Editor's Choice
Fictional generosity in nature is a compensation for the finitude of humanity itself".
The culmination of half a century of fictional research.
Selected for the French National Book Center Award Translation Project.
Translated and recommended by Professor Cao Danhong, doctoral supervisor of the School of Foreign Chinese Languages, Nanjing University.
A cross-media, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary perspective that examines diverse fictional practices.
In the "post-truth era", defend the border between fact and fiction.
Introduction
The construction and expansion of fictional culture in our time has largely shaped the way we understand and exist in the world. Fact and Fiction: On Boundaries is the work of French academic star Françoise Lavoca. The book is a complete assessment of the controversies surrounding fiction from ancient times to the present day, rethinking the boundaries of fiction in literature, film, theater, and video games, spanning literary theory, psychoanalysis, law, cognitive science, and more.
The book is extremely rich and almost encyclopedic, which not only shows the author's intention to construct a new discipline, which is open to the theories and methods of different disciplines, but also summarizes the research on fiction in the past half century, aiming to better understand the relationship between fiction culture and society.
It is worth mentioning that although this book is about "fiction", it is also a defense of "reality", showing human efforts to understand "reality". After all, the generosity of fiction is a compensation for the finitude of humanity itself.
About the Author
Françoise Lavoca, writer and literary theorist, professor and doctoral supervisor of comparative literature at the Sorbonne du Neuuvelles de Paris, France, honorary doctorate from the University of Chicago, researcher at the Institut d'Études Française de l'Académie de la Société de l'Académie de la Collège de l'Académie de la Collège de l'Académie de la Laurel de la Ville (chair of the Division of Literary and Dramatic Studies).
Her main research areas are fiction and possible world theory, comparative literary epistemology, 16th-18th century Europe** and drama, etc., and she is the author of "Unfortunate Arcadia: On the Origin of Modern **", "Pan Flute on the Pyreak: Pan God and Lin Shen in the Renaissance and Baroque Era", "Fact and Fiction: On Boundaries", "Characters Can Dream", etc. In 1998, he was awarded the Prize of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences.
About the translator: Cao Danhong is a professor and doctoral supervisor of the French Department of the School of Foreign Chinese of Nanjing University, a visiting scholar at the Sorbonne University in France, and a national young talent selected. His main research interests are translation studies and French literary studies. He has translated and published more than 10 masterpieces of French literature and literary theory, such as "Fact and Fiction: On Boundaries", "Another Language in Sound" and "Impossibility".
Wonderful book review
The incisiveness of Lavoca's stance lies in the fact that she has at the same time succeeded in demonstrating the pervasiveness of borders and the diversity of ways in which they have been portrayed across eras and cultures.
Jean-Marie Schaefer (French contemporary aesthete).
Françoise Lavoca, a professor at the University of Paris-Nouvelle Sorbonne in France, is an awe-inspiring new book, and it is a blessing to have such a book with such a rich collection of information, almost encyclopedic completeness, excellent structure and clarity of diction. This book is a huge achievement and will certainly be an important reference in the field for a long time to come.
Jan Bettens (Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Leuven, Belgium).
Lavoca's book is an effective response to the over-generalization of theories or cultural analysis, theoretical parochialism, and so on. It covers a wide range of historical periods and analyses, not limited to contemporary Western society, but across time, space, and media, fully demonstrating the diversity, complexity, and fragility of the connections between the real and imaginary worlds. ......Although much of the book is devoted to "fiction", it is also largely a defense of "reality": it is committed to a rigorous and consensual assessment of what is "what is", with reason, logic, and science as indispensable tools. At the same time, the book passionately defends the "fictional" practices of art and games that keep us nimble and alert, because they also complement this effort to understand the "real."
Lisbet Kotals Altaïs (Professor of Literature, Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, The Netherlands).
The blurring of the boundary between fiction and fact suggests the necessary ...... to establish boundariesBoundaries, intelligence against disinformation**.
Musanostra Book Review.
Literary or philosophical theories of the last fifty years have tended to support a kind of solipsistic skepticism, in which the world is seen as appearances, where everything is a story impregnated with imagination, or even a beautiful lie. ......Lavoca's precise analysis of the writings of Ricoeur, White, Barthes, Weiner, Lacan, Solers, Forrestal, and Cristeva shows that the postmodernist intellectual landscape shares the idea that "everything is fiction" in a lasting and profound way.
en attendant nadeau** Book Review.
