The Routledge Dictionary of Literary Terms

institution. The term appears to have
become the focus of a valuable relativism,
an anti-positivistic, anti-empiricist caveat.
The justification for such an extension is
not so clear; the argument seems flawed
and ultimately uninformative. If we can
only make sense of things through fictions,
how do we know of the existence of
that which is non-fictional? By the same
argument, the vitally necessary assumption
of Pure Contingency is also a fiction.
Equally, it is absurd to reduce whatever is
true to whatever we cannot make sense of.
In addition this extension of the term
initiates a set of general conditions for the
operation of fictions which makes it
either impossible or unnecessary to distinguish
between one fiction (say, poetry)
and another (say, history).
Another aspect of the extension of this
term needs justification. Fictions in general
are like legal fictions – suppositions
known to be false, but taken as true for
the purposes of practical or theoretical
convenience. Where this usage extends to
a description of mental processes, it overlaps
with the preceding sense, but the
stricter model gives a more explicit
account of the role of belief implied in
that sense. It is claimed that fictions are
mental structures which we know to be
false, but which we accept as true for the
purposes of mental coherence and order.
Thinking becomes a matter of simultaneous
belief and disbelief in the truth of our
ideas; we know that our interpretations of
things are ultimately false, but we must
go on relying at least in part on these
fictions because we have no other way of
making sense of things. The term seems
relativistic because it sensitizes us to the
limitations of our own and other people’s
viewpoints, but it also tends to imply such
mental diffidence that it is hard to know
how we could take the truth of any idea
seriously enough to be sceptical about it.
Fiction 89
There is a danger that the unthinking use
of the term could lead to a lack of intellectual
commitment in criticism, because
no fiction will need justification when it
implies its own falsehood. On the other
hand, the term is not really relativistic at
all, if it implies that all our critical interpretations
are ultimately invalid in the
same way. It then becomes the banner of
a naïve and reactionary fundamentalism,
which measures the validity of all ideas
by a single standard of truth (Pure
Contingency or Chaos). Perhaps the most
telling objection to the extension of this
term is that it adds to our vocabulary
without adding to our understanding:
except where it can be shown to be false,
according to conventional criteria, it
makes no difference to an interpretation
that we call it a ‘fiction’.
Literary fictions may have various
degrees of plausibility. The archaic adjective
fictive, revived by the American poet
Wallace Stevens, is used extensively in
modern criticism to denote the making
of fictions which do not suspend the
reader’s disbelief, but stimulate it, in order
to establish particular kinds of rhetorical
effect. Many novelists in the post-war
period, such as Barth, Borges, Beckett,
Genet and Nabokov, often depended
for their effects on a consistent sense of
implausibility, and such writers forced
critics to distinguish shades of meaning in
their terminology to account for varieties
of literary self-consciousness. Hence, the
use of the cognate terms fictiveness
and fictionality, which differ from fiction
or fiction making by their implication of
authorial self-consciousness. Critics have
also distinguished between MODERNIST
self-consciousness and the POSTMODERNIST
degree of self-consciousness in the postwar
period which flaunted its own conditions
of artiface. Hence, the rise of
such terms as metafiction, surfiction and