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Fiction and Imitation

Thomas Pavel
Romance Languages and Literatures, Chicago

This article begins with a discussion of the views on mimesis defended in


recent works by Lubomr Doleel, Dorrit Cohn, and Jean-Marie Schaeer. It then argues that literary ction typically represents human beings in their relationship with
norms and values. But since norms and values cannot be uniformly reduced to a set
of observable facts, they cannot be copied directly but only highlighted indirectly,
through examples of human action. These examples, however, do not necessarily
represent the norm or the value they are meant to typify. It follows that representation of norms and values cannot be reduced to imitation and that mere observation of
nature cannot suce for creating and understanding ction. The poet and the reader
must know how to distance themselves from the world of is, the empirical realm,
in order to explore its dependence on the world of ought, the realm of norms, and
the world of praise, the realm of values.

Abstract

Recent work in narratology and aesthetics of ction evidences a renewal


of interest in the resemblance between the imaginary features of literary
worlds and the objects and properties that belong to the actual universe.
The question of mimesis is back, with three positions being defended: the
full rejection of the mimetic character of ction, the recognition of the partial role imitation plays in ction, and the rm assertion that human imagination and therefore ction are essentially mimetic. I will examine a few
recent instances of these positions and argue that while it is right to see
mimesis as essential for understanding what ction is, it is nevertheless
wrong to see mimesis as adequate for understanding what ction does. It
is even more wrong to take the act of assessing imitation as our main task
Poetics Today : (Fall ) Copyright by the Porter Institute for Poetics and
Semiotics.

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when reading ction. We use literature as a springboard for reection about


human condition, and because of this, to gauge the mimetic success of ction is far less important than to seek in it the opportunity for raising questions, pondering hypotheses, and debating issues relevant for the kind of
beings we are.1

In his recent book Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Lubomr Doleel (), rejects the widespread view according to which literary works
imitate life.2 Focusing on ctional semantics, that is, on the search for the
reference of terms encountered in ctional texts, Doleel argues that semantic approaches based on the idea of imitation are unable to make sense
of the individual characters portrayed in works of ction. Consider a set of
such characters: Emma Bovary, Charles Bovary, and Rodolphe Boulanger,
from Flauberts novel Madame Bovary. These characters can be said to be a
result of imitation in two ways: either as the literary transposition of actual
prototypes or as the literary embodiments of actual properties or predicates. Literary historians tell us that the name of Emma Bovarys actual
counterpart was Mrs. Delphine Couturier, married to Mr. Eugne Delamare, Charles Bovarys model, and seduced by Mr. Louis Campion, Rodolphes prototype (Thibaudet : ). Other critics dismiss the search
for such narrow models and interpret Madame Bovary in a more abstract
fashion. If, for example, the novel is seen as the representation of an entire human existence which has no issue (Auerbach : , quoted in
Doleel : ), then the text is understood to imitate the actual property
of leading a life that has no issue. But Doleel rightly notices that many
literary charactersmy examples would be Pamela, Lucien de Rubempr,
and Sherlock Holmesdo not have actual prototypes, yet neither writers
nor readers of ction distinguish between the characters who are based on
actual prototypes and those who are not. He also observes that a mimetic
theory that assumes that literary works imitate general properties belonging to the actual world still needs to explain the status of ctional characters. Are these mere incarnations of abstract properties? How come then
that in many cases the human beings portrayed in ction strike us as being
so well individualized? And why do modern critics devalue works of c-

. The present article continues the reection on literature, norms, and values sketched out
in Pavel and . I am particularly indebted to Bernstein (), Emerson (), and
Morson () for guiding me toward the topic of freedom of action in literature. Menachem Brinker, Dorrit Cohn, Larry McEnerney, Rainer Rochlitz, Jean-Marie Schaeer,
Meir Sternberg, and the reviewers for Poetics Today read an earlier version of the paper and
oered invaluable comments and suggestions for improvement.
. Although Doleel refers to Aristotle, the argument he presents is directed against the informal presumption, shared by most critics, that ction is always based on life. For a careful
discussion of Aristotles views on mimesis, see Sternberg .

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tion whose characters are not convincing as individuals but merely embody
abstract universals? Finally, Doleel notices that in fact, most critics discuss literary characters as if they preexisted the act of their representation
in a work of ction. Ian Watt () writes, for instance, that Fielding lets
us into Blils mind () and that we have not been taken [by Fielding]
close enough to Toms mind (; both passages quoted in Doleel :
). But this way of speaking implies that a ction writer is a chronicler of
ctional realms. The existence of these realms is assumed without being explained. (Doleel : ). The mimetic approach, Doleel concludes, is a
necessary consequence of the assumption that there is only one world, the
actual one, and that, accordingly, ctional individuals must be somehow
accommodated in the actual world. But obviously they cannot. It follows
that mimetic semantics of ction cannot account for ctional individuals.
Even though it appears to be problematic in ctional semantics, the
notion of imitation might still serve in pragmatics, in particular when ction is taken to be dependent on the playful imitation of serious speech
acts, as John Searle () and Barbara Herrnstein Smith () have cogently argued. Writing about Tolstoys Death of Ivan Ilyitch, Smith submits
that Tolstoy is pretending to be writing a biography while actually he is fabricating one (Smith : ).Tolstoys novel appears to imitate life, because
Tolstoy imitates biographical discourse. But Dorrit Cohn, who discusses
this argument in her recent book, The Distinction of Fiction, disagrees. In her
view, the last thing Tolstoy is doing is pretending to be writing a biography. A competent reader of ction . . . understands the author to be communicating to his reader a ctional narrative about the death of an imaginary
person (Cohn : ). Two arguments can be brought to support Cohns
position. One is the observation that Searle and Smith consider ction to
be nonmisleading pretense. They do not mean that the author, Tolstoy in this
case, intends to trick his public into believing that his story is a factual
biography; rather, they point to the common awareness, shared by Tolstoy
and his public, that works of ction obey dierent rules regarding reference
and interpretation than biographies and books of history. Second, according to Cohn (: ), speech acts encountered in ction are not always
imitations of natural speech acts, since, as she submits, there is at least one
kind of speech that has no natural correspondent: the narration of life as
experienced in the privacy of a characters consciousness. Tolstoy (:
) recounts Ivan Ilyitchs last moments in these terms: Yes, it was all not
the right thing, he said to himself, but thats no matter. It can be done. But
whats the right thing? he asked himself and suddenly grew quiet. Cohn
argues that in everyday life no one can know and much less report the intimate thoughts of a fellow human being on his deathbed: as a consequence,