The field of fiction extends far and wide, and it can be a challenge to look at fiction in an all-encompassing light, as Lavoca does. The distinction between narrative and storytelling, the monism and dualism controversy, pan-fictionalism, the relationship between fiction and history and reality, human cognitive faculties, the role of faith, the limitations imposed by law on fiction, virtual worlds, the empathy that forms the basis of our relationship with fiction, the phenomenon of identity, the theory of possible worlds, multiple paradoxes, the wonder of imaginary worlds, restorytelling, pretty much everything.
Zone Critique** Book Review.
Table of Contents
Introduction 001 Chinese Translation Preface 001
Introduction 001 Part 1 The Monism vs. Dualism Controversy 001
Chapter 1: From Narrative to Storytelling 003
1. From "Différentialisme" to "Monism"007
From the fictitious internal standard to the external standard 008
The Narrator Theory: An Illusory Solution 012
2. What's left of fiction under the prism of storytelling?015
A kind of regression?016
Fictional vs. Fictional 019
III. Lessons from the Expansion of Fictional Concepts 027
Fictional Resistance 028
A kind of political boundary 029
Chapter 2 Fictional History, Historical Fiction 034
1. The Pan-Fictionalist Movement (1967-1987) 036
"Real Effect" (EFFET de réel), from ** to history:
Roland Barthes (1967) 037
Boundaries of Boundaries: Lico & White 042
Textual justification 046
Accept Justification 052
Cognitive Justification 059
Reef of the factual monument 063
Imaginary Palace: Paul Weiner 071
II. The Battlefield of the 17th Century 084
Hayden White's Historical Arguments 084
Revelation of Parallel Contrasts 096
Correcting History 098 with fiction
Chapter 3 On the Impossibility of Truth 102
I. Lacan's Reference to Bentham 105
II. Jacques Lacan's Neo-Baroque Anthropology 110
Shadow Theater of the Subject and the World 110
The proper place of literary fiction 115
The allegory of butterflies, or life is not as dreamy as 117
3. Fiction 2 = Truth 124
Parallel paths of theory 124
Hatred of fiction 126
superposition" 131
Chapter 4 The Boundaries of Cognition 136
I. The cognitive ability to distinguish between the real and the imagined 138
II. The Differential Effects of Fictional and Factual Artwork on Readers and Spectators 143
III. Transfer and Simulation: The Continuum Hypothesis 147
IV. The Pleasure of Facts 153
V. Fictional Theorists Caught in the Trap of Simulation 157
Part II: Culture and Beliefs 165
Chapter 1 Is Fiction an Invention of Western Modernity?177
I. Reflections on Fiction in The Tale of Genji 177
II. The Anthropological Boundaries of Fictional Cultures 191
What about Aristotle?192
Western Sources of Fictional Problems 192
Drama & Ritual: Fiction vs. Action 194
Action and Fiction in Several Traditional Societies 197
The Arandans and the "Dream Creature" 197
The Witch Song of the Kuna: Paradox and Performative 201
Chapter 2: Fiction and Belief 206
I. The Game of Fiction and Belief 208
Game with Faith 211
Fictional Problematic Functions 214
II. Religion and Fiction: Interweaving 218
Uncontrollable Games (17th century) 221
Myth, Religion and Fiction: The Matrix (1999-2003) 224
3. Blasphemy, imaginary borders234
*The Last** (1954): Demonized Counterfactual 244
Jerry Springer: The Opera (2003): Meta TV Reality TV with Parody 249
Chapter III: The Boundaries of Law 253
I. Misdemeanors related to the facts 258
II. From Infringement of the Right to Name to Invasion of Personal Privacy 263
III. The duality implied by jurisprudence 272
4. Is the virtual world a place outside the law?276
Chapter 4: Virtuality, Reality, and Fiction 287
I. (Quasi) Overall Reproduction: Interaction and Immersion 289
2. Fun Synthesis World 295
Virtual worlds pretending to be real 297
Hybridation of the place 301
Game avatars: digital avatars or characters?309
Games & Fiction 318
Chapter 5: People, Characters 331
I. Updating the Theory of Identity 334
2. The culture of empathy 341
III. The New Fictional Paradox 344
Useful fiction: Characters as Neighbors 346
Empathy and Morality 348
4. Empathy vs Identity 351
Part III From One World to Another 359
Chapter 1 The Real World and the Possible World 368
1. Is the real world one of the possible worlds?373
Referential and Reality 374
Pluralism in the world 384
II. The Essential Characteristics of Fictional Works 386
Imaginary World of Possibility 386
Fictional ontological heterogeneity 390
Chapter 2: The Impossible Possible World 402
I. The Paradox of Fictional Paradoxes 404
II. The Non-Existential Paradox 409
III. The Structural Paradox of Fiction 412
