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SIMONA ZETTERBERG GJERLEVSEN AND HENRIK SKOV NIELSEN (Aarhus) Distinguishing Fictionality 1. Introduction This chapter examines fictionality and its distinguishing features. We suggest separating fictionality from fiction by introducing a definition that clearly specifies the characteristics of fictionality and the signs that point to fictionality as something distinct from signs of fiction. The overall framework for the theory of fictionality offered in this chapter is rhetorical 1 : we regard the use of fictionality as a specific way of communicating with distinct means and ends. The idea of a rhetorical concept of fictionality was originally proposed by Richard Walsh in The Rhetoric of Fictionality (2007). His work has generated a paradigm shift in narrative studies from a focus on fiction as a genre to a focus on fictionality as a rhetorical communicational strategy across genres and media. In this chapter, we pursue the implications of this: we build on the concept of fictionality offered by Walsh and attempt to advance the main ideas 1 By characterizing our approach as rhetorical we adopt the framework offered by Walsh in The Rhetoric of Fictionality (2007). Rhetoric is prevalent wherever and whenever someone wants to move someone else to do or think or change something; which is to say, it is inherent in the intentional nature of communication. A rhetorical approach wants to ask how somebody uses particular techniques, strategies, and means to achieve particular ends in relation to particular audience(s).

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Page 1: AND Henrik Skov Nielsen

SIMONA ZETTERBERG GJERLEVSEN AND HENRIK SKOV NIELSEN

(Aarhus)

Distinguishing Fictionality

1. IntroductionThis chapter examines fictionality and its distinguishing features. We suggest separating fictionality from fiction by introducing a definition that clearly specifies the characteristics of fictionality and the signs that point to fictionality as something distinct from signs of fiction. The overall framework for the theory of fictionality of-fered in this chapter is rhetorical1: we regard the use of fictionality as a specific way of communicating with dis-tinct means and ends. The idea of a rhetorical concept of fictionality was originally proposed by Richard Walsh in The Rhetoric of Fictionality (2007). His work has gen-erated a paradigm shift in narrative studies from a focus on fiction as a genre to a focus on fictionality as a rhetorical communicational strategy across genres and media. In this chapter, we pursue the implications of this: we build on the concept of fictionality offered by Walsh and attempt to advance the main ideas behind the theory. While recognizing the groundbreaking na-ture of Walsh’s work, we argue that some of the essen-tial aspects of the concept of fictionality remain under-developed. More specifically, a clear characterization of the differentia specifica of fictionality is absent. The same holds true for exactly how fictionality differs from

1 By characterizing our approach as rhetorical we adopt the framework offered by Walsh in The Rhetoric of Fictionality (2007). Rhetoric is prevalent wherever and whenever some-one wants to move someone else to do or think or change something; which is to say, it is inherent in the intentional na-ture of communication. A rhetorical approach wants to ask how somebody uses particular techniques, strategies, and means to achieve particular ends in relation to particular au-dience(s).

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other rhetorical resources; and for how fictionality can be recognized. As for interpretational consequences, Walsh explicitly proclaims:

I am not advancing a critical methodology, only illus-trating a theoretical model. Relevance theory can ex-plain the principles underlying the experience of fic-tive communication, but it doesn’t lend itself to the eloquent articulation of sophisticated instances of such experience, and still less to the production of striking new interpretations. (2007, 33)

The rhetorical fictionality theory has so far been pre-dominantly concerned with a) developing and revising theory; and b) identifying cases of fictionality in dis-courses outside fiction. We are sympathetic to this and have ourselves contributed to both. In addition to defin-ing and characterizing fictionality, we hope that this in-troductory chapter can make a critical methodology pos-sible and demonstrate the analytical consequences of our proposal through two examples: a work of fiction and a piece of non-fiction. In the last part of the chapter we elaborate on the effects of fictionality and argue that a communicational approach can explain how and why fictionality in fact attaches reflections, thoughts and emotions to the actual world rather than detaching the discourse from reality.

