Köppe, Stühring 2011 - Against pan-narrator theories

Against pan-narrator theories
Tilmann Köppe and Jan Stühring
Abstract
Most narratologists today maintain that all fictional narratives have a fictional
narrator that is to be distinguished from its author. Call this a “pan-narrator
theory” (PN). In this essay, we argue that there are good reasons against this
position, while important arguments that seem to speak in favor of it can be
shown to be ultimately untenable. We start by offering a brief sketch of a theory
of fiction that serves as the basis of our considerations and then defend the
view that there is no need, theoretical or pragmatic, to postulate a fictional
narrator for every fictional narrative.
1.
Pan-narrator theories and optional-narrator theories
Do all fictional narratives have a fictional narrator? This question allows for
either of the following two answers:
(i) Pan-narrator theories (PN) maintain that all fictional narratives have a
fictional narrator that is to be distinguished from its author. In addition, proponents of PN typically hold that fictional narrators can be ‘implied,’ ‘effaced,’
‘covert’ or the like.1
(ii) Optional-narrator theories (ON) deny that all fictional narratives have
a fictional narrator. According to ON, a fictional narrative without a fictional
narrator is possible, and there is no theoretical need to postulate the existence
of a fictional narrator in every fictional narration.
As far as we can see, most narratologists today favor PN.2 In this essay,
however, we shall argue that there are good reasons in support of ON, while
important arguments that seem to speak in favor of PN can be shown to be
u­ltimately untenable. Since a plausible theory of fictional narrators depends
on a theory of fiction, in what follows we shall start by offering a brief sketch
of such a theory. Next, we shall discuss the main arguments put forward by
JLS 40 (2011), 59–80
DOI 10.1515/jlse.2011.004
0341-7638/11/040–59
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proponents of PN and point out what we take to be their deficiencies.3 While
some of the arguments for PN are refuted on the basis of our theory of fiction,
there are other arguments for PN that can be shown to be untenable on independent grounds. A proper criticism of our view, therefore, can be made to
work in either of the following two ways: one can show that there is a theory
of fiction that is both better than ours and entails the concept of the fictional
narrator; or one can show that there are independent grounds for PN that outweigh our objections.
2. What is fiction?
In this section, we shall offer a brief sketch of a theory of fiction. This theory
is by no means new. It is based on work by John Searle, Gregory Currie and
Kendall Walton and has been elaborated most clearly by Peter Lamarque and
Stein Haugom Olsen.4 According to the Institutional Theory of Fiction (ITF),
a text is fictional, if and only if it is intended to be approached in accordance
with the rules and conventions of the institution of fiction, or if readers have
agreed upon treating the text in accordance with these rules and conventions
independently of authorial intentions.5 A theory of fiction has to specify the
structure and content of these social rules or conventions. Basically, the following two dos and don’ts are mandatory:
ule 1 (R1): Readers of fictions are invited to engage in an imaginative acR
tivity based on the sentences of the text.
Consider, for example, the opening passage of Dickens’ David Copperfield:
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be
held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of
my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at
twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to
cry, simultaneously.6
Readers of these sentences are invited to imagine that a person reports and
comments on his birth.7 These imaginings are both guided and authorized by
the work. Specifying the content of these authorized imaginings amounts to
giving an account of what is fictionally true resp. true in the fictional world of
David Copperfield.8 Note that talk of fictional truths bears no special t­heoretical
weight. A fictional truth is defined as a fact to be imagined in accordance with
R1, and this in turn is spelled out as a proposition one is authorized to imagine
on the basis of a particular work of fiction.
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ule 2 (R2): Readers of fiction are neither justified, solely on the basis of the
R
fiction, in regarding as true what they are authorized to imagine, nor are they
justified, solely on the basis of the fiction, in ascribing any such beliefs to the
author of the work.9
Readers are, for instance, neither justified in believing that the sentences
quoted from Dickens’ David Copperfield are true, nor that Dickens took them
to be true, nor that Dickens meant to assert them as true and so on. Speech acts
other than assertions are treated in a similar fashion: one is not justified in ascribing typical speech act commitments, such as beliefs, existential commitments, whishes, obligations, etc., to the author of the work. R2 of ITF thus
works as an inference blocker. With fictional sentences, one may not draw
certain inferences regarding facts in the real world.10
According to ITF, the concept of fiction is neither defined in terms of (reference to) fictional objects, nor in terms of particular speech acts (or pretended
speech acts),11 nor in terms of particular text-world relations such as truthvalues or referential presuppositions. There are some deep and puzzling problems to be solved in these areas, to be sure. But it is important to note that the
tenability of ITF does not depend on any particular solution to them, for ITF
does not depend on any special ontological, pragmatic, or semantic commitments. The core of fiction consists in institutionalized conventions or rules
which govern readers’ engagements with works of fiction, R1 and R2 being
most prominent among them. Rather, the structure and content of these rules
can be satisfactorily explained without an answer to any of the thorny questions concerning the ontology of fictional objects or the pragmatics or semantics of fictional sentences.
For our purposes, what matters most is the fact that the concept of a narrator
does not figure substantially in ITF. The concept of a narrator, that is to say, is
not part of the explanans of the concept of fiction. However, it is possible that
a particular text generates the fictional truth that a narrator reports certain
things. Remember the opening passage of David Copperfield (quoted above).
Readers are entitled to imagine that David comments on his birth and the probability of his future fame (etc.). Other novels, however, do not generate f­ictional
truths about someone reporting (or narrating, for that matter) anything. Thomas
Hardy’s Jude the Obscure opens thus:
The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. The miller at
Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and horse to carry his goods to the
city of his destination, about twenty miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the departing teacher’s effects.12
The novel’s opening authorizes readers to imagine that the schoolmaster
was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry (etc.). The opening does
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not generate a fictional narrator, who tells us about these things. In general,
according to ITF it is not true that every work of fiction necessarily has a fictional narrator. The prescription to imagine being told something by a narrator
is part of particular works of narrative fiction only.
Based on these considerations it is useful to group fictional narratives into
ones which do generate a fictional narrator and ones which do not. This distinction can be represented by either of two operators. Sentences of fictional texts
which do generate a fictional narrator ( N) are prefixed by the operator ‘Imagine that N narrates that . . . ,’ while sentences of texts which do not generate a
fictional narrator are prefixed by the operator ‘Imagine that . . . .’ Both operators reflect R1 and R2 of ITF. Only the first one, however, generates a fictional
narrator, or, to be more explicit, entails that readers are authorized by the text
to imagine being told certain things by a narrator.
