Gallagher: "The Rise of Fictionality" (Paradoxical Fictionality)

In this article, Gallagher argues for a recovery of discussions about fictionality in the novel.She begins with an analysis of mideighteenth century British narratives to demonstrate how the nature of fictionality changed during this century, which in turn influenced narrative fictionality in Europe and American in the nineteenth century and thus influencing our expectations of novels today.

Gallagher suggests the the novel had to differentiate itself from other genres establishing a unique and paradoxical fictionality. On one hand, the novel tried to hide behind realism making claims about truth offering a sort of ambivalence towards its fictionality. The 18th century novelists "abandoned earlier writers' serious attempts to convince readers that their invented tales were literally true or were at least about actual people"while still concealing "fictionality by locking it inside the confines of the credible" (337).However, what seems important about fictionality is that as a discursive mode readers "developed the ability to tell it apart from both fact and (this is the key) deception" (338).  Indeed, fantasy genres such as allegory and fables are easy to identify as fiction, but Gallagher argues that "plausible stories are thus the real test for the progress of fictional sophistication in a culture" (339).  In the 18th century, novels that did not contain the obvious fiction of talking animals but rather seemed referential were accused of fraud. Such fictionality was not accepted nor welcome. Allegorical novels with imaginary kingdoms and talking animals may refer to contemporaries; a reader can tell it apart from reality (i.e. not deceptive) yet not clearly set apart from fact as it still alluded to a referent. Is the truth, then, a disguised reflection and thus fictionality,and can we distinguish fictionality from fiction? It seems that Gallagher is wanting to explore the fictionality as features that satisfy some sort of wanting in the readers, a wanting that is specific to modernity.

In the 18th century, Gallagher argues, two things were missing in discussions of the novel: 1) a conceptual category of fiction and 2) believable stories that did not solicit belief (340).  In consider how the novel developed an awareness of fictionality as such, Lennard Davis argues that it developed out of the "news-novel matrix" -- a tangled mass of journalism, scandal, and and political and religious controversy. By calling it fiction, some authors avoided libel eventually being enjoyed for itself without reference to "the person satirized" (341). In addition to the fiction alibi, Gallagher points out that fictionality expanded the idea of truth to include verisimilitude. So we see this idea of historical as truth to a sort of simulated experience as truth. Furthermore, fictionality assumes that the novel is about no one in particular with no particular referent yet a "proper name in a believable narrative an an embodied individual in the world." And in doing this -- resisting a particular referent -- readers can "contemplate their own deformity, and endeavor to reduce it, and thus by suffering private mortification may avoid public shame" (342).  The fiction writer is no longer a libeler because the "nonreferentiality could be seen as a greater referentiality." Nonetheless, any invention of a person to represent the universal would prove to bee too narrow to cover all the cases; thus, this feature of fictionality is problematic if not paradoxical.


"For the difference between the historian and the poet is not in their presenting accounts that are versified or not versified...' rather, the difference is this: the one tells what has happened, the other the kind of things that can happen. And in fact that is why the writing of poetry is a more philosophical activity, and one to be taken more seriously, than the writing of history.  For poetry tells us rather the universals, history the particulars. "Universals" means what kinds of thing a certain kind of person will say or do in accordance with probability or necessity, which is what poetic composition aims at, tacking on names afterward" (Poetics, ch. 9, 301-2).

Gallagher suggests here that the "novel may be said to have discovered fiction." The use of fictionality is a special way of shaping knowledge through the fabrication of particulars. Writing about something that was probably was not necessarily an indicator of fiction. The question Gallagher asks "what it was about early modernity in the first capitalist nation that propagated not just realist  fiction but realist fiction. What is the modernity-fictionality connection?..to explore what it means to read a narrative as credible while thinking it affirms nothing" (346). (I feel like education reform is fictitious in a similar way if we consider what it means to read its dominant narrative as credible when it affirms nothing.)

