Fiction, pretense, and narration - critique of 'The Logic of Literature'

Style, Spring, 1998 by David Gorman

First of all it involves the use of verbs describing interior processes (for instance, thinking, reflecting, believing, feeling, hoping, etc.) applied to a third party. But, according to Hamburger, outside of fiction these verbs can be applied solely to the first person: they are only utterable on the basis of the subjective interiority they describe, since we only have access to our own interiority. She thus concludes that "Epic fiction is the sole epistemological instance where the I-originarity (or subjectivity) of a third-person qua third-person can be portrayed" (83).

The second phenomenon is in some way an extension of the first: it involves techniques of free indirect discourse and interior monologue. By different means these lead to the same result, namely the direct representation of a third person's interior life. Here too discursive forms are involved that are impossible in a nonfictional narrative in the third person, and this for the same reason as the one opposed to the use of verbs of feeling: in an actual utterance a third person can only be viewed as an object and not starting from his subjective interiority.

A third trait consists in the combination of situational verbs (for instance getting up, going, sitting down, passing a restless night, etc.) with utterances concerning events very remote in time, or those of indeterminate date. Only in fiction can we use a statement like this: "Toward the end of the 1820s, when the city of Zurich was still surrounded with extensive fortifications, on a bright summer morning in the middle of the city there arose from his bed a young man . . ." (Gottfried Keller, Zuricher Novellen, qtd. 94). In an actual utterance "the continuity between a young man's getting up out of bed and the assertion that the city of Zurich, where this took place toward the close of the 1820s, was surrounded with extensive fortifications, would not be possible" (95).

A fourth difference of fiction lies in its use of dialogue. This, if not impossible, is at least displaced in actual utterances, unless the words that it reproduces are situated in a past very close to the time of utterance: "Like the narrated monologue, dialogue, too, has as its indigenous locus only third-person narration, i.e., pure fiction. For only here can narration so fluctuate that 'reporting' and dialogue blend within the unity of the narrative function" (176-77). It is in the name of this thesis, a surprising one as it must be admitted, that Hamburger will elsewhere come also to criticize the use of dialogue in first-person narratives (which, we will see, are situated outside the logical field of fiction).

A fifth trait: the use of spatial deictics along with the third person, and the combination of temporal deictics with the preterite and the pluperfect. In a fictional narrative in the third person, spatial deictics no longer fulfill any "existential function" (132); they do not organize the actual spatiality of the author's and reader's field, but are connected to fictional characters, and this, according to Hamburger, signals that they cease to function as deixis to become "symbol[s]." They no longer allow any effective orientation (since they are situated in a fictional space, and not in real or pretended space) and are in some way just lexemes connoting spatiality as such. Temporal deictics violate the rules of the system of actual utterances in an even more visible way: it is only in fiction that it is possible to combine terms like 'today' and 'tomorrow' with the preterite, or 'yesterday' with the pluperfect. This shows that the temporal axis of the narrative is not that of the author or of the reader, and hence is not the axis of the system of actual utterances but that of the characters' fictive existence.