From pretence to fiction
CHAPTER 7. FROM PRETENCE TO FICTION
7.2 More on the secondary pretence
7.2.1 A toy example
Interestingly, children’s literature often play with this double-structured pretence.
Shel Silverstein is an expert in the subject of playing with the secondary pretence.
Here are two dual examples which will serve as toy examples to understand what the secondary pretence is.
First, the poem “Slithery Dee”. In this narrative poem, a character is trying to escape a sea monster called the “Slithery Dee”. The first-person narrator is telling us how the monster chased “all the others”. Toward the end of the poem, the narrator says that the Slithery Dee “ate all the others / But he didn’t eat me”. The punchline of the poem is the following:
He ate all the others
But he’ll never eat — (abrupt stop and a strange noise)19
The effect works because it seems that the secondary fiction and the primary fiction are one and the same thing to a degree that if the narrator dies in the primary fiction, then the secondary fiction also ends. This is a highly unusual fictional setting, hence the comic effect. It thus wittily points out that a lone primary pretence (in the first person) cannot represent the death of its narrator.
Second, the story “A Giraffe and a Half”. In this story, it seems that there is only a secondary pretence and no primary pretence. The story unfolds by stretching the antecedent of a conditional, starting with “If you had a giraffe ...” But no consequent is ever told. Indeed, the first half of the story unfolds many extraordinary things happening to the giraffe in this growing antecedent. But the second half of the story consists in undoing all these extraordinary things by subsequent events within the same antecedent. Consequently, one is left at the end of the story with nothing having happened in the story! There is just this hypothesised giraffe. The story thus
18[Walton1990], p. 11-2.
19There are several versions of this poem which was later adapted into a song.
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unfolds as a potential story only. One is stuck to the secondary pretence in which it is possible to tell primary-fictional things in ever so many ways.
These jocular fictions breed on the availability of both the primary and secondary pretences in fiction. As such, they are extreme cases which reveal the hidden complex structure of fictions.
7.2.2 A linguistic puzzle explained
Marcel Vuillaume has found and solved an interesting linguistic problem when it comes to fiction.20 The problem concerns the tenses in fiction. It so happens that the past tenses co-occur with adverbs like “now” or “today” in the same sentence very frequently in fiction. In non-fictional contexts, by contrast, the presence of such an temporal adverb forces the present tense. In other words, having a VP in the past tense with an adverb like “now” or “today” in non-fictional contexts in either judged ungrammatical or borderline grammatical. In fiction, it happens all the time and we do not even notice it. Here is Vuillaume’s favorite example, it is an excerpt fromthe Red and the Black, by Stendhal:
Our hero was awkward enough to stand close to the little straw chair, which had once witnessed such brilliant victories. No onesaida word to him, today; his presence was imperceptible – or worse.21
This puzzle is easily solved once we recognise that there are always two timelines available in the fiction and that these timelines are systematically correlated. There is the timeline of the primary and that of the secondary pretence.22 In this example,
“today” refers back to the timeline of the secondary pretence while the past tense in
“said” refers to the primary pretence.
This idea also explains many other kinds of surprising collocations in temporal linguistics. For instance a sentence like the following is straightforwardly understand-able:
(13) Anna Karanina met Vronsky at the train station where she will commit suicide towards the last chapters of the novel.
20In [Vuillaume 1990]. See also [Iatridou 2000] for a similar line of research investigating the relationship between tense, mood and counterfactual statements.
21The Red and the Black, chapter 20. Translation by Burton Raffel, ed. the Modern Library New York.
22For the record, Vuillaume tries and formalise this double structure using the so-called “mental space account” as developed in [Fauconnier1994]. He also attempts to generalise this structure to non-fictional reports of fact.
Vuillaume’s inquiry is based on many examples from nineteenth century French novels that led him to investigate the secondary pretences of these books. He shows how many novelists play with their secondary pretences, inviting the reader to ironi-cally imagine what the secondary pretence is like by having their narrator explicitly addressing the narratee. The narratee is thus invited to follow the narrator, to closely look at the fictional character, to leave the room, and so on. And sometimes the nar-rator wittily remarks that the narratee is an invisible seer of the fictional events. This contributes to a shared pretence (among several novels) that the narrator and narra-tee are like ghosts in the primary pretence. They can see and comment on (especially the narrator, of course) the primary-fictional events without being seen or heard by the primary-fictional characters. They can also travel in the primary-fictional space and time without difficulty. Interestingly, the effect of such a “betrayal” of the double structure of the fiction does not destroy anything. Quite the contrary, it has been claimed to enhance the overall “realism” of the fictions in which they occur.23
7.2.3 Two narratological puzzles explained
Some works of fiction play with the double structure of fictional pretences. They are sometimes called “metafictions”. They usually challenge narratological explanation.
