Abstract
Perhaps I should begin by emphasizing, as they do, that the ideas of mine on which Julia Friederike Göhner, Tim Grafe, Yannis Krone, and Johannes Ueberfeldt focus—ideas about fictional characters, and specifically about the fictionalized versions of real people, places, etc., that sometimes turn up in works of fiction—are only a kind of codicil to the central themes of the much more comprehensive metaphysical theory I call Innocent Realism; and that Innocent Realism itself needs to be understood against the background of my defense of an approach to metaphysics as neither a priori nor dependent on the recondite kinds of experience sought by the sciences, but as requiring, rather, reflection on aspects of our everyday experience of the world so familiar that ordinarily we hardly notice them. Moreover, I will add (though Göhner et al. don’t say this) it’s a logically independent codicil; in particular, there would be no inconsistency in accepting both my conception of metaphysics, and my Innocent Realism, in combination with a different account of fictional and quasi-fictional characters.
Of the three Universes of Experience familiar to us all, the first comprises all mere Ideas, those airy nothings to which the mind of poet … might give local habitation and a name.
—C. S. Peirce
C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers, eds. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and (vols. 7 and 8) Arthur Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–58), 6.455 (1908).
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- 1.
Themes worked out starting in the last section of Susan Haack, “Reflections on Relativism: From Momentous Tautology to Seductive Contradiction” (1996), in Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 149–66; developed in more detail in “Realisms and Their Rivals: Recovering Our Innocence,” Facta Philosofica, 4, no.1 (2001): 67–88, in “The World of Innocent Realism” (first published in German in 2014), in this volume, pp. 33–55, and in “The Real, the Fictional, and the Fake,” Spazio Filosofico 8 (2013): 209–17.
- 2.
See Susan Haack, “The Legitimacy of Metaphysics: Kant’s Legacy to Peirce, and Peirce’s to Philosophy Today” (2004), reprinted in Polish Journal of Philosophy, 1 (2007): 29–43.
- 3.
Someone might, for example, opt for a simpler (though I think, less plausible) account according to which, if a character is in any respects fictional, that is sufficient for him or her to count unqualifiedly as a fictional character.
- 4.
George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1891–72; New York: Signet Classics, 1964).
- 5.
In the town of Nuneaton, in the English midlands, “[n]ot far from [a statue of George Eliot] … there’s a pub named for her, the George Eliot Hotel, that is said to be the one on which she modeled the Red Lion in Scenes from the Clerical Life.” Rebecca Mead, My Life in Middlemarch (Bond Street Books [imprint of Random House, Canada], 2014), 32.
- 6.
Edward Rutherfurd, New York: The Novel (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009).
- 7.
At the beginning of one of her novels Sue Grafton writes that, while the fictional Santa Teresa where her feisty, eccentric private investigator Kinsey Millhone plies her trade resembles the real Santa Maria, California, she has freely “relocated, rerouted, and renamed” roads, invented small towns, etc; and she asks readers please not to write and tell her she got it wrong! Sue Grafton, S is for Silence (New York: Berkely Books, 2006).
- 8.
The phrase derives from the way that, as they tell the story of their biggest catch over and over, fishermen often exaggerate the size of the fish they caught.
- 9.
Zoë Fairbairns, Stand We at Last (London: Virago Press, 1987).
- 10.
Susan Haack, “Not Cynicism but Synechism: Lessons from Classical Pragmatism” (2005), in Susan Haack, Putting Philosophy to Work: Inquiry and its Pace in Culture (2008; expanded ed., Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2013), 83–96, 276–77.
- 11.
The word “fact” has the same root; but that (if you’ll pardon the pun) is a whole other story.
- 12.
James Frey, A Million Little Pieces (New York: Doubleday/Anchor Books, 2003).
- 13.
I give such an example in chapter 7 of Defending Science—Within Reason: Between Scientism and Cynicism (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003), comparing the way a novelist would feel if his story turns out to be true, and the way a scientist would feel if his theory turns out to be false.
- 14.
Sinclair Lewis, Arrowsmith (1925; New York: Signet Classics, 1961).
- 15.
John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress (1678; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960). (The Wkikipedia article on this book, by the way, includes a long list of “The Pilgrim’s Progress in films, television, video games, and music,” and another substantial list of “Retellings.”) “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” available at http://en.wikipedia.org/The_Pilgrim’s_Progress.
- 16.
The first novel in the series was Dorothy L. Sayers, Whose Body? (1923; New York: Avon Books, 1961); the last was Busman’s Honeymoon (1937; New York: HarperTorch, 2006).
- 17.
The first novel in the series was Robert B. Parker, The Godwulf Manuscript (New York: Dell, 1973); the last, published after Parker’s death in 2010, was Sixkill (New York: Berkley Books, 2011).
- 18.
Shakespeare’s “All’s Well that Ends Well,” for example, is adapted from Boccaccio’s Decameron (third day, ninth story). Anne Wilson, “The All’s Well Story,” available at http://www.annewilson.co.uk/allswellhtm
- 19.
Tom Stoppard, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead,” first staged at the Edinburgh Festival in 1966.
- 20.
Rudyard Kipling, “The Master Cook,” in James Cochrane, ed., Kipling (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1982), 287–88.
- 21.
Ace Atkins, Lullaby (New York: Berkley Publishing Group, 2012).
- 22.
Jill Paton Walsh, The Latin Scholar (New York: Minotaur, 2014).
- 23.
“Jurisfiction is the name given to the policing agency that works inside books.” Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots (note 25 below), 26.
- 24.
See, e.g., Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2001); Lost in a Good Book (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2002); The Well of Lost Plots (New York: Penguin Books, 2003).
- 25.
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1860–61; New York, Bantam Classic, 2003). Dickens’s Miss Havisham is an elderly lady who was jilted at the altar, and still wears her moldering wedding dress and keeps her moldering wedding-cake; Fforde’s Miss Havisham, however, is not a recluse but a Jurisfiction supervisor—and a demon driver.
- 26.
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), in Roger Lancelyn Green, ed., The Works of Lewis Carroll (Feltham, Middlesex: Spring Books, 1968), 19–110, 61–67. Fforde’s “cat formerly know as Cheshire,” however, guides visitors to the library that contains all the fiction ever published and, in the basement, the twenty-six floors of the “well of lost plots,” where books are constructed, honed, and polished in preparation for a place in the library above ground.
- 27.
“Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow/With silver bells and cockle shells/And pretty maids all in a row”; Fforde’s Mary Mary, however, lives in a grounded flying boat and keeps a pet dodo.
- 28.
As the co-author of a play about the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger said to me, “if we’d have put in a scene where Heidegger went to the U.S.—which we know he never did—the play would have been much less realistic.” Mark Migotti and Richard Savage, “Hannah’s Turn,” performed at the Summerworks Festival for Drama, Toronto, August 2012.
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Haack, S. (2016). The Real, the Fictional, and the Somewhere-in-Between: Response to Julia Friederike Göhner, Tim Grafe, Yannis Krone, and Johannes Ueberfeldt. In: Göhner, J., Jung, EM. (eds) Susan Haack: Reintegrating Philosophy. Münster Lectures in Philosophy, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24969-8_11
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