Fictionalizing: The Anthropological Dimension of Literary Fictions

Author(s): Wolfgang Iser

Source: New Literary History , Autumn, 1990, Vol. 21, No. 4, Papers from the
Commonwealth Center for Literary and Cultural Change (Autumn, 1990), pp. 939-955
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/469193

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 Fictionalizing: The Anthropological
Dimension of Literary Fictions

Wolfgang Iser

MOST PEOPLE would associate the term fiction with the story-
telling branch of literature, but in its other guise it is what
Dr. Johnson called "a falsehood; a lye."' The equivocalness
of the word is very revealing, for each meaning sheds light on the
other. Both meanings entail similar processes, which we might term
"overstepping" what is: the lie oversteps the truth, and the literary
work oversteps the real world which it incorporates. It is therefore
not surprising that literary fictions would so often have been branded
as lies, since they talk of that which does not exist, even though
they present its nonreality as if it did exist.
Plato's complaint that poets lie met its first strong opposition in
the Renaissance, when Sir Philip Sidney rejoined that "the Poet
. . nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth," as he does not
talk of what is, but of what ought to be,2 and this form of overstepping
is quite different from lying. Fiction and fictionalizing entail a duality,
and the nature of this doubleness will depend upon the context:
lies and literature are the different end products of the process of
doubling, and each oversteps the boundaries of its contextual reality
in its own way. Inasmuch as this duality precedes its forms of
realization, boundary-crossing may be viewed as the hallmark of
fictionalizing. The liar must conceal the truth, but so the truth is
potentially present in the mask which disguises it. In literary fictions,
existing worlds are overstepped, and although they are individually
still recognizable, they are set in a context that defamiliarizes them.
Thus both lie and literature always contain two worlds: the lie
incorporates the truth and the purpose for which the truth must
be concealed; the literary fictions incorporate an identifiable reality,
subjected to an unforeseeable refashioning. And so when we describe
fictionalizing as an act of overstepping," we must bear in mind that
the reality overstepped is not left behind: it remains present, thereby
imbuing fiction with a duality that may be exploited for different
purposes. In what is to follow, we shall focus on fictionalizing as a
means of actualizing the possible in order to address the question

New Literary History, 1990, 21: 939-955

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 940 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

why human beings, in spite

make-believe, seem to stand in need of fictions.

Even if nowadays literary fictions are no longer charged with

lying, they are still stigmatized as being unreal, regardless of the
vital role fictions play in our everyday lives. In his book Ways of
Worldmaking,4 Nelson Goodman shows that we do not live in one
reality, but in many, and each of these realities is the result of a
processing which can never be traced back to "something stolid
underneath" (6, 96). There is no single, underlying world, but
instead we create new worlds out of old, and they all exist at the
same time in a process which Goodman describes as "fact from
fiction" (102-7). Fictions, then, are not the unreal side of reality,
let alone the opposite of reality, which our "tacit knowledge" still
takes them to be; they are, rather, conditions that enable the pro-
duction of worlds whose reality, in turn, is not to be doubted.
Such ideas were first articulated by Sir Francis Bacon, who argues
that fictions "give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind . . . in
those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it."5 This is
not quite the same as Goodman's ways of worldmaking, but it shows
how we can gain access to the inaccessible by inventing possibilities.
It is a view that has survived down the ages, and four hundred
years later Marshall McLuhan described the "art of fiction" as an
extension of humanity.6
It is, however, a view that runs counter to the criticism leveled
against fictions since the rise of modern epistemology. Locke de-
nounced fictions as "fantastical ideas,"' as they did not correspond
to any reality, and it was not till fifty years later that David Hume
spoke of "fictions of the mind,"8 which condition the way in which
we organize our experiences. But Hume was mainly concerned with
exposing the cognitive premises posited in epistemology, and it was
Kant who initiated an almost total turnabout, by conceiving the
categories of cognition as heuristic fictions to be taken as if they
corresponded to something. This as if was, in Kant's view, an
indispensable necessity for cognition. Necessities without alternatives,
however, must be true,9 even if one has to add that such truth will
be anthropological rather than epistemological.
If fictions have primarily an anthropological bearing, it seems
hard to provide an ontological grounding for their epistemological
inevitability. This may be one of the reasons why we cannot talk of