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the reenacting of someone elses inner thoughts in the rst person is a linguistic act that occurs only in ction. Situations of this kind are assumed
to prove that ctional discourse is not restricted to the playful imitation of
natural speech.
The similarity between Cohns and Doleels arguments is striking: both
argue against the reduction of ction to imitation, Cohn at the discursive
level, Doleel at the level of ctional semantics, and both bring forth a situation that cannot be explained in terms of imitation: Doleel points to the
semantics of ctional individuals, Cohn to the presentation of a characters
consciousness in its privacy. The two authors therefore do not claim that
ction is entirely free of imitation (i.e., reference to the actual world, in semantics, and imitation of natural speech acts, in ctional discourse); they
simply note that since mimesis does not exhaust the possibilities of ction,
its denition cannot be based on imitation, be it of objects or of discourse.
Cohns position is an elaboration of Kte Hamburgers () convinction that in contrast with factual discourse, ction is capable of conveying
the subjective experience of other human beings, the here and now of their
lives, as Cohn (: ) puts it, to which no real observer could ever accede in real life. For Cohn and Hamburger, a stylistic device like free indirect discourse, which conveys the subjective experience of other human
beings from outside as it were, embodies the very essence of ctional discourse. For them, ctional discourse is the sole epistemological instance
where the I-originarity (or subjectivity) of a third person qua third person
can be portrayed (Hamburger : ; quoted by Cohn : ). When
Cohn argues that the Death of Ivan Ilyitch is not a pretended biography but a
genuine ctional text, she, like Hamburger, at the same time strives to avoid
the confusion between truth-valued discourse (factual statements) and ction, and grants ction a specic cognitive function. Fiction, Cohn seems
to say, is not a mere game, a histrionic, ventriloquistic use of serious discourse; it is a highly serious endeavor, having a unique missionto portray
the operation of other minds in their very otherness, that is, to make us
humans aware of the inner life of other humans, without however blurring
the borders between our own I and their I. Open-minded enough to represent the subjectivity of a third person, ction is wise enough to portray it
qua third person. Fiction both imitates the inner life of other people and
emphasizes its inaccessibility.
But why should one believe that access to someone elses mind is by necessity ctional? And why should ction, while inventing other peoples inner
life, keep it at bay? The answer to these questions has something to do with
a dierent, more archaic acceptation of mimesis, understood as individual
immersion in a ctive being or world. This distinction and the term immer-

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sion come from another ne recent book on ction, Jean-Marie Schaeers


Pourquoi la ction? [Why ction?] (), which is one of the most complete
and complex attempts to rehabilitate the notion of imitation in literature
and, as such, a worthy heir of the contemporary promimetic tradition initiated by Kendall Waltons () compelling defense of mimesis on aesthetic
grounds. Schaeer, who has written several important books on philosophy of art, is a formidable critic of romantic theory of art (Schaeer )
and a staunch defender of cognitivism in aesthetics (Schaeer ). His
latest book represents a successful attempt to anchor ction as forcefully as
possible in the reality of the actual universe. In order to achieve this goal,
Schaeer, following Aristotles example, takes literary ction to be a subclass of mimetic behavior. But as everybody knows, mimesis, or imitation, is
a muddled and disputed idea, and in order to clarify it, Schaeer sketches an
anthropology of imitation that leads to a conceptual analysis of the notion.3
From an anthropological point of view, Schaeer argues, imitation can
be considered either as a form of empathic immersion in an alternative
reality or as a strategy for deliberate or instinctive learning of new types
of behavior. This distinction, Schaeer shows, is as old as the world, since
Platos famous rejection of literary mimesis in his Republic (book ) is based
on his mistrust of immersion, while Aristotle, in his Poetics, considers mimesis as a useful learning strategy. In book of The Republic, Socrates and his
friends discuss the ideal state and ask themselves whether poetry is worthy
of being studied by its future leaders.4 They observe that Homer sometimes
speaks in his own voice, thus producing pure narrationdiegesis in Platos
termsand sometimes speaks in his ctional characters voices, generating
imitative speechor mimesis in Platos terminology. When Homer does the
latter, he identies with, or impersonates, his characters, mimesis as identication being dened as the eort to adapt oneselfones voice or ones
appearanceto someone else (The Republic c).5 Because the guardians
of the city must only concentrate on activities that tend toward the goal
of directing their community, their education should require them to identify only with courageous, self-disciplined, just, and generous people and
avoid imitative speeches that express reprehensible or morally debilitating
. In addition, Schaeers book examines the phylogenetic and ontogenetic emergence of
ction from imitation and considers the consequences of his mimetic theory of ction for the
poetics and semiotics of various arts.
. See Nehamass () illuminating discussion of Platos hostility to ction. Although Nehamass main topic is the philosophical rejection of artistic imitation in book of the Republic,
his reading of Platos considerations on the educational dangers of mimesis in book of the
Republic is particularly insightful. I borrow from him the notion of mimesis as identication
or impersonation (; see also nn. and , ).
. The quotes come from the lively translation by Robin Watereld.

