"Truth in Diegesis"

Tom Pappalardo on fiction

The title of this post comes from the title of a chapter of a book by Michael Riffaterre, Fictional Truth. He has also penned Semiotics of Poetry and Text Production. Those last two titles suggest something of the nature of professorial approaches to literature. "Diegesis" basically means narrative.

I bought this book (published in 1990) when I was in graduate school, thus some years ago, but have never got around to reading it. At the moment I am "de-accessioning" things in my apartment, including many, many books, and I thought I would take another look at this one before disposing of it. I even thought it might offer some interesting insights, and indeed the opening paragraphs of this chapter did seem promising. Here is what Riffaterre writes:

"The only reason that the phrase 'ficitonal truth' is not an oxymoron, as 'fictitious truth' would be, is that fiction is a genre whereas lies are not. Being a genre, it rests on conventions, of which the first and perhaps only one is that fiction specifically, but not always explicitly, excludes the intention to deceive. A novel always contains signs whose function is to remind readers that the tale they are being told is imaginary."

Despite such reminders of artificiality, fiction still manages "to interest, to convince, and eventually to appear relevant to the reader's own experience."

After that, I am afraid it went downhill Here is a sentence at random from the book to show why that happened: "The clausula may be true mimetically, that is, psychologically. Its narrative function is to provide the pseudo-story, the ostensibly familiar tomato construct, with a punchline, however, and at the same time to reintegrate it into verisimilitude . . ."

Too much going on in my head

Such academic writing is why I so seldom read contemporary secondary literature when researching a subject. For instance, I understand what the words mimetically and psychologically mean, but why does he make the second one a variant of the first? It takes the traditional meaning of mimetic (going back to the Greeks) and applying it to a category to which it does not belong. This is not at all unusual in academic writing. There seems to be a desire here to sound more profound that the material calls for. The rest of the sentence is likewise obscure.

Back before I finished my Ph.D. I published two novels, which were pretty well received, so I have always been interested in fiction and its "reality." I have read lots of works on all manner of aspects of narration and technique, but it is the way that readers are able to sink into the reality of the fictional world and, moreover, identify with the fate of characters in this world that gives me most to consider. It seems to be the case that we can identify with them more than with the fortunes of people we actually know and love, which, I think, must be because fiction is the only medium where we actually get "into the heads" of other people –– even if they are not real! One has the feeling that one knows Elizabeth Bennett or any other favorite fictional character in a way that one doesn't know one's own husband.

One more book de-accessioned.

Picture credits: Tom Pappalardo; Writers Cafe