why fiction can’t be the imaginary
If a fiction is defined as any text that is ‘imaginary’, problems arise because the move renders the phenomenon dependent on authorial intent. If the text’s status is tied to the imagination and the intention of the author, it is of no moment whether or not its claims correspond to events in the world. The author may have imagined the events described in the text without making reference to anything known to be true of the world, and in the full belief that these events have not occurred. But in truth this need not be so. Either fiction is defined as such without regard for what has taken place, potentially leading into absurdity, or we concede that the author’s invention of characters, scenes and incidents is not after all conclusive.
Three instances serve to illustrate problems with this approach to defining fictionality. First, suppose that Dune, or some other text that purports to describe what are at this point events of a future time, transpires to be in every detail true. At that later time, it might be remarked that since such a text contains a set of claims concerning events that have come to pass, the text, whatever it’s earlier status, is now non-fiction. If fiction is defined as the imaginary, though, the status of the text cannot be said to have changed: it remains the product of the imagination of the author. It is then a fictional text containing only truths.
The second case indicative of the limitations of taking fictionality as the imaginary is that in which an author possessed of absurd and erroneous beliefs deploys what they assume is accurate knowledge of the world in penning a text intended as non-fiction. The world the author believes to be actual appears to the reader imaginary, an invention profoundly unlike the world she inhabits. Of course, when this is put to the errant writer, disagreement results, at which point it’s one subjectivity against another with no final arbiter in view.
A third case is the inverse of the second. The author of the previous paragraph decides to have a tilt next at writing fiction, and plumbs the depths of the imaginary in order to produce a rollicking fantasy. The author’s belief system, though, is so at odds with the way things in actuality are that their concept of fantastical worlds includes the actual world at which the text is written. By chance what is written as though fiction proves to be in every detail true.
In this case or the last, the moral of the hypothetical is the same: if we want to say a text is fiction despite the wrong-headed world-view of an author who claims otherwise, it had better be that fictionality is defined in the context of what is externally true or false, actual or possible, and not only in terms of an author’s understanding. Otherwise we leave ourselves unable even to express in an intuitive and unconvoluted way a conviction that a deluded author’s fiction is really true, or their non-fiction in point of fact false.