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 FICTIONALIZING 941

fiction as such, for

that is, the manifest
it. This is evident e
find fictions as pr
fictions provide the
tions that guide ou
these cases, fiction
mological positing, i
with world-pictures,
concealed if the fo
actions it is anticip
cations, we might w
achieve, and what t
is appropriate to t
extrapolate further

II

There is one particular form of literature in which fictionali

itself is graphically depicted; this is pastoral poetry, which foun
its most elaborate expression in the Pastoral Romance of the Re
aissance. Already in Virgil's Arcadia, a world invented by poetry wa
coupled with a political world.1' In the Pastoral Romance two ra
ically different worlds are telescoped: the artificial and the soci
political. The degree to which the Pastoral Romance highlights thes
two diverging realities can be gauged from the fact that there i
sharp dividing line between them, and if the main characters w
to cross this borderline, they must themselves be doubled-the
must disguise themselves as shepherds in order to act, and th
must use the disguise in order to hide who and what they are. Such
a division of the protagonists into character and disguise shows the
importance of the boundary that separates the two worlds. Onc
again boundary-crossing comes to the fore as the epitome of fi
tionalizing, by means of which two divergent worlds are broug
together in order to act out their difference.
From this observation we may derive the basic formula of fi
tionality: it brings about a simultaneity of what is mutually exclusiv
As this, however, is also true of the lie, literary fictions embra
another condition which sets them apart from the lie: they disclose
their fictionality, which lying, in turn, cannot allow. Therefore litera
fictions contain a whole series of conventionalized signposts whi

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 942 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

indicate to the reader that th

discourse,"" thus indicating th
be taken as if it were referrin
all the references are brack
what is to be imagined. The
indeed all the literary genres
governed signals. The shepher
the country, but are only the
reference is no longer given
Literature is always a form
is a prominent case in poin
thematizes fictionalizing itself
Touchstone, in a play adapt
that "the truest poetry is the
beyond Audrey's comprehen
true poetry is a heightened fo
is at home in two worlds at th
of fictionalizing and becomes
ing, then the question arises a
to reveal. Sir Philip Sidney's
an answer.

Sidney's protagonists, coming out of the hist

of Greece and Asia Minor, have to mask them
into Arcadia and again have to don different d
another borderline that marks off a strictly f
Arcadia itself. They undertake these bound
they want to be close to the king's daughters,
fallen in love. Under their guises-with Pyro
Musidorus a shepherd-they entertain the p
their heroic adventures in the historico-politi
that it had been their aim to prove their c
not in the way in which the epic heroes of
and Aeneas, conceived of such tasks. Instead
the desire to "go privately to seek exercise
Although they had saved one kingdom aft
pursuit, had reestablished social order, and
conflicts, all their glorious deeds remained inc
exercise of courage and virtue does not in it
It is therefore fitting that the sequence of th
ends in shipwreck.
If the exemplarity of Ulysses and Aeneas
goals ("go privately"), if the epic queste is rep
order" (A 275), as the princes explicitly sta
of fortune and necessity are replaced by perso

