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The Distinction of Fiction (review)

Craig S. Cravens

Comparative Literature Studies, Volume 37, Number 1, 2000, pp. 78-80

(Article)

Published by Penn State University Press

DOI: 10.1353/cls.2000.0001

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78 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

The Distinction of Fiction. By Dorrit Cohn. Baltimore and London: TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 1999. ix + 197 pp. $42.00 hardcover.

The relationship between fiction and nonfiction has always been a prob-lematic one, and since Aristotle, there has been no dearth of apologistsfor the serious nature of imaginary works of literature. In the eighteenthcentury, it was common practice to preface novels with evidence of theirauthenticity. The convention of the manuscript found in a desk draweror the discovered diary were attempts not so much to persuade readers ofa works authenticity, but to urge readers to approach them with the sameseriousness as a nonfictional piece of writing. For although not true inthe historical sense, fiction has always laid claim to its own kind of idio-

syncratic truth. In the late twentieth century, the situation seems tohave been reversed (at least among literary critics)historical writinghas been charged to defend itself against accusations of fabulation. Mostsuch claims are strained at best. Since both historical and fictional writ-ing enchain causally connected events in a temporal sequence, goes theargument, and since causal relations between events cannot be provenlogically but only inferred from experience (as Hume demonstrated longago), the connection between events, or narrative, is essentially nothingmore than a human projection with no claims to authenticity; it cannotdescribe the way things really are out there, whatever that means.

In her latest work, the doyenneof American narratology Dorrit Cohncites such deconstructivist critiques to launch her own discussion of theontological status of fiction, the Distinction, as her title reads, of Fiction.What is fiction, and how does it relate to other forms of writing? Is itpossible to determine its necessary and sufficient properties? Recently,such questions have been treated mostly by philosophers of language,especially speech-act theorists, and, as Dorrit Cohn points out in herpreface, it is odd that such a textually based methodology as narratologyhas not investigated these issues earlier. Cohn is not the first narratologistto take on questions of fictional ontology (see for example GrardGenettes Fiction et diction, 1991 and Thomas Pavels Fictional Worlds,1986), but what Cohn brings to the debate is what lies at the heart of herclassic study of narrative form Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes forPresenting Consciousness in Fiction (1978), that is, a focus on voice orperson. By concentrating on the psychic or vocal origin of texts that seem

to straddle the fictional/nonfictional dividesuch as biography, autobi-ography, and historical fictionshe distills three formal criteria that may

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES, Vol. 37, No. 1, 2000.Copyright 2000 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA.

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79BOOK REVIEWS

be used to mark out the boundaries of fiction. These are her Signposts ofFictionality (the title of chapter 7).

Cohns first formal indicator is cognitive privilege (traditionally re-ferred to as omniscience): in the realm of fiction alone is an author con-ventionally entitled to portray the private subjective experiences ofanother human being. Biographers may speculate on their subjects pri-vate thoughts, but any psychic insights are usually qualified with some-thing along the lines of, He or she must have been thinking . . . Indeed,argues Cohn, the most imaginative biographer would be hard put to jus-tify the type of omniscience Tolstoy uses in The Death of Ivan Ilych,wherethe author presents us with the direct psychological experience of a manpassing from the living to the dead.

There is more to this first signpost than mere mind-reading, how-ever. Not only are we privy to a characters mental life in certain types offiction, but we often experience time and space from a characters per-spective as well. Hence, only in fiction do we come across such gram-matically odd constructions as, His plane left tomorrow, where the pasttense refers not to the past in relation to the speaker (the narrator), butrather to the present of a fictional character looking forward to the fol-lowing day (2425).

This criterion holds, of course, only for works narrated in the third-person. First-person speakers obviously have direct access to their ownthoughts in both the past and present. Here Cohn suggests a second dis-tinguishing featurea dual vocal origin. In short: if the author is differ-ent from the narrator, we have a work of fiction; if not, non-fiction. Thisdistinction is clearest in autobiographical works. We know The Confes-sions of Felix Krull are fictional because they were written by ThomasMann, not Felix Krull. By using the identity of the speaking subject asthe discriminating feature for first-person works, Cohn obviates prob-lems of referentiality. Rousseau may have in fact fantasized parts or all ofhis own Confessions, but we still read his work as genuine autobiographydue to the nominal identity of author and narrator. Proust, however, be-comes problematic, but this is part of Cohns point: some works will al-waysresist generic categorization. And the best parts of Cohns book arethose that examine closely such formally ambiguous works.

Wolfgang Hildesheimers fictional biography Marbotis another ge-nerically equivocal composition which Cohn investigates in chapter 5.

Since Andrew Marbot is not a documented person, the work obviouslybelongs to world of fiction. Cohn examines this pseudo-biography in de-tail, however, for other tell-tale signs of fictionality. She concludes thatalthough Hildesheimer was quite thorough in removing signals offictionality, his own voice ultimately betrays him: the author has created

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a narrative persona bearing his own name but with whom he is not iden-tical, since the narrator believes in the genuine existence of a man namedMarbot, and Hildesheimer does not. On second thought, however, thiscriterion is problematic. The only way to discern the difference betweennarrator and implied author is by knowing that Marbot never existed inthe first place.

Here we come to Cohns third criterion of fictionality and back tothe beginning of the book, that is, the non-referentiality of the fictionaltext. Historical writing refers to real events; fiction does not. This refer-ential constraint is obvious to the most inexperienced reader, but Cohnsimplied audience is the professional reader who has been trained to seeall narrative in terms of the binary opposition fabulaand siuzhet. Out-

side the realm of fiction, Cohn writes, the synchronous interplay ofstory and discourse is undergirdedno matter how shakilyby the logi-cal and chronological priority of documented or observed events (115).This third level must be taken into any narratological discussion of whatshe calls the fictionality debate. The fact that such an astute critic asDorrit Cohn feels compelled to expend so much critical energy on thisobvious notion is testimony to the blinkered vision to which professionalreaders are prone. The radically skeptical arguments cited at the begin-ning are red herrings and to her credit, she does not mention them afterher introduction. Cohns critical vision is as acute as it comes. Her Trans-parent Mindswill always remain a classic in the analysis of narrative; butif we place her earlier work alongside this one, the weakness of the latter,its reluctance to think through its assumptions, jumps into relief.

Unlike many theorists of narrative, Cohn is not prone to over-schematization. Her close narrative and stylistic analyses always producecomplex and thoughtful descriptions of literary works without reducingthem to simplified diagrams. The chief shortcoming of The Distinction ofFictionis precisely Cohns emphasis of the theoretical. She is too sensi-tive of a reader to make any larger claims on the essential nature of fic-tion, and this lends her work a theoretical thinness. On the other hand,even those chapters lashed to her conceptual framework are loaded withmagnificent local insights to individual works. In the end, her book seemsto propose unintentionally another question debated since at least Aris-totle: do we really need a well-developed epistemological theory of fic-tion to pronounce on the values of literature, or to help us partake of

literary pleasures? Those are the questions raised by The Distinction ofFiction.

Craig S. CravensThe University of Texas at Austin