9 - Benign untruths: the discourse of fiction

Summary

In chapter 8 I cited a joke analysed by Freud to illustrate how true statements can, in certain circumstances, be used to deceive. Likewise, in other circumstances, statements may be untrue without being deceptive. The presence or absence of an intention to deceive does not always conform to the falsity or truth of what is said. The contrast between falsity and falsehood, or between truth and truthfulness, manifests itself in many contexts but is nowhere seen more clearly than in connection with what we call ‘fiction’. The linguist John Searle (1975:325) notes:

It is after all an odd, peculiar and amazing fact about human language that it allows the possibility of fiction at all.

With a sufficiently wide definition of ‘fiction’ this possibility can be seen as a universal attribute of human society. In any given society, however, fiction, and what Searle (1975:326) calls ‘the conventions of fictional discourse’, take forms that are socially constructed. Literary theorists have examined the concept of fiction at great length (e.g. Pavel 1986, Smith 1978) but my concerns are somewhat different from theirs; I limit my discussion to the possibilities for deception in fiction and to the ways in which authors have asserted or denied the veridicality of their texts. Furthermore I confine myself to selected evidence from one group of literate societies.

In general, the readers of a work of fiction nowadays recognize it for what it is.