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thoughts and attitudes. When, however, such thoughts and attitudes are
narrated in the third person (as pure narration or diegesis), the danger is
drastically reduced. A virtuous poet would therefore avoid what we call direct speech and compose poems in which the proportion of imitative speech
(mimesis) in comparison with pure narration (diegesis) would be small. A
wicked poet, however, would make extensive use of direct speech (mimesis) and impersonate a variety of attitudes and thoughts, including the most
degrading ones (). (Notice how dierent Platos view of good and bad
writers is from the modern norms of eective writing, which, as Wayne
Booth [: ] observes, prescribe the minimization of pure narration
and the maximization of dramatic impersonation.)
Having made its point against recitation of imitated speech, Platos argument takes a new turn. The ideal city, Socrates reminds his interlocutors,
must encourage the division of labor, for, in order to do things well, people
must devote themselves to a single occupation : shoemakers should be shoemakers and not ship captains as well, farmers should be farmers and not
judges as well, and so on. Therefore, the poet, that is, a man who is clever
enough to be able to assume all kinds of forms and to represent [read identify with or impersonate] everything in the world is not needed in the ideal
city ().
In the argument defended in book III of The Republic, it is therefore possible to distinguish the mistrust of direct speech (of immersion, in Schaeers
terms) from the mistrust of poetic ction in general. While recitation of direct
ctional speech threatens individual integrity because it requires people to
identify with degrading thoughts and feelings and thus exposes them to the
danger of being contaminated by detrimental attitudes (Schaeer calls this
critique the epidemiological model of mimesis), poetic ction in general
is dangerous because its versatility in representing a wide variety of things
contradicts the principle of the social division of labor and, as a consequence, undermines professional competence and therefore correct knowledge. Mimesis undermines personal virtue; ction threatens our comprehension of the world. Both put people besides themselves, as it were; both
allure them away from the path of the good and the true.
But how are virtue and social roles internalized if not by imitation, understood both as impersonation and as a strategy for learning? Plato (: )
himself allows for the possibility of good imitation, whereby the guardians
impersonate courageous, self-disciplined, just, and generous people. And
Aristotles (: ) defense of ction rests on the claim that it has the same
underpinnings as learning. Imitation by observation is a basic human impulse, in Aristotles view, an impulse enhanced by poetic ction. Moreover,
human understanding and learning proceed by way of abstract cognitive

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models that represent the general features of an object or a situation. Poetic


ction specializes in these kinds of cognitive models, since works of poetry
do not tell what has happened, as history does, but the kind of thing that
would happen (). Thus, in addition to the acceptations of imitation by
observation and impersonation, the term mimesis acquires a third, more
abstract, meaning: representation with the help of a cognitive model.
Schaeer wants to demonstrate that these distinctions are still relevant
for our time. Using the tools of analytical philosophy, the results of cognitive psychology, and his own conceptual ingenuity, he links Platos and
especially Aristotles views on imitation to present-day theory of ction.
Aristotles cognitive realism informs Schaeers eorts to link ction with
the development of our species and with the operation of individual psychology. To thrive, ction requires a complex mental ability capable of
consciously distinguishing between truth, falsehood, pretension and deception, and a social system in which cooperation prevails over conict. At the
individual level, the predisposition for ction depends on the plasticity of
the I, the acquired character of self-identity, and the partial independence
of mental activity from external stimuli. In other words, we need and can
aord ction because we are neither well-dened beings nor fully dependent on actual stimuli. From early childhood on, we mix reections on the
surrounding world with mental wanderings that have no immediate empirical basis, our brain being eager to act even when outside stimulation is
lacking. We therefore supplement homological modeling, that is, the creation of cognitive models based on the surrounding reality, with ctional
modeling, which is less dependent upon actual stimuli.When these private
activities become public, ction as a cultural genre is born.
To the extent that such ctional models are supposed to refer to features
of the actual world, one would expect Schaeer to describe them in semantic terms. Yet, following the example of Genette (), Schaeer considers semantic theories of ction to be useless. Such theories, Schaeer
observes, take for granted that we cannot properly understand the meaning
of a statement without satisfactorily identifying its reference. Yet we understand quite well ctional statements that have no identiable reference in
the actual physical world. One cannot claim that such statements are meaningless as Carnaps disciples once did, since we obviously understand such
statements, and it does not help much to argue that their meaning is purely
emotive as suggested by Ogden and Richards (), since this meaning is
not always fullling an emotive function. Agreeing that the actual physical
world is the only world, Nelson Goodman (: ) restricts denotation
to physical objects in the actual world but acknowledges that statements
containing ctional characters are meaningful insofar as they involve rep-

