Kendall Walton on Fiction, Make-Believe & Imagination

I read all of Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe betwixt and between sunny sessions on Thai sand. Overall verdict: quite interesting but ultimately unconvincing.

Let’s take up where I left off in previous posts. The nature and proper definition of ‘fiction’. Analytic philosophy stuff, not very flashy. Anyone who wants to help me out is welcome, but probably you will not be entertained.

And really this is just me recording impressions, trying to express them before I forget them; so everything should be qualified with 'I'm really not sure, but it seems to me that ...' But that's dead boring to keep repeating every other sentence. So I sound more confident than I really am just to punch it up a little.

§1 Walton’s Thesis: Fiction As Props in Games of Make-Believe
Walton’s central notion is that of ‘representation’ but he uses the term almost interchangeably with ‘fiction’. His thesis is that works are fictions if and only if their function is to serve as 'props in games of make-believe'. Something is a prop in a game of make-believe if and only if its function is to 'prescribe imaginings'. More precision and elucidation needed – not to mention defense - but we readily intuit more or less where Walton is coming from.

The intuition behind the proposed analysis and definition is genealogical. “In order to understand paintings, plays, films, and novels, we must look first at dolls, hobbyhorses, toy trucks and teddy bears. The activities in which representational works of art are embedded and which give them their point are best seen as continuous with children’s games of make-believe" (p. 11). So sitting down to read War And Peace is like lying on the rug, playing with toy soldiers and dollies. Toy soldiers and dollies prompt imaginings of real soldiers and real families. This is their function. Likewise, sentences in the novel prompt imaginings of real soldiers and real families. This is their function. Not that there aren’t differences. But there is, Walton maintains, essential continuity. Reading novels is an activity crucially identical in kind with playing make-believe. Somehow this is going to be the key that unlocks many puzzles.

§2 Conceptual Analysis or Conceptual Revision?
At points Walton suggests that his account – his definition of ‘fiction’ – is mildly but not terribly revisionary of our ordinary notions of what is, and is not, fiction. I think this is mistaken, and the mistake leads at the very least to obscurity in presentation. Walton adduces examples of fiction and non-fiction in support of his account – relying on our ordinary, classificatory intuitions – without considering whether these very examples may not stand in need of reclassification if his account is accepted. It seems to me our ordinary concept of fiction is likely to stand in need of substantial revision as a precondition of its being amenable to interesting theoretical treatment. So I don't object to revision, per se. But it should be clearly marked as such to avoid confusion.

§3 Our Ordinary Notion of Fiction
Let me lay out the elements of what I take to be our ordinary, everyday notion of fiction. I make no claims for the timelessness or universality of this concept. (I'm sure it is neither.) I merely catalogue what I take to be standard English usage at the present time. The point of noting how we in fact do use the term ‘fiction’ is not to lock us into this usage but just to clarify the degree of Walton's departure from ordinary usage.

I think ordinarily we look for four features. Anything clearly exhibiting all four will be easily, confidently and securely classed as ‘a work of fiction’. Anything lacking even one will be, at best, a borderline case. Probably most three-out-of-four cases fall into the 'yep, it's a work of fiction but it seems weird to call it that' category. Anything lacking two or more of the following features probably does not qualify as a work of fiction (though I would not want to insist on that as any sort of iron law.)

1. Fictions are works of intentional, undeceptive untruth.
We don’t call it ‘fiction’ if the author believes it all really happened; nor if the author hopes to trick us into believing it all really happened; nor if it all really happened. Works of fictions are not records of delusions, nor lies, nor essentially reliable reports of data about the actual world around us.

All three conditions are ticklish, needing qualification; the third very much so. Few works of fiction contain no true sentences; few works of non-fiction contain no false ones. So it seems we are going to be looking at a true/false ratio, when we were vaguely hoping for a cleaner, binary relation. Furthermore, propositions are the standard candidates for truth and falsehood; whereas works – containing many propositions, or perhaps none (if they are pictorial) – are the standard candidates for being fiction or non-fiction. So what does ‘work of … untruth’ mean? A few lies and delusions (what artist can resist?) and some incidental factual reportage around the edges, would seem to be quite consistent with the commission of an act of fiction – even of pure fiction. But how exactly is that possible?

[UPDATE: Somehow I forgot to mention all the well-known, well-worn puzzles about truth in fiction. It's true in the story Sherlock is a detective, etc. So it's no good just saying that sentences/propositions that are true in the story are false, simpliciter. Something more complicated has to be devised. Lots of literature on this.]

