Hannah H. Kim is an Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona. She works on aesthetics, metaphysics, and Asian philosophy.
A post by Hannah Kim
I saw Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things over winter break, and I was impressed. The costumes, settings, and even castings (Mark Ruffalo!) felt original, and I had a hard time describing the work to others (“it’s a… Frankenstein-meets-Barbie-meets-Siddhartha in a twisted-Wes-Anderson-meets-Salvador-Dali style”).
The ability to conjure up people, places, and events in a compelling manner is a real imaginative feat, and it’s common to think that fiction is more imaginative than nonfiction. This holds for both senses of the word ‘imaginative’: producing a work of fiction seems to require more creativity (the ability to come up with something novel and meritorious), at least when it comes to content generation. Creating fiction also seems to involve more use of imagination—there’s a sense in which we don’t want non-fiction creation to involve imagination!
In fact, what’s been dubbed the “consensus view” of fiction closely connects fiction to imagination and defines fiction as works where the creator intends for the audience to imagine, and not believe, its contents. Stacie Friend (2012) and Derek Matravers (2014) question this close connection between fiction and imagination, arguing that any representational works, including nonfiction, invite the consumers to imagine their content.
I think Friend and Matravers are right in their skepticism that fiction and imagination share a special relationship, or at least in their doubt that imagination is a key concept with which fiction can be defined. However, the fiction-imagination connection is a persistently intuitive one, so a satisfactory dispelling should be able to explain why we’re tempted to link them together in the first place.
My suggestion: it’s actually creativity that fiction is especially tied to, and imagination’s close connection to creativity makes us transfer the association and think it’s fiction and imagination that share a special bond. I find it intuitive that using one’s imagination is the foremost way to be creative, and given space constraints, I’ll simply presuppose that creativity and imagination are closely linked. What I’ll show in the rest of the post is that creativity is involved in both consuming and creating fiction, and that creativity might be an important feature of fiction because we expect the creation of fiction to have involved fabrication.
Engaging with a work of fiction seems to involve creativity in ways that often go beyond the way we engage with nonfiction. Noël Carroll (2014) shows how readers and critics use a variety of types of imagination when consuming fiction. Knowing that something is a work of fiction, and building a mental model of its goings-on without confusing it to be real, is to use fictive imagination. Understanding metaphor or symbolism requires that one use exploratory imagination to test various associations of a word or an image (Gregory Currie and Ian Ravenscroft (2002)’s creative imagination seems like exploratory imagination employed creatively). Elaborative imagination is activated when we’re invited to fill in the gaps and discern states of affairs that are left implicit (Neil Van Leeuwen (2013)’s constructive imagination, which generates representations, is used in elaborative imagination).
As mentioned, using one’s imagination is an important way of being creative, and some fictive, exploratory, and elaborative imaginings can be creative. For example, one might come up with an unexpected but apt interpretation of some detail in a story to illustrate a greater point; interpretations can be more or less creative depending on how fresh, novel, or unorthodox they are. Discerning the theme, point, or message of a work can also be creative if, for example, one forges an unobvious connection between a particular formal feature to a theme in the work.
Producing a work of fiction also involves creativity. But to fully explain why, let me first discuss another ingredient that I think is crucial to fiction: fabrication.
Harry Deutsch (2000, 2013) has argued that it is necessary and sufficient for something’s being a work of fiction that it features content that is fabricated (made up “out of whole cloth”). It hasn’t been a popular view—Friend (2012), for instance, quickly dismisses it in a footnote— but the intuition that fiction involves made-up elements is a common enough one. So let’s revisit the idea.
Deutsch’s fabrication thesis admits two versions: the strong version (that fabrication is necessary and sufficient for a work to be fiction) and the weak version (that fabrication is necessary, but not sufficient, for a work to be fiction). I agree that the strong version is untenable. It would immediately render bad-faith nonfiction (e.g. fake news) to be a work of fiction, making it impossible to hold bad actors accountable. The weak version, however, is much more reasonable. Most works of fiction we consume include made-up elements. Legal disclaimers such as “Unless otherwise indicated, all the names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents in this book are either the product of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental” require that the works fabricate, or at least require that consumers take the works to have done so.