The Liar Paradox, The Impossible Narrator 413
Set Theory Paradox 418
IV. The Special Case of Time Travel 419
Paradox and Disaster 420
Time travel in the 17th century 427
Chapter 3: Imaginary Boundaries in Fiction 432
1. The fictional world as a biotope 435
Meteorology and Food 435
* Time of the country with the body 441
II. Imagination, Reality and Death 449
Legend of the death of the creature 450
The sorrow of the Creator 453
3. Towards an undifferentiated ontology456
Chapter 4 Fictional Boundaries and the Problem of Narrative 463
I. Retreat of the Border 466
Ontological Transfers, Expulsion of Rhetorical Transfers466
Boundary displacement and transcription dissolution 472
II. Pseudo-Narrative and True Boundaries 475
3. The Real Presence Effect (EFFET de Présence Réelle) 482
4. Fictional Inner Narrative 490
The degree of fusion of motivation and the paradox of recounting is 494
Spiritual World (Mondes mentaux) 495
The World of False Beliefs 497
Pluralism of interpretation 501
Literality (littéralité) 504
Conclusions 516 Main References 531
Table 604 of the translation of personal names
Preface Preamble
Introduction. Cao Danhong.
Fact and Fiction is a heavyweight monograph by French literary researcher Françoise Lavoc in recent years, published by the Sey publishing house in 2016 and included in the "Poetics" series edited by Genet. The publication of Fact and Fiction has attracted much attention from the Francophone community. In 2017, Antoine Compargnon organized a symposium on "Literature: A New Direction in the Decade" at the Collège de France, introducing the more representative literary theory works published in France in the decade from 2007 to 2016 in the form of a book a year, and "Fact and Fiction" became a representative work of literary theory in 2016. In the years since its publication, the influence of Fact and Fiction has spilled over into the French-speaking world, and has been translated into English, Italian, and now in Chinese. Fact and Fiction has a short subtitle, "pour une frontière" (On Boundaries), and the word "pour" is in favor of it, indicating the author's position on fact and fiction, and also making clear the motivation for writing the book. In the introduction, we will show how the author defends this boundary, reveals the significance of this defensive action, and considers the value of Fact and Fiction for the study of literature today.
1. Blurring of boundaries.
The reason for defending the boundary between fact and fiction is, first of all, because the author believes that in today's society, "the idea that imaginary boundaries may disappear or eventually blur is widely accepted" (Introduction). Lavoca boils down the reasons for this ambiguity to four aspects and discusses them in four chapters in the first part of his work, "The Monism vs. Binism Controversy." These four aspects include the success of the concept of storytelling, the influence of postmodernism on Roland Barthes, Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White, Paul Veyne, Jacques Lacan and psychoanalytic influences, and cognitive science influences.
The first is the total triumph of storytelling in the Western world since the mid-1990s. A 2007 survey showed that 20.2 million results appeared after Google typed "storytelling." This figure multiplied tenfold at the beginning of 2021. The so-called storytelling refers to the substitution of reality with a carefully woven story in order to achieve the purpose of "formatting the mind" world and even mind control. As "a communicative, control, and power technique", storytelling was born out of a wide range of interest in narratology, but its practice and thinking eventually replaced narratology on many levels. As a result of this substitution, on the one hand, storytelling's adherents are more likely to come from the English-speaking world, the successors of Searle's pragmatics, and blur the boundaries between the two by denying the internal criteria of fiction held by most narrative scholars, arguing that it is impossible to distinguish between fact and fiction from form alone. On the other hand, storytelling is more applied to the field of political economy, so the research object of researchers has also shifted from the field of literature to non-literary discourse practices. The use of the broad term "story" to understand all aspects of social life has led to a great expansion of the fictional notions associated with stories, culminating in a kind of "panfictionnaliste" that "dissolves the boundaries of fiction as well as the fictional ideas themselves" (Part I, Chapter 1).