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 FICTIONALIZING 943

the heroic adventu

ideals only to draw a
the world into a s
uncontrollable instab
epic schemata.'5
The protagonists, ho
cesses they are in lov
in order to cross th
they tell Basilius's d
expectedly restored
must use their tales in order to intimate their true selves to the
princesses without having to remove their masks. Thus the aim
their queste is not to reproduce what they have achieved in
world, but to endow their adventures with a meaning which is
inherent in them. This meaning does not consist in the demonstrat
of virtue and courage, the rescue of the oppressed, the overth
of tyrants, or the punishment of envy and vindictiveness; it is, rat
the desire to impress the princesses with the suggestion that
Amazon and the shepherd are in fact the heroes of these adventu
Thus the manifest meaning of the heroic adventures has sim
taneously to be understood as a different meaning in order to ma
the mask transparent without lifting it. As the protagonists wan
mean something other than what they say, the tales of heroic de
are turned into carriers for a latent meaning, without ever ceasin
to mean what they say in the first place, since the princesses
to be impressed by what the protagonists did. Therefore the spec
use that is made of the tales begins to fictionalize them; they
turned into signs for spelling out a hidden reality, as only t
fictionalized meaning of the tale can bring to light what is to rem
elusive. However, if the one meaning (that of the heroic dee
serves as a sign for another meaning (that of the desire to be tak
for what the protagonists are), then a mutual displacement is
of the question, and hence this inseparable duality presents it
as the structure of double meaning. The latter entails that the
always a manifest meaning adumbrating a latent one, which obtai
its salience by what the manifest says.
This structure of double meaning resembles that of dreams.
Ricoeur points out: "All questions of schools aside, dreams at
that we constantly mean something other than what we say
dreams the manifest meaning endlessly refers to hidden meaning
that is what makes every dreamer a poet."'6 In view of such
correlation it is all the more revealing that in Arcadia itself dr
and double meaning are considered to be interchangeable phen
ena; at a critical moment in the development of the story, we lea

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 944 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

that "As for Pamela, she kept

where she was, and present
being ended, after some amb
of being mistaken, be taken
estranged from the speake
what they thought, but wh
624-25). Double meaning a
equated.
Once the manifest meaning is released from what it designates,
it becomes free for other uses. If it is now to be taken for a
metaphor, bringing some hidden reality to light, then, c
play space opens up between the manifest and the latent m
It is this play space that makes literary fictionality into a ma
generating meaning. For now what is said and what is me
be differently correlated, and according to how they are
new meanings may continually be derived both from the
and the latent.
As the structure of double meaning bears a close "family resem-
blance" (Wittgenstein) to the dream, the question poses itself as to
the extent to which literary fictionality modifies the identical pattern
that seems to underlie both of them. Double meaning in literature
is neither a repetition of the duality in dreams nor a representation
of the latter, in spite of the fact that contemporary descriptions of
the Pastoral Romance constantly harped on the dream analogy."
The differences will become apparent if we again consider the
disguises in Sidney's Arcadia.
The disguises bring out something that also plays a part in dreams,
but is generally left on the margin in dream theory: that is, the
forms of the disguise in which the dream thoughts are wrapped.
Sidney's division of his protagonists into character and mask still
resembles the dream insofar as the disguise serves to conceal what
the princes are in order to gain them access to a forbidden world.
Deceit is necessary in either case to permit the crossing of borders.
But once the princes have entered the forbidden realm, they also
desire to be perceived as what they are (because they want to win
the love of the princesses). This inevitably leads to them playing
games with their own masquerade, and such free play with one's
own doubleness begins to set it off from that of the dream.
In the dream, concealment is paramount, for it must be maintained
to facilitate the disguised return of the repressed. The princes,
however, want to puncture their own disguises in order to display
their princehood. Thus they must combine concealment with dis-
closure. Disclosure, however, cannot entail discarding the masks, for