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resentations and not objects proper. To speak of Mr. Pickwick is to speak of


a Pickwick-representation, not of an imaginary being. But since other cultural entities (gods belonging to dead mythologies, for instance) also lack
denotation, Schaeer concludes that Goodmans approach does not provide us with a satisfactory denition of ction. A third option consists in
abandoning ontological physicalism and positing a multiplicity of worlds,
most of them nonexisting. This option sees ctional worlds as alternative
worlds, and ctional statements as referring to states of aairs that occur
in such alternative worlds. The problem with ctional worlds, Schaeer argues (borrowing his argument from Danto), is that if we conceive of them
as genuinely dierent from the actual world, it becomes dicult to fathom
why people are interested in stories about such remote regions of being,
and if we take them to be minor variants of the actual world, it becomes
dicult to distinguish between ction and other species of counterfactual
statements. Semantics, concludes Schaeer, is not useful in dening ction. Such a denition can be found, according to him, in Searles ()
idea that from a logical point of view, ction is shared pretense. Genette
(: ) concurs by saying that ction is beyond truth and falsehood,
in the sense that it leaves aside the question of the referential value and
ontological status of the representations it induces (Schaeer : ).
Shared pretense being, in Schaeers view, closely related to Platos mimesis
understood as identication or immersion, Schaeers denition of ction
reconciles the Aristotelian and the Platonic views of mimesis.
Pourquoi la ction? perceptively captures the two major pragmatic uses of
ction: docere (teaching), insofar as it depends on the description of already
existing realitythe specialty of imitation based on observation and generalizationand delectare (gratifying), generated by ctions close kinship
with leisurethe specialty of imitation understood as playful immersion.
Moreover, Schaeers distinction between representation with the help of
a cognitive model and ctional, or analogical modeling captures to a
large extent the relative independence of ction from actual experience.
Fiction, Schaeer shows, resembles what psychologists call instance learning,
or learning by the use of examples (). Such examples do not closely imitate reality but only suggest analogies to it, thus fostering reection and
debate about the world in which we live. While I could not agree more with
Schaeers realist and cognitive orientation, I believe that the nonmimetic
impulses involved in analogical modeling deserve more attention.6 And
while Schaeer focuses on cognitive models and description of facts, I am
. My point is close to Franoise Meltzers () introduction, which subtly shows that while
mimesis is inevitable, literature cannot nevertheless be reduced to imitative representation.

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convinced that ctions close links with values and norms are equally important.
We certainly enjoy ction because it helps us better understand the world
to which we belong. We like to recognize our world in the works of imagination, but we also appreciate ction for its ability to make us less dependent
not just on actual stimuli but on actuality as such. In other words, we also
appreciate it for its power to create alternative sets of situations, thereby
putting the actual world into perspective, challenging its supremacy. All
ction wields this power, but two species of prose ction instantiate it in a
particularly manifest way: the idealist novel, from the Greek romances to
nineteenth- and twentieth-century popular ction, and the antirealist narrative prose, exemplied by Rabelais, Sterne, the surrealists, and the magic
realists. To take an example from the rst species, the nineteenth-century
popular novel Les Mystres de Paris () by Eugne Sue includes attentive observation of Parisian life of the time, excellent descriptions of prisons
and mental institutions, and illuminating details on the nancial diculties of poor families. But the personality, the actions, and the speeches of
the main characters Fleur-de-Marie and Rodolphe de Gerolstein defy observable reality in the same way in which a levitating body oating above
the ground would defy gravity. The implausible perfection of these characters makes them chimerical and raises, therefore, the old problem of inexistent and/or impossible beings. Are chimeras, golden mountains, and
square circles the result of an erroneous combination of incompatible properties that each imitate a real property? Or are they a way of imagining an
alternative reality, which is deliberately conceived as impossible? The latter
possibility suggests that, contrary to the claims defended by the poetics of
imitation, reference to the actual world does not always and fully explain
away ctional creations. Fiction dees actuality.
When Aristotle compares poetry with history, he does not exclude the
possibility that poetry and history could take the same characters and situations as their objects. Homer wrote about the Trojan war and Herodotus
about the Persian war, but nothing precludes an epic poem and a book of
history from concentrating on the same events, as do Lucans Civil War and
Plutarchs biographies of Pompey and Caesar. Lucans poetic treatment of
the civil strife certainly pays more attention to the generality of the situations, while Plutarch, as Aristotle correctly predicts it, is quite careful about
individual detail. But this distinction is not sucient, since extracting cognitive models from actual situations is not the only task of poetry. History,
by the way, in particular Plutarchs moralistic history, also extracts cognitive models from actual situations. In the rst book of his poem, Lucan
describes Pompey in these terms:

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He stands, the shadow of a great name;


like in a fruitful eld a lofty oak, . . . clinging with roots no longer
strong,
by its own weight it stands rm, and spreading naked branches
through the air, it makes shade with trunk, not foliage . . .
()