Obviously the tricky cases are going to be things like historical novels, which may be very hard to distinguish from histories written with literary flair. Biography and autobiography will also skate close to the line, causing us to scratch our poor heads.

Since I cannot sort this briefly, I will not sort it. I take it to be obvious that we do in fact operate with some such standard, even if there are problems working out what it means to say 'works of fiction should be intentional, undeceptive untruths.' We do in fact sort delusion, from lies, from factual reportage, from fiction. Or at least we think this is what we do. Any account of our ordinary notion of fiction needs to acknowledge that we at least try to do this.

2. Fictions tell stories.
Works of fiction are, paradigmatically, narrations of stories. (In a somewhat more strained sense, stories themselves – e.g. the story of Little Red Riding Hood, which may be conveyed by all manner of narrative vehicles – are fictions but not works of fiction.) By contrast, a painting, joke, poem, philosophical dialogue, diagram, forged document, map, tableau, diorama, sculpture, theatrical set, prop, dance, song, individual sentence, may intentionally and undeceptively represent – or imply - that which never was. But we begrudge the likes of these the title ‘work of fiction’ unless we detect not just characters but actions and events in a temporal order. Not to put too fine a point on it, there should be a beginning, a middle, and an end (not necessarily in that order.) So a picture of a face, even of a non-existent subject, is a poor candidate ‘work of fiction’. A slightly less bad candidate would be an illustration accompanying the narration of a story. But I think we are not much inclined to call illustrations included with works of fiction, or gracing their covers, ‘works of fiction’ in their own right. A yet less bad candidate would be an image representing a scene from which the viewer could infer the occurrence of a series of actions – man on ground, knife in chest, horrified woman and children standing by, blood-spattered fellow frantically attempting to get out the window, police pounding on door. Some pictures tell a story. One-frame “New Yorker”-style comics often do this, but often not. Two people, holding drinks, saying something funny, is not much story. Three-frame comics, such as appear in the newspaper, are typically more story-like. Serial story strips – e.g. “Prince Valiant” – are clear cases (although they lack endings.) Strips whose characters age – e.g. “Doonesbury” – are more intuitively story-like than strips whose characters stay the same age. We perceive a sort of over-the-years story-arc in “Doonesbury” that is absent from “Calvin & Hobbes”. On the other hand, “Calvin & Hobbes” more often tells a little one-strip story, as opposed to just telling a joke. Nor is it just sequential visual art that often teeters on the cusp of storyhood like this. Tove Jansson has a Moomintroll novel (anyone remember which one?) in which one character tells a ‘story’ that runs, in its entirety: “There was a water-rat named Poot.” That's not a story. Philosophical dialogues tend to be most infirm in the narrative department. ‘Socrates met someone and they talked philosophy.’ Poems are often not very rich, story-wise, however rich otherwise.

The general point is: jokes, poems, philosophical dialogues, narrative essays, short stretches of sequential visual art, so forth, tend to be only uncomfortably classifiable as works of fiction. We just don’t call them that (even if we are prepared to admit, somewhat head-scratchingly, that they are that.) And our willingness tracks, precisely, the degree of story-ness we detect. The more paradigmatically story-like the representational content of a work, the more comfortable we are classing it as a work of fiction.

One exception: experimental literary works that strive to undermine narrative and story conventions – i.e. that willfully lack beginnings, middles and ends, characters, so forth – are usually quite easily classified as fiction (unless they seem to be turning into poems.) I take this ease of classification to be the result of a sort of grandfather-clause. Or maybe an Oedipus-like father-clause: if you are trying so hard to overthrow story, you must be story, ergo fiction. (A bit of a puzzle.)

3. Fiction is complex. [maybe complex isn't the right word? artful? crafted?]
‘Fiction’ comes from the Latin, ficti: ‘the act of shaping, a feigning, that which is feigned.’ It might be thought that the bit about feigning is what we have chiefly retained, domesticating it (for entertainment purposes) by breeding out that anti-social strain of intentional deception. But, on reflection, I think we have also retained our sense that fiction should, by rights, be decently complex, should bear the hallmarks of having been wrought, crafted. A fiction should be elaborate and artful, or at least not too pathetically brief and simple. Hence our intuition that a very complex, non-narrative deception or lie – e.g. a spy’s scrupulously maintained cover, a con man’s elaborate set-up – may be counted as ‘a fiction’, even though we ordinarily insist on the story-form and exclude fraud, as per above. (Possibly ‘legal fictions’ can be shoehorned in here, too.) By contrast, a thoroughly artless lie – ‘I didn’t do it’, when really I did – will not be awarded the palm of ‘fiction’. (And would you consider the following to be a work of fiction: ‘Smith was born, grew up, worked for a living, died of old age.’ It’s got a main character, a beginning, a middle and an end. It’s a story. But it needs shaping, I should think.)