Texts which do have a fictional narrator can be more or less explicit about it.
Truths about fictional narrators can vary enormously both in amount and content. Texts may, for instance, specify a fictional narrator’s knowledge, his aims
and motives, his life-story, his sex, his reliability, or his ethical integrity. Sometimes a fictional narrator is the story’s protagonist, sometimes he is among the
marginal figures, sometimes he ‘fades’ somewhere in the course of the story.13
It seems that, generally, there are hardly any limits as to how fully a narrator
can be described. What is important is that fictional truths about narrators can
be generated directly or indirectly.14 Directly generated fictional truths are generated on the basis of the words of a particular text alone. Accordingly, it is
fictional that David reports to have been born at midnight solely because of the
opening words of David Copperfield. In contrast, the fictional truth (if it is one)
that David struggles with his modesty is generated indirectly, which means that
we have to infer it on the basis of other fictional truths. As Walton notes with
regard to fictional truths: ‘[s]ometimes the most prominent and significant ones
[truths] are generated indirectly. A few offhand remarks by a character or a
telling gesture may establish, elegantly and precisely, crucial characteristics of
his personality or motives.’15
Note, finally, that we can be invited to imagine a narrator who is not part
of his story. Obvious examples would be ‘storytelling narrators’, that is, fictional narrators who make up a fictional story.16 ON, in other words, is not
committed to the claim that there are no heterodiegetic narrators. The distinction between texts with narrators and texts without narrators is not identical
with, and does not reduce to, a distinction between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrators.17
In closing this section, we should stress that, of course, this is only a brief
sketch of a theory of fiction. We believe however, that it is not only correct, but
also allows us to get a clear account of what is wrong with PN. It is this task
that we shall turn to in the next section.
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3.
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Can PN be defended?
3.1. The Analytic Argument
A rather simple argument in favor of PN claims that the concept of narrative
analytically entails the concept of a narrator.18 Hence, it is conceptually true
that there is no narrator-less narration. Proponents of PN claim that this already
establishes that there is a fictional narrator in every fictional narrative. Since
ON ignores this simple conceptual truth, it must be wrong. Or so the argument
goes.
Upon closer inspection, however, the Analytic Argument fails. In order to
see why this is so, consider a slightly more formalized version of the argument:
(P1) Narratives are speech acts.
(P2) Speech acts presuppose someone who utters them.
● (P3) The utterer of a narrative is called ‘narrator’.
● (C) There is a narrator for every narrative.
●
●
Obviously, so far the argument is conclusive. It might seem that this already
establishes PN, but in fact it does not. Remember that PN claims that for every
fictional narrative there is a fictional narrator. But the above argument only
establishes that for every narrative there is a narrator and does not give us any
information regarding the ontological status of the narrators of fictional narratives. Someone who claims that the Analytic Argument establishes the truth of
PN at bottom claims that the conclusion of the Analytic Argument entails the
proposition that there is a fictional narrator for every fictional narrative. This
assumption is false, however. To see why this is so, consider the following argument where P* is the conclusion of the Analytic Argument and C* is the
main tenet of PN:
●
●
(P*) There is a narrator for every narrative.
(C*) There is a fictional narrator for every fictional narrative.
But this step is clearly unsound. For if x is a narrative, then x is narrated by
some y does not entail if x is a narrative and x is fictional, then x is narrated by
some y and y is fictional.19 The Analytic Argument so far only establishes that
there is a narrator and not that there is a fictional narrator. In order to establish
this point, one needs a further argument.20
At first it might seem strange to claim that, on the one hand, there is a narrator for every narrative and, on the other hand, to deny that there is a fictional
narrator for every fictional narrative. We assume, however, that this irritation is
mainly due to the established usage of the notion of a narrator in both literary
criticism and the philosophy of literature. In literary studies the word ‘narrator’
is commonly understood as meaning the same as ‘fictional narrator’. However,
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clearly a narrator is not eo ipso a fictional narrator, as there are also factual narratives and thus factual narrators (think of David Hume’s The History of Great
Britain).
Of course it is perfectly possible for a non-fictional narrator to narrate a
f­ictional narrative. In fact, every fictional narrative is authored by some nonfictional narrator. Thus Charles Dickens narrates the fiction David Copperfield.
Note that there is an important difference between David Hume who narrates
The History of Great Britain and Charles Dickens who narrates David Copperfield. The latter invites us to imagine the story of David Copperfield without
being in any way accountable for the truth of the tale. David Hume, in contrast,
is committed to the truth of what he says about the history of Great Britain; the
point of his narration is to inform us about what really happened.
The Analytic Argument establishes that there is a narrator for every narrative. However, ‘narrator’ here is to be taken in a weak sense and is not synonymous with ‘narrator’ as it is usually used in literary criticism. Only in this
weaker sense we might refer to the author of a fictional narrative as its narrator.
Thus, there is another way to show that the Analytic Argument fails to establish PN. The Analytic Argument becomes fallacious if ‘narrator’ in its conclusion is taken as meaning ‘fictional narrator.’ ‘Narrator’ has to be read in the
weak sense throughout the whole argument. If we read ‘narrator’ in the strong
sense throughout the whole argument, P3 is false. If we read ‘narrator’ in the
weak sense in P3 and in the strong sense (as meaning ‘fictional narrator’) in C,
the Analytic Argument involves an equivocation, and C is false, as it is simply
not true that there is a fictional narrator for every narrative, because ‘narrative’
here means both fictional and factual narratives.
Note, finally, that the claim established by the Analytic Argument that every
narrative has a narrator implies nothing about the role of the author as concerns
matters of interpretation. Calling the author ‘narrator’ in the weak sense does
not imply that his intentions fix the meaning of the text. It simply means that
the author is the person composing the fictional text according to the rules of
the social institution of fictionality. Nothing that is said in this paper commits
one to an intentionalist or anti-intentionalist model in interpretation. Both ON
and PN are perfectly compatible with intentionalist and anti-intentionalist theories of interpretation.