The second is the confusion between history and fiction caused by postmodern thought. Lavoca focuses on the theories of Bart, White, Ricoeur, and Weiner because "they formed the basis of the arguments of the 1960s-1980s that questioned the distinction between history and fiction" (Part I, Chapter 2). From Barthes's Discourse of History (1967), Ricoeur's Time and Narrative, White's Metahistoriography and The Content of Form to Weiner's Whether the Ancient Greeks Believed Their Myths and How Man Writes History, the attitude of these theorists can be summed up by Jacques Derrida's famous quote that "there is nothing but the text". Everything is woven by language, and language can only point to itself. In the writings of this group of postmodern thinkers, even 19th-century realism**, which was considered to be a faithful representation of reality, was deconstructed, accused of presenting the truth as an "effet de réel" (real effect) or "illusion référentielle" (illusion référentielle). These thinkers went on to extend this conclusion to all linguistic products, including historical writing, with Hayden White taking it to the extreme, using four figurative modes to describe four ways of understanding and interpreting history, equating the writing of history with the compilation of plots, thus erasing the formal differences between historical writing and fictional creation.
Again, it is psychoanalytic questioning of reality. Jacques Lacan's famous phrase "Le réel, c'est l'impossible" (Le réel, c'est l'impossible) fully embodies the concept of truth in part of psychoanalytic theory. In Lacan's view, the real is both the ultimate goal of the psychoanalyst and at the same time impossible, because there is a subject between the real and the knowledge of the real, the subject's desires dominate his senses, and the subject's language limits his expression of what he perceives. Like other post-modern theories, Lacan's view of reality was deeply influenced by the linguistic view of his time, which regarded reality as a product of linguistic construction, and at the same time believed that this reality was not the same as reality. Therefore, literature and art can only provide a simulacrum of reality, a representation of reality, or even a representation of such representation. In this way, "the poles that form between what 'real' and 'imaginary' usually refer to are completely reversed." Reality is located in the undefinable, untouchable psychological reality of the subject (das ding), and fiction encompasses the totality of feelings, discourses, concepts, and socio-artistic products that constitute the 'world'" (Part I, Chapter 3). Lacan's famous words have been repeatedly quoted and commented on, especially by Juliaf Kristiva (1979, 1983) and Philippe Sollers (1971, 1983), and have long been regarded as the norm in the field of literature, shaping a sense of "illusionary anthropology", whose influence has continued into the 21st century, mainly reflected in the French philippe Forest 1999, 2006).
Finally, there is the impact of the development of cognitive science, especially cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Broadly speaking, the first study to examine literary works from a cognitive perspective was the psychologist F. Bartlett c.Bartlett published his book Remembering in 1932. The combination of cognitive science and literary studies in the narrow sense began around the mid-to-late 1970s and has become an important avenue for interdisciplinary literary studies today. Cognitive psychology mainly examines the effect of literary reading on the behavior of the subjects through experiments, and experiments have shown that textual attributes—whether they are considered factual or fictional texts—do not have a significant effect on the experimenter. In the field of neuroscience, mirror neurons were discovered in the early 1990s, and researchers observed through scientific experiments such as magnetic resonance imaging that an action, whether it is real, perceived, or imagined, activates the same neural networks, and the neural networks are active for the same amount of time. In general, cognitive science is concerned with people's ability to understand narratives, but it does not deliberately distinguish between factual and fictional narratives, because in the view of cognitive scientists, the changes caused by these two types of narratives at the neuronal level are the same, both in terms of process and impact. Such conclusions have profoundly influenced the field of criticism, where "the influence of cognitive science has been seen as a rejection of, or even a failure of, the problem of the difference between factual and fictional narratives" (Part I, Chapter 4).
In short, the pan-fiction theory that emerged at the end of the 20th century can be summed up in the words of philosophers Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen as "the most extreme rhetoric, reflecting a general tendency in modern thought according to which there is no 'real' world, everything that exists is only constructed, reality is an illusion, and fiction is everywhere".
2. The defense of borders and their significance.
Although Lavoca considers himself a researcher of fiction theory, the starting point of Fact and Fiction is not to defend fiction. Because in Lavoca's view, despite the growing distrust of fiction among its contemporaries, fiction has always maintained a strong vitality that we do not need to defend, and the prevalence of various pan-fiction theories also proves the vitality of fiction from another perspective. "In turn, imaginary borders need to be defended, because for fifty years, after repeated attacks, they have been destroyed. (Conclusion).