This metaphor undoubtedly contains a cognitive message, but it also conveys the sense of a ceremonial solemnity. The poetic utterance is a noncasual utterance; it elevates Pompey above his mortal condition, moving
him, as it were, from the confusion of actual events into the ideal realm
of exemplary beings: changed into an aging lofty oak, he forever radiates
magic grandeur and powerlessness. The strategies for explaining away this
uncanny irradiation are well known: its expression, some say, involves the
emotive function of language; others attribute it to the connotations triggered by the semantic clash between the literal term, Pompey, and the gurative element, the lofty oak. Correct as they are, these explanations overshadow one of the most intriguing aspects of the poetic utterance: its power
to transgure everyday realities (Danto ), to reveal properties that cannot be immediately observed. Fiction dees the visible.
It would be easy to romanticize poetrys ability to evoke chimerical characters and magic properties; in fact, there is nothing mysterious about these
instances of ctions anti-empirical thrust. They are consequences of the
well-known propensity of literature to represent human beings not only as
physical objects but also as creatures that obey (or disobey) norms and pursue (or reject) values. This aspect of human nature, which has recently been
explored by Charles Larmores moral anthropology ( and forthcoming) and John McDowells metaphysics (), poses a serious challenge to
mimetic theories of literature. I wont go here into the details of their argumentation, and I refrain from examining more technical issues related to
norms and values, such as whether they form separate classes or can be reduced to a single one: norms, as Larmore (forthcoming) suggests, or values,
as Max Scheler ( []) claimed. My only pointalbeit a crucial
onewill be that because norms and values do not belong to the actual
world in the same way as factual realities do, they cannot be represented
by straightforward imitation.
A poet imitates the shield of Achilles by carefully describing it. But how
does the poet imitate Achilles wrath, or his hesitation between disloyalty
and loyalty to his comrades-in-arms? How does the poet imitate our relationship to norms and values? Because such a relationship is not uniformly
reducible to a set of observable facts, it cannot be copied directly but can
only be highlighted indirectly, through examples of human actions. These

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examples, however, do not always clearly instantiate the norms and values
they are supposed to illustrate, because neither norms nor values, nor our
attitudes toward them relate to behavior in a deterministic way. An example, in other words, does not necessarily represent the norm, the value,
or the attitude it is meant to typify. Is Achilles behavior at the beginning
of the Iliad an example of jealousy, spite, youthful recklessness, lack of loyalty, aristocratic pride? Of all of the above? Of some of them? Is Pompey,
in Lucans passage, an example of decaying strength or senseless pride? Of
vainglory or of splendid, but obsolete, achievement?
The diculty of identifying the norms and values involved in an example
aects actual learning by imitation as well. What are the options of a young
Frenchman who admires Napolon and decides to imitate him? To travel
to Egypt and pronounce uplifting discourses in front of the pyramids? To
declare war on Austria? To promulgate a new Civil Code? Obviously, to
imitate Napolon means less to imitate his actual actions than to extract
from them a set of ideals and practical maxims that are worthy of being observed.7 But nothing guarantees that by his actions the young Frenchman
who admires Napolon will succeed in emulating his model.
To go back to ction, Julien Sorel, the main character in Stendhals The
Red and the Black, translates his admiration for Napolon into a passion for
social advancement. He can be said to imitate Napolon, although the
French emperor never made the very movesoften sneaky and cowardly
that help Julien Sorel get ahead. In his devouring ambition to reach a respectable social status, Julien does have something quite admirable about
him; he even displays occasional bouts of courage, a virtue made fashionable by Napolon, yet his courage mostly serves unworthy causes: the seduction of women, the revenge of hurt vanity. The point made by Stendhals
novel is that it is not easy to know whether an action fully or partly embodies, fails to observe, purposefully transgresses, or challenges norms and
values. Human action unambiguously instantiates a norm or a value only
in exceptional cases: usually, the conformity of an action to a norm, the
embodiment of a value in a deed are matters of doubt, hesitation, dialogic
interpretation.8
. This diculty is one of the main sources of the comic eects in Cervantess Don Quixote.
The good hidalgo is perfectly justied in his desire to imitate Amadis de Gaula and other
admirable ctional characters; he is a comic character only insofar as he copies their deeds
literally instead of abstracting the norms they embody and adapting them to the surrounding
reality.
. Doubt, hesitation, slow interpretation of other peoples and ones own moral impulses
are the main topics of Henry Jamess novels. Robert Pippin () links the predicament of
Jamesian characterstheir diculty in making sense of ones duty in a world in which moral
ambiguity prevailsto the peculiar moral arrangements of the modern world. As Pippin
shows, in the modern world, in which the norms themselves lose some of their universal va-

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All human communities devote a large part of their cultural resources to