The requirement that fiction be complex is vague. But it may shed some incidental light on the first requirement. As per 1, we do not ordinarily deem stand-alone propositions (or sentences) to be suitable candidates for being fiction or non-fiction. Works are assessed as a whole to determine whether they are fiction or non-fiction. It may be that we are hereby insisting on a certain overall complexity - holistic artfulness in shaping. (Not that sentences cannot be complex and artful, so perhaps I am just speculating.)

4. Works of fiction function as props in games of fiction appreciation.
Obviously this is circular if we are trying to define what makes for fiction. But let me try to salvage something. (Really I am just working my way back to Walton, whose ‘props in games of make-believe’ is in the vicinity. More on that momentarily.)

It is tempting for a number of reasons to define ‘fiction’ at least in part in terms of what audiences do (or should do) with the stuff. The trouble is that there is disagreement about what audiences do (and should do) with the stuff. You wade into these disputes and never make it out. Aesthetes swear up and down that fiction should pleasure us. A more moralizing breed of critic denounces this is callow and shallow. Fiction serves to express eternal verities about life and the human condition – in short, it serves to educate us morally. There are far more than just these two views, and I am stating them about as baldly and lamely as possible. But they will do, for illustrative purposes. We could try to finesse the need to settle disputes between the likes of aesthetes and moralists by saying something is a work of fiction if aesthetes will regard it as a prospective source of pleasure; and if moralists will regard it as a prospective source of moral education. And so forth for other views about what the stuff is for. So this requirement ends up saying, roughly: fiction is that which is exquisitely diplomatical enough to promise to give everyone what they think they ought to get from fiction.

There are difficulties with this oblique strategy, not the least of which being that it will be turn baroque quick. And it is, as initially suspected, at least semi-circular. It almost comes down to saying: fiction is what everyone thinks it is. True, but unilluminating. Nevertheless, there may be some content to the notion that fiction is whatever manages to be acknowledged by everyone (or nearly everyone) as fiction. The content comes in when we actually look at everyone’s wish-lists and sets of demands – the habitual uses to which everyone collectively put the stuff, the notions with which they burden it, the work they insist it do, so forth. These wishes and demands may be articulable without circular reference to fiction, and so we may learn something. To be an artifact that can be both flexible and stiff enough to serve all ends – pleasure, moral improvement, etc. – may be a non-trivial achievement.

And certainly it is true that, to some extent, we really do decide whether something is a work of fiction by looking and seeing whether everyone else says so, and then saying: ‘what they said’.

Authorial intentions may be quite determinative in this regard. A work that satisfied conditions 1-3 but whose author did not intend the thing to function as a prop in a game of fiction appreciation would be, at best, a borderline case of a work of fiction. Are there any actual cases in which works can be seen being pushed in or out of the fiction box, intuitively, through an application of this requirement? Perhaps the difference between two well-known journalistic frauds, Stephen Glass and Jason Blair, will serve. Blair was a liar. He become a liar, apparently, through a mix of laziness, instability, and temperamental unsuitability for the profession. Glass was a liar, too. He became one, apparently, because he was an obscurely compulsive fabulist – as per the title of his first novel. Glass was driven to produce verbal artifacts that function admirably as props in games of fiction appreciation. He had the knack for giving pleasure, the knack for making an audience feel morally instructed (and so on, all down the list of things you might dream of demanding from fiction.) Blair just wrote shoddy stuff for the paper.

Clearly neither Blair’s fraudulent work, nor Glass’s, will ever be offered up as a perfect paradigm of fictionality. Both writers are intentionally deceptive untruth-tellers, hence in violation of requirement 1. But we may be inclined to class Glass’s works, not Blair’s, as borderline works of fiction, in virtue of their status as exemplary props for the game of appreciation, even if they were not originally advertised as such. (This requirement dovetails with the requirement for ‘shaped-ness’, as per 3, but I will not attempt to fill this in. Glass shapes his frauds in a way that Blair does not.) Glass’s works seem so admirably engineered to trick the audience into reading them, unawares, as works of short fiction. So maybe Glass really was a (borderline) fiction author even before he turned to novel-writing.