2. The rhetorical theory of fictionalityTraditionally, fictionality has been investigated as the qualities, characteristics and affordances of fiction as a genre, which has, in turn, been described by the ways in which fiction differs from other genres (e.g. Cohn). Our view is that the conflation of fictionality theory with fic-tion theory has been to the detriment of both, since it has resulted in a general neglect of the study of fiction-ality outside fiction as well as of some of the most im-portant functions of fiction itself. In explaining how fic-tion and fictionality should be separated, Walsh states:

Not that fictionality should be equated simply with “fiction,” as a category or genre of narrative: it is a

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communicative strategy, and as such it is apparent on some scale within many nonfictional narratives, in forms ranging from something like an ironic aside, through various forms of conjecture or imaginative supplementation, to full-blown counterfactual narra-tive examples. (Walsh 2007, 7)

In this conception fictionality is a rhetorical resource in a real-world communicative framework that is not re-stricted only to fictional genres. The fictionality theory proposed by Walsh has been called paradigm shifting for many reasons. Through the prism of a rhetorical ap-proach to fictionality, Walsh re-examines fundamental questions in narrative theory: the narrator; the story/discourse distinction; narrative across different media; and many other classical narratological categories and concepts. The fictionality theory has led to a number of new areas of investigation: fictionality inside and out-side fiction (Nielsen 2011, 2012); fictionality across me-dia (Jacobsen 2011, Iversen 2014); its relationship to other communicative resources (Zetterberg Gjerlevsen 2013); and expanding the key aspects of the theory (Phelan, Walsh and Nielsen 2015). We take as our point of departure the usefulness of Richard Walsh’s sugges-tion to extricate fictionality from fiction as a genre. Be-fore moving on to points of disagreement and our own extensions of his theory, we will briefly explain how he arrives at a rhetorical concept of fictionality.

Walsh argues that modern accounts of fictionality gen-erally regard fiction as a problem of truthfulness, posi-tioning fiction in a second-order relation to the real world (2007, 13). In order to approach fictionality as a communicative device and at the same time avoid treat-ing the question of fictive discourse as a question of (ex-ception of) truth, Walsh uses the relevance theory devel-oped by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson (1986). Sper-ber and Wilson differentiate themselves from H. P. Grice’s theory of language. According to Grice, lan-guage use is governed by the four maxims of: Quantity, Quality (truth), Relation (relevance), and Manner (1989:26). Sperber and Wilson take it that only the

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maxim of relevance is necessary to explain communica-tion. According to them, the receiver will always at-tempt to find an interpretational context that will make a given utterance relevant. The most important part of their theory is that the maxim of truthfulness does not play any essential role in language use, but that rele-vance is the only guiding principle (2002). Walsh takes this as his starting point. He states:

Most fundamentally, it allows me to say that the problem of fictionality is not, after all, a problem of truthfulness, but a problem of relevance […] The rel-evance theory model allows for a view of fiction in which fictionality is not a frame separating fictive discourse from ordinary or “serious” communication, but a contextual assumption: that is to say, in the comprehension of a fictive utterance, the assumption that it is fictive is itself manifest. (Walsh 2007, 30)

Thus Walsh argues that in interpreting fictionality a re-ceiver will strive for the most relevant assumption in the context. In other words, Walsh explains the interpreta-tion of fictionality as a matter of whether the context cues the receiver to think that what is being conveyed is fictional. The argument, however, runs the risk of be-coming circular because Walsh’s radically pragmatic point of departure makes him hesitate to point out any specific textual signs of fictionality. If fictionality is solely a question of relevance determined by the con-text, the question remains why and how a context would make it relevant for a receiver to interpret a discourse as fictional.

3. Defining fictionalityFictionality theory has expanded into other fields, but as mentioned several fundamental questions related to fic-tionality remain largely unanswered. Walsh declares that he conceives of fictionality as a rhetorical resource, but does not say exactly how it is distinguished from other types of rhetorical resources and how it can be recognized as such. In our view the relevance theory does not explain which circumstances might prompt the

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assumption of fictionality. Similarly, Walsh does not say much about in what ways such an assumption, once made, changes the reader’s interpretation.

One of the most recent contributions to the fictionality debate is the article “Ten Theses about Fictionality” written by Walsh together with Henrik Skov Nielsen and James Phelan, and the ensuing debate in Narrative (23.1, January 2015). The three contributors strive to get closer to answering a number of essential questions that are not addressed in The Rhetoric of Fictionality:

The questions we want to foreground [… are] “When, where, why, and how does someone use fictionality in order to achieve what purpose(s) in relation to what audience(s)?” (2015, 63)

The authors of “Ten Theses”, including one of the au-thors of this chapter, describe fictionality as: “the inten-tional use of invented stories and scenarios” (62) and proceed to offer ten theses about how fictionality gener-ally works. One aim in the precent chapter is to get one step closer to answering a question which is absent from the series of questions listed above: the question what is fictionality? In this chapter we propose to do so by means of a definition of fictionality. We wish to sug-gest a definition which builds on a radical separation of fictionality from fiction, and argue that this definition agrees with a view of fictionality as a quality that ap-plies to non-fictional genres and at the same time funda-mentally changes our idea of how fictionality works in fiction.

