as fiction. A work can feel like fiction if it triggers these patterns even when the work is non-fictional. However, these patterns derive from the lapse of the fidelity constraint which John takes to be necessary for fiction (122). Surprisingly, she claims that the film adaptations she focuses on—McKay’s and Campion’s films—are nonfictional (120), but they nevertheless feel like fiction because they trigger the relevant patterns, even when both films are indeed subject to the FC.
I found this claim puzzling; I think the films are more naturally described as fictional, dramatized adaptations of non-fiction books. But leaving this aside, once John admits there are works that trigger the relevant experiential patterns despite complying with the FC, one questions whether these patterns really derive from the lapse of such condition. In the case of McKay’s and Campion’s films a more parsimonious hypothesis would be that if they feel like fiction, it’s because they are fiction and there are many standard features of fiction (Friend 2012), different from the lapse of the FC, that contribute to triggering the relevant patterns of engagement. For example, ‘representativeness’ could be prompted by the presence of well-known actors; ‘Minimal epistemic-aesthetic interest’, by the comic/ironic approach with which the narrative is developed (in the case of The Big Short) and the fact that the film simplifies the explanation of the financial operations described with more depth in the book. To the extent that ‘evaluative open season’ is triggered by these films, this can arguably be due to the choice of perspective film directors take on the characters and situations. The comic approach in McKey’s film might make us judge characters as if all of it were a joke; Campion’s way of presenting the character, sometimes as calling for empathy, other times for exasperation, might prompt us to judge the characters accordingly.
One could further question whether the three experiential features really capture a feeling of fiction. On the one hand, there are many fictional works which do not generate the experiential patterns proposed by John. In the fictional series Dopesick, for example, characters are fictional or composite; however, far from standing for universal kinds, they help the audience understand the concrete particulars who, while not directly represented in the film, went through very specific actual experiences such as the ones depicted. In Dopesick the audience cannot experience a ‘minimal epistemic-aesthetic interest’ either. Arguably, they engage with the series partly to get to know about America’s actual opioid addiction crisis. Also, both the producers and the audiences hold their judgements when it comes to the (fictional) depicted victims. On the other hand, a wide variety of nonfictional works adopt creative narrative styles for entertainment or other rhetorical purposes and trigger the relevant patterns. ‘Representativeness’ is clearly called-for, in podcasts such as Cautionary Tales where the whole point of the narrative is not so much to focus on the actual individuals and situations described, but on the life lessons they can teach. ‘Representativeness’ is also manifest in lyric poetry which, according to Ribeiro should not be considered fiction. She claims that the “lyric poet seeks to express the universal via the particular” (167). Also, many nonfictional works prompt the experience of ‘minimal epistemic-aesthetic interest.’ What is most interesting in the podcast S-Town, for instance, is not so much whether a murder took place or how, but the fascinating details that unfold in the story. We enjoy them not because they are useful knowledge but because they contribute to a fascinating story. Similarly, nonfictional works frequently trigger ‘evaluative open season’—in the British comedy podcast My Dad Wrote a Porno the three hosts make hilarious and judgmental comments about the erotic novel that the father of one of them actually wrote. These are just a few representative cases, but they are not rare among non-fictional works.
Certainly, John doesn’t deny that nonfictional works trigger these experiential patterns, but her claim is that when they do, they feel like fiction, and I don’t think that’s an accurate description. Whether the patterns identified by John are more pervasive in fictional or nonfictional works is an empirical question but, in principle, given the wide variety of existing genres both in fiction and nonfiction, it’s far from clear that we can adjudicate these patterns as characteristic of fictional rather to nonfictional products.
I suspect that when theorizing about these topics, there is a general neglect of a wide range of genres and types of nonfictional works available in various media. This, I think, is also part of the problem I find in L&BJ’s otherwise great article.
L&BJ claim that engaging in experiential imagining is necessary for a competent engagement with literary fiction, while it isn’t for literary nonfiction, non-literary fiction and non-literary nonfiction. Unfortunately, they don’t specify what exactly circumscribes each of these categories, but it’s safe to say that the main category they have in mind is textual (non-visual) creative narrative fiction.
One might think that the experience of aphantasic people might raise potential problems for this view. Consider this report by Blake Ross:
Some books are so fleshy they're opaque: Lord of the Rings numbs. But Lord of the Flies gnaws, because I could meditate on the idea of society gone wild forever. Animal Farm is awesome. 1984. The splendor of Hogwarts is lost, but the idea of a dementor is brain fuel.
If we trust Ross, it seems that aphantasic people cannot be fully competent readers of certain literary fictions—the Lord of the Rings, say. But they might be sufficiently or perhaps fully competent with others: The Lord of Flies or Animal Farm. Certainly, this evidence is circumstantial and not detailed, but it might nevertheless be something worth considering.
Less speculative and more problematic for L&BJ’s view are non-fictional creative podcasts that would be hard to exclude from the category of literary non-fiction. To properly engage with these audible non-fictional stories, the audience “should aim to have the kind of experience in mind that the author is aiming for” (153), just like readers do when they engage with literary fiction. L&BJ don’t see a problem “if sometimes there is such a normative link between literary non-fiction and imagination” (152), but it’s hard to think that this type of content in general doesn’t require experiential imagination to the same extent than literary fiction does. This being so, it's not clear what explanatory value there is in proposing that fiction has this normative force.
References
Friend, S. (2012). “Fiction as a Genre.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 112 (2pt2):179--209.
Ross, B. (2016) Imagine a dog. Got it? I don’t. Here’s what it’s like to be unable to visualize anything. Available at https://www.vox.com/2016/5/19/11683274/aphantasia