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 FICTIONALIZING 945

the princes must s

guarded borders. If
concealment and rev
of the mutually ex
fictionalization, wh
Here, then, in this
from the structure of the dream. The character must enact itself
through a disguise in order to bring about something that does no
yet exist. The person in the mask is not, therefore, left behind, b
is present as something which one cannot be as long as one is
oneself. Unlike the dream, in which the sleeper is a prisoner of hi
or her own images, the images of disguise fan out the charac
into a welter of possibilities. If, in the course of one's self-staging
one steps out of oneself, one must nevertheless remain prese
because otherwise no staging can take place.
This already gives us a first glimpse of what can be achieved
the structure of double meaning operative in fictionalizing, and al
what sets it apart from that of the dream. To be present to onesel
and yet to view oneself as if one were another, is a condition
"ecstasy" in which, quite literally, one is beside oneself. One st
outside the enclosure of oneself, and so is enabled to have oneself.
In this respect, literary fictionality outstrips the dream analogy whose
structure it shares. Paul Ricoeur, who still tends to bracket dream
and poetry together, calls special attention to this veiled unveiling:
"To overcome what remains abstract in the opposition between
regression and progression [that is, in the dream] would require a
study of these concrete relations, shifts of emphasis, and inversion
of roles between the functions of disguise and disclosure."'8

Perhaps at this point we might pause to sum up the argument

so far. Literary fictionality has the structure of double meaning,
which is not meaning itself but a matrix for generating meaning.
Double meaning takes on the form of simultaneous concealment
and revelation, always saying something that is different from what
it means in order to adumbrate something that oversteps what it
refers to. Out of this duality arises the condition of "ecstasy,"
exemplified by Sidney's protagonists who are at one and the same
time with themselves and outside themselves. Thus fictionalizing
epitomizes a condition otherwise unattainable in the ways in which
normal life takes its course.
How does this structure of double meaning function, and to what
extent does it point to dispositions in our anthropological makeu

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 946 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

Here once again we can tak

point. In Sidney's Arcadia th
that their princehood is absen
extent that it directs the op
master situations with which
are may prove-more often
the demands of the situations
abilities, norms and values w
binding are no longer applicab
be suspended. Consequently,
tinually between their prince
generative nature of double
possible. Neither mask nor pr
present, and the constant int
shows that the character alw
is not sought for its own sa
to what is actually entailed in
of oneself. If disguise enab
what one is, then fictionaliz
we want to be. Thus being
minimal condition for creat
in which one finds oneself.

III

Fictionalizing in literature points to a further anthropologic

pattern integral to human beings: the structure of the doppelging
An observation by the social anthropologist Helmuth Plessne
pertinent for assessing such a disposition: "Our rational self-unde
standing can be formalized through the idea of the human a
being generally inseparable from a social role but not defined
one particular role. The role-player or bearer of the social fig
is not identifiable with that figure but cannot be conceived
separately from it without losing his or her humanity. ... O
through the other of oneself does one have-oneself. With th
doppelgdinger structure which links together role-bearer and role
figure, we believe we have found a constant.... The doppelgain
structure . . . makes all self-understanding possible, but in no
is the one half to be set against the other in the sense that it is 'b
nature' better."'9
A vital feature of Plessner's observation is his rejection of a
ontologically based structure of the self which might-to use idealis
terminology-contrast the homo noumenon with a homo phenomen

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 FICTIONALIZING 947

a contrast which ha
and psychoanalysis.
tically inspired basis
be distinguished from
speaks of a core-self
as their own doppelg
travelling between t
one another. Roles ar
ends; they are mean
individual role.
Of course the individual role will be determined by the social
situation, but although this conditions the form, it does not condition
humankind's doppelginger status; it puts its stamp on the division,
but neither binds nor eliminates it, thus unfolding humanity's duality
into a multiplicity of roles. This duality itself arises out of huma
being's decentered position-our existence is incontestable, but a
the same time inaccessible to us. Ludwig Feuerbach suggests that
"In one's ignorance one is at home,"20 and to this we might add
the comment of the French social philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis:
"Man can exist only by defining himself... but he always outstrip
these definitions--and, if he outstrips them . . . this is because they
spring out of him, because he invents them . . . and hence becaus
he makes them by making things and by making himself, and because
no rational, natural or historical definition allows us to establish
them once and for all. 'Man is that which is not what it is and is
what it is not,' as Hegel has already said."21 This deficiency pr
to be the mainspring of fictionalizing, and fictionality, in tu
qualifies what it has set in motion: the creative process and b
the whys and the wherefores of what it stages.