Please note that this is not purely a point about authorial intention (though it is not purely not a point about authorial intention either.) Glass’s intentions are quite unclear, probably even to himself. What is clear is that he produced a body of work with exemplary functionality along a certain axis – the fiction appreciation axis. These are props you can lean on with confidence, unless you are looking for solid journalism. (And obviously if this thumbnail sketch of the differences between the cases and characters of Glass and Blair is disputed, the example should be regarded as hypothetical.)

Quite inadequate, I admit. Which carries us back to Walton.

§4 Where Is Walton With Respect To This?
Walton’s definition of ‘fiction’ amounts to a radical simplification of the foregoing four-fold order of our ordinary notion of fictionality. Walton simply drops 1-3 and drastically refines 4.

Running down the list:

1. Fictions are works of intentional, undeceptive untruth.
Walton demands nothing of the sort. He is happy to class delusions, lies and accurate factual reportage as fiction, at least potentially. “Could an author be claiming truth for every sentence he writes and still be writing fiction? I see no reason why not, why there couldn’t be a genre of historical novel in which authors are allowed no liberties with the facts and in which they are understood to be asserting as fact whatever they write” (p. 79). What is Walton’s motivation for departing from ordinary usage in this way? He says surprisingly little on behalf of what seems to me a substantial act of conceptual revisionism. But it is pretty clear he regards requirement 1 as analytically unworkable as it stands, and unrefinable into anything much better. Basically, the notions of ‘true’ and ‘false’ that need to be made to do work won’t, in Walton’s considered opinion. So he is placing his chip on a different number – number 4, to be exact.

2. Fictions tell stories.
Walton does not demand, or even mildly request, that works of fiction tell stories. He has no problem saying one-frame comics, poems, paintings, sculptures and a great many other things we would not ordinarily call ‘works of fiction’ – because they don’t tell stories – are perfect paradigms of fictionality. Walton says even less about dropping the story requirement than he does about dropping the intentional, undeceptive untruth requirement. But it is possible to guess what leads him not to build storytelling into his account: our ordinary insistence on representations of characters and events through time – beginning, middle and end – can easily seem an arbitrary feature of our concept of fiction, hence analytically unpromising. Any analysis of fiction that accommodates insistence on storytelling can seem ad hoc, then.

Why would this be so? Think about a painting of a knight on horseback, a sculpture of a knight on horseback, a little plastic knight on horseback for the kids to play with, a description of a knight on horseback in a novel, a poem about a knight on horseback. For Walton the thread running through all this is not any story about a knight on horseback but just prescriptions to imagine a knight on horseback. In other words, Walton thinks he sees an analytically fruitful grouping of objects – of ‘representations’, as he calls them – which only very imperfectly overlaps the set of things that tell stories (hence the set of things we are ordinarily inclined to call ‘fictions’.) For the sake of the analytic fruit he thinks he sees, Walton is prepared to equate ‘representation’ with ‘fiction’, which means dropping the story requirement.

I think a serious slip is hereby made. It has to do not with the fact that ordinary usage of ‘fiction’ is hereby flouted (that’s all right if you have your reasons) but with the fact that make-believe – Walton’s official focus – is not just a matter of imagination but also of role-play; and role-play is storytelling. So Walton ends up not talking about something big and important. We will come back to this.

3. Fiction is complex.
Again, Walton says nothing about why he does not insist on this. Here the silence is understandable, as this requirement is less obviously an essential component of our ordinary notion (I think it really is an essential component.) It is also analytically unpromising. It does not promise to shed light on what sort of complexity makes for fictions. Obviously not just any sort will do. And it is inherently vague. On we go.

4. Works of fiction function as props in games of fiction appreciation.
Here Walton places his bet. According to him fictions function as props in games of make-believe. This is his definition of ‘fiction’. Now clearly this is an improvement on – or, at any rate, a less circular specification of – my more generic formulation. With ‘make-believe’, Walton is explicitly committing himself to a specific answer to the question: wherein consists the activity of appreciating fiction? He is saying it consists in audiences making-believe, imagining things as prompted by props. This clearly avoids the triviality with which my formulation is at least somewhat threatened. On the other hand, in philosophy when your steer clear of triviality you usually say something wrong. Is Walton right that playing the game of fiction appreciation in some deep sense consists in making-believe?