3.2. The Ontological Gap Argument
The Ontological Gap Argument claims that only fictional narrators can have
access to fictional worlds.21 For how could we know what happens in the fictional world of Jude Fawley, unless a fictional narrator tells us about it? We
cannot go and see for ourselves since, for us, epistemic access to this world is
barred. It takes a fictional narrator to mediate between fictional worlds and the
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real world we live in. Without a fictional narrator, therefore, we simply would
not know the goings-on in fiction. More formally, the Ontological Gap Argument consists of the following steps:
(P1) Only fictional persons have access to fictional worlds.
Only Persons that have access to fictional worlds can tell real-life
­persons about the goings-on in fictional worlds.
● (C1) Only a fictional person (a fictional narrator) can tell real-life persons
(readers) about the goings-on in fictional worlds.
● (C2) Since only fictional narrators have access to fictional events, there is a
fictional narrator in fictional narrative, and hence PN is correct.
●
● (P2)
We do not think that this is a sound argument. Let us, momentarily, assume
that only fictional narrators have access to fictional worlds (P1), and that reallife readers are told by fictional narrators about the goings-on in fictional worlds.
Consider further that anything a fictional person does must be fictional.22 Consequently, the utterances of fictional narrators are fictional utterances. Fictional
utterances occur in fictional worlds. Now it follows from the claim that only
fictional persons can have access to fictional worlds that only fictional persons
have access to the utterances of a fictional narrator. Since readers are not fictional persons (P2), they cannot have access to the utterances of fictional narrators. Hence readers’ access to fictional worlds cannot be provided by fictional
narrators. The Ontological Gap Argument is thus refuted by its own premises.
It cannot establish the truth of PN.23
3.3. The Blocked Inference Argument
According to a widespread position held within both literary theory and critical
practice, the illocutions (assertions, condemnations, etc.) of a fictional narrative have to be attributed to a fictional narrator simply because it would be false
or absurd to attribute them to the author. Call this the Blocked Inference Argument. Thus Kendall Walton writes:
Narrators are commonly distinguished from (real-life) authors. What is meant when
critics or theorists insist on this distinction is usually that properties of the narrator
are not to be attributed to the author. If it is fictional that the narrator disapproves of
certain kinds of activities, for instance, we must not assume that the author actually
does.24
For instance, the declarative sentence ‘The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry’ seems to express an assertion, but it would
be clearly false to say that Thomas Hardy genuinely asserted something in writing the sentence. Attributing the assertion to a fictional narrator both preserves
the idea that we are dealing with an assertion that picks out some fictional state
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Tilmann Köppe and Jan Stühring
of affairs and explains why we cannot infer that Thomas Hardy had any beliefs
concerning its truth. So one version of the Blocked Inference Argument for PN
might run as follows:
(P1) All fictional illocutions have to be attributed to someone.
Fictional illocutions have to be attributed either to the author or to the
narrator.
● (P3) Fictional illocutions cannot be attributed to the author.
● (C) Fictional illocutions must be attributed to a fictional narrator and, therefore, PN is correct.
●
● (P2)
This argument suffers from an equivocation in P3; that is, ‘fictional illocution’ can mean either of two things:
Interpretation 1 (I1): According to the first interpretation, what is meant by
‘fictional illocution’ is something a fictional character (fictionally) utters. In
this sense, a fictional illocution can be represented by ‘Fictionally, S utters p.’
Interpretation 2 (I2): According to the second interpretation, what is meant
by ‘fictional illocution’ is any sentence of a work of fiction as uttered by its
author. A fictional illocution, in this sense, can be represented by ‘S utters that,
fictionally p.’25
The chief difference between the two interpretations lies in the scope of the
fiction-operator. Under I1, it is merely fictional that someone utters something
and, therefore, both the utterance and its speaker lie within the scope of the
fiction-operator. Under I2, in contrast, it is true that someone utters something
according to the rules and conventions of ITF (or any other plausible theory of
fiction) and, therefore, neither the speaker nor her utterance but only its content
( p) lies within the scope of the fiction-operator.
With the distinction of I1 and I2 in mind, we are now able to see what is
wrong with the Blocked Inference Argument. To begin with, P3 is false under
I2. It is not true that sentences of the form ‘S utters that, fictionally p’ cannot
be attributed to the author – for, of course, sentences of this kind precisely
characterize what authors of fictional narratives do (namely, uttering sentences,
the content of which has to be taken as fictional). Under I2, therefore, the argument is not conclusive, and it does not support PN.
So what if I1 is chosen instead? Under I1, P3 is correct. It is certainly true
that anything a fictional speaker fictionally does cannot be attributed to the
author. However, P1, P2 and P3 do not establish the truth of C. For P2 simply
begs the question. While it is trivially true that anything a fictional speaker
fictionally utters must be attributed to a fictional speaker, it is not clear that all
fictional sentences have to be interpreted along these lines in the first place.
Arguably, the logical structure of some sentences of fictional texts is simply
‘Fictionally, p’ (rather than ‘Fictionally, S utters p’). It is not clear that sentences of the form ‘Fictionally, p’ must, or indeed can be, attributed to a fic-
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tional speaker. Therefore, proponents of the Blocked Inference Argument must
show that all sentences of fictional texts have to be interpreted according to I1;
only then does it follow that we need a fictional speaker. This is what has to be
established by the Blocked Inference Argument. It cannot, on pain of petitio
principii, be presupposed by it.
We now turn to another, though closely related, line of criticism directed at
ON. The author vs. narrator distinction is often meant to explain the fact that
we are not justified in attributing properties of the narrator to the author. This,
however, cannot be right. For the author-narrator distinction is merely a theoretical consequence of what inferences are warranted (that is, authors and narrators have to be distinguished because we must not draw certain inferences).
The distinction itself does not explain what we are allowed to do. Rather, the
fact that we must not do certain things with regard to fictional utterances is
explained in terms of the rules and conventions of the institution of fiction. Our
inferential practice is restricted by R2, and this is, presumably, what explains
why theorists have felt the need to draw the author vs. narrator distinction.26 In
fact, you have to know and understand R1 and R2 of ITF in order to understand
what a fictional narrator is in the first place. For a fictional narrator is simply
someone you have to imagine telling a story (with your imagination being
guided by R1 and R2).