exploring and clarifying such issues. Speaking of the way ancient Greeks
understood their tragedies, Martha Nussbaum (: ) points out that to
attend a tragic drama was not to go to a distraction or a fantasy in the course
of which one suspended ones anxious practical questions. It was, instead,
to engage in a communal process of inquiry, reection, and feeling with respect to important civic and personal ends. The relevance of this remark
goes far beyond ancient Greece and its tragic dramas: all ction and poetry
insofar as they provide, to use Aristotles expression, the imitation of an
action, signicantly contribute to normative inquiry, controversy, and interpretation. They provide the community with a vast repertory of cases,
with a full-blown casuistics, of human conformity to and divergence from
norms. To be sure, ction and poetry are not the only cultural activities
that debate our relation to norms and values through presentation of exemplary actions: mythology often explores the same concerns, as history
also does. Literary ctions, however, dier from history (but not from myth)
insofar as they emphasize the problematic nature of the links between observable (imitable) action and the invisible norms and values that inform it,
while history, which also deals with crucial normative issues, is primarily
interested in the correct narration of actual actions. But as hermeneuticsoriented historians have always known, history, considered as reection on
human action, has many features in common with ctional literature. And
so does myth. Like many myths, ction lingers on exemplary conformity
and nonconformity to norms, but in contrast with myth, ction has a much
weaker degree of exemplary force: there is no treatise called Imitatio Fausti.
This is the reason why myths can so easily become ction once they lose
their religious grip on a given community, and why the worst insult one can
hurl at a believer is to call his religion myth.
Since literary ction debates norms and values, and since their behavioral manifestations are not clearly determined once and for all, mere observation of nature cannot suce for creating and understanding ction:
the poet and the reader must also know how to distance themselves from
the world of is, the empirical realm, in order to explore its dependence
on the world of ought, the realm of norms, and the world of praise, the
realm of values. In the introduction to his Aesthetics, Hegel (: ) belabors this point when he refutes those who claim that art only amounts to
deceptive appearance: in comparison with the appearance of immediate
lidity, it is particularly hard to relate observable behavior to norms and values. Alternatively,
one can surmise that the predicament described by James, far from being strictly restricted to
modern morality, can be seen as a modern consequence of the more general nondeterministic
nature of the links between behavior and norms and values.

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existence and of historiography, the pure appearance of art has the advantage that it points through and beyond itself, and itself hints at something
spiritual of which it gives us an idea, whereas immediate appearance does
not present itself as deceptive but rather as the real and the true, although
the truth is in fact contaminated and concealed by the immediacy of sense.
To move away from the immediately observable world and examine it
from a distance from a normative and value-oriented point of view, ction needs a powerful anti-empirical thrust. This explains why, over the
centuries, ction writers have invented scores of idealized characters who
assert the highest values, those who have no observable bearer in the empirical world: Chariclea in Heliodorus Aethiopian Story; Amadis, the protagonist of Amadis de Gaula; Cladon in Honor dUrfs LAstre, Julie in
Rousseaus La nouvelle Hlose, Jean Valjean in Hugos Les Misrables. Such
characters are not imitations of life but incarnations of ideals. In order to
depict the blurred, uncertain relationship between the realm of moral ends
and the observable world, ction posits imaginary universes whose very differences from the observable ones foreground the norm-related message.
That Fleur-de-Marie and Rodolphe de Gerolstein are impossible beings
who do not resemble any real human creature is the point of Les Mystres
de Paris. This is the reason why the operation that moves actual (or imaginary) mortals into the realm of exemplary beings often has a ceremonial
solemnitya bit like the canonization of a saint or the excommunication
of a sinnerwhose echoes reverberate in the poetic diction. This is also
the reason why, changed into a lofty oak, Lucans Pompey appears larger
than life, and why the awe inspired by his decaying grandeur forces us to
acknowledge the distance and the dierence of elevation between the realm
of ction and our usual surroundings. Idealization certainly is not the only
option, since comic genres focus on the imaginary realms in which the characters appear worse than life, while various forms of realist literature attempt to bring ction closer to the everyday experience of its readers. But in
all these cases, in order to contemplate the characters presented by poetry
and prose ction, readers need partly to forget their involvement in the
actual world and devote their attention to the nonempirical elements represented by poetry or prose ction.
For this reason, the arguments brought by Schaeer against semantic approaches and in favor of discursive approaches to ction should be taken
with a grain of salt. Schaeer is right to assert that available theories based
on formal extensional semantics have serious shortcomings.9 He argues that
. But I must confess that I did not fully grasp Schaeers argumentation (: )
against Nelson Goodmans perfectly reasonable distinction between denotation and representation.

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possible world approaches bear the mark of philosophical worries related to


existence and individuation, worries that, in his view, have little to do with
the issues raised by literary ction. But as the worlds conjured up by ction have specic properties that need to be described, one cannot dispense
with all semantic considerations about ction. As a cognitive metaphor (or
model), the notion of alternative worlds helps us capture various relevant
properties of ction, in particular those linked with coherence, incompleteness, and, most important, distance from the real world. I would add in
passing that Schaeers candidate for a denition of ction, namely Searles
identication of ction with a set of pretended speech acts, equally bears
the mark of philosophical worriesrelated to the validity of illocutionary
actsthat have little relevance for literary theory. Searles approach also
fails to grasp the specicity of ction, because it does not include the artistic
goal as part of the denition.10 But perhaps achieving a clear-cut denition
of ction is not a major priority: when dealing with cultural phenomena,
which are rarely reducible to a stable set of formal properties, clarifying the
way they function is probably more important than dening them.11
For such clarication, Schaeers notion of shared pretense is certainly
helpful, since it accounts for the suspension of disbelief that accompanies
the reception of ction. But I wonder whether pretense is the right term.12
Does Lucan pretend to tell us the story of Pompey and Caesar? Does he
fabricate it (to use Smiths term)? Not at all; he tells us a true story, embellishing it. Does Schiller fabricate the plot of Mary Stuart? Poetic license
indeed allows him to modify some of the historical details, such as the age
of the two Queens (Elizabeth and Mary), for instance, who in the play are
much younger than they were in reality, but to state that he pretends to
tell the truth when making the Queens younger, or that he fabricates this
detail, or that the public pretends to believe their age is an awkward way
of describing the situation. It would make more sense to say that Lucan
and Schiller transgure real stories, lift them to a higher plane, bring out
their exemplary force, and that in order to make them reach a higher level
of relevance, these authors slightly modify the historical details. Between
such works based on actual happenings and, say, Lost Illusions by Balzac,
. The best available discussion of Searle can be found in Ryan : .
. The classic article by Morris Weitz ( []) makes a powerful case against attributing
stable essences to cultural objects.
. Waltons () term make-believe seems to me more eective than the French feintise
(pretense, sham) and faire semblant (to pretend, literally make seem) used by Schaeer. He
accounts for the consensual aspect of Waltons notion by specifying that ction is a feintise
partage (a shared pretense). Feintise and faire semblant, however, unduly emphasize the attitude
and actions of the pretender, while the notion of make-believe captures both the input of the
pretender (make) and the expected reaction of the public (believe).