Fiction, we take it, is a generic notion encompassing genres such as novels, movies, short stories and other cultural products that have been conventionalized to a degree where audiences will recognize typical species.

We define fictionality as intentionally signaled, commu-nicated invention.

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For us invention is the central notion in the definition and a distinguishing feature of fictionality. We recognize that human beings have a general ability to invent, but by employing the word communicated we assert that only when manifested in communication will this ability result in a use of fictionality. Suggesting that fictionality must be communicated implies that it must be part of a communicative situation with a sender and a receiver, and therefore cannot simply be equated with invented objects or pure imagination. Thirdly, fictionality must be signaled in order for a receiver to recognize it as such and in order to distinguish it from other rhetorical re-sources and discourses.2 The signals can be contextual, semantic and syntactic. Finally, the word intentionally is added to emphasize that the communicator who uses fictionality has to deliberately signal that he or she is employing a fictional discourse, and thereby distinguish-ing fictionality from lies.

Defining fictionality as intentionally signaled, communi-cated invention differentiates it from lies as well as from truth assertions, irony and other communicative devices because fictionality invites responses to what is given and taken as invented. But even though fictionality is different from truth, lies and irony, it also has some-thing in common with them. Like the lie, fictionality does not describe reality as it is. Like the true state-ment, fictionality is not aimed at deceiving anyone. But unlike the lie, fictionality foregrounds the fact that un-like the truth, it does not describe reality exactly as it is. In using fictionality, a sender deliberately signals to a receiver that what is communicated is not referentially true, whereas with lies such intended signals are ab-sent. Unlike assertions about actual states of affairs, fic-tional utterances cannot be judged either true or false. Like irony, fictionality often states non-actual affairs. Ac-cording to The Oxford Dictionary irony is: “The expres-sion of one’s meaning by using language that normally signifies the opposite, typically for humorous or em-

2 In the following we will use “signs”, “signals” and “sign-posts” synonymously.

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phatic effect.” Unlike irony, fictionality far from always states something that the speaker does not mean, let alone the opposite of what he or she means. Instead it invites the receiver to interpret the discourse as in-vented. We have not exhausted everything that could be said with regard to the relation between fictionality and other discourses such as figurative speech (for instance metaphors). Nonetheless, we argue that our definition can account for the specificity of fictionality that distin-guishes it from other rhetorical resources. From that we argue that certain types of figurative language use can be subsumed under the concept of fictionality as they are deliberately signaled as invented, but that this does not mean that the two concepts coincide3.

4. Signs of fictionalityWe now wish to expand on what it means to compre-hend fictionality as a communicative resource that is signaled. Walsh argues that the interpretation of fiction-ality is a matter of contextual assumptions: the receiver will be guided by the context to reach the most relevant assumption about what type of discourse is being con-veyed. Because Walsh explains fictionality as a result of the context, the paratext comes to play a significant role for interpretation in his theory. He declares: “Fictional-ity is the product of a narrative’s frame of presentation, of the various possible elements of what Gérard Genette has described as the paratext (1997)” (2007, 45).

Stating that fictionality is the product of the paratext is, in our view, placing too much emphasis on the impor-tance of the paratext. A consequence of our definition is that fictionality is signaled not only by paratextual mark-ers, but also by textual signs. When it comes to signs of fictionality, Walsh states:3 In a broader context Zetterberg Gjerlevsen expands on this and argues in line with Genette that fictional discourse can be approached as a result of an indirect speech act. Here Zetter-berg Gjerlevsen argues that the effect of fictionality – and similarily that of metaphors – cannot be accounted for by a general theory of communication which aims at conveying the most efficient way of communicating.

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Of course it is the case that most fictions do in fact exhibit characteristics indicative of their fictional sta-tus […] but these are neither necessary nor sufficient conditions of fictionality. […] Even within the terms of the familiar, modern fictional contract, though, fic-tionality has no determinate relation to features of the text itself […] (44).

