Fiction Updated: Theories of Fictionality, Narratology, and Poetics

Lawrence Mathews is an associate professor of English at Memorial
University of Newfoundland and the author of Norman Levine and His
Works.

This collection of 24 scholarly essays is dedicated to Lubomir Dolezel,
“one of the main adherents of the Prague School,” and professor
emeritus at the University of Toronto. The contributors range from
international superstars (Umberto Eco, Michel Riffaterre) to Canadian
journeymen and -women. Most essays use as an explicit point of reference
the work of Dolezel, whose writings challenge mimetic,
deconstructionist, and hermeneutical theories of literature. The
volume’s overriding question is that of the relation of fictional
worlds to reality, a question whose answers often involve some
Escher-like tail-chasing. An exemplary Escher drawing is in fact invoked
by one contributor: “Does this same kind of perceptual trouble not
characterize all fiction, where the real Paris becomes, as depicted by
Balzac, a paper Paris, a pure fiction, which itself gives rise to a
reality that would have all the appearances of the real Paris?” These
essays are not, by and large, intended for the fabled common reader.
Witness some of the titles: “Formalist and Structuralist Activity in
Poland: Tradition and Progress,” “The Renaissance Dialogue and Its
Zero-Degree Fictionality,” “Signposts in Oral Epic: Metapragmatic
and Metasemantic Signals,” “Scratching the Bronze Mirror: Looking
for Traces of Fictionality in Chinese Poetics.”

But some contributions are more accessible. Nicholas Rescher, in
“Questions About the Nature of Fiction,” playfully and provocatively
asks whether God, if he exists, reads fiction (No), and whether it is
true that truth is stranger than fiction (Yes). Peter W. Nesselroth’s
“Naming Names in Telling Tales” is an entertaining brief meditation
on the use of proper names in literature, making instructive reference
to David Lodge’s Morris Zapp, inter alia. And the most distinguished
Canadian contributor, Linda Hutcheon, provides a lucid and perceptive
analysis of J.M. Coetzee’s novel Foe; she concludes that no
satisfactory way has yet been devised to deal with “politicized
metafictional novels.” In so doing, she echoes in specific terms
Rescher’s more general comment: “there is a substantially
uncultivated field of inquiry out there just waiting to be developed.”
But Fiction Updated is evidence that the process of such cultivation is
well under way.