A post by Julia Langkau

We all seem to agree that intuitively, there is a strong link between fiction and imagination. Beginning with Walton's influential account of make-believe, imagining has been seen as the operative attitude when it comes to fiction as opposed to believing: "Imagining aims at the fictional as belief aims at the true." (Walton 1990: 41). This mutually exclusive distinction between imagining and believing has shaped much of the discussion about our engagement with fiction, such as the definition of the relevant kind of imagination, patchwork puzzles, etc. The claim, as I understand it, has been a normative one (see Balcerak Jackson & Langkau 2022) — after all, Walton talks in terms of what fiction prescribes. Even if it turned out that most people actually believed most fictions while reading – perhaps before realizing they were fictions and then disbelieving them – they would all be making a mistake: they should have imagined instead.

Arguably, imagination can play a role in nonfictional texts, while works of fiction require us to believe certain propositions (see Friend 2008). This leads Matravers (2014) to question the idea that we do two different things when reading. He is less (or not at all) concerned with the normative question of what the reader should do, but rather with what the reader really does when reading. Whether fiction or nonfiction, he argues, the reader is engaged in one and the same activity (building mental models), and the really interesting distinction is the one between confrontations and representations: facing a lion vs. reading about a lion, be it fictional or nonfictional.  

Yet, there remains the intuition of a strong link between fiction and imagination that marks a difference to nonfiction. If we don’t think that fiction and imagination are in fact closely connected, we need an alternate explanation for the intuition. I’m aware of three recent attempts to provide such an alternative.

Magdalena Balcerak Jackson and I (Balcerak Jackson and Langkau 2022) have argued that both notions should be understood in a more restrictive way: ‘imagination’ stands for phenomenal or experiential imagination and ‘fiction’ stands for literary fiction. We argue that literary fiction necessarily requires the engagement of these richer forms of imagination, encompassing mental images of all kinds—simple ones such as visual or auditory images, as well as more complex experiential ones that include feelings and emotions. By restricting both the scope of fiction and the scope of imagination, we argue that the original normative claim holds.

Hannah Kim (forthcoming) proposes that our intuition is underpinned by a confusion between imagination and creativity: ‘imaginative’ and ‘creative’ are often used synonymously. What really is tightly linked to fiction is creativity, more  precisely: fabrication. For something to be fiction, some element of it needs to be fabricated or expected to be fabricated in the sense that it needs to be invented or made up from scratch (following Harry Deutsch’s (2013) notion of fabrication). When engaging with fiction, we expect that fabrication was involved in its production.

Eileen John (2022)’s explanation operates at the experiential level. She sees the difference between fiction and non-fiction in the overall experience of our engagement with both (see also Friend 2008; 2012). Our experience of engaging with fiction is influenced by the removal of the ‘fidelity constraint,’ meaning the author is not bound by a truth-telling obligation (John 2022: 122). This lapse of the fidelity constraint allows us to, first, experience characters as representations or symbols; second, enjoy learning about the story without any practical purpose; and third, exercise freedom in judgment, as ‘[n]o real individuals will be insulted or misjudged, and no one’s actual conception of self-worth will be undermined or ignored’ (John 2022: 132). Freedom from social and similar constraints significantly influences our experience of reading fiction (see also Moonyoung Song’s discussion on contrary but apt emotions, Song 2020: 51-56).

I no longer think that fiction is relevant in the explanation of our initial intuition (see Langkau, forthcoming). Rather, it is the feature of literariness (and not literary fiction, as argued in Balcerak Jackson and Langkau 2022). Literariness and experiential imagining are tightly linked, I think: literary text, fictional or nonfictional, invites us to engage in rich forms of imagination. John is right in that the distinction is about our experience rather than a propositional attitude, and I think that Kim is right in that creativity plays a role – though in a slightly different way than she proposes.

Literariness is notoriously hard to define, since it can encompass not only syntactic, stylistic or expressive elements such as, for instance, repetitions, metaphors, comparisons, etc., but also semantic aspects such as certain topics as well as contextual aspects, including instructions of how the reader should engage with a text. Literariness, however, is only loosely tied to fiction. Quite obviously, more often literary texts are fictional than nonfictional – but there is no intrinsic or necessary connection. Still, the connection might suffice to fuel the intuition that imagination is linked to ‘fiction’.

Imagining in response to a literary work (fictional or non-fictional) is highly subjective. This is so because phenomenal and experiential imagining come in various forms and depend on the subject’s previous lived experience (for empirical work, see, e.g., Brosch 2018, Jajdelska et al. 2011, Kuzmičová 2014).