Proponents of PN often, and always mistakenly, think that we need the
a­uthor-narrator distinction to account for the ‘distinction of fiction’; that is, that
we need the distinction in order to explain what differentiates fictional from
non-fictional discourse.27 Call this the Distinction of Fiction Argument. This
argument, however, cannot be right, since the very notion of a fictional narrator
can only be explained on the basis of a theory of fiction. The Distinction of
Fiction Argument simply gets the order of explanation wrong, and in fact it
faces a circularity problem. For if fiction is explained in terms of fictional narrators, we need a further explanation of what a fictional narrator is. According
to the Distinction of Fiction Argument, this has to be explained in terms of the
author/fictional narrator distinction.28
3.4. The Argument from Creation
It might be claimed that at least some narrators are indispensible for the fiction
because it is their voice that creates the fiction in the first place.29 Now this
cannot be correct. The hero’s name in Dickens’s David Copperfield cannot be
‘Frank’ unless the text says so. So, in order to change the name, you would have
to change the text. It follows that if the narrator did cause changes in the world
of the fiction, he would be responsible for some changes in our world. More
broadly, in order to be causally responsible for a property of any fictional entity, the narrator would have to be causally responsible for the textual p­roperties
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that describe those very entities. Thus, the claim that the fictional narrator creates the world of the fiction entails that the fictional narrator is causally efficacious in our world. The latter, however, is wildly implausible.30 No fictional
narrator can create (or alter) a real text.
Second, it amounts to a category mistake to claim that there are relations of
cause and effect between author, narrator and fictional world. Claiming that the
author creates the world of the fiction surely is a handy metaphor. Strictly
speaking, however, this cannot be true as it amounts to the claim that the author
creates something that does not exist. In a similar fashion, it cannot be true that
the fictional narrator creates the world of the fiction, since it amounts to the
claim that something that does not exist creates something that does not exist.
In fact, this claim harbors two mistakes: (a) something that does not exist cannot create anything, and ( b) one cannot create something that does not exist.
Fortunately, we are not in any way forced to assume that either the author or
the fictional narrator literally create the fictional world. The author does create
the text of the fiction, thereby inviting us to imagine some fictional states of
affairs (including, for instance, the presence or absence of a narrator). The fictional narrator, on the other hand, does not create anything (since he does not
exist); obviously, however, we might be justified in imagining of the narrator
that he creates virtually anything, given that the text at hand invites us to do so.
Thus, for instance, the text of David Copperfield invites us to imagine that
David writes (‘creates’) his own life-story, which we are reading.
To sum up, then, the Argument from Creation suffers from two flaws. First,
the claim that the fictional narrator creates the fictional world entails that he is
causally responsible for textual properties, because the text describes the fictional world and what the text describes as fictionally true is true in the fictional
world. Second, the claim that the narrator creates the fictional world cannot
literally be true as he does not exist and, thus, cannot create anything at all; as
we have argued, this does not mean that we might not be justified in imagining
the narrator as creating something (even the whole fictional world).
3.5. The Argument from Mediation
What is true in a fictional world seems to be presented to us from a certain
mediating perspective. This perspective may manifest itself in, for instance,
the choice and arrangement of details, in explicit commentary, in more or less
subtle evaluations, or in modal qualifications.31 Thus the opening sentence of
Jude the Obscure reads ‘The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry’ (our emphasis), and it thereby indicates some sort of uncertainty as to whether it is fictional that everybody (really) was sorry. What is
more, sometimes narrative unreliability leaves us in doubt as to large and important chunks of the fictional world.
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Proponents of PN may claim that these and further aspects of mediation
must be accounted for by introducing a fictional narrator, for it is his perspective that explains why our access to what is true in the fiction may be mediated.32 Call this the Argument from Mediation:
●
●
●
(P1) There is no mediation without the mediating voice of a narrator.
(P2) All fictional narratives display some sort of mediation.
(C) All fictional narratives have a fictional narrator.
Now the point that our access to fictional worlds is mediated is well taken.
We do not think, however, that it supports PN. In order to maintain the tenability of ON, what we need to do is show that there is mediation that does not
depend on the concept of a narrator and hence is fully consistent with ON.
First of all, some clarification is in order. ‘Mediation’ is best taken as an
umbrella term that covers a variety of quite different phenomena which call for
different explanations. Questions concerning our epistemic access to the fictional world, the design of fictional texts and creation of fictional worlds shall
therefore be discussed in their own sections (see The Ontological Gap Argument, and The Argument from Creation). In this section, we will concentrate
on some further types of narrative mediation, namely ‘coloring’, explicit commentary, and evaluations.
Before turning to these issues, we must stress that, when a narrative does
contain a narrator, then it is almost inevitably the case that we are invited to
imagine of his report that it exhibits various signs of mediation (e.g., that it
emphasizes certain details while it neglects others, that it contains evaluations
and commentary, or that it is ‘colored’ in various ways). The crucial part of our
defense of ON, however, is an explanation of mediation that is consistent with
narrator-less narration. We need, in other words, to show that P1, as it stands,
is false.
Let us start our discussion of narrator-less mediation with what might be
called the ‘coloring’ of the fictional events or facts as they are described by a
fictional narrative. One simple explanation that is consistent with ON is this.
Any prescription to imagine an event is a prescription to imagine an eventunder-a-description. To see why this is so, consider the following. All prescriptions to imagine a certain event found in a literary work of fiction are linguistic
in nature. Readers can only be invited to imagine a particular event, if they are
told what event to imagine. So the event has to be identified. The only way this
can be done linguistically is to give a description of the event in question,
which means that the prescription will be a prescription to imagine an eventunder-a-description. Accordingly, we can be invited to imagine an event or fact
in almost any number of ways: as happening right before our eyes, as seen
from a particular angle, as happening in some distant past, as modally qualified, etc. Just as we can be invited to imagine that the refrigerator is empty, we
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can be invited to imagine that it looks empty, that it was empty, that it looks
kind of empty, that it looks as though it is empty, or that it is probably empty.33
In short, nothing prevents us from accepting that the events we are invited to
imagine are individuated under a description that accounts for their being ‘colored’ in some way or other. As we have shown in our refutation of the Argument from Creation it is necessarily the author who is responsible for both the
creation of a fictional description and the invitation to imagine its content.
There are instances of ‘coloring’, then, which are fully compatible with ON.
The difference between the narrator-less account of coloring and the narratorbased account can be said to be this: while the narrator-based account involves
imagining of a narrator that he describes certain events under a particular description, the narrator-less account involves imagining certain events under a
particular description.
We now turn to another aspect of ‘mediation’, namely explicit commentary.
