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Implicitness in Narrative Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
From the cognitive statement that it was raining, we infer that the street got wet. In fiction, we cannot infer that the street got wet (nor that it did not): we cannot make the implicit explicit by applying causal laws. Historical events are implicitly posited in relation to the here and now. Fictional events are not. Thus, the implicit meaning of tenses changes when we turn from history to fiction. In both cases (causality and temporality), a gain in esthetic resonance can correspond to a loss in cognitive reference.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970
References
Note 1 in page 988 This paper is not a contribution to the classical issue of induction. It challenges the application of causality, or probability, to fictional, not to historical, states of affairs. No doubt, bringing in fictional designation should set the traditional problem of induction in a different perspective. But my paper is not oriented in this direction.
Note 2 in page 988 Coleridge's phrase “suspension of disbelief” is often used to avoid saying “belief.” “Suspension of belief and disbelief” would be a more straightforward phrase to characterize the esthetic intentionality. As for the neither-true-nor-false status: this concerns the descriptions in narrative fiction, not a commentator's quotations, paraphrases, and summaries. A sentence may become a true statement when it is transferred from the narrative to the critical context: it becomes a quotation, which can be accurate or inaccurate. See Haig Khatchadourian, “About Imaginary Objects,” Ratio, 8 (June 1966), 87.
Note 3 in page 988 See, for instance, Louis-René Des Forêts, Le Bavard (Paris: Gallimard, 1946); or Samuel Beckett, L'Innommable (Paris: Minuit, 1953).
Note 4 in page 990 For a fairly comprehensive ontological picture, note the differences between: the text as an intemporal entity; a reading of the text, as a historical event or process; interpreting, comprehending the text, as an act in the traditional philosophical sense (it happens, but not at this or that time) ; if the text is narrative, the narrated process (events situated in the same field as the event of reading in the case of history, in another field in the case of fiction).
Note 5 in page 991 “The author cannot refer to himself either by the subject pronoun ‘I’ or by his name or by any other means.” Laurent Stern, “Fictional Characters, Places and Events,” Philosophy and Plienomenological Research, 26 (Dec. 1965), 206.
Note 6 in page 991 This would also apply to the second-person pronoun. See, for instance, Michel Butor, La Modification (Paris: Minuit, 1957).