READERS AS FICTIONAL TRUTH-MAKERS?

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entirely read, which sounds very odd indeed.

Some theorists are not happy with the idea of author-less fictions, but there is no particular conceptual problems with them. So I see no reason for turning them down.

The double-structured report principle works just as fine with author-less fictions.

Indeed, it suffices to get rid of the author in Figure 7.1. I think this shows an interesting feature of the above analysis of fictional discourse. It is usually thought that the narrator is a projection of the author, a fictional Doppelganger of the real author. But actually, what these author-less fictions show is that the narrator is a fictional entity which is presupposed by the report principle without any connection to a real author. In other words, the narrator originates in the text, not in the author.

8.2 When readers are authors

There are numerous examples of well-known fictions which are authored by several people, from theIliad to most contemporary TV series. There are also many exam-ples of participative fictions, from choose-your-own-adventure books to improvised storytelling on the audience proposals. I think one can even go a step further in considering fiction-writing practices in which the readers are explicitly expected to be creating truths in fiction by writing them out.

One such project comes from the group of Italian authors Wu Ming who published a novel entitled Manituana first published in Italian in 2007. The book was accom-panied with a website where contributions to writing missing chapters, prologues or making some pictorial or musical contributions were possible.⁴ What is true in this fiction ultimately depends on both the authors and several readers’ contributions.

This was planned ahead, as is shown by this excerpt of an interview of Wu Ming:

When we wroteManituana, we built a web site in which anyone could contribute to the narration, but not only in written form: drawings, music, videos, any contribution that would multiply and develop the fictional world we opened with the novel. We believe that the novels we write do not define the boundaries of a fictional world, but they open the door on this universe. We explore a part of it, but readers keep exploring some other parts together. It is a never-ending process.⁵

4www.manituana.com

5Collectif Mauvaise Troupe 2014Constellations. Trajectoires révolutionnaires du jeune 21e siè-cle, Constellation “La folle du logis. Imaginaires, récits, fictions” (https://mauvaisetroupe.org/

I think this practice is interesting in that it intentionally blurs the distinction between authors and readers, prompting readers to become authors.

8.3 A legal prequel for future fan-fictions

Another practice I want to discuss comes from fan-fictions. Fan fictions are fictions which take up on a popular work of fiction, and they are written by fans rather than their original authors. There is already a large literature on the phenomenon, although nothing really systematic yet.⁶

For instance, fans ofStar wars have produced numerous stories taking place aside the Skywalker saga in the same fictional universe. They can be stories which do not interfere in anyway with the canonical stories. Or they can be stories in which the fictional characters of the fan-fictions cross path with the characters of the canonical fictions.

So far, nothing really interesting happens conceptually. Fan-fictions are derivative or dependent on their original fictions. This can be modeled very easily by picking up on an existent pretence and modifying the prop by adding some new sentences for instance. Authors writing series of adventures have been doing that for a long time.

Within fan-fiction practices, one literary device is interesting in the debate about fictional “truth”, though. Retroactive continuity (or Retcon) is a literary device in which established facts in a fictional work are adjusted, ignored, or contradicted by a subsequently work which breaks the continuity with the former. One usually writes a retcon to connect several fan-fictions together for instance or fan-fictions with the canonical fictions. Retcons are also widely used to correct some errors or identified problems with a fiction after its publication, because, for instance, scientific dis-coveries are challenging already published anticipation works of fiction. Sometimes, they are also written so that the received interpretation of a fiction is changed, for

spip.php?article96). My translation. Here is the French version of the interview:

Quand nous avons écritManituana, nous avons créé un site internet où n’importe qui pouvait apporter sa contribution narrative, mais pas seulement écrite: bandes dessinées, musique, vidéo, n’importe quel type de contribution qui multiplie, amplifie l’univers nar-ratif que nous avions ouvert avec le roman. Nous croyons que nos romans ne définissent pas les frontières d’un univers narratif, mais ouvrent une porte sur cet univers. Nous en explorons un bout, mais les lecteurs continuent d’explorer d’autres bouts ensemble.

C’est un processus qui peut continuer.

6See [Uckelman2019] for a review of the literature.

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instance be revealing the true (that is fictional) identity of a famous character. In those cases, retcons do contribute to establish the fictional “truths” as it were. Of course, as most fan-fictions, retcons are not produced by the authors.

Jean Rhys wrote such a novel in 1966 entitled Wide Sargasso Sea, which is a retcon in the form of a prequel of Charlotte Brontë’sJane Eyre. Jean Rhys makes it fictional inJane Eyre, so to speak, that Bertha Antoinetta Mason, the madwoman in the attic, Rochester’s first wife, became insane because of some voodoo spell which went astray. All this happened in Jamaica in the first years of their marriage, and Jean Rhys’s novel well explains why it did not affect Rochester. Of course, this is crucially important to Jane Eyre because it undermines Rochester’s telling of the story and explains his latent brutality.

Retcons naturally prompt many debates in the literary and fan communities alike.

Not all such modifications are accepted. Dissident versions of what is the fictional

“truth” appear and fight over the internet. That is fair enough. But the puzzling fact is that some fictional “truths” are thus added to the canon by the majority voice.