I think not, but before making the negative case let me say something positive. There is something shrewdly diplomatic about Walton’s position, and that is a good thing on its face. Take my two sample quarreling critics: the aesthete and the moralist. They cannot, it seems, be brought to agree about what one is supposed to do with fiction – what the stuff is for. Is it for pleasure, or for moral education? But once upon a time these two were children, down on the rug with toy soldiers and dolls and so forth. As adults, they cannot see eye to eye about War and Peace, but as children they played together happily enough. The strategic promise of Walton’s account, then, is to finesse this childish unity into something that bears on adult activities, without having to settle all the tedious arguments adults have. (Not obviously a good plan, but at least it's a plan.)

§5 Brief Overview of My Problems With Walton’s Thesis
This will probably be pretty telegraphic. Let me just try to get it down

First, I think Walton overemphasizes the degree to which make-believe can be construed as a matter of being obedient to prescriptions to imagine. At the very least he hereby mistakes a part – an inessential part – for the whole.

How so?

To take one of Walton’s own examples: if you are making-believe that every stump is a bear, the way to play is to imagine a bear whenever you see a stump. The trouble is that this conflates two different games. First, there could be a game in which the rule is that, when you see a stump, you are supposed to form a mental image of a bear standing where the stump is (probably mentally erasing the stump in the process.) Second, there could be a game in which the rule is that when you see a stump, you are supposed to suppose there is bear there. And behave accordingly. (Exit, pursued by bear. Much shrieking had by all.) In the second case, there is no special obligation to form an actual mental image of any bear, although you might find one handy as an internal prop, for purposes of inhabiting your role more thrillingly and dramatically.

The second game is the one children play; but Walton consistently talks as though make-believe were the first game. But it isn’t. For that matter, no one actually plays the first game, which isn’t really a game, more a recipe for private phenomenological activity of a highly particular sort. (Suppose I made a private resolution to conjure as vivid a mental image of Christ as I could, whenever I witnessed someone sinning. To do so would not be to play a game of make-believe, I take it. Certainly it would be an extremely unusual resolution to make.)

To imagine is to spectate, after a fashion. To make-believe is to play– to role-play. These stances are not mutually exclusive but neither are they mutually entailing. Walton does not deny this but neither does he affirm it. He consistently hints at an account of the nature of games of make-believe while speaking purely in terms of prescriptions to imagine, which is like hinting that it is possible to explain what it is to do in terms of what it is to watch, which does not really make sense.

My second objection flows from the first. Walton wants to explain fiction in terms of make-believe. This is a promising enough gambit. But since Walton has an unduly imagination-based conception of make-believe, he ends up with an unduly imagination-based account of fiction, among other problems.

Let me offer one example of how Walton goes wrong - not a terribly important example but symptomatic, so it seems to me. Both my objections score here. "Appreciating paintings and novels is largely a matter of playing games of make-believe with them of the sort it is their function to be props in. But sometimes we are interested in the props themselves, apart from any particular game" (p. 53). This is wrong with regard to painting and probably wrong with regard to novels. Paintings first: if it were the case that paintings were usually just props to stimulate imaginings of their subject matter, then it would be not too difficult for me to produce a painting that does the essential artistic work of (to pick one of Walton's own frequent examples) George Seurat's "A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte". I am just good enough at drawing and painting to make it decently clear to the viewer that this is supposed to be a woman, that a man, an umbrella, a dog, boats in the background, so forth. And really that is all that is needed to get the viewer imagining the proper thing, if that is what you want. The reason no one is going to accept my poor substitute for Seurat is that, frankly, the prop's the thing - not sometimes, always (except in vanishingly few cases.) But really this is just the thin edge of the wedge. It is wrong to imply that the main artistic function of paintings is to get us to imagine their represented subjects. (Not that apprehending the subjects may not be necessary. I doubt you could properly appreciate Seurat's painting if you couldn't tell that it was a representation of human beings in a park. But apprehending that it is a representation of human beings in a park is a means to a further artistic end - one that I will not at the present time venture to specify.) But it is even wronger to imply that it is at all common, let alone standard practice, to play games of make-believe with the likes of Seurat's painting. Seurat is actually the exception that proves the rule, because Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine have gone and written a whole musical - that is, a story - based on his painting. And, plausibly, we identify with the character of George when we watch "Sunday in the Park with George". And, plausibly, that leads to a sort of role-play, i.e. make-believe. But this whole development is so wildly non-standard and out of the ordinary that it only serve to underscore - emphatically - the extent to which we do not play games of make-believe with every picture in the gallery. We just don't make such a beginning, middle and an end production out of it, mostly. We don't make up stories. We don't wonder what happened before, or happened next. In vanishingly few cases do we make up a story and then, as children will imagine that they themselves are driving the little truck as they vroom it around on the rug, insert ourselves into it, i.e. strongly personally identify with the characters: make-believe.

