Imagining Fact and Fiction

Abstract

Why does it matter whether a work is fiction or non-fiction? Gregory Currie claims that the distinction is crucial:

There can hardly be a more important question about a piece of writing or speech than this: Is it fiction or nonfiction? If the question seems not especially important, that’s because we rarely need to ask it. Most often we know, in advance of reading or hearing, that the discourse before us is one or the other. But imagine we did not know whether The Origin of Species is sober science or Borgesian fantasy on a grand scale. We would not know whether, or in what proportions, to be instructed or delighted by it. No coherent reading of it would be possible.¹

Whether or not we agree with Currie’s view of the general importance of the distinction, the classification of a text as fiction or non-fiction can certainly make a difference to how we respond to it.² We read history, not romance, to learn about the past. We worry about the serial killer identified in the newspapers, not the fictional psychopath in a popular novel. We praise Shakespeare for the artistically justified distortions in his history plays, whereas we would be critical of such blatant falsehoods in a history of England.