One could marvel at this new democracy of readers against the old tyranny of the author.

The puzzle is elsewhere. It comes from US law. Indeed, when it comes to fan-fictions of mass productions, the copyright law aims at being strictly applied, since a lot of money is at stake when it comes to commercial derivative products. In these cases, companies hold the rights to sell and distribute not only the fictions but also all the toys and games associated with it. It is thus crucial to knowwhat they (and only they) have the right to sell. This depends on what is “true in the fiction”. So the law, in some cases, gets to decide what is fictional. Interestingly, section 107 of the Copyright Act defines a so called “fair use” of some copyrighted material, including some fictions. In the US law self-laudatory voice:

Fair use is a legal doctrine that promotes freedom of expression by permitting the unlicensed use of copyright-protected works in certain circumstances.⁷

The fair use doctrine is the section that, for instance, permits that scholars use some copyrighted material for research or educational purposes.⁸ When it comes to fan-fictions, and retcons, things tend to get tricky. But in principle, some fan-fictions can be made legally part of the canon, so to speak.

Of course, the trouble with this is that the court is only getting to arbitrate when there is a conflict. That is why one of the owners of a given copyrighted fiction

7https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/more-info.html.

8Should we thank the law?

gets to sue a fan for producing such and such fan-fiction. This is very unlikely to happen in normal circumstances, because the amount of fan-fictions is usually seen as advertisement for the copyrighted canon. So nobody loses either fame or money in this kind of activity.

Here is a very relevant case from 1983, though. The key facts are the following:

Plaintiffs, Warner Bros., Inc. and D.C. Comics, Inc., owned copy-rights for the character “Superman” and works embodying Superman, including comic books, animated and live-action television series, and a motion picture. Defendant, ABC, Inc., created a television series called The Greatest American Herowhich starred the fictional superhero “Ralph Hinkley.” Plaintiffs alleged that defendant’s Ralph Hinkley character and related promotional campaign materials infringed its Superman copy-rights. Plaintiffs appealed the district court’s ruling that public confusion as to the origin of defendant’s superhero was unlikely as a matter of law.

The holding is the following:

The court found that the characters Superman and Ralph Hinkley were not so substantially similar that consideration by a jury was re-quired. Although the fair use defense was not raised or at issue, the court briefly addressed “fragmented literal similarity,” which was the du-plication of exact, or nearly exact, wording of a fragment of the protected work. The court noted that with respect to such claims, the fair use de-fense can be raised. The court pointed out that it can be expected that phrases and other fragments of expression contained in successful works will become part of the national language, but that does not mean that such expression loses all protection. On the other hand, although the author of a well-known copyrighted phrase “is entitled to guard against its appropriation to promote the sale of commercial products,” original works of authorship with elements of parody have a stronger fair use defense against unauthorised use. The court emphasised that “[i]t is de-cidedly in the interests of creativity, not piracy, to permit authors to take well-known phrases and fragments from copyrighted works and add their own contributions or commentary or humor. After all, any work of suf-ficient notoriety to be the object of parody has already secured for its proprietor considerable financial benefit.” This discussion did not have any bearing on the outcome of the case, but provides insight on the role of parody in a fair use analysis.⁹

9https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/summaries/warnerbros-abc-2dcir1983.pdf.

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Let us be warned.

Of course, one can question the rationality of such a “fair use” analysis. On the other hand, if this is a thing and if it is true that people disagree about fiction so as to take lawyers to prove the other wrong, then one is desperately in need of a rational framework to conduct one’s arguments. This, I think, I provided in general here. In the next chapter, I will discuss less dramatic disagreements although equally conceptually challenging. I will try to provide a fine-tuning of the functional analysis.

8.4 Open-ending

These considerations show that the idea that fictional propositions originate in the reader’s activity is perfectly compatible with the pretence semantics framework and the analysis of fictional discourse I have been proposing in this framework. In a sense, it is tailor made for it.

Fan-fiction practices and especially retcons show an interesting interaction be-tween what is fictionally “true” and how the community of readers can contribute to it. I do not mean to say that it threatens the framework, quite the opposite. The sociology and dynamics of what is recognised as fictional in a community is a very interesting phenomenon which has become a theoretical object of study in the last decade, the result of which are sometimes difficult to grasp. My suggestion is that one can ground this object of study in the underlying principles of generation in force within fictions. Negotiations about which principles are precisely in force in which fiction reflect fan creative discussions and contributions as well as potential forks of canonical stories.

As an application of this negotiation phenomenon, I suggested one can get a closer look at copyright issues and the so-called “fair use” of copyrighted material. Indeed, what is copyrighted is sometimes what is fictional. In potential conflicts of interest, it is thus important to have an objective framework in which one can discuss about what is fictional and what is not fictional in a given fiction. Lawyers and judge might use intuition in empirical situations. I suggest they should rather try to formalise their argument within pretence semantics.

The next part will focus on a similar case where two readers disagree about what is fictionally “true”. This part should be seen as an case-study in which I will have the opportunity to fine-tune the model I proposed in this first part. However, the second part is also largely self contained so that I will avoid as much as possible making reference to the points discussed here. The connections should be clear, though.