Like Walsh we subscribe to a pragmatic notion of fic-tionality where the interpretation of signs is dependent on the contextual framework, but we argue that this is not contrary to an idea that it is possible to look for, and find, textual signs that point to the fictional status of an utterance independent of contextual knowledge and paratextual markers. Walsh wishes to distinguish his ap-proach from earlier ones by regarding fictionality as a serious communicative and rhetorical device. We have the same ambition, but argue that such a pragmatic ap-proach can be combined with an investigation of textual signs.

There have been several attempts to describe the sign-posts (Cohn 1990), signs (Riffaterre 1990), indices (Schaeffer [1999] 2010), markers (Fludernik 2005) or signals (Schmid 2010) of fiction or fictionality. The search for signs of fictionality has been undertaken by theorists who contribute to a so-called semantic or for-malistic conception of fictionality. This approach has of-ten been contrasted with the pragmatic approach that Walsh, amongst others, stands for. One early precursor of a semantic theory is Käte Hamburger’s The Logic of Literature from 1957, in which she suggests that certain grammatical forms, especially the epic preterite, work differently in fiction than in non-fiction.4 Ann Banfield’s book Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Represen-tation in the Language of Fiction followed in 1982. Ban-field states that sentences of pure narration and sen-4 Hamburger writes: ”Die Bedeutungsveränderung aber besteht darin, daß das Präteritum seine grammatische Funktion, das Vergangene zu bezeichnen, verliert.“ (Hamburger 1957, 29)

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tences of represented speech and thought are fiction-specific features5.

More recently Dorrit Cohn has investigated what she calls signposts of fictionality (1990 and 1999). Cohn ex-amines different potential signposts and argues that there are three main ones: a specific structure of the story/discourse relation, where story does not in any un-ambiguous way precede discourse; certain narrative modes of presenting consciousness; and the doubling of the narrating instance into author and narrator. Cohn affirms that the signposts all point to the “differential nature of fiction” (1999, 131). What we find in Cohn’s theory is paradigmatic for existing theories of signs of fictionality: signs of fictionality have been equated with, and investigated as, signs of fiction. The very purpose of looking for signposts of fiction has been to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction; to find signs that could only belong to fiction and therefore distinguish it as a genre.

We suggest operating with a concept of signs of fiction-ality different from one of signs of fiction. Whereas signs of fiction have served to identify a genre as such, the idea of signs of fictionality is that these can also be found outside fiction, and that they are therefore not necessarily indicative of any generic relations. This also means that we avoid the argumentative trap of conclud-ing that since signs of fiction are sometimes found out-side the genre of fiction, they cannot be seen as signs of fictionality. Genette, for one, does exactly this in explor-5 This is because, for Banfield, fiction is characterized by the lack of an act of utterance. She writes: “[…] NOW must be defined independently of PRESENT. When an E [expression] contains a communication between an I and a you, NOW and PRESENT necessarily coincide. But if an ADDRESSEE/HEARER is lacking, as well as a present moment referring to the act of utterance, an exchange between two interlocutors, NOW may be cotemporal with PAST. When these conditions exist – absence of you and/or of I and absence of PRESENT – represented thought emerges.” (Banfield 1982, 234).

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ing and subsequently repudiating possible signs. He concludes that “the devices of ‘fictionalization’ which Käte Hamburger enumerates have in recent years be-come widespread in certain forms of factual narrative” (1990:772). Self-evidently, whenever signs of fiction are found outside fiction, they can no longer be signs of fic-tion. The point we want to make is that the same argu-ment does not hold true for signs of fictionality. The sep-aration of fictionality and fiction allows for signs of fic-tionality outside fiction and for an investigation and de-scription of them as such. This is so because signs of fic-tionality do not necessarily determine the generic status of a work, but signal the fictional intent of an utterance. In order to specify what we mean by signs of fictionality, we will now present a distinction between signs and characteristics suggested by Klaus W. Hempfer in the article “Some Problems Concerning a Theory of Fiction(ality)”. Even though Hempfer’s distinction is not consistently followed through in his article, we would like to adopt the main idea behind this division and to make a distinction between the characteristics and the signs of fictionality. Hempfer differentiates between the characteristics that constitute fictionality and the practi-cal issue of how one can discover that a text possesses these characteristics (2004, 310). According to Hempfer, “[…] signals of fictionality can be understood as the historically variable manifestations of character-istics of fictionality” (311). Accordingly, the characteris-tics of fictionality are the properties that define fiction-ality. The signs are manifestations of these, and they can vary in different historical periods, cultures and me-dia. This differentiation is important for our purpose, as we advocate for a pragmatic approach to signs of fic-tionality. The approach allows us to look at specific fea-tures even if their status can change over time.