Since not all fictional texts contain explicit commentary, P2 is false and the
Argument from Mediation fails under this interpretation. The same holds true
for evaluations. What is more, even when explicit commentary and evaluations
are present in a fictional text, this does not establish the presence of a narrator.
Consider the following excerpt from Jude the Obscure:
Somebody might have come along that way who would have asked him his trouble,
and might have cheered him by saying that his notions were further advanced than
those of his grammarian. But nobody did come, because nobody does; and under the
crushing recognition of his gigantic error Jude continued to wish himself out of the
world.34
The passage constitutes an instance of what, for matters of tradition, might
be called ‘telling’, rather than ‘showing’.35 However, explicit commentary of
this kind does not necessarily establish the presence of a narrator. As has been
shown in the sections on the Analytic Argument and the Argument from Creation, neither the idea that someone must have uttered these sentences nor the
idea that someone must have created the fictional descriptions successfully
establishes the presence of a fictional narrator. Nothing prevents authors to
invite us to imagine general statements regarding the fictional world (or general probabilistic statements, etc.). Note also that questions about origin (Who
utters p?) are independent from, and do not settle, questions of function (What
is the point of p?). It seems to us that what is really interesting about this passage is its function, rather than its origin. Determining the function of a fictional passage is what an interpretation should be concerned with. Thus an
i­nterpretation of the quoted passage might establish that we are invited to consider the fictional truth of the general description offered by the text and that
we are invited to think about Jude’s predicament from different evaluative angles.36 An interpretation that is concerned with considerations like these is con-
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sistent with the claim that the passage does not contain a fictional narrator. A
plausible analysis and interpretation along these lines is thus fully consistent
with ON.37
The third kind of mediation to be discussed here is evaluation. Many fictional texts establish more or less explicit evaluations of fictional states of
a­ffairs (compare again the passage from Jude the Obscure quoted above). Do
fictional evaluations necessarily involve the presence of a fictional narrator?
We do not think so.
Arguably, an evaluation necessarily presupposes an evaluating subject.38
One might claim that this principle extends to fictional worlds, yielding the
following result: there are no fictional evaluations without some fictional evaluating subject. This, in turn, might be supposed to lead naturally to the assumption that whenever an evaluation takes place in passages of telling, we have to
ascribe the act of evaluating to a teller-figure – the narrator. Thus, it would be
true that there is a narrator in every fictional work where we find evaluations
in passages of telling. But we hold there to be two problems with this line of
reasoning.
The first problem is the following: Although there are no evaluations without some evaluating subject and we often do find passages of evaluative telling
in works of fiction, we do not necessarily have to suppose that it is the narrator
who does the evaluating. In fact, there seem to be clear-cut cases where the
narrator is not responsible for the evaluations in question. Consider cases of
evaluative free indirect discourse. In these cases the source of the evaluation is
a fictional character. All in all, who does the evaluating in evaluative passages
of telling is a matter of interpretation. The question has to be answered on a
case-by-case basis. Possible candidates are, amongst others: the author, a fictional narrator, someone or other within the fictional world, a particular
­fictional character, the vast majority of people within the fictional world,
and some small subgroup of people within the fictional world.
The second problem concerns the claim that there are no fictional e­valuations
without some fictional evaluating subject. First, note that the assertion ‘there
are no evaluations without some evaluating subject’ does not entail that ‘there
are no fictional evaluations without some fictional evaluating subject.’ So the
second assertion would have to be established on independent grounds. Can
this be done? We will argue that it cannot. Consider that it is perfectly possible
for us to evaluate some fictional state of affairs. For example, we might say that
it is not good that Effi Briest does not have the possibility to divorce her husband. Furthermore, we cannot only actually evaluate states of affairs; we are
also capable of imaginatively evaluating them. Thus, I can imaginatively take
on the perspective of someone who thinks that it is good that Effi Briest cannot divorce her husband.39 Finally, remember that fictional discourse invites us
to imagine certain states of affairs. Now, when confronted with a passage of
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evaluative telling, do we necessarily have to assume that there is some fictional
agent in the fictional world doing the evaluating? Clearly not. For the evaluative fictional assertion might simply be seen as an invitation to imagine a certain fictional state of affairs from a particular evaluative perspective, i.e. an
invitation to imaginatively evaluate some fictional state of affairs in a p­articular
way.
Thus, every passage of evaluative telling confronts us with a number of possibilities: the evaluating could be done by some fictional agent, e.g. the f­ictional
narrator, or a certain fictional character, etc. Alternatively, the evaluating might
be understood as an invitation for the reader to imaginatively evaluate a certain
fictional state of affairs in a particular way, or the evaluating might be done by
the author. In this case the evaluating would not be done by some fictional
agent. Again, this is a matter of interpretation. We can only choose between the
different options on a case-by-case basis.40
The upshot of our discussion of ‘coloring’, commentary and evaluation is
the falsity of P1 and thus the failure of the Argument from Mediation. There is
no theoretical need to introduce a narrator in order to explain these kinds of
mediation.
3.6. Two Pragmatic Arguments
Proponents of PN might want to claim that (1) it is necessary to postulate a
fictional narrator for every fictional narrative for pragmatic reasons, for it is not
possible to interpret a given work of fiction adequately without recourse to a
fictional narrator. Alternatively, one might hold that (2) PN is – irrespective of
its truth – pragmatically superior to ON, as it allows us to interpret all works of
fiction adequately, and is easier to handle than ON. According to this second
claim the debate between PN and ON is irrelevant for the practice of literary
interpretation.41 Both of these arguments might be called Pragmatic Arguments. Note, however, that they differ considerably in what they try to establish. Whereas (1) tries to confirm the truth of PN, (2) simply claims that PN is
all we need in order to be able to interpret literary texts. We will discuss the two
arguments successively.
We do not think that the Pragmatic Argument understood as (1) actually
constitutes an argument for PN in its own right. So far, the argument simply
relies on a claim: that it is pragmatically necessary to postulate a fictional narrator for every fictional narrative. This amounts to saying that (a) it is necessary to postulate a fictional narrator for every fictional narrative and ( b) that
this is so for practical reasons. Note that (a) is what PN claims. Thus, once
proponents of (1) spell out ( b), i.e. just why it is that the narrator is pragmatically necessary, what they are in effect doing is putting forth an argument for
PN. So (1) has clearly not brought us any closer to establishing the truth of PN.