To defend the boundaries of fiction is to insist on a distinction between fiction and fact. In fact, in presenting the pan-fiction view, Lavoca has already pointed out the contradictions of pan-fictionalism itself at the same time, because these theories themselves imply a dualistic idea. From the perspective of storytelling theory, although such theories do have a tendency to erase the boundaries between fact and fiction, many storytelling theorists do not treat all transcendent phenomena equally, and often distinguish between deceptive fiction and aesthetic fiction at the last minute—that is, fiction in the narrow sense, in Lavoca's words, "fiction in the narrow sense is always the implicit model for most of the treatises on storytelling" (Part I, Chapter 1). Fiction in the narrow sense is the belief that "fiction is a cultural product created by the imagination, not limited by the vériconditionnalité established by the reference to the empirical world" (Part I, Chapter 1). The distinction between deceptive fiction and aesthetic fiction, between the imaginary world and the empirical world, undoubtedly requires a solid judgment of truth and falsehood.
From the perspective of historical writing, no matter how much the new historicism emphasizes the fictionalization of history, the starting point of historians is always the pursuit of truth. Historians often have to rely on imagination to fill in the gaps when their working conditions are limited, but when faced with extreme issues such as catastrophes and catastrophes, historians' ethical concepts and professional ethics often prevent them from adopting fictional methods, especially when such methods may lead to the distortion of history. From the recipient's point of view, the reading of historical documents necessarily takes into account "the pragmatic context of the title of the work, the identity of the author, the paratext, etc." (Part I, Chapter 2), that is, "the predominant reading contract in the reading of historical narratives is intended to convince us of the existence of an authoritative voice and to trust it, unless there is an indication to the contrary (e.g., we are told that the historian is not very credible, etc.)" (Part I, Chapter 2). History is a truth-seeking discipline in which the deliberate erasure of the boundaries between fact and fiction often implies some kind of political or ideological appeal.
From the perspective of cognitive science, the development of psychology and neuroscience in recent years has not erased the distinction between fact and fiction, but has confirmed the distinction hypothesis. Cognitive science uses experiments such as questionnaires, tests, or magnetic resonance imaging to reveal that "we have a cognitive construct capable of distinguishing between reality and imagination, especially when it comes to memory processes" (Part I, Chapter 4), that is, the brain's understanding of fact and fiction "uses different types of memory......Different types of memories elicit special neuronal responses, confirming differences in their logical properties" (Part II, Chapter 5). Specifically, fact versus fiction stimulates different areas of the brain. The fact is that the midline structures of the cerebral cortex, especially the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, are more stimulated, and the fictional stimulation is mainly the lateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex. Different areas of the brain are associated with different memory types, with facts activating memories related to oneself and triggering individual responses, while fiction activates semantic memory, which in turn controls and reduces mood swings. If the brain judges a work as fictional, then the acceptance of the work will lead to a disconnect between cognition and perception, loosen moral judgment and empathy responses, and encourage us to be more tolerant of fictional characters, and on the other hand, it will prevent us from taking action to rescue the "princess" from rushing to the stage of the puppet show to rescue the "princess", as Don Quixote did. In fact, for some scholars, "the ability to distinguish between different types and to control confusion between them is a hallmark of mental health."
In an age when dualism is easily criticized, why does Lavoca not only insist on distinguishing between fact and fiction, but also talk about it in hundreds of pages?In fact, although Fact and Fiction repeatedly points out that the insistence on the boundary between fact and fiction is "cognitively, conceptually and politically necessary", or that "the definition of the boundary is socially and politically significant" (Introduction), it does not systematically demonstrate the dangers of boundary confusion. On other occasions, though, we've seen Lavoca's case for defending the border. In a special moot court in 2017, scholars represented by Lavoca, as the "plaintiffs", filed an "indictment" against the practice of blurring the boundaries, stating their five "crimes": If you do not distinguish between fact and fiction, it is particularly easy to lead to the proliferation of fake news in the so-called "post-truth era";To deny the distinction between history and fiction is to deny the ethics of historians and their responsibility to reveal the truth about history and the pastBlurring boundaries can sometimes cause harm to others, especially in fictional works that are based on real people;Blurring boundaries can prevent us from experiencing the joy of fiction and its play with boundariesBlurring boundaries can lead to cognitive and scientific errors.
For all these reasons, the idea that the boundary between fact and fiction should not be confused has been supported by many scholars, with Schaefer even arguing that "let us assume for a moment that human beings 'decide' no longer to distinguish between the real and the false, or that technological progress will one day cause us to confuse the real with the imaginary......If this were to happen, the result would be simpler, rather than a completely alienated society, which would be the rapid extinction of our expansive race."
3. The nature of fiction.
Defending the boundary between fact and fiction means, on the other hand, prejudging the different attributes of fact and fiction. In fact, defining the essential nature of fiction is precisely one of the ...... of the work that Part III of Fact and Fiction attempts to undertake