Similarly, in his review of Cohn’s “Signposts of Fiction-ality” (1990) Eyal Segal argues for a distinction between what constitutes and what signals fictionality. Segal demonstrates the usefulness of the distinction as he ex-plains how only the second of Cohn’s three pronounced

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signposts (certain representations of consciousness) can be taken as a sign. The other two (the special relation between story and discourse and the presumed doubling of the narrative instance into author and narrator) are “invisible” consequences or conditions of fictionality – what Hempfer would call characteristics. Unlimited ac-cess to consciousness is the only one of the three which can actually be taken as a sign in the form of a visible textual feature serving as a means of guidance or indi-cator of the text’s status.  

We adopt the distinction between characteristics and signs as part of our conception of fictionality, adding that the stable characteristic of fictionality is invention. Fictionality can be signaled by means of many different – and historically variable – signs, but its basic charac-teristic is that it is invention in communication. This conception entails two interrelated, yet separate issues: that signs of fictionality have to signal communicated invention; and that they do not necessarily determine a genre, but guide interpretation. This way of viewing signs allows us to re-evaluate candidates suggested as signs of fictionality in terms of whether they signal com-municated invention. For example, when Riffaterre points out that humorous narrative is a sign of fictional-ity, it would not count as such according to our concep-tion, simply because it does not have to signal communi-cated invention. However, we agree with Riffaterre’s suggestion that author intrusion, multiple narrators, meta-language, paratextual markers such as “novel”, and emblematic names for characters and places can signal fictionality (1990, 29-30). Some signs of fictionality such as paratextual labels cue the reader to interpret a whole work as fiction. In a po-litical speech, a blog or a newspaper article, signs of fic-tionality need not point to a generic relationship with fiction but rather to the employment of fictionality as part of a communicational intent. In fact they are often more visible outside fiction. Fictionality can take forms conventionally associated with recognizable genres such as the novel, and can signal invention through idiomatic

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expressions such as: “Once upon a time there was an enchanted castle”. Or it can be used for specific pur-poses in public discourse as in statements like: “Today we are all Norwegians” or: “Je suis Charlie Hebdo”, where fictionality is put to use to express empathy and sympathy after tragical events. The statements are em-phatically untrue, but at the same time it is evidently meaningless to argue against them because one would then be treating a fictional statement as if one assumed it to be non-fictional; and as if it could therefore be judged either true or false. Some fictionality signs be-come conventionalized in the genre of fiction because of consistent use, and they are conceived of as specific to fiction, such as for example “Once upon a time”. Other signs signal fictionality independent of any generic con-ventions, such as “Consider this scenario”, which is not associated with any fictional genre.

To conclude this section: a more radical separation of fictionality and fiction where paratext is not the only cri-terion for determining the status of fictionality makes an investigation of textual signs possible. Thus, we suggest that signs proposed by earlier theorists, such as free in-direct discourse, representation of minds, use of certain names, idiomatic expressions and metanarrative and metafictive commentaries can be investigated within a different framework than has been the case until now because until now signs have been studied in order to determine the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction. Conversely, we propose to investigate what distin-guishes fictionality inside as well as outside fiction; to reevaluate potential signs and examine how they are employed and function as rhetorical devices. In the fol-lowing we examine a piece of fiction and a piece of non-fiction to try to accomplish exactly this.

5. Interpreting fictionalityOne of the ambitions of this chapter is to develop a method that enables interpretations of fictionality. When extrapolating from his theoretical model, Walsh uses the first sentences of Kafka’s The Trial as the em-pirical basis for his analysis. In order to compare our

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approach to his, we will begin by focusing on the same example. We do not propose a strikingly new interpreta-tion, but demonstrate how the focus on signs of fiction-ality guides interpretation and sheds light on some of the most important effects of fiction.