Considering the position of the reader external to the fiction and capable of speculating on the action, the novel seeks to suspend such disbelief; fictionality is about believability or plausibility rather than reality. Such was modernity in the 18th century and modernity in the 21st century,both with interests in capitalism, development, and anticipation of progress. Consider paper money and credit. We do not live in reality but on plausibility  Gallagher writes, "Indeed, almost all the developments we associate with modernity -- from greater religious toleration to specific scientific discovery -- required the kind of cognitive provisionality one practices in reading fiction, a competence in investing contingent and temporary credit" (347).

Nevertheless, fiction asks for a willing suspension of disbelief, and so reading a novel allows the reader to suspend skepticism  and detach from the mental effort of critique or doubt. Fiction absorbs the reader asking for a suspension of disbelief yet not going so far as to believe. The form brings the reader into imaginary experiences presuming interference with  volition (348).

Coleridge says of this: "It is laxly said that during sleep we take our dreams for realities, but this is irreconcilable with the nature of sleep, which consists in a suspension of the voluntary and, therefore, of the comparative power.  The fact is that we pass no judgment either way: we simply do not judge them to be real, in consequence of which the images act on our minds, as far as they act at all, by their own force as images.  Our state while we are dreaming differs from that in which we are in the perusal of a deeply interesting novel in the degree rather than in the kind (1960: 116).

The fictionality of a novel ask for pleasure or a "deep immersion in allusion because  {you} are protected from delusion by the voluntary framework of disbelief" when you pick up the novel.  The enjoyment or the experience is a fictional encounter without a "tangible profit or practical advantage"  thus fictionally experiencing. Here is the paradox: "the novel reader opens what she knows is a fiction because it is a fiction and soon finds that enabling knowledge to be the subtlest of the experience's elements. Just as it declares itself, it becomes that which goes without saying" (349).

In considering characters, Gallagher discusses the problematic that the novel encourages naive essentialism: "the reader's involvement in the dominant modern form of fiction has generally been thought to come about through some sort of psychic investment in, or even identification with, the characters" (350). However, as fictionality became more commonly understood, writers also realized that reader identified with characters not because of their realness but because of their fictionality. In other words, "they noticed that the fictional framework established a protected affective enclosure that encouraged risk-free emotional investment. Fictional characters, moreover, were thought to be easier to sympathize or identify with than most real people" (351).

Gallagher discusses the characters' "peculiar affective force" as "generated by the mutual implication of their unreal knowability and their apparent depth, the link between their real nonexistence and the reader's experience of them as deeply and impossibly familiar" (356).  Knowing their fictionality makes it easier to surrender and be intimate.  The character is what Jeremy Bentham in "A Fragment on Ontology" called an "imaginary nonentity." This is fascinating: "We would not be able to enter represented subjectivity while subliminally understanding that we are, as readers, its actualizers, its conditions of being, the only minds who undergo these experiences" (357).

The fictionality is the ontological contrast. The narratorial mode elucidates this further. First person narrations differentiates the narrator and the implied author whereas third person omniscient narrators "must sustain the illusion of opacity of the characters surrounding them...vehicles for the epistemological uncertainty that modernists were anxious to produce" because of the intimacy between the narrator and the characters. Paradoxically, the representational tactics that make the character seemingly knowable are "peculiarly delimited" because the character is a textual being.  The character is  also and always partial or incomplete as a fictional construct.

The naming of the character, for Barthe, however, "imports the supplement of personhood, the ideological assumption that the character is everything attributed to it by the text, and everything else that is needed to make up a human being. Where it is not purposely prevented from doing so...the proper name draws together and unifies all the semantic material, and we have...the ideologically suspect pleasure of sensing a person on the other side of the text" (360).

In the end, Gallagher explains how fictionality which seemingly originated in the mid 18th century novel  extended into the 19th century and now informs modern readers' anticipations and expectations of a novel's fictionality. She writes: "What we seek in and through characters, therefore, are not surrogate selves but the contradictory sensations of not being a character.  On the one hand, we experience an ideal version of self-continuity, graced by enunciative mastery, mobility, and powers of almost instantaneous detachment and attachment. We experience, that is, the elation of a unitary unboundedness. On the other hand, we are also allowed to love and equally idealized immanence, an ability to be, we imagine, without textuality, meaningfulness, or an other excuse for existing" (361).