Not Lying, Not Reporting
"Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich", there is no Emma Woodhouse. Austen wrote a false sentence and no one has ever accused her of dishonesty. What exactly is the difference between fiction and a lie?
Searle: pretended illocutionary acts
John Searle's answer, in "The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse" (1975), is the standard one. A serious assertion commits the speaker to the truth of what is said, to having evidence, and to believing it. The author of fiction performs pretended assertions, non-deceptive pseudo-performances, and pretended is the crucial word:
- A lie is a real assertion made with intent to deceive.
- A fiction is a pretended assertion made with no intent to deceive, because the pretence is mutually known.
So the count of sentences in a novel that commit their author to the truth of what they say is zero. Not few, none. It is not that the author is asserting something loosely; the illocutionary force is suspended, and that suspension is what makes the whole thing possible. Nothing in the text marks it: Searle's further claim is that there is no textual property that identifies fiction, which is why hoaxes work and why paratext, a title page saying a novel, carries so much weight.
The reader's side of the contract
Coleridge named the reader's half in 1817: that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Two words in that phrase are usually dropped and both matter. Willing: it is granted, not induced. For the moment: it is bounded.
The contract is what makes internal error possible. A reader who objects that dragons do not exist has misunderstood the contract; a reader who objects that the dragon had two heads in chapter three and three in chapter nine has not, the second is a breach, the first is not.
Possible worlds and minimal departure
If a fiction sets up a world, how much of that world does the text have to specify? Marie-Laure Ryan's principle of minimal departure answers: readers construe the fictional world as being as close to the actual world as the text allows, changing only what is explicitly stated or entailed.
The consequence is quantitative. If a story specifies four departures from actuality, the reader carries over everything else, of a hundred background facts, ninety-six survive intact. This is why fantasy needs so little exposition: state that dragons exist and the reader supplies gravity, mortality, weather and the fact that people get hungry, all unbidden. It also explains a common failure, a world that departs on too many axes at once leaves the reader with nothing carried over and nothing to stand on.
The paradox of feeling
Colin Radford asked in 1975 how we can be moved by the fate of someone we know does not exist. Three positions on the table: we are momentarily deceived (implausible, we do not call the police); the emotions are a different kind, "quasi-emotions" (Walton); or emotions do not require belief in existence, only vivid representation. The problem is unresolved, and it is a good example of a literary question that is genuinely philosophical.
Common pitfall: thinking fiction is defined by falsity. Most sentences in most novels are perfectly true, of London, of grief, of how a market works. What makes a text fiction is not the truth value of its sentences but the suspension of the author's commitment to them, and a novel packed with accurate detail is no less fictional for it.