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The Distinction of Fiction. By Dorrit Cohn. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. ix + 197 pages.
Poststructuralist theorists have tended to collapse the categories of fiction and nonfiction, especially those of fictional and referential narratives. According to them, all narratives share the same common feature. They are, as Hayden White puts it, "emplotted," that is, their materials are organized into coherent stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. If there is a difference between them, it must be located at the level of the speech act that sets the initial relationship between a text and its readers. Authors of nonfiction, John Searle thus contends, "assert seriously," whereas authors of fiction only "pretend to assert." But on the formal level, for White as well as for Searle, fiction and nonfiction are indistinguishable from one another. No textual, semantic, or syntactic property identifies a work as "fictional," setting it apart from a piece that should be classified as "referential."
Other theorists, though, have maintained that the categories of fiction and nonfiction should remain discrete, and Dorrit Cohn's The Distinction of Fiction constitutes the strongest statement to date that articulates this "separatist" position. Taking "distinction" both in the sense of "uniqueness" and "differentiation" (vi), Cohn argues that fictional and referential narratives are in fact ontologically dissimilar, and that formal features also distinguish the two genres. According to her, works of fiction have at least three "signposts" (109). First, the traditional dichotomy story-discourse only applies to them. Historical narratives need a third level: "reference," namely, a data base of "verifiable documentation" (112). In this respect, only referential (i.e., historical, journalistic, autobiographical) narratives are properly speaking "emplotted"; there is nothing to "emplot" in works of fiction since the events that they report are invented, and they should rather be described as "plotted" (114). Furthermore, the no-less traditional dichotomy author-narrator is also reserved for fiction; Dickens obviously is not David Copperfield, and the heterodiegetic narrator of Death in Venice expresses opinions that do not necessarily coincide with Thomas Mann's "implicit norms" (129). The narrator of a piece of historiography, though, is also its author; the latter is expected to stand behind the statements that the former is making, as the possibility of a "play" between the two...