Here is an example of what this can look like. In his (non-academic) book What we see when we read (2014), Peter Mendelsund reports how a friend and how he himself used to imagine when reading:

A friend grew up in suburban Albany. He’s always been an avid reader, even as a child, and whenever he read, he tells me, he mentally situated the stories in the backyards and side streets of his native blocks, because he had no other frame of reference. I did this too. For me, the settings for most books I read was Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I grew up. So the stage for all of these epic encounters—for Jean-Christophe, and, say, Anna Karenina, or Moby-Dick—was a local public school, my neighbor’s backyard (…) (Mendelsund 2014: 105)

While Mendelsund is aware that Moby-Dick (partly) takes place in New Bedford, Massachusetts, he is also aware that the mental image as part of his imagining is a mental image of his neighbor’s backyard. He propositionally imagines that Ishmael is in New Bedford, while he phenomenally imagines Ishmael in a backyard in Cambridge.

While it is required of the reader that they imagine experientially, how exactly they ought to imagine is not prescribed by the text. Moreover, Mendelsund should not recommend to anyone that they, too, imagine Ishmael in Cambridge, because the story doesn’t take place in Cambridge, and there is no interesting connection between the two places that would justify imagining the story there. What makes Mendelsund imagine the story in Cambridge is that the images he retrieves from his memory are detailed and emotionally charged. Which images do this work depends entirely on the reader.

This way of imagining could be called ‘creative’ insofar as it goes beyond what the author could have intended, and it escapes the author’s control. The reader is the author of their very own reading experience. This reading experience, moreover, is likely very elusive: the product is not one that can easily be remembered or shared.

Literary non-fiction such as a literary autobiography, however, puts a constraint on the author as well as the reader to truthfully reconstruct some of the experiences of a person or to grasp the relevance of an event or a situation. This constraint changes how we ought to imagine: we are required to imagine or at least aim to imagine correctly.

In the debate about the link between fiction and imagination, the initial claim was a semantic claim about truth and truth in fiction with normative consequences for the reader. Matravers and others have directed the focus onto what really goes on in the reader’s mind. I think a crucial distinction can be found at the experiential level, but fiction doesn’t play a role. Literary texts (among other representations) invite us to imagine experientially. The normativity of this invitation comes from a different place, though: it is likely epistemic and aesthetic.

So, maybe it’s time for a literary turn in the discussion of how imagination and ‘fiction’ are related: maybe it’s time to focus on exploring experiential kinds of imagining, and in what sense they are creative forms of imagining in the context of literary text (or other artistic representations).

References:

Balcerak Jackson, M. and Langkau, J. (2022), ‘Literary fiction and imagination’, in P. Engisch and J. Langkau (eds), The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition, 140-156, London: Routledge.

Brosch, R. (2018), ‘What we “see” when we read: Visualization and vividness in reading fictional narratives’, Cortex 105, 135-143.

Deutsch, H. (2013), ‘Friend on Making Up Stories’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, 113: 365–70.

Friend, S. (2008), ‘Imagining Fact and Fiction’, in K. Stock and K. Thomson-Jones (eds), New Waves in Aesthetics, London: Palgrave Macmillan,150–69.

Friend, S. (2022), ‘Emotion in Fiction: State of the Art’, British Journal of Aesthetics 62 (2): 257-271.

Jajdelska, E., Butler, C., Kelly, S., McNeill, A., & Overy, K. (2011), ‘Crying, moving, and keeping it whole: What makes literary description vivid?’ Poetics Today, 31 (3): 433-463.

John, E. (2022), ‘The Experience of Fiction’, in P. Engisch and J. Langkau (eds), The Philosophy of Fiction: Imagination and Cognition, 140-156, London: Routledge.

Kim, H. (forthcoming), ‘Imagination, Creativity, and Fiction’, in: A. Kind and J. Langkau, The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination and Creativity, New York: Oxford University Press.

Kuzmičová, A. (2014), ‘Literary Narrative and Mental Imagery: A View from Embodied Cognition’, Style, 48: 3, Cognitive Literary Study: Second Generation Approaches, 275-293.

Langkau, J. (forthcoming), ‘Imaginative Freedom and Epistemic Constraints in the Context of Literary Text’, in K. Bantinaki, E. Kyprianidou, F. Vassiliou (eds), Empathy and the Aesthetic Mind. Perspectives on Fiction and Beyond, Bloomsbury.

Matravers, D. (2014), Fiction and Narrative, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mendelsund, P. (2014), What we see when we read, New York: Vintage Trade Paperback.

Song, M. (2020), ‘Aptness of Fiction-Directed Emotions’, The British Journal of Aesthetics 60: 1, 45-59.