Greger Andersson
CONCLUSION: PROBLEMATIC METAPHORS
I have in my discussion of two approaches to narrative fiction assumed that the major difference between those who advocate an “epistemic” approach and “separatists” is that the latter claim that it is a mistake to theorize about fiction and the reading of fiction as if it were a secondary version of a pri-mary nonfictional form. Instead, fiction is to be regarded as a (or several different) communicative acts. A central concern in my treatment of the theoretical approaches has been the tenet adopted to explain and develop the “epistemic” approach via references to versions of the idea of readers’
world-making. According to the “separatist” reasoning I have discussed, neither the semantic nor the psychological argument sustains the necessity of the “epistemic” approach.
Yet, a major issue underlying my reasoning has been whether theore-ticians who suggest that readers construct “worlds” really assume an
“epistemic” approach or if such an interpretation is a misreading of the metaphors they use. How, for example, are we to understand their reason-ing about “gap-fillreason-ing” and the drawreason-ing of inferences? If we were to assume a “separatist” approach, we could argue that these terms only refer to the reader’s quest for meaning required by a particular story. “Story” is then, as I have mentioned, not understood as a “world” but as a literary structure offered to readers by the author for aesthetic purposes and not for infor-mation. If this is what “world-theoreticians” suggest (the assumption that fiction cannot be falsified; the discussion about relevant gap-filling; and Bortolussi and Dixon’s and Kuzmičová’s critiques of earlier empirical stud-ies could all be taken to imply this), then there is no real tension between the two approaches at all. The “disquieting” interpretations that I have suggested (along with critics such as Skalin and Wistrand) would in that case merely be “vulgarizations” based on too literal a reading of certain metaphorical expressions.
It could be argued though that if this apprehension of the “world- theoreticians” is correct, they should not use those problematic meta-phors. They should instead try to come up with theoretical concepts that
do justice to the relative closedness of fiction, to its artwork properties, its transformation of items and occurrences into motifs, its construction of themes, and its functions in order to provide more accurate descriptions of how we read literary fiction.
The alternative interpretation is that “world-theoreticians” actually assume that readers are informed about a world and that they direct their interpretative focus to this world. It could even be suggested that these theo-reticians hold that readers relocate to a world and interpret items and occur-rences as “matter.” Readers could in such cases be expected to interpret the world as they would interpret situations they come across in their daily life.
If so, then there is a real tension between the two approaches, and critics who represent the “separatist” approach could argue that the “epistemic”
approach will generate disquieting interpretations, since interpreters, so to speak, change stance or rule-system and read a fictional story as facts. They would then run the risk of both pursuing a non-aesthetic sense-making and neglecting the compositional wholeness of the story to focus on and exam-ine particulars instead. This is a salient issue since scholars who advocate a
“separatist” approach argue that fictional narratives are compositions con-sisting of motifs. The mistake of the interpreters they criticize would then not only be that they provide irrelevant inferences and gap-filling and so tend to produce new versions but that they miss instead the very raison d’être of fiction.
NOTES
1. I am not convinced that theoreticians working with “unnatural narratology”
(Krogh Hansen 2011), whom Herman views as exceptionalists, are “separatists.”
The very designation “unnatural narratology” could be taken to imply that they assume that there are “natural fictional narratives” while “separatists” such as Skalin assume that all literary fiction is “unnatural” if the rules of nonfiction are taken as a norm (Skalin 2011).
2. It could though be argued that unnatural elements are a problem for the “epistemic” approach if readers do not perceive them as unnatural, since that would imply that readers do not construct representations of fiction in the way the theoretical framework implies.
3. Ryan argues in her chapter in this volume that the study of literature has gone from a focus on the text (the signifier) to the world (the signified). It could be suggested that the “separatists” represent a rhetoric or pragmatic turn in which the focus is yet again on the text. Both Skalin and Walsh thus focus, regardless of certain differences, neither on the story (in the sense of a fictitious content) nor on the world but rather on the text as an act of communication and the effects it generates. And they would probably argue that world-theoreticians who do not consider the function of the text risk starting to read the text as a referential act and thus to miss the intended frame of interpretation.
4. I am speaking of a theme as in art forms like music and painting and not of a thesis.
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