Although there are multifarious examples, I will explain two. This will show how the fictional principle can be applied.
InIn on a winter’s night a traveler, Italo Calvino plays with the double structure of fictional pretences by shifting the attention to the secondary pretence in a very original way. As seen above, it is very common for the secondary pretence to be assimilated as a part of the primary pretence. This yields the strong interpretation of the report principles. Calvino ingeniously tries to assimilate the secondary pretence with reality.
Indeed, the secondary pretence, as seen above, is intermediate between the re-ality in which the actual reader and author dwell and the primary-fiction where the primary-fictional characters dwell. The narrator and narratee, the secondary-fictional characters can easily become primary-secondary-fictional characters. After all, they are fictional characters, it suffices that both fictions be merged in the imagination of the reader.
Calvino proposes that we merge reality and the secondary fiction. He does so by using the second-person pronoun to address the reader. He describes the narratee
23I say “realism” with quotation marks because it is precisely theseunreal devices that ground the “realistic” effect. The realistic effect was studied along these line, for instance, in [Barthes 1968].
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thus addressed as the actual reader of the book. He speculates in different places about the detail of the actual reader: is it a “he” or a “she”? In the meantime, the primary pretence is comically malfunctioning: the reader (that is you) is systemat-ically coming across unfinished stories due to some mischievous misprints. As such the secondary fiction becomes a search for the primary fiction, the actual reader is looking for the book entitled If in a winter’s night a traveller, that is the one he is actually reading. One now gets the meaning of the title which stops half way through, so to speak.
Of course, this merging of the secondary fiction and the real situation is impos-sible. By definition, the fiction is not reality. And Calvino is just cleverly using the communicational situation to generate some key fictional propositions which are also true propositions: “You are reading Italo Calvino’s new bookIf on a winter’s night a traveler”. Of course, nobody is tricked into believing that the story is about oneself and it is part of the fun. The cornerstone of Calvino’s idea is that the pronoun
“you”, in the context of the secondary fiction, refers to the narratee and, given that the actual reader plays the role of the narratee, also homonymously to the actual reader.24 This is because the reader “is” the narratee, i.e. whoever is the reader
“count as”, or fictionally is the narratee.
This interpretation of Calvino’s novel, naturally, is open for narratological dis-agreement depending on the detail of the text. But I think this is basically what happens. One can appreciate how the pretence semantic framework is applicable and useful here.
Another nice application of the framework concerns a well-known narratological problem inMadame Bovary by Flaubert. The novel famously opens thus:
We were at prep when the Headmaster came in, followed by a “new boy” not wearing school uniform, and by a school servant carrying a large desk.25
The pronoun “we” used here forces the strong interpretation of the report principle:
the narrator is a character in the story, and its report is thus part of the primary fiction. Given the context, we naturally infer that the narrator is one of Charles Bovary’s classmates back then. He thus knows about Charles, who is going to be one of the main characters in the story.
But this first-person narrator gradually fades out so that after a few pages the nar-rator of the story is clearly a third-person omniscient narnar-rator. As such, it suggests a weak interpretation of the report principle, with a distinct, discreet secondary fiction.
24Had we two pronouns “you” and “zou” to define both, the whole joke falls down.
25Translation Margaret Mauldon, ed. OUP 2004.
The secondary fiction is distinct, for the narrator is omniscient and has information about primary fictional events which had no witness whatsoever, like the numerous moments of Emma’s solitary thinking or her moments of adultery love making which, given the fictional detail, could not have been known by a hypothetical classmate of Charles.
I suggest that Flaubert is here “zooming out” of the primary pretence, so to speak. The subliminal change, created by Flaubert’s mastery, has a number of literary effects, the first of which is the complete oblivion of the secondary pretence and the entire focus of attention on the primary pretence. In other words, the reader will not even raise the “how do you know?”-question which would inevitably distract him from the primary-fictional events. Flaubert thus has the narratological cake and eats it: he gets the narratological freedom a secondary pretence permits without raising the reader’s suspicion or disinterest.
As such, Flaubert’s trick consists in rendering the secondary pretence seamless, invisible, i.e. phenomenologically intractable. It is thus the dual of Calvino’s nar-ratological trick which consisted in rendering the secondary pretence full fledged.
Notice that this interpretation squares with Flaubert’s stated aesthetic standards when he famously writes that he wrote that the author in its work was to be like God in His creation: “everywhere present but nowhere to be found.”
Again, this narratological interpretation of Madame Bovary is open for rational disagreement. But I take it that it explains what could really be mysterious if one did not allow for the double structure presented above.