IV

As we have seen, the structure of double meaning links literary

fictionality to the dream, although the former is by no means a
representation, let alone a repetition of the latter. Even if the dreamer
should be aware that he or she is dreaming, he or she will still
remain within the confines of his or her dream, whereas fictionalizing
in literature brings about a condition of "ecstasy" which allows one
to be simultaneously with oneself and beside oneself. Hans-Georg
Gadamer considers this to be a major achievement of humankind.
It makes him take a critical stand against Plato: "Even Plato, in his
Phaedrus, makes the mistake of judging the ecstasy of being outside

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 948 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

oneself from the point of v

seeing it as the mere negation
of madness. In fact, being ou
of being wholly with somethi
The implications of this may
analogy, though from an an
following him. According
Globus, the dream is not co
mnemic images, let alone t
displaced; it is a creative eve
is to be created anew.23 By c
is always there, and at best
whatever concerns us. Alth
tinual creation of alternative worlds whose bizarre character is con-
ditioned by the interruption of sensory input during sleep, dreamer
cannot transport themselves to the fringes of these worlds in order
to see what dreaming has produced. For even "lucid dreaming"24
cannot permit more than the mere awareness that one is dreaming.
Fictionalizing, however, spotlights a different mode according to
which a basic human disposition is able to manifest itself. If the
human self is the meeting point of its manifold roles, literary fictions
show human beings as that which they make themselves and that
which they understand themselves to be. For this purpose one must
step out of oneself, so that one can exceed one's own limitations.
We may therefore describe literary fictionality as a conspicuous
modification of consciousness which makes accessible what merely
happens in the dream. The dreamer is inextricably bound up in
the world he or she creates, but fictionalizing in literature permits
a loosening of these very bonds. Eduard Dreher says that the dreamer
is split into a "dream-liver" and a "dream-player,"25 who must always
suffer the worlds he or she has created; literary fictions which
disclose themselves as an "as if," reveal themselves to be a seeming
as opposed to a being; they show that our ability to transmute
ourselves into different shapes cannot be reified. At the same time,
this seeming permits humankind constantly to invent itself anew
And finally it shows that there is no ultimate frame of referenc
for what we make of ourselves through fiction, even though fic-
tionality functions as an extension of the human being and thus
gives the impression that it is in itself just such a frame of reference
Literary fictionality may therefore be regarded as an indication
that human beings cannot be present to themselves-a condition
which makes us creative (even in our dreams) but never allows us
to identify ourselves with the products of our creativity. This constant

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 FICTIONALIZING 949

enactment of self
though the price to
of definitiveness of
humankind with p
inherent deficienc
bility to ourselves.

Fictionalizing is the enactment of humankind's creativity and as

there is no limit to what can be staged, the creative process itself
bears the inscription of fictionality: the structure of double meaning.
In this respect it offers the paradoxical and (perhaps for that very
reason) desirable chance to be both in the midst of life and at the
same time outside of it. This simultaneous involvement in and
detachment from life through a fiction which stages the involv
and thereby brings about the detachment, offers a kind of
mundane totality that is otherwise impossible in everyday life
fictionalizing enacts our being in the middle of things by t
this very involvement into a mirror for itself. But what do w
to gain from this detached involvement through which fictio
gives us the impression that we know what it is to be in the m
of life?
We might consider a passage in Milan Kundera's novel T
bearable Lightness of Being:

Staring impotently across a courtyard, at a loss for what to do;

the pertinacious rumbling of one's own stomach during a moment o
betraying, yet lacking the will to abandon the glamorous path of be
raising one's fist with the crowds in the Grand March; displaying on
before hidden microphones-I have known all these situations,
experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to th
my curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels a
own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of t
and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I
have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond wh
own "I" ends) which attracts me most. For beyond that border begin
secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is
an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become."'2