Now with regard to novels there is certainly at least a little something to the idea that, in at least some cases, there is at least something inessential about the prop, i.e. all the words - because the story is the thing, and any given story can be narrated any number of different ways. But indifference to the specifics of the narrative, i.e. all the words, is really not a standard attitude. You don't have to be much of a critic to care how a given story is told, i.e. to care about the prop itself, as well as what the prop makes us imagine (if it does make us imagine.) More generally, what Walton's slip with regard to painting has done is run together two questions regarding novels, to which the answers are not at all self-evident, and running them together does not help. First, to what extent do novels function by making us imagine what happens in them? Second, to what extent are novels occasions for make-believe, i.e. to what degree does fiction function to draw us into feeling that we ourselves are part of the action?

Lurking underneath all this is the rather stubborn fact that Walton and I are not at all agreeable about the usage of terms. Specifically, we are using 'imagination' and 'make-believe' and a couple other terms differently. Walton would probably say that I appear to be perversely determined to construe these terms very narrowly, which makes his claims come out sounding like nonsense. But he did not intend the terms so narrowly, so all my objections are nonsense. For my part I would have to reply that the narrow senses are the ones that make sense to me. But I'll leave it at that for tonight. Maybe tomorrow I'll take up at this point. Or not. Walton's book really is quite interesting, I find. It's turning out to be one of those 'disagree with everything but thereby figure out what you really think' type books.

Comments

[bob mcmanus]

Well, I do read these. You do mention biography as a borderline case, but for instance, "In 1791, James Madison rode to Philadelphia for the Convention" is very interesting to me for how much the author leaves out. He doesn't tell me the color of the horse, tho he probably knows, nor do I usually imagine the color of the horse. I accept certain artistic decisions he makes, under a set of mutually-agreed rules or conventions. I am also not sure how much more "real" James Madison is to me than Oliver Twist, except in a social, conventional sense. Everybody else says Madison was real.

So I guess I go for (4), and role-playing, for I usually don't imagine myself as James Madison or as interacting with him. (Or George Bush, or Barry Bonds, this extends into much non-fiction, I think.)

I guess I have more trouble distinguishing than you do, based largely on material conventionally excluded in non-fiction.

[jholbo]

Your a trooper to put up with my long stuff, Bob. Thanks. Just a quick thought: it is possible to leave a lot of stuff out of your narration of a series of events - very artfully omitting it, and arrranging what's left for the sake of turning it into a cracking good yarn - and still be telling the truth, i.e. perpetrating non-fiction. The Michael Moore 9/11 controversy may fit in here: true but crafty being the general verdict. I don't think even its unkindest critic would actually say it is a work of fiction (except as a bit of not literary meant hyperbolic abuse.)

Anyway, lots of narrative history that is a lot less controversial than Moore is like this. But there is a big difference between leaving out the color of the horse, even if you know it, for the sake of the story, and including the color of the horse, even if you don't know it, for the sake of the story. If you see what I mean. I think versions of this simple test work pretty well for separating a lot of historical fiction from narrative history and biography and so forth. There's a good quote from Patrick O'Brien but I'll just have to paraphrase: "you use all the history you've got, but you run out pretty quick." Then you make up the color of the horse.

[Jeffrey Kramer]

Another possible objection jumps out (to me at least) against regarding fictions as 'props in games of make-believe'. When we play games, we assume that it is in our power to shape the outcome of the game. We don't play games in which the result is determined entirely by the other player, or by somebody outside the game, but that's the case in reading fiction. (Unless we take upon ourselves the right to make believe, for example, that Madame Bovary 'really' lived happily ever after, no matter what Flaubert wrote about her.)

