Rise of fictionality

Novels, we say, are long prose fictions, but general the terms of that definition are left unexamined. What is “prose” after all? What, Catherine Gallagher wants to ask, is fiction? And how did fictionality become established as the matter-of-factly defining characteristic of the novel. It is often assumed that “fiction” is a tool always already available in everyone’s mental toolkit, but Gallagher suggests that “there is mounting historical evidence for the . . . proposition that the novel discovered fiction.” Sidney claimed that some human writing “nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth,” and that might seem to indicate that “fictionality” is an unhistorical natural category. But in fact it took a long time for fictionality, at least the particular kind of fictionality that is characteristic of the novel, to become acceptable and for the earlier definition of fiction as “deceit, dissimulation, pretense” to fade out of use.

In many early works, what might be called “fiction” is virtually indisguishable from fantasy; romances, fables with talking animals, allegories, fairy tales all wear their unreality on their sleeve. That is not the kind of fictionality characteristic of the novel: “When the only reliable ‘operator’ of fictionality was mere incredibility, believability was tantamount to a truth claim.” What happens when Defoe starts writing texts that are believable AND false? That’s a new thing, complicated by the fact that Defoe initially claimed that the story was in fact true.

Few stories of the early eighteenth century, she argues, “were both plausible and received as narratives about purely imaginary individuals.” Such stories were difficult to process because “Two things were lacking: (1) a conceptual category of fiction, and (2) believable stories that did not solicit belief.” Novels forced a conceptualizing of the category of “fiction” because this conceptualizing was needed only “as the difference between fictions and lies became less obvious, as the operators of fictionality became multiple and incredibility lost its uniqueness.”

Gallagher interestingly described proper names as “the key mode of nonreferentiality in the novel.” Earlier story types had employed proper names that carried either allegorical significance or signaled their fictionality by being unbelievable. Tom Jones, Robinson Crusoe, Clarissa Harlow, Elizabeth Bennet – all these could be names of your next-door neighbor. Again, it’s the plausibility of the fiction that raises new questions. What exactly do these names refer to? Was Fielding right in saying that the names stand in for a “species” and not an individual? If so, why seems the species so particular?

One final note on Gallagher’s essay: She notes that “novels promoted a disposition of ironic credulity enabled by optimistic incredulity; one is dissuaded from believing the literal truth of a representation so that one can instead admire its likelihood and extend enough credit to buy into the game.” Again, “Novels seek to suspend the reader’s disbelief, as an element is suspended in a solution that it thoroughly permeates. Disbelief is thus the condition of fictionality, prompting judgments, not about the story’s reality, but about its believability, its plausibility.”