Walsh’s focal point is the context framing the work: be-cause the reader found the book in the fiction section of the bookshop, because he or she is reading it for a course on the modern novel, or because of prior general knowledge of Kafka, the reader will assume that the work is fiction. Taking his starting point in the context, Walsh approaches the text and the first sentence of The Trial as something determined – a priori – as fiction. Consequently, when interpreting the first sentence of the work: “Someone must have made a false accusation against Josef K., for he was arrested one morning with-out having done anything wrong” (2007, 33). Walsh states that “‘somebody must have…’ is, in a fiction, un-necessarily conjectural unless it reflects K.’s perspective (or it is the voice of a represented narrator – but no other evidence emerges to support that inference)” (34). Because Walsh starts by affirming the assumption that the text is fiction, he arrives at the conclusion that the first sentence must represent K.’s perspective; because for him in the fictional frame the speculative “must have” is unnecessary if it does not reflect K.’s thoughts.

Walsh captures something essential to the reading expe-rience when he analyses the result of the ambiguity of Kafka’s text. He writes: “There is a nice equilibrium be-tween evaluative detachment and imaginative involve-ment here: the reader’s uncertainty in relation to the evaluative import of the internal focalization has an ef-fect of detachment, yet its congruence with K.’s own anxiety about his standing before the law also invests it with the quality of affective involvement” (35). From Walsh’s perspective the reader has to interpret the pas-sage as expressing K.’s thoughts, but is unsure of the validity of K.’s thoughts, and this uncertainty mirrors K.’s own uncertainty in the narrative.

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The text, however, displays another important ambigu-ity concerning when and if the reader is actually pre-sented with K.’s perspective. Walsh argues that in fic-tion the expression “Someone must […]” has to express K.’s thoughts. One interpretational problem, though, is that the authoritative, undoubtable (because invented) narration by the author on the one hand, and the per-sonal, potentially unreliable narration by characters on the other hand, are not always clearly distinguishable. This can take several sophisticated forms: in ho-modiegetic narration, the narration by the character can be unreliable. And in heterodiegetic narration, as in this case, the authorial narrative can share the idioms, world views and mistaken thoughts with the characters via free indirect discourse and similar techniques. The author is inventing a narrative that the reader is invited to trust, and that includes trusting that mistaken beliefs can exist in the world presented in the narrative. But free indirect discourse is characterized precisely by making it ambiguous whether the perspective is per-sonal or authorial. Therefore, if we take the sentence to reflect K.’s point of view, it is subject to doubt; whereas if we take it to be part of the inventing discourse, it is stating a fact in the narrative. In the specific narrative the ambiguity concerning the delimitations of and dis-tinction between thought and reality in the story are crucial. For Walsh the main ambiguity is caused by the uncertainty about whether K.’s perspective is correct; for us this uncertainty is doubled by the uncertainty about whether or when we get K.’s perspective. These ambiguities are suggested with great subtlety by the first sentence and then developed over the next lines and pages, with the reader gradually being granted ac-cess to the thoughts of the protagonist but never fully knowing the limits of his perspective. The ambiguity built into the first sentence about whose perspective the sentence is narrated from (as opposed to an ambiguity about the correctness of this perspective) is only possi-ble because of the use of fictionality.

Especially interesting in this context is a sentence fur-ther down the first page: “K. lebte doch in einem

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Rechtsstaat”.6 Readers are strongly invited to read this as free indirect discourse and hence as an expression of a wrong impression or a vain hope about living in a soci-ety like that. This reading is arrived at by noticing that the sentence seems starkly contradicted by the state of affairs represented in the narrative. The sentence is read as a sign of fictionality if it is interpreted as poten-tially expressing K.’s hopes or thoughts, in which case the invented state of affairs amounts to K. hoping to live “in einem Rechtsstaat”, but not to this actually being the case in the narrative.

Focusing on signs of fictionality that point to the in-vented status of the utterances creates interpretations that are aimed not at explaining away the ambiguity created by fictionality, but at explaining its function. In the case analysed above, the formal ambiguities mirror the thematic ones in the novel and are important parts of the whole novel: the reader is engaging in the same questions of justice and guilt as K., questions that have everything to do with perspective, questions which are all prevailing but unresolvable. At the same time, the assumption of fictionality does not wipe out questions that concern the real world, but encourages us to ask them differently. The Trial might compel us to ask: to what extent is our society opaque and labyrinthine? What does it mean to live in a society ruled by law? From what perspective do we judge what is right or wrong? Asked through a non-fictional text, such ques-tions would have to address specific aspects and prob-lems about a real society; whereas in this case fictional-ity has a potential to communicate different things to different audiences at the same time. This is because each reader interprets a fictional text based on his or her contextual knowledge and according to his or her conception of reality.

6 The English translation is: “K. was living in a free country”, but a more precise translation would be “K. was, after all, liv-ing in a society ruled by law”.

