The Reality of Fiction: A Functionalist Approach to Literature

SVERY TEXTUAL MODEL involves certain heuristic decisions; the model cannot be equated with the literary text itself, but simply opens up a means of access to it. Whenever we analyze a text, we never deal with a text pure and simple, but inevitably apply a frame of reference specifically chosen for our analysis. Literature is generally regarded as fictitious writing, and indeed, the very term implies that the words on the printed page are not meant to denote any given in the empirical world, but are to represent something which is not given. For this reason fiction and reality have always been classified as pure opposites, and so a good deal of confusion arises when one seeks to define the reality of literature. At one moment it is viewed as autonomous, the next as heteronomous,1 in accordance with whatever frame of reference is being applied. Whatever the frame, the basic and misleading assumption is that is an antonym of reality. In view of the tangled web of definitions resulting from this juxtaposition, the time has surely come to cut the thread altogether and replace ontological arguments with functional, for what is important to readers, critics, and authors alike is what literature does and not what it means. If and are to be linked, it must be in terms not of opposition but of communication, for the one is not the mere opposite of the other-fiction is a means of telling us something about reality. Thus we need no longer search for a frame of reference embracing both ends of a scale, or for the different attributes of truth and fiction. Once we are released from