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ABSTRACT
This paper rehearses a debate with Stacie Friend on the nature of the fiction/non-fiction divide. The paper first puts in a sharper focus the dividing issue, arguing that it is ontological in character. It focuses on how the distinction emerges in films, by contrasting fiction films with documentaries; Friend has also discussed films, even though the debate has mostly studied the literary case. The medium does not affect the main issues, but it raises interesting questions. After highlighting two important points of agreement with Friend, in contrast with some other proponents of a similar view on the present debate like Currie, the paper offers a normative account of the distinction, offering reasons to prefer it to Friend’s.
Acknowledgements
The author thank the audience for their comments and suggestions. Stacie Friend’s writings, and conversations with her over the years, have strongly influenced my thoughts on these issues. The author also thank the Bianca Cepollaro, Filippo Contesi, Stacie Friend, Dan López de Sa, Adam Sennet, Enrico Terrone, the editors and two referees for this volume for their very helpful comments, and Michael Maudsley for his grammatical revision.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Recent discussion of these issues mostly stems from the influential work of Kit Fine; cf. Rosen (Citation2015) for a good account and further references.
2 The account in Section 3 for kinds like fiction and assertion takes them to be social constructs grounded on social rules. They are ‘Platonic’ essences (defined by their ideal or correct instances), as opposed to ‘causal’ essences like that of water (Newman and Knobe Citation2019).
3 As a referee pointed out, my interpretation casts Friend’s view as an institutional approach like those listed at the outset, including mine, which seems apt to me. Stock (Citation2017, 164–165) interprets Friend’s claims in similar terms. Friend (Citation2012, 193) appears to confirm this: ‘this is not merely an epistemic requirement’. However, Friend (Citation2020, 73) declares that Walton’s (Citation1970) claims are ‘not ontological but epistemological’.
4 This proposal is consistent with recent accounts of genres, like Currie’s (Citation2004) for genres instantiated in a community (i.e. possibly changing historical sequences of features related by expectations in the community), or Abell’s (Citation2015) intentionalist account. Closest is Evnine’s (Citation2015) view of genres as historical traditions, except that he (Evnine 2015, 11) makes anti-definitional claims – in my view, mixing up epistemological issues about concepts with ontological ones about the kinds they pick out.
5 Masha Gessen’s New Yorker says that HBO 2019 fiction Chernobyl is a ‘lie’ including ‘fantasies, embellishments, shortcuts’ which ‘are not the truth’ (‘What HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’ Got Right, and What It Got Terribly Wrong’, June 4, 2019); cf. García-Carpintero (Citation2016).
6 This is meant seriously, not just to fictitiously add realism to the tale as this sort of claim is sometimes meant. Thanks to Enrico Terrone for the Ginzburg example, and help with the translation.
7 The Mexican writer Luis Villoro amusingly reports the anecdote that a character in Marías’s novel he had in a review proclaimed fictional wrote to him to protest his existence, http://www.javiermarias.es/PAGINASDECRITICAS/criticasnegraespalda.html.
8 Davies (Citation2015) and Stock (Citation2017) provide more sophisticated versions of the view that fictions must include made up content. Their views, I have argued, still fall short of what is needed (García-Carpintero Citation2016, Citation2019b).
9 Ginzburg offers a similar justification: ‘I have written only what I remember. Because of that, if the book is read as a chronicle, it would be objected that it has infinite gaps’.
10 I am envisaging a fictional version of Caouette’s 2003 Tarnation, or Apted’s Up series; Nuria Giménez’s 2019 My Mexican Bretzel and Sébastien Lifshitz's 2019 Q are plausible examples.
11 Cf. Di Summa-Knoop (Citation2016, Section 2) for good reasons against claims that Boyhood is not a fiction. García-Carpintero (Citation2013, Citation2016) discusses literary cases. Terrone’s (Citation2020a, Citation2020b) account of the difference between documentaries and docudramas excludes the possibility I envisage, but I cannot critically engage his reasons here.
12 Interestingly, shots of Eyes Wide Shut work rather like ad hoc fictional reenactments in Room 237, illustrating what the voice-over narrator tells us; they are thus not meant to work as traces of the relevant pro-filmic scene with Cruise and other actors, but as fictive in their own way, albeit not of course for the contents whose imaginings they prescribe in the original film. Shots of The Shining do play the role of traces of the pro-filmic scene; they of course don’t play the same narrative role in Room 237 as in the original fiction.
13 Terrone (Citation2020b) mentions Breloer’s 2019 Brecht as an example. I am not sure; I for one watched it as a (fictional) docudrama, a biopic. Paisley Livingston suggested Von Trier’s 2004 The Five Obstructions, which does seem genuinely puzzling to me. The IMDB classifies it as a documentary, but A. O. Scott in the New York Times (26/5/2004) calls it a ‘semi-documentary’, and Robert Ebert at the Chicago Sun Times (10/9/2004) doesn’t take a stand. I am not aware that Von Trier has classified his film, but he is notoriously unreliable anyway. To my mind, Nuria Giménez’s already mentioned My Mexican Bretzel is another example.
14 We also assume that the pro-filmic scene was spontaneously recorded (not scripted, nor acted) – an assumption of which (unlike in Nanook, or Wright’s 1936 Night Mail) the credits at the end disabuse us. This is why, unlike those two controversial cases, No Lies is not an problematic documentary, but a derisive mockumentary.
15 I am following here a helpful suggestion Stacie Friend once made. Williamson (Citation1996, 241–242) envisages such a comparative form for constitutive rules.
16 Friend (Citation2007b) also makes this point in her brilliant analysis of Vidal’s Lincoln. Currie (Citation2020, 21–25) offers essentially the same account of why we classify hybrids the way we do.
17 Cf. Levinson (Citation2016) for discussion and further references. Note that while he and others offer good reasons why particular artworks are historically bound, they give none for the claim that the general category of artworks is similarly bound.
18 Or artwork, for that matter; cf. Currie (Citation2010) for an excellent discussion.
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Manuel García-Carpintero
Manuel García-Carpintero, University Professor in Philosophy, Universitat de Barcelona, works on philosophical logic, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. He was awarded a ‘Distinció de Recerca’ for senior researchers by the Catalan Government between 2002 and 2008, and in 2008 (2009–2013), 2013 (2014–2018) and 2018 (2019–2024) the prize ‘ICREA Acadèmia’ for excellence in research. He is completing a book on the nature of assertion under contract with Oxford University Press, entitled Tell Me What You Know. He has published extensively on fiction (British Journal of Aesthetics, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Erkentniss, etc.)