[Ray Davis]

If Walton had generalized to "play" instead of "make believe" and "art" instead of "fiction", it seems he might have avoided muddle. Most play is performative rather than strictly representative, and much of the representative isn't strictly narrative. What we recognize as fiction can be derived from (or more exactly shares some traits with) some aspects of what is more generally recognized as children's play: that seems enough to build safely on.

Running down your four features:

1. Openly intentionally (and voluntarily self-)deceptive - I'm suprised that Walton would flub this, since it supports his thesis so neatly. An agreed-upon insistence that the narrative isn't true is primary to make-believe and fiction both. Literally primary: when children first learn story-telling chops, they tend to be especially explicit about the "not really"s. If newspapers still published maudlin short stories in place of human interest, Stephen Glass wouldn't have gotten into trouble. Compare the "We were just playing" excuse used by children who have gleefully exploited more gullible peers. The deciding factor is understanding the frame of intentional self-deception.

2. Narrative - As you say.

3. Complexity - I've already referred to a couple of sources on the development of storytelling skills in an earlier post. I remember control over narrative complexity being valued in performative make-believe as in fiction, building from the basic "I shot you, you're dead" put on of cause-and-effect. The distinction seems to me just a matter of degree.

4. Props in fiction appreciation - I'm less impressed with the fit here, since that formula generalizes to so many human activities that any parallel between two particular activities isn't exactly startling. Athletic achievements become props in the appreciation of athletics; cooking achievements become props etc.; sexual achievements etc.; etc. Being humans, we act (and conceptualize our actions) in contexts that seem paradoxically dependent on the actions they support.

[Ray Davis]

(Sorry about the rushed job on that comment, John. Even for me, it reads rough.)

Jeffrey, insofar as we want to call fiction a game, wouldn't "suspension of disbelief" be the reader's performative role, which the reader can play well, or badly, or aggressively -- or simply refuse to assume, stopping the game dead? Flaubert seems the kind of writer who counts on a skillful adversary.

[Dave]

"Suspension of disbelief" works for me, and seems to fit Walton's argument as well.

We get more out of nonfiction when we're evaluating the veracity of what we're told: is it deep truth, or a skin job? how well do indivisible atoms explain the universe? how about top and bottom quarks? was that newspaper article written by a journalist, or a sock puppet? etc.

Conversely, we get much more out of fiction when we're willing to accept it at face falue. (fictional characters can be more human than human, as it were) There is plenty of pleasure for the aesthetes, and a moral or two for the moralisers, in Jim Henson's Muppets work, but it's only available to those who aren't looking too hard for the sock puppet.

[Larry]

It was a pleasure to read your review of Walton.

Here's a passage that made me stop and think:

"Take my two sample quarreling critics: the aesthete and the moralist. They cannot, it seems, be brought to agree about what one is supposed to do with fiction – what the stuff is for. Is it for pleasure, or for moral education? But once upon a time these two were children, down on the rug with toy soldiers and dolls and so forth. As adults, they cannot see eye to eye about War and Peace, but as children they played together happily enough."

It's a tangential point, but I wonder if it's really like that. I'm trying to picture John Gardner and John Updike as little tykes down on the rug with their toy soldiers. Somehow I can't help seeing little Gardner holding dramatic court-martials while little Updike muses about how the swordpoints catch the late afternoon sunlight...

[jholbo]

Thanks for comments, everyone. I've tried to respond to a few of your points implicitly in my follow-up post. For example: Ray, your point about the bland and tautological character of the 'props in appreciation' formulation comes up in the form of my point about how saying works of fiction stimulate the imagination is almost as bad as saying that sleeping pills have a dormative power. Because 'imagination' has sort of acquired a stipulative connection to fiction, in the English language. If we recognize that it's fiction, we automatically say it's 'imaginative' - 'makes us imagine'. But this can't obviously be levered into a substantive explanation.

Well, maybe my point is the same as yours. I'm not sure.

[TricksterB]

Hi all,

I´m new to these boards and therefore quite ignorant with regards to the local etiquette, so forgive me if I take some wrong turns or if this topic is already closed or whatever.

I´ve got some quick questions and remarks with regards to the "Walton part I"-piece. I´m running short on time, so I´ll come back to the second piece later this week.