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a novel that skillfully inserts imaginary characters within a real historical


and social situation, the dierence is only of degree, not of nature. Balzac,
like Lucan and Schiller, aims at enticing his readers to reect on the values
and norms that govern, could govern, or should govern their real life.13 This
being the case, it is natural that high-minded philosophers like Plato would
wonder whether ction is the most appropriate way of reecting on such
important topics: for how can one be certain that the examples brought
forth by literary ction unambiguously reinforce the most commendable
norms and attitudes? And how can one trust poets with this momentous
task, when they can identify so well with any kind of moral attitude, even
the least desirable?
The interest in the exemplary force of ction is pervasive in debates
among literary critics and readers, who rarely uphold unqualied neutrality
toward the attitudes it encourages. Readers and critics wonder whether
Madame Bovary is a pessimistic, immoral work, and whether the moral perfection of Jean Valjean in Les Misrables is plausible; they ask questions about
the ideals that preside over the worlds represented in these two novels.
In a fascinating recent book, Franois Flahaut () discusses Frankenstein by Mary Shelley as an exploration of human wickedness, demonstrating that literary ctions are also deeply involved in the creation of exemplary counter-ideals. Auerbachs previously quoted assertion (: ) that
Madame Bovary is the representation of an entire human existence which
has no issue is, therefore, a typical and correct way of reacting to ctions
normative content. But Doleel is right to argue that ction does not imitate such abstract notions. The statement Emma Bovary leads a pointless,
stied existence is not about a state of aairs that can be observed and
faithfully depicted; it is an evaluation of a set of observations, and as such
it does not state a truth but rather initiates a debate. Platos discussion of
mimesis in The Republic points in the same direction insofar as it expresses
mistrust of direct speechthat is, of the impersonation of human behaviorbut adopts (at least in book III) a relatively tolerant position in regard
to pure narration, which Plato assumes fosters a more reective attitude
toward the characters represented in ction.
Doleel is also right to point out that authors and readers take ctional
characters to be full-blown individuals, not mere incarnations of abstract
properties. Homer, Lucan, Schiller, Sue, Hugo, Flaubert,Tolstoy, and their
readers understand Achilles, Pompey, Mary Stuart, Rodolphe de Gerolstein, Jean Valjean, Emma Bovary, and Ivan Ilyitch as a special kind of
. I owe the stimulus for these reections to the penetrating remarks on exemplarity presented in the introduction by Lyons (: ).

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beings that have all relevant properties of humans, in particular the ability
to follow norms and incarnate values, but in some cases lack actual, or even
possible, existence. Either Alexis Meinongs ( []) notion of beings
that have properties but not existence, or the Goodmanian representations
that have no actual denotation seem to me to capture quite adequately our
intuitive understanding of the cases in which individuals present in literary
ction do not belong to the actual world.14 What Searle and Schaeer call
pretense is in fact the awareness, shared by author and readers, that the
story being told belongs to a special kind of cultural artifact that debates
(either guratively or allegorically) the normative dilemmas and the value
conicts of actual and invented beings alike.
Whether these cultural artifacts, in addition to the set of common problems they debate and to a couple of semantic peculiarities they share (such
as the occasional use of Meinongian entities or of Goodmanian representations that lack denotation), also display exclusive discursive properties
is in my view a moot point, as Searle observes in his article. Hamburgers contention that ction is the sole epistemological instance where
the I-originarity (or subjectivity) of a third person qua third person can
be portrayed is unconvincing. Such a portrayal can be found as well in
other kinds of discourse that describe human subjects seen from inside: biographies, sermons, attorneys concluding statements. The narration of the
inner thoughts of other individuals qua subjects indicates less the ctionality of a text than the activity of the empathic imagination, which legitimately
and plausibly explores the life of other minds in both ctional and actual
contexts.15 That Cohn and Hamburger would like to restrict such activity
to the realm of ction is a mild symptom of Platonism: like the author of
The Republic, the two narratologists are disconcerted by the possibility that
human beings could impersonate other peoples thoughts for real.
But if ction is not a purely mimetic activity, how can we make sense
of its manifest links to the actual world? As we saw, the distance at which
ction moves the objects it speaks about does not necessarily make them
lose their referents in the actual world. Transgured by the magic of poetry
into an aging lofty oak, Pompey in Lucans poem still remains the historical Pompey. Fictional objects do not necessarily lack a referent (denotation
in Goodmans terminology) in the real world: they are not necessarily ctitious. Moreover, although writers of ction are free to invent particular ob. For a discussion of various philosophical accounts of ctional beings, see Pavel :
.
. Patricia Meyer Spacks () analyzes nineteenth-century ction as gossip, that is, as a
manifestation of our impulse to learn the actions of our fellow human beings and understand
their motivations.