The possibilities Kundera speaks of lie beyond what is, even though
they could not exist without what is. This duality is brought into

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 950 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

focus through writing, whic

the reality which surroun
write about what is, and hi
that retains its equivocalness
be derived from what is. On
into a range of its own po
possibilities overstep what is
of possibilities could not hav
it forms the horizon, had b
uncover what hitherto had
now refracted by the mirr
trap.
In the novel, then, the real and the possible coexist, for it is only
the author's selection from and textual representation of the real
world that can create a matrix for the possible, whose ephemeral
character would remain shapeless if it were not the transformation
of something already existing. But it would also remain meaningless
if it did not serve to bring out the hidden areas of given realities.
Having both the real and the possible and yet, at the same time,
maintaining the difference between them-this is a process denied
us in real life; it can only be staged in the form of the "as if."
Otherwise, whoever is caught up in reality, cannot experience pos-
sibility, and vice versa.
In what sense, though, is our world a "trap," and what compels
us to overstep the boundaries? All fictionalizing authors do this,
and so too do readers of fiction, who go on reading despite their
awareness of the fictionality of the text. The fact that we seem to
need this "ecstatic" state of being beside, outside, and beyond our-
selves, caught up in and yet detached from our own reality, derives
from our inability to be present to ourselves. The ground out of
which we are remains both unplumbable and unavailable to us.
Samuel Beckett's Malone says: "Live and invent,"27 for we do not
know what it is to live, and so we must invent what eludes penetration.
There is a similar dictum, equally pithy, by H. Plessner, who cor-
roborates Beckett from a rather different angle, that of social
anthropology: "I am, but I do not have myself."28 "Have" means
knowing what it is to be, which would require a transcendental
stance in order to grasp the self-evident certainty of our existence
with all its implications, significance and, indeed, meaning. If we
wish to have what remains impenetrable, we are driven beyond
ourselves; and as we can never be both ourselves and the tran-
scendental stance to and of ourselves necessary to predicate wha
it means to be, we resort to fictionalizing. Beckett gave voice
what Plessner had posed as a problem: that is, self-fashioning

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 FICTIONALIZING 951

the answer to our i

where knowledge le
the fountainhead of
beyond ourselves.
The anthropological
takable in relation
human life. Beginni
realities of this kind. This means no less than that the cardinal
points of our existence defy cognitive and even experientia
etration. The Greek physician Alkmaeon is believed to have
Aristotle's approval when saying that human beings must die b
they are not in a position to link beginning and end togethe
death is indeed the result of this impossibility, it is scarcely sur
that it should give rise to ideas that might lead to its abo
These would entail concocting possibilities in order to do away
what resists penetration, thus linking up ineluctible beginning
endings and thereby creating a framework within which we m
learn what it means to be caught up in life. The unending
eration of such possibilities points to the fact that there
means of authentication for the links provided. Instead, the
ioning of the unknowable will be determined to a large exte
historically prevailing needs. If fictionalizing transgresses
boundaries beyond which unrecognizable realities exist, the
very possibilities concocted for the repair of this deficiency, c
between our unknowable beginning and ending, become ind
of how we conceive of what is withheld, inaccessible, and unavail
In this respect, fictionalizing turns out to be a measuring r
gauging the historically conditioned changeability of deep
trenched human desires.

If the borderlines of knowledge give rise to fictionalizing activ

we might perceive an economy principle at work: what can be k
need not be invented, and so fictions always subsidize the unkno
able. There are realities in human life which we experience
yet cannot know. Love is perhaps the most striking example.
more we seem unable to rest content with what is; we also want to
"have" it, in Plessner's terms. We overstep love's reality in order to
impose on it a form that will make it accessible. It is the same with
Kundera's desire to overstep himself in order to have himself through
his own possibilities. We know that certain things exist, but we also
know that we cannot know them, and this is the point at which our
curiosity is aroused, and so we begin to invent.
That is also the point at which literary fictions diverge from the
fictions of the ordinary world. The latter are assumptions, hypoth-
eses, presuppositions, and more often than not, the basis of world