-although your article is certainly interesting, I was wondering how much of your view on Walton´s theory is/can be supported with the actual text. This is not criticism -I haven´t read Walton yet, unfortunately-, but simply a question. The reason I´m asking this, is that I find it hard to believe that Walton would disagree with 1 and 3. Designating a text or whatever as a prop surely presupposes some craft and intentionality on the part of the creator, does it not? Presumably, the story-bit is more problematic, but I´m not entirely sure if I agree wholeheartedly with what you do and do not call a story. A similar remark can be made with regards to the use of the word fiction -as you correctly point out, much of this debate probably revolves around definitions.

-I assume Walton chooses the make-believe-option over the dulce or utile, not so much to reconcile them, as to come to a more formal, perhaps even more fundamental, view of what it is we do with fiction. On top of that, aesthetics and ethics are -as you yourself seem to suggest- hardly exclusive options. On the contrary.

-Kendall´s definition is in itself not circular, or am I mistaken?

-I do think mental images play an important, though not entirely similar, role in both reading novels (poems are more problematic) and watching paintings and sculptures. With regards to the visual arts, we do not start to form haphazard visual images of whatever we please, of course, but I think we more or less complement the images, fill them in, as it were. A striking, though thoroughly unsophisticated example of this happened to me recently. My brother was watching some trailer of the new Shyamalan movie and was absolutely convinced it showed the claw of one of the ´monsters´ even though a frame by frame analysis quickly showed there were no actual claws to be seen. Nevertheless, I agree that most people probably do not form elaborate mental constructions on the basis of Seurat´s painting. But then again, I don´t think most people spend that much time on these issues as either Walton or we do ;-)

BTW, are you familiar with the work of Wolfgang Iser? He is a German literary theorist who has dealt with a lot of the issues you address here; fiction and the fictive, mental images, aesthetics-ethics, playing and play-acting and what it has to do with mental images et cetera. If you don´t mind the German abstractions, both The Act of Reading and The Fictive and the Imaginary provide some interesting additions to this topic.

Kind regs,
a T who is thoroughly shocked such sophisticated fora exist

[spacetoast]

Trickster-

"... mental images play an important, though not entirely similar, role in both reading novels (poems are more problematic) and watching paintings and sculptures...I agree that most people probably do not form elaborate mental constructions on the basis of Seurat´s painting."

I really think that the centrally relevant idea of imagination, i.e. (Walton's) with respect to visual media, isn't about calling up visualizations or imagery or whatnot that are distinct from the vehicle of representation. Rather, Grand Jatte (or whatever) induces me to imagine what it depicts in the sense that my engagement with it consists in thinking of myself as seeing what it depicts. I say, "there's a sailboat," "I see a sailboat," and so forth. It's kind of like the painting itself is included in the space of my imagining, kind of, if that makes any sense to you. I sort of think that John Holbo is kind of mixing up various things when he goes from the quote about "appreciation" to the thing about "imagining" in the scenario of Grand Jatte vs. its crude copy. But that's just my opinion.

[spacetoast]

Eh, just to try to clarify, the way Walton formulates the thing, what's going on is that the painting induces you to imagine seeing what it depicts, which is not the same thing as what you might call imagining what it depicts. This is such an odd looking formulation in terms of what we pretheoretically make of those terms, that it doesn't, I don't think, provide an easy entry into the idea. Anyway, it's what I was trying to reformulate, maybe impressionistically, by saying that the painting is in a certain sense included in the imaginative space.

[ben wolfson]

Specifically, we are using 'imagination' and 'make-believe' and a couple other terms differently. Walton would probably say that I appear to be perversely determined to construe these terms very narrowly, which makes his claims come out sounding like nonsense.

I had a similar problem when I read the book, especially with regard to the word "pretend" (actually now I can't remember if "pretend" occurs frequently in the book, but certainly in general). I now think I may have a better idea where he's coming from, though I still don't want to follow him, or rather, go to the same place and then emerge from it. I've recently been assigned Austin's "Pretending" and the chapter "Imagination" from Ryle's The Concept of Mind, and Ryle has a similarly metastasized view of what pretense is (giving a demonstration, for example, or pencilling in an answer in a crossword puzzle, are held to be instances of pretending).

Unfortunately I'm not quite clear at what drives Ryle to that belief, so.

[jholbo]

Hey, thanks for the late comment added to the thread, ben. Putting the 'long' back in 'long tail' I don't really have anything constructive to add, except that I'm getting hazier about Walton by the month. I really don't get where he's coming from. Well, I said it in the post. If you care to explain what the motivation is, I'll read with interest.