Style

In his target essay, Richard Walsh offers an elegant account of his rhetorical approach to fictionality, which is based on Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory (see also Wilson and Sperber). His approach works perfectly well for the example of fictionality that he himself presents at the beginning of his article. It may, if suitably adapted, fit the kinds of examples Mari Hatavara and I presented in two papers on fictionality (Hatavara and, “Fictionality” and “Hybrid”), namely instances of local fictions in otherwise nonfictional discourses, [End Page 463] especially in conversational settings. Unfortunately, Walsh’s account does not suit generic fiction or, for that matter, any other kind of artistic fiction, whether it is conveyed through film, (radio) drama, video games, painting, opera, or whatever. For these artefacts, Walsh’s account only works if its assumptions are understood metaphorically, which Walsh precisely claims not to do. On the contrary, he contends that Relevance Theory “provides the means for a more finely granular and more comprehensive account of fiction as a serious mode of communication” (411). What exactly he means by “serious” communication is never specified—just as several other terms he uses are not defined clearly enough, as I will detail below. When talking about “serious” communication, he seems to have in mind “real-world” communication. The term “serious,” however, is misleading as it evokes, at least in everyday parlance, communicative actions such as remonstrations, arguments, admonitions, warnings, and so on. How fiction should be similar to those communicative actions is a big question, especially if one considers that fictional texts—especially those that expose their own fictionality—are precisely not serious in this sense but playfully challenge readers’ expectations and reading habits. Indeed, fiction that too obviously pursues the goal of conveying a serious message tends to be boring and predictable.

The problem is more deep-seated, however. In drawing upon a theory in linguistic pragmatics, Walsh, like others before him, ignores the fact that the kind of communication that pragmaticians have in mind when devising their theories is very different from the “communication” that is achieved in and through generic fiction. The object of analysis in pragmatics is how people understand utterances in context.¹ It is no coincidence that pragmaticians—and Sperber and Wilson are no exception—talk about “speakers” and “hearers.” That is, the default communicative situation from which they develop their theory is face-to-face communication. This has ramifications for the theoretical assumptions and concepts that Walsh adopts from Relevance Theory when he defines fictionality as

a pragmatic, contextual inference about communicative purposes manifest in the shared cognitive environment between communicator and audience; it has a basic effect upon the way in which the audience seeks to realise the relevance of the communication, minimising expectations of its direct relevance as information, and so directing cognitive effort towards the retrieval of less immediate implicatures.

(412) [End Page 464]

In face-to-face communication, a “shared cognitive environment” and “contextual inference” relate to the situational context in which speaker and hearer are present. This situation includes the space–time deixis pertaining to that particular situation and from which the discourse is developed;² mutual perception of nonverbal communicative signals such as interlocutors’ respective body language, facial expressions, and paralinguistic features such as tone of voice, sighing, silences, and so on; shared knowledge regarding the communicative situation at hand and its conventions; assumptions about the communicative partner and inferences about his or her goals and the purpose of the communicative activity; the possibility to negotiate the communicative activity by means of “metacommunication” (Ruesch and Bateson) and to use questions, repairs, rewordings, and so on, to remedy communication gone awry. None of these features apply to the communicative “situation” of fiction; in fact, there is no single situation: the writing and reading of fiction take place at spatiotemporally distant moments, authors and readers precisely do not communicate directly. So, what does Walsh mean by “shared cognitive environment” if there is no (immediate) shared environment? Could he refer to something like Gadamer’s Horizontverschmelzung (melting together of horizons), a metaphor Gadamer used to theorize our...