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Three points should be made concerning the Pragmatic Argument understood as (2). First, imagine that all fictional works can be interpreted adequately
by positing a narrator for each single one of them. Would this show ON to be
false? Clearly not. It might still be the more adequate and precise theory of the
role fictional narrators play in fictional works of literature. And shouldn’t literary scholars as well as philosophers of literature have an interest in an adequate
understanding of how our engagement with fictional literature works? Second,
even if the debate between PN and ON turned out to be irrelevant for the practice of literary interpretation, the debate is surely far from irrelevant for discussions of narrative communication in narratology. If ON is true, standard m­odels
of ‘narrative communication’ are wrong. Thirdly, we would like to make a
rather tentative point. Remember our analysis of evaluative passages of telling
in fictional works. We argued that it is a matter of interpretation whether the
evaluation is done by a narrator, or by some other fictional agent, or whether
the passage in question is to be understood as an invitation to the reader to
imaginatively evaluate a fictional state of affairs in a particular way. Now, by
assuming right away that there is a narrator, could not interpreters run the risk
of forgetting about some of these possibilities, and especially the possibility of
there not being any fictional agent who does the evaluating? In this sense,
might ON not be pragmatically superior to PN?
Of course, critics may feel that analyzing fictional narratives with recourse
to narrators, even if there are none, may be easier simply because that is what
they are used to doing. Custom and convention alone, however, do not establish the truth of PN either.
3.7. The scope and force of counter-examples to ON
Proponents of PN might want to defeat ON on the basis of a counter-example.
In order to do this they would have to demonstrate that (i) the example can be
analyzed adequately only with recourse to a fictional narrator and that (ii) it is
characterized as narrator-less by ON. There seem to be two problems with this
approach. First, remember that the basic tenet of ON is that there is a narrator
whenever we have good reason to postulate a narrator. According to ON we
have good reason to do this if a text explicitly or implicitly authorizes us to
imagine that the story is told by a narrator. Now the fact that a certain text can
only be analyzed adequately by positing a narrator is good reason to do exactly
that. Thus a proponent of ON would claim that it is cases like these where the
text implicitly justifies us in imagining being told the story by a narrator. But
this means that whenever (i) is true, (ii) is not, and vice versa.
Note further that showing that a certain example cannot be analyzed without
recourse to a narrator does not establish the truth of PN. This is due to the fact
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Tilmann Köppe and Jan Stühring
that, logically speaking, ON establishes an existential claim (‘There are some
fictional texts that do not have a fictional narrator’), and this claim cannot be
falsified by another existential claim (‘There is a fictional narrative which cannot be analyzed without recourse to a fictional narrator’).
What has to be shown in order to defeat ON is that (i) is true of all fictional
texts. Thus, in order to defeat ON by way of counter-examples, proponents of
PN have to come up with one example for every conceivable type of narration
and show that (i) is true of it.
4.
Concluding remarks
In this paper, we have defended a fairly modest claim, namely, that there is no
need, theoretical or pragmatic, to postulate a fictional narrator for every work
of narrative fiction.42 One question which we left unaddressed is under which
conditions it should be maintained that a particular work of narrative fiction
has a fictional narrator. However, we think that there is no theoretical answer
to this that is both general and interesting. An answer that is in line with ITF
amounts to this: The question whether a text has a fictional narrator comes
down to whether the text authorizes imaginings about a fictional narrator.
There are clear cases where this is the case as well as clear cases where this is
not the case (or so we have argued). Sometimes, however, it will be unclear
whether a text authorizes imaginings about a narrator. Fictional truths (i.e. authorized imaginings) can be hard to detect, and it may be a matter of controversial debate whether a particular set of fictional truths about a narrator obtains
in a fictional world. As we have indicated at the outset, fictional narratives
come in all sorts of sizes and shapes, and the presence of fictional narrators
does not make for an exception of this claim. – Now does this answer amount
to a shortcoming of ON? We do not think so. Theoretical thought about fictional narrators should allow for, and cover, the actual diversity and complexity of fiction. Note also that this does not mean that we do not have a unitary
account of fiction, or that we do not have a unitary account of fictional narrators.43 ITF is such a unitary account: what is fictionally existent depends on
what the text of the fiction authorizes us to take as fictionally existent – that is
as true of the narrator as of any other fictional entity.44 We would claim that we
have developed a sufficiently clear account of what it means for a work of fiction to have a fictional narrator. Proponents of PN, in contrast, are in the uneasy
situation that for some texts, they stipulate an entity that is both theoretically
wrongheaded and practically useless.45
Courant Research Centre “Text Structures”, University of Göttingen
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Notes
Correspondence address: [email protected]; [email protected]
1. For talk of ‘covert’ narrators see Chatman 1978, 197. In addition, it has been proposed that
narrators can be ‘backgrounded’ (Toolan 2001, 5); ‘unself-conscious’ or ‘undramatised’
(Phelan/ Booth 2005), or ‘non-perceptible’ (Bal 1997, 27).
2. See Bareis 2006, 102, for this assessment. Amongst the proponents of PN are Ryan 1981, 517
(‘The paper defends the thesis that the concept of narrator is logically necessary of all fictions
. . . .’); Ryan 1991; Toolan 2001, 5; Rimmon-Kenan 2002, 89; Schmid 2005, 72; Neumann/ Nünning 2008, 30. Gérard Genette is not quite clear on the matter. While Genette
1980, 244, clearly favors PN, he seems to concede in Genette 1988, 101–102, that the narrating instance of a fictional narrative can be the author, which is perfectly compatible with ON.
In any case, Genette has been read as a proponent of PN, see Fludernik 2001, 621– 622;
Scheffel 2006, 91.
3. We are by no means the first to criticize PN. Previous discussions include Banfield 1982;
Morreall 1994; Weimar 1994; Walsh 1997; Ryan 2001; Gaut 2004; Kania 2005; Banfield
2005; Patron 2006; Walsh 2007, chapter 4.
4. See Searle 1975/75; Currie 1990; Walton 1990; Lamarque/Olsen 1994.
5. Lamarque and Olsen hold that authorial intentions are indeed necessary for fiction, while
Walton thinks that they are not. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter much which one is true.
We therefore chose a disjunctive definiens that combines both proposals. For discussion see
Lamarque/Olsen 1994, 45; Walton 1990, 88, 91–92; Gertken/ Köppe 2009, 247–249.