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Moving on to another main point in this chapter, we wish to show that there may be signs of fictionality out-side fiction and to demonstrate the value of investigat-ing such signs. Fictionality can be found in many con-temporary newspaper articles and blogs, as well as in general public discourse. We will highlight one example which is written in the context of the global concerns about the outbreak of Ebola. The example is chosen to demonstrate that fictionality is used rhetorically as an efficient tool in current global political debates in a non-fictional text.

On October 31, 2014 a blog post entitled “Republicans call Ebola a federal government failure. It’s exactly the opposite” appeared in The Washington Post. Arguing for his position, the author of the article, Paul Waldman in-vites the reader to:

Imagine that a year ago, I told you that a few months hence, west Africa would see the largest Ebola out-break in history. Then I explained that despite regu-lar travel in and out of the affected countries by health professionals and ordinary people, there would be a grand total of two — not two hundred, or two thousand, but two — Americans who contracted the disease here, and both of them would be nurses who had treated a dying patient who had contracted the disease in Liberia. And I told you that both of them would be treated, and would survive and be healthy. If I had told you that a year ago, would you have said, ‘Wow, that sounds like a gigantic federal government failure’?Of course not. You’d say that sounds like a public health triumph (Waldman 2014).

By the initial idiomatic expression: “Imagine that”, Paul Waldman signals his use of fictionality. Even if the con-tent of what is to be imagined is actually true, the initial invitation to interpret it as such urges the reader to per-ceive of the discourse as invented and changes the in-terpretation. The shifts in verb tense, in this context, also function as signs of fictionality: the section starts

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out with an imperative, then switches to the past tense, next the future tense and back to the past tense until it resolves in a conditional “would”. The conditional works as a sign of fictionality as it is used to talk about the hy-pothetical and possible, instead of the real. Through the use of fictionality Waldman creates a scenario where the reader is invited to imagine how he or she would have reacted if it was possible to go back in time and be informed about the actual, current state of affairs. In the last sentence the function of the conditional changes as it is no longer used to pose a question but to state an imagined outcome of the invented scenario.

This short example exhibits a rather complex use of a number of different signs of fictionality. Waldman uses fictionality as a deliberate strategy in trying to persuade the reader that what the government is doing is actually close to a best-case scenario. He is using fictionality to directly comment upon and influence (opinions about) real world affairs. The reader is not meant to interpret the blog as a whole as a fiction: it is a comment feeding directly into the actual political discourse. Nor is the ut-terance meant to be interpreted as referentially true – the rhetorical strategy of fictionality is employed in a non-fictional discourse with the purpose of communicat-ing something specific about the actual state of affairs.

The two case examples show how fictionality can be used for different purposes in different contexts, but they also demonstrate that the functions of fictionality also have things in common. Even with fictionality out-side fiction the reader is not compelled to consider whether the statement is true or false, but can reflect upon the message conveyed.

6. Concluding remarks – the effects of fictionalityThroughout the chapter we have been advocating a communicational approach to fictionality. By extricating fictionality from fiction and offering a definition to clar-ify how it is distinguishable from other rhetorical and communicative strategies, we argue that a pragmatic approach is not irreconcilable with the idea of signs of

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fictionality. Focusing on signs of fictionality, including those discussed by theorists such as Hamburger, Cohn and Riffaterre, can be a starting point for an analysis of fictionality as long as these signs are not taken to be ex-clusive to the genre of fiction, but seen as indicators of the invented nature of the discourse.

Fictionality is distinct from other rhetorical resources and must be understood as existing in a relationship be-tween author intentions and reader interpretations. Ac-cordingly, when conducting an analysis of fictionality, the relationship between intentions and interpretations is crucial: the analysis is centered on the way a sender uses fictionality as a strategy to obtain different goals and the way these strategies are interpreted by a re-ceiver. This, however, does not mean that an analysis of fictionality from a communicative perspective is an at-tempt to reduce manifestations of fictionality to the in-tention(s) of the author – one of the qualities of fictional-ity is the potential diversity of interpretations it creates. What it does mean is that fictionality is regarded as not just something “that is there”, but a means of communi-cation.

Works can signal their fictionality more or less overtly, and (as we have argued) fictionality is often more visible outside than inside fiction because readers are accus-tomed to many of the techniques of fictionality that have been conventionalized in the fictional genres. Focusing on the fictionality of fiction can provide new interpreta-tions that reveal how these techniques are capable of articulating issues that cannot be voiced without fiction-ality.