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 952 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

views, and may be said to com

them "concord-fictions"3S b
by its very nature is open. F
appears to have a different ai
realities (beginning, end, an
come to fruition by staging
propelled by the drive to re
to transcend oneself, but to become available to oneself. If such a
move arises out of a need for compensation, then this very need
remains basically unfulfilled in literary fictions. For the latter are
always accompanied by convention-governed signs that signalize the
"as if" nature of all the possibilities they adumbrate. Consequently,
such a staged compensation for what is missing in reality never
conceals the fact that in the final analysis it is nothing but a form
of make-believe, and so ultimately all the possibilities opened up
must be lacking in authenticity. What is remarkable, though, is the
fact that our awareness of this inauthenticity does not stop us from
continuing to fictionalize.
Why is that so, and why are we still fascinated by fictionality,
whose self-disclosure reveals any hoped-for compensation as pure
semblance? What accounts for the potency of semblance is the
following:
(1) None of the possibilities concocted can be representative, for
each one is nothing but a kaleidoscopic refraction of what it mirrors
and is therefore potentially infinitely variable. Thus semblance allows
for a limitless fashioning of those realities that are sealed off from
cognitive penetration.
(2) The possibilities concocted never hide or bridge the rift between
themselves and the unfathomable realities. Thus semblance invali-
dates all forms of reconciliation.
(3) Finally, the rift itself can be acted out in an infinite number
of ways. Thus semblance lifts all restrictions on the modes accordin
to which that play space may be utilized.
This state of affairs throws a rather unexpected light on the
human condition. The firmly rooted desire within us not only t
have ourselves, but even to know what it is to be, makes fictionalizin
head off in two different directions. The fictions ensuing from
can depict the fulfillment of this desire, but they can also provide
an experience of what it means that we cannot be present to ourselve
As regards fulfillment, it must be noted that this will very swiftly
become historical, whereas a far more lasting effect ensues when
instead of a compensatory fulfillment-the fleeting illusoriness o
such a desire is staged. In such a case, staging is not an escape

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 FICTIONALIZING 953

route, but reveals th

be an authentic com
is the form of stagi
follow that the fulf
cannot be the anthr
Corroborative evide
vided by the fact th
process cannot be de
This distinguishes lit
In the latter, the po
This is why, as Han
ification of the Utop
because Utopia is m
and this meagrene
humankind, living
living will be like, a
to release the still hidden abundance of human nature.""' Possibilities
that cannot be derived from what is can only be narrated, but the
narrative will only highlight the mode of their existence, and will
tell us nothing of their provenance.
In dreams we constantly build worlds anew; as Gordon Globus-
following Leibniz-put it, we might be called the possibilities of
ourselves. But since we are the originators of these possibilities, we
cannot actually be them-we are left dangling in-between what we
have produced. To unfold ourselves as possibilities of ourselves,
and-instead of consuming them to meet the pragmatic demands
of everyday life-displaying them for what they are in a medium
created for such an exposure, literary fictions reveal a deeply en-
grained disposition of our makeup. What might this be? The fol-
lowing answers as to the necessity of fictionalizing suggest themselves:
we can only be present to ourselves in the mirror of our own
possibilities; as monads we are determined by bearing all imaginable
possibilities within ourselves; we can only cope with the openness
of the world by means of the possibilities we derive from ourselves
and project onto the world; or, in staging our own possibilities, we
are incessantly striving to postpone our own end.
But in the final analysis fictionalizing may not be equated with
any of these alternative manifestations. Instead, it spotlights that
in-between state whose indelible traces mark the structure of double
meaning, that of the doppelginger as well as that of the boundles
options for self-fashioning. Fictionalizing, then, might be considered
as opening a play space between all the alternatives enumerated
thus setting off free play which militates against all determinations

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 954 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

as untenable restrictions. In
to the problem which Alk
beginning and end togethe
through which the end, ev
least be illusively postpone
of a work of art . . . may
produces a certain illusion;
the time that we have liv
miraculous enlargement of e

UNIVERSITY OF KONSTANZ
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE

NOTES

1 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language (London, 1983).