Of course, all fictions mix true and untrue elements; all the fabrication thesis requires is that fiction involve at least one feature that is made up.
But don’t nonfiction works, like memoir, also include features that are made up? I’m of the mind that nonfiction works, including memoir, ought not straight-up fabricate, i.e., knowingly introduce elements known to be false (also see De Bres 2021). Writers can be mistaken, but the fabrication thesis only requires that nonfiction be free of intentional fabrications and that fiction include them.
What about works of fiction that don’t involve any fabrication? Catherine Abell (2020) argues that a work where nothing is fabricated can still be fiction; Helen Garner’s The Spare Room (apparently) relays a true account of the author nursing a dying friend but is represented as fiction for legal protection. Abell concludes that what’s more important than the truth status of a work’s content is the intention of the author to conform to a practice of fiction (39).
I’m a fan of shifting the emphasis from the nature of a work’s content to the nature of the creator’s intention (or activity). Whether The Spare Room is a novel is controversial (some have argued it’s closer to journalism), so I’ll leave that issue unsettled, but there’s a safer lesson we can draw from the example: what’s important is the expectation that fabrication was involved in a fiction’s creation, and not whether the content was actually fabricated.
If it’s not so far-fetched to require fiction to invite the expectation that it involves at least one fabricated element, we can see why creativity is closely connected to fiction. A good way to highlight that something is fabricated is to have it be creative. If fiction involves fabrication, then creativity is an important feature of it being good of its kind. Of course, fabricating often involves imagining, so in an indirect sense, creating fiction will require imagination. But this is consistent with acknowledging that creating (and consuming) both fiction and nonfiction require imagination. Fiction doesn’t enjoy a special relationship to imagination, but it does enjoy a special relationship to creativity.
The condition, or expectation, that fiction involve fabrication makes creativity an important desideratum in judging fiction because creativity makes it manifest that something is a fabrication. If producing a work of fiction is expected to involve fabricating, then one way to produce fiction well is to make it obvious that one did in fact fabricate—and one reliable way to do this is to make clear that the fabricated content doesn’t seem like something that is copied or derived from another source. Being creative involves producing something that is new or novel, so being creative is a good way to produce something that doesn’t seem derivative.
If I’m right that fiction is intimately connected to creativity by way of its invited mode of engagement and the standard expectation of fabrication, then it is no surprise that we connect fiction to imagination given creativity’s close association with imagination. Loosely thinking of creativity as “praiseworthy and novel uses of the imagination” might have led philosophers to think that imagination itself is crucial to fiction.
There is a tight association among imagination, creativity, and fiction, and the fabrication thesis is a promising way to tell a unified story of why creativity—and derivatively, imagination—is so centrally linked to fiction.
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This blog post is based on my forthcoming “Imagination, Creativity, and Fiction” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination and Creativity (edited by Amy Kind and Julia Langkau).
References
Abell, Catherine. 2020. Fiction: A Philosophical Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carroll, Noël. 2014. “The Creative Audience: Some Ways in which Readers, Viewers, and/or Listeners Use Their Imaginations to Engage Fictional Artworks.” In The Philosophy of Creativity, edited by Elliot Samuel Paul and Scott Barry Kaufman, 62–81. New York: Oxford University Press.
Currie, Gregory and Ian Ravenscroft. 2002. Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
De Bres, Helena. 2021. Artful Truths: The Philosophy of Memoir. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Deutsch, Harry. 2000. “Making Up Stories.” In Empty Names, Fiction, and the Puzzles of Non-Existence, edited by Thomas Hofweber and Anthony Everett, 17–36. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
———. 2013. “Friend on Making Up Stories.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 113: 365–70.
Friend, Stacie. 2012. “Fiction as a Genre.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 112: 179–209.
Garner, Helen. 2008. The Spare Room. Melbourne: Text Publishing.
Matravers, Derek. 2014. Fiction and Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Van Leeuwen, D.S. Neil. 2013. “The Meaning of ‘Imagine’ Part I: Constructive Imagination”, Philosophy Compass, 8(3): 220–230.