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jects and events (imaginary individuals and actions), they most often take for
granted the properties and abstract notions of their world, in particular the abstract notions that have a normative content. In Stendhals The Red and the
Black, properties and notions such as commoner, aristocrat, ambitious, in love,
proud, obstinate, indierent, and the like cannot be said to be invented in the
same way in which Julien Sorel, the main character, is. Searle () refers
to this distinction when he notices that in Anna Karenina Tolstoy oers the
reader a mixture of pretended, nonserious statements about Anna, Vronsky, Levin, Kitty, and of genuine, serious statements, such as, All happy
families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion,
uttered by the narrator. The ctional anecdote is, in Searles terminology,
mere pretense, while the wisdom imparted by the narrator (Searle writes
the author) is serious. Indeed, the typical reader at one and the same time
knows that Julien Sorel and Anna Karenina are not actual people, yet attentively observes Juliens ambition and Annas extravagant love, judges them,
and derives from them various norm-related maxims and value judgments,
most often with the narrators explicit and the authors implicit guidance.16
Such speculation takes place because works of ction, just like myths and
history books, are inferential projects that entice the reader to link particular
events narrated about particular objects to a variety of conclusions that involve descriptions, norms, and values. Benjamin Harshav (Harsaw )
has shown that one cannot understand literary ction without integrating
the internal eld of reference projected by the text within the external elds
of reference that surround it. The validity of his integrational position
has been conrmed by Brandoms () recent work in theory of language,
which shows that understanding the meaning of a sentence or a set of sentences amounts to being able to make further inferences based on them. A
statement found in a history book, like Zola and Jaurss articles proved
that Dreyfus was innocent, leads, among other inferences, to descriptive
statements, such as, The press played a major role in the Dreyfus Aair,
and to statements that involve normative moral and political notionsfor
example, Zola and Jaurs were courageous men, or, Freedom of speech
is essential in a democracy. Similarly, the passages at the beginning of
Prousts A la recherche du temps perdu that narrate how little Marcel could not
fall asleep without his mother rst kissing him good night lead the reader
to infer various statements about human moral behavior and patterns of
attachment, insecurity, and dependency.
The normative inferences triggered by a work of ction can lead to sub. Wayne Booth argues this point in chapter of his The Company We Keep (), Implied
Authors as Friends and Pretenders.

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stantial hypotheses concerning the foundations of the moral and political


world, to more circumscribed if, then statements, to considerations regarding the process of interpretation itself, and to critical speculations concerning the relations between the normative perspective of the literary work
and the artistic procedures it displays. In Anna Karenina, for instance, most
of the characters are prisoners of a social world that is pervaded by convention and articiality (which leads the reader to formulate a substantial
hypothesis about the moral nature of the social world of the novel); those
characters who attempt to escape can either be led astray by self-centered
romanticism, as is Anna, or nd the right path by naively devoting themselves to the happiness of their fellow men and women, as do Levin and
Kitty (which leads the reader to formulate two if, then statements that
operate like normative injunctions). The novel also reects on the uncertain links between moral notions and their perceptible manifestations: Are
Annas feelings for Vronsky love? True love? Commendable love? Is Kitty
genuinely in love with Vronsky? With Levin? What kind of moral feelings
do Vronsky and Karenin experience? Critical inferences, nally, attempt to
grasp the rapport between the moral anthropology projected by the work
and the artistic methods it employs, in this case the realist approach, with its
low level of idealization, its use of defamiliarization techniques, its careful
depiction of the social milieus and the clinical attention it pays to human
imperfection.17 If we accept that critical debates about the value of a literary work are both desirable and possible, as Rochlitz () pleads, then it is
obvious that such debates must both consider the intuitive appeal, the richness, the subtlety, and the revelatory power of the descriptive and normative
inferences called for by literary works, and evaluate the eectiveness of the
formal, narratological means selected by the writer in order to encourage
these inferences.
To conclude, it is undeniable that ction does maintain close links to the
actual observable world. Most mentions and descriptions of actual objects
(the mention of Pompey in Lucans Civil War, the description of the mental hospital in Sues Les Mystres de Paris) belong to Schaeers category of
imitation as observation, while most depictions of imaginary objects and
actions (the mansion of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations by Dickens, the
escape from prison in The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas) are
imitations in Schaeers sense of analogical modeling of existing patterns.
But analogy also involves distance and dierence. Intricately mixed with
. Rotheld () demonstrates the links between the rise of nineteenth-century realism
and the growing prestige of medical discourse. Clinical attention to detail, therefore, is not
simply a metaphor; it refers to a nineteenth-century practice that eectively transformed the
way novelists wrote.

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elements borrowed from the actual world, ction calls our attention to the
nonactual, to the invisible, and to the exemplary. Rather than imitations,
Antigones predicament, Pompeys fall, Amadis de Gaulas energy, Don
Quixotes folly, Mary Stuarts despair and dignity, Fleur-de-Maries awlessness, Anna Kareninas mindless love are puzzling examples of the unpredictable bonds between humans and the norms and values that govern
their existence. These examples bring our mind to bear upon such unobservable things as the majesty of the ideals, the opacity of the world, and
the operation of freedom. About such topics, while there are a few things
out there that need to be imitated, there is also a lot to be asked, pondered,
inferred, hypothesized, interpreted, and debated over.
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