Assuming that a discourse is fictional amounts to aware-ness that the author intended the discourse to be read as invented and that the events depicted (probably) never existed in real life. And yet it is a very common experience that fiction affects our perceptions of real life. This seems so evidently true that it is hardly worth mentioning. However, all or almost all theories specifi-cally on the ontology of fiction tend to ground the dis-

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tinction of fiction on the basis of the remoteness of fic-tion from real life and accordingly have a hard time ex-plaining why fiction influences the perception of the real world: possible world theories contrast the actual world with non-actual worlds of fiction; and theories about fic-tion as ontologically non-referential oppose fictional sto-ries to stories about real life. Not only do such theories have little to say about why fiction affects us in the ways described; their logics even seem to run counter to such effects. Or to put it even more bluntly: as theories they effectively work as a refutation of one of the most com-mon everyday experiences of reading or watching fic-tion because they build on the assumption that fictional stories are remote from reality.

Finally, we will address the question of the effects of fic-tionality and try to suggest that an answer to why and how opinions about real life can be strongly affected and changed by fictional stories lies exactly in their in-vented status and in the fact that they are not restricted to describing what is actual and real. We argue that the effect of fictionality does not consist in the fictional uni-verse it allegedly creates, nor in the non-actuality of its events, characters and entities, or in the appeal it makes to imagine what is not. We argue that the effect of fictionality lies in the ways in which a receiver tries to interpret how the fictional discourse could affect his or her perception and understanding of non-fictional states of affairs. This is independent of whether the receiver takes recourse to any or all of the above assumptions of a fictional universe, non-referentiality, and non-actual and imaginative events.

Fictionality is a way of asking “what if?”. And as is clear from the very semantics of the expression “what if?”, its function is not to detach discourse from reality – but rather to attach and to form a point of contiguity be-tween the actual and non-actual. The imagined is ex-actly brought to bear on the real in the sense that it in-vites questions such as: “what if my reality was partly or wholly in this way, which is different from how I per-ceive it now?”; “what would it mean to be “star-cross'd

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lovers” (The Hunger Games citing Romeo and Juliet); and “what if war is actually sometimes a charitable act to help an underdeveloped people not self-destruct?” (The Hurt Locker). Our argument is that all of the above points are actually generated by fictionality. The Hunger Games, The Hurt Locker, The Trial and fiction-ality in general – whether in novels or when used in a blog or in Luther King’s and Obama’s speeches – pro-vide us with imagined and invented stories through which we see the real world. Fictionality greatly influ-ences our perception of what is right and what is real. It is not our perceptions of some fictional life, war and love, but our perceptions of real life, real war, and real love that change when we read fiction and respond to fictionality. We will try to make this clear in the final part of this paper.

As the examples attest, the effect of fictionality depends on the context in which it is used. It can activate emo-tions, cause confusion or laughter and evoke tears, and be a means to win elections, change beliefs and negoti-ate identity. To mention just a few examples: Barack Obama’s “Lion King speech” at the White House Corre-spondents’ Dinner 2011 ridiculing Donald Trump’s at-tempt to make Obama present his birth certificate con-tributed substantially to Trump withdrawing his candi-dacy a few days later. Fictionality in the form of pre-senting the birth scene from The Lion King as if it was Obama’s birth video effectively solved the problem of closing the debate about electability without compro-mising integrity. Obama managed to implicitly say things about Trump as well as about himself that could not have been said otherwise, including: “Electing a man without the ability to distinguish between truth and lie and without political skills will be catastrophical”. As well as “I can jokingly play with your prejudice that I was born in Africa”; and “I was in a sense born to rule (the world)”. Spiegelmann’s Maus (1980-91) has con-tributed to shaping readers’ beliefs about Jews and Ger-mans during the Second World War not in spite of but because of presenting all the characters as animals. Ad-ditionally, one could mention that three major crises

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that have involved conflicting notions of Muhammed (the Danish cartoon crisis, the Charlie Hebdo crisis, and The Innocence of Muslims) all notably had emphatically fictional narratives as a major reason for their outbreak (the cartoons, the satirical drawings and the low budget movie). Fictional stories offer imaginary perspectives that impact the assumptions – ethical, emotional, ideo-logical – on which we act. For better and for worse, fic-tionality changes our perceptions of, opinions about, and actions in the world.

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