6. Dickens 2004, 13.
7. The structure and normative force of this invitation can be specified according to H. P. Grice:
‘[T]he speaker intends there to be a reason for the required response such that the utterance
brings about that response for that reason. Applied to fiction, the primary reason for an audience to adopt the fictive stance would be recognition of the story-teller’s intentions to speak
(or write) fictively.’ (Lamarque/Olsen 1994, 45). ‘Fictive stance’ is how Lamarque and Olsen
call a rule-governed response to fiction. For clarification of the normative aspect of this invitation, see Grice 1957, 385.
8. See Walton 1990, 35– 43.
9. Of course, there are cases where we might assume that an author believes what she writes to
be true, and there are cases where we might think to be true what we read in a fiction. Thus,
when in Arthur Conan Doyle’s fiction we read that London is the capital of England, we are
both justified in thinking that it is actually true that London is the capital of England (and was
so at the time when Doyle was writing) and in assuming that Doyle really thought that London was the capital of England. However, we are not justified in doing so on the basis of the
fiction. Rather, we are justified in doing so because we know that London was the capital of
England at the time when Doyle was writing and we do not have any reason to assume that
he did not know London to be the capital.
10. That is to say, inferences of the kind mentioned are not truth-preserving. From fictionally, p,
it does not follow that p, or that anybody believes that p, or that anybody asserts that p, or
meant to assert that p, etc. – Note that fictional truth is not to be conflated with truth. While
what is true arguably depends on what is the case, what is fictionally true depends on what
we are invited to imagine on the basis of a work of fiction. Fiction is entirely indifferent to
truth: a fictional truth can be either true or false or neither true nor false. Note also that assenting to this claim does not commit one to a particular truth-theory.
11. See Searle 1974/75. We do not think that Searle’s pragmatic account of fictional utterances
as pretended illocutionary acts is particularly helpful. Fiction, in our view, is not to be explained in terms of an author’s actions but rather in terms of readers’ entitlements. These
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12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
Tilmann Köppe and Jan Stühring
entitlements, in turn, must be explained with reference to social rules and conventions,
namely R1 and R2. Searle, however, was one of the first to point out that fiction depends on
social conventions and thereby laid the cornerstone of ITF.
Hardy 1998, 9.
What happens in the case of ‘fading narrators’ is that readers find fewer prescriptions to
imagine being told the story by a narrator as the story progresses.
See Walton 1990, 140 –144.
Walton 1990, 142.
See Walton 1990, 368. The claim that a narrator is not part of his story can come down to
different things; amongst them are: (1) It is a contingent fact that the narrator is not part of
his story; thus a narrator may tell about his brothers and sisters, accidentally leaving himself
out of the picture (although he might as well have included himself ). (2) It is physically
impossible that the narrator is part of his story; thus a narrator may tell about events that happened in some distant past that preceded his lifetime. (3) It is logically impossible that the
narrator is part of his story; thus a narrator may tell about some made-up events. – While we
may want to say that in (1) and (2), the narrator inhabits the same fictional world as the things
he is telling about, (3) invites us to imagine that the narrator is making up a story crowded
with fictional entities; hence we are invited to imagine that the narrator is telling a story that
is fictional from his perspective (and fictional from our perspective). Note, finally, that these
distinctions quite obviously do not exhaust the field. We may, for instance, wonder what to
make of a narrator who makes up things about himself. The upshot of all this is that the claim
that the narrator is not part of the ‘world of his story’ can mean quite different things, and this
should be acknowledged in definitions of ‘heterodiegetic’ narration.
And it is not identical with, or reduces to, any of the distinctions between third-person narrators and first-person narrators, authorial narrators and personal narrators, teller figures and
reflector figures, etc.
The argument comes in various versions. Toolan makes the rather general point that ‘Narratives have to have a teller . . . narrative is language communication like any other, requiring
a speaker . . .’ (2001, 5), while Rimmon-Kenan claims that ‘[i]n my view, there’s always a
teller in the tale, at least in the sense that any utterance or record of an utterance presupposes
someone who has uttered it.’ (2002, 89). And Chatman argues ‘that every narrative is by
definition narrated – that is, narratively presented – and that narration . . . entails an agent
even when the agent bears no signs of human personality.’ (1990, 115) At least Chatman can
be read to make a conceptual point since he thinks that his point is true by definition; see also
Scholes/Phelan/ Kellogg 2006, 240 (‘By definition narrative art requires a story and a storyteller.’).
Consider another example: From ‘every car has a steering wheel’ it does not follow that
e­very blue car has a blue steering wheel.
Cf. Kania 2005.
Compare Martínez-Bonati 1981, 85: ‘Author and work are separated by the abyss that separates the real from the imaginary. Consequently, the author of works of narrative is not the
narrator of these works.’ For Tamar Yacobi, the fictional narrator ‘serves as an indispensable
bridge between two participants who cannot otherwise meet and communicate.’ (Yacobi
1987, 335) Compare also Genette 1980, 214: ‘the narrator of Père Goriot “is” not Balzac,
even if here and there he expresses Balzac’s opinions, for this author-narrator is someone
who “knows” the Vauquer boardinghouse, its landlady and its lodgers, whereas all Balzac
himself does is imagine them; and in this sense, of course, the narrating situation of a fictional account is never reduced to its situation of writing.’ – One version of the Ontological
Gap Argument is sometimes ascribed to Levinson 1996, see Kania 2005, and ThomsonJones 2007. But we do not think that Levinson actually wants to say something along the
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22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
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lines of the Ontological Gap Argument. Rather, Levinson’s line of reasoning seems to be this:
the Analytic Argument establishes that there is a narrator for every narrative. And ‘the narrator must perforce share the fictional plane of the characters, since they are apparently real and
reportable to that narrator.’ (149) Thus, we know that in every fictional narrative there is a
fictional narrator inhabiting the world of the story. It is hard to tell what to make of Levinson’s claim that the events of the fictional world are ‘apparently real and reportable’ to the
narrator. Clearly, it is not backed up by the Analytic Argument, and Levinson does not argue
the point. Maybe Levinson thinks that narration is always factual narration, i.e. the presenting of what the narrating agent takes to be facts. In this case, it would indeed be conceptually
true that the narrator has to partake in the fictional world. Thus, the reader of a fictional narrative could not, on pain of incoherence, imagine being told the story by a narrator who is not
part of the fictional world. But why should this be true? According to ITF both imagining that
p, and imagining being told that p is possible. Furthermore, apart from factual narration there
is also fictional narration, where narrating fictionally means presenting a story to an audience
in accordance with the rules of the social institution of fiction-telling. If Levinson really
thinks that all narration is factual narration, his intuitions seem to differ from those of a great
many philosophers.