2 Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie, in The Prose Works, ed. Albert
(Cambridge, 1962), III, 29.
3 See my essay "Feigning in Fiction," in Identity of the Literary Text, ed
Valdes and Owen Miller (Toronto, 1985), pp. 204-28.
4 See Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Hassocks, 1978), esp. p
hereafter cited in text.

5 See Sir Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and New Atlantis, ed. Arthur
Johnston (Oxford, 1974), p. 80.
6 See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York,
1964), pp. 42, 66, 107, 235, 237, and 242; also Susan Sontag, "The Basic Unit of
Contemporary Art is not the Idea, but the Analysis of and Extension of Sensations,"
in McLuhan: Hot and Cold, ed. Gerald Emanuel Stearn (New York, 1967), p. 255:
"The new sensibility understands art as the extension of life."
7 See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (London, 1971), I,
315-17, 127, and 335.
8 See David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford,
1968), pp. 216, 220 ff., 254, 259, and 493.
9 See Dieter Henrich, "Versuch tiber Fiktion und Wahrheit," in Funktionen des
Fiktiven, Poetik und Hermeneutik, X, ed. Dieter Henrich and Wolfgang Iser (Munich,
1983), p. 516.
10 See Bruno Snell, "The Discovery of a Spiritual Landscape," in his The Discovery
of the Mind: The Greek Origins of European Thought, tr. T. G. Rosenmeyer (Oxford,
1953), pp. 283 and 291; also Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet: Theocritus
and the European Pastoral Lyric (Berkeley, 1973), p. 214.
11 See Rainer Warning, "Der inszenierte Diskurs. Bemerkungen zur pragmatischen
Relation der Fiktion," in Funktionen des Fiktiven, pp. 183-206.
12 William Shakespeare, As You Like It, ed. Agnes Latham (London, 1975), p. 80.
13 See my essay "Dramatization of Double Meaning in Shakespeare's As You Like
It," in my Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore, 1989),
pp. 98-130.
14 Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Har-
mondsworth, 1977); hereafter cited in text as A. All quotations are taken from this

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 FICTIONALIZING 955

edition of the Complete

of 1621, and combines t
Arcadia which first app
himself wrote the linkin
15 Such an omitted but e
i.e., minus prijom by Juri
Dietrich Keil (Munich,
16 Paul Ricoeur, Freud a
(New Haven, 1977), p. 1
17 This description is ap
Opere, ed. Enrico Carr
Saavedra, Obras Comple
18 Ricoeur, Freud and P
19 Helmuth Plessner, "So
ed. Giinter Dux et al. (F
20 Ludwig Feuerbach, S
X, 310; my translation.
21 Cornelius Castoriadis
(Cambridge, 1987), p. 1
22 Hans-Georg Gadamer
(New York, 1975), p. 11
23 See Gordon Globus, Dr
(Albany, 1987), p. 57.
24 See Stephen LaBerge
25 Eduard Dreher, Der T
liver discovers . . . the p
"The dream-player has a
beyond the wish-fantasy
26 Milan Kundera, The U
York, 1987), p. 221.
27 Samuel Beckett, Mal
28 Helmuth Plessner, "
Sozialer Wandel. Zivilisatio
Hans Peter Dreitzel (Ne
29 Aristotle, Problemat
916a.

30 See Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New
York, 1967), pp. 4 and 62-64.
31 Hans Jonas, Das Prinzip Verantwortung (Frankfurt/M., 1989), pp. 343 f.
32 See Henry James, Theory of Fiction, ed. James E. Miller, Jr. (Lincoln, Nebr.,
1972), p. 93.

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