Is this assumption controversial? Hopefully not. As we will elaborate in the next section on
the Argument from Creation, assuming that an interaction between fictional and non-fictional
entities is possible amounts to a category mistake.
For a similar line of reasoning see Kania 2005.
Walton 1990, 356. An early proponent is Kayser 2000 [1957].
One may want to pin this distinction down terminologically. Thus in German the term ‘fiktional’ attaches to a mode of discourse, while the term ‘fiktiv’ attaches to what a work of
fiction is about. Accordingly, a fictional illocution is, under I1, a ‘fiktive Illokution’ while,
under I2, it is a ‘fiktionale Illokution’. This terminological distinction, however, appears to
have no generally accepted equivalent in English.
Come to think of it: in order to restrict our actual behavior in our actual world, it takes some
actual rules or conventions. A conceptual distinction, by contrast, has no such regulative or
explanatory powers.
See Hernadi 1976, 252; Genette 1990, 764; Cohn 1990, 792; Ryan 1991, 65– 67; Scheffel 2006.
This analysis, by the way, holds true regardless of the truth of either PN or ON.
See e.g. Bronzwaer 1978, 3; Margolin 1991, 521 (‘The DN [Discourse of the Narrator] is
world-stipulating.’); Phelan/ Booth 2005, 389 (‘[The narrator] is the immediate source of the
narrative text.’); Nelles 2006, 120 (‘the most Godlike narrators of all present themselves as
omnipotent, as the creators of their narrative worlds.’).
Denying this amounts to denying that the actual world is causally closed as assumed in standard theories of physics.
See Schmid 2005, 72–73, for a list of such aspects of narratives.
See Morreall 1994, 431–32. Compare Toolan on modality: ‘In essence, in grammatical and
textual studies, modality refers to some of the crucial means by which a speaker qualifies
what would otherwise be absolute statements [ . . . ]. So modality introduces a kind of coloring of the discourse, investing utterances with some of the commitments and reservations of
its speaker or author (It seems that it’s wet and cloudy in Lima; I didn’t mind Tony borrowing
my bike; Tanya must have eaten the pasta). Modality is a powerful indicator of point of view,
of the speaker’s or writer’s subjectivity; it is one of the means by which an addressee feels
they are hailed by a person with a voice and human feelings, needs, burdens, and uncertainties.’ (Toolan 2001, 71)
Two clarifications may be in order here. First, imagining must not be equated with visual
imagining, that is, with imagining seeing something (see e.g. Bennett/ Hacker 2003, 183–84).
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34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
Tilmann Köppe and Jan Stühring
We can also imagine facts one cannot see (‘Imagine that no man is immortal’; ‘Imagine that
Sally is thirteen years old’; ‘Imagine that if Peter is in the kitchen, then his dog is not with
Morton’), and we can imagine things one can see in a non-visual manner (you can imagine
that there is a church in my hometown although you have never seen it and do not know what
it looks like). R1 of ITF is entirely indifferent as to the visual aspect of the imagining we are
invited to engage in, and the fictional worlds we are invited to explore imaginatively usually
contain much more than meets the mind’s eye. Second, there may be some worries about
modally qualified statements (‘it is likely that people were sorry’). There are different types
of probabilistic statements which call for different treatments. So called ‘subjective probabilities’ or ‘credences’ measure how strongly someone believes a proposition; hence there is
no (fictional) subjective probability without a (fictional) believer. Physical probabilities
(‘Smokers have a greater chance of getting cancer than non-smokers have’) and epistemic
probabilities (‘New evidence makes it unlikely that the butler did it’) do not in this way depend on (a fictional) someone’s opinion, see Mellor 2005, 7–9.
Hardy 1998, 31.
This way of putting the matter may be somewhat misleading, see Genette 1980, 163– 64.
We should add that maybe we are also invited to consider the truth of the statement. Consider­
ing the fictional truth of the statement amounts to considering whether it holds true in the
fictional world; considering the truth of the statement amounts to considering whether it
holds true in our world; see above, note 10.
We should stress again that neither PN nor ON is necessarily committed to, or barred from,
an intentional model in interpretation. The fact that it is Hardy who wrote the passage quoted
above does not settle the question of what further (semantic) intentions he had in doing so.
Moreover, it does not settle the question of whether we should take these intentions seriously
(as an intentional interpretation would aim to do).
Note that this does not amount to the claim that there can be no values without some evaluating subject. The question of whether or not values should be taken to exist independently of
evaluating subjects seems to be irrelevant for our purposes. For in any case, it is true that
there cannot be any evaluations without evaluating subjects, as evaluations are acts performed in evaluating. What we find in fictions are evaluations. Thus, the question we are
confronted with is whom the evaluating is done by.
There is nothing metaphysically worrying about this. Just as we can imagine seeing Jude on
the street we can imagine finding his actions silly or brave, or good or bad.
Note finally, that the false assumption that fictional evaluations which cannot be attributed to
some fictional character must be attributed to a fictional narrator may be just another consequence of the idea that fictional discourse must be attributed either to some character or to
the narrator. This dichotomy is mistaken, as can be seen from the arguments we have rehearsed above.
See McHale 1983, 22, for a similar point against Banfield’s version of ON.
There are other arguments in favor of PN which we have left unaddressed, see Lewis 1983;
Currie 1990, 155–158. We hope to address these in a follow up paper.
It has been urged by Ryan 1991, 69, and taken up by Nielsen 2004, 135, that this constitutes
an argument in favor of PN.
Simply stipulating a fictional narrator for every fictional narrative is no solution. Consider an
analogy. Some illnesses are notoriously hard to detect. Does this give us grounds to stipulate
that everybody has them? No. And neither should the fact that sometimes the question
whether a text has a fictional narrator is hard to answer incline us to stipulate that every text
has one.
Work on this essay has been funded by the German Initiative of Excellence. A previous
v­ersion was presented in a seminar chaired by Monika Fludernik in Freiburg at which
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much fruitful discussion arose. We would also like to thank Tom Kindt for various helpful
suggestions.
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