Birke, Dorothee & Köppe, Tilman (Eds.) (2015) - Author and Narrator. Transdisciplinary Contributions To A%2 PDF

Author and
Narrator
Transdisciplinary Contributions to a Narratological

Debate
Edited by
Dorothee Birke and Tilmann Köppe
ISBN 978-3-11-034836-1
e-ISBN [PDF] 978-3-11-034855-2
e-ISBN [EPUB] 978-3-11-038400-0
ISSN 1869-7054
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Contents
Dorothee Birke and Tilmann Köppe
Author and Narrator: Problems in the Constitution and Interpretation of Fictional
Narrative 1
Tilmann Köppe and Jan Stühring

Against Pragmatic Arguments for Pan-Narrator Theories: The Case of
Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” 13
Frank Zipfel
Narratorless Narration? Some Reflections on the Arguments For and Against the
Ubiquity of Narrators in Fictional Narration 45
Vincenz Pieper
Author and Narrator: Observations on Die Wahlverwandtschaften 81
Dorothee Birke
Author, Authority, and ‘Authorial Narration’: The Eighteenth-Century English
Novel as a Test Case 99
Julian Schröter
Interpretive Problems with Author, Self-Fashioning, and Narrator: The
Controversy Over Christian Kracht’s Novel Imperium 113
Adrian Bruhns
Fictional Narrators and Creationism 139
Regine Eckardt
Speakers and Narrators 153
Tobias Klauk
Serious Speech Acts in Fictional Works 187
Claudia Hillebrandt
Author and Narrator in Lyric Poetry 213
Markus Kuhn and Andreas Veits

Narrative Mediation in Comics: Narrative Instances and Narrative Levels in Paul
Hornschemeier’s The Three Paradoxes 235
VI Contents
Julian Schröter
Narrator and Author: A Selected Bibliography 263
Notes on Contributors 269
Index 273
Dorothee Birke, Freiburg, and Tilmann Köppe, Göttingen
Author and Narrator: Problems in the
Constitution and Interpretation of Fictional
Narrative
‘Who speaks?,’ in Gérard Genette’s famous phrasing, is one of the central ques-
tions in the narratological analysis of fiction. The interest in the text as a tale also
requires a concern with its teller. Classical narrative theory, as represented by
Franz K. Stanzel’s and Genette’s influential work, has proposed to answer this
question by positing and describing a fictional narrator as the entity responsible
for the production of the words we read. This move has allowed a generation of
narratologists to focus on the study of ‘what’s on the page,’ without having to
concern themselves with the person ultimately responsible for the production of
the text, i.e. its author. Since the 1990s, however, the tables seem to have turned:
the ‘return of the author,’ after his widely promoted burial at the hands of
poststructuralist critics, has also had an impact on narrative theory.1 Increased
attention has been paid, for example, to a rhetorical approach to narratology
which advocates an interest in the text’s production and reception, condensed
most prominently in Wayne C. Booth’s concept of the ‘implied author.’2
Rather than circumventing a concern with the author as a relevant category
for textual analysis, then, the concept of the narrator gives rise to further ques-
tions about the conceptualization and analysis of voice in fictional texts. These
questions have become the subjects of lively and at times highly controversial
debates. The present volume is intended as a contribution to these debates. It
manifests the status of narrative theory as a transdisciplinary project by collating
1 For works on the return of the author, see in particular Maurice Biriotti/Nicola Miller (eds.),
What is an Author?, Manchester 1993; Fotis Jannidis/Gerhard Lauer/Matías Martínez/Simone
Winko (eds.), Rückkehr des Autors: Zur Erneuerung eines umstrittenen Begriffs, Tübingen 1999;
Peter Jaszi/Martha Woodmansee (eds.), The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in
Law and Literature, Durham 1994; Peter Lamarque, “The Death of the Author: An Analytical
Autopsy”, in: British Journal of Aesthetics, 30/1990, pp. 319–331; Eugen Simion, The Return of the
Author, Evanston, IL, 1996. A brief survey of the concept of the author in the context of narrative
theory is provided by Jörg Schönert, “Author”, in: Peter Hühn/John Pier/Wolf Schmid/Jörg
Schönert (eds.), Handbook of Narratology, Berlin 2009, pp. 1–13.
2 See Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction: The Quest for Effective Communication, Malden,
MA, 2004 [1961]. For rhetorical approaches to narrative and the author after 1990 see e.g. James
Phelan, Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology, Columbus 1996; Richard
Walsh, The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction, Columbus 2007.
2 Dorothee Birke and Tilmann Köppe
approaches from different disciplinary backgrounds – literary studies, philoso-

phy, linguistics and media studies – in order to deal with a number of different,
albeit closely related, problems:
– Does every piece of narrative fiction feature a fictional narrator that is to be
distinguished from its author?
– What are the success conditions for attributing a fictional narrator to a work
of narrative fiction?
– Is the assumption that there is a fictional narrator in every piece of narrative
fiction helpful, or even necessary, when it comes to the interpretation of
fictional narratives (that is, is the claim that there is a fictional narrator in every
piece of narrative fiction somehow pragmatically superior to its negation)?
– How should critical interpretations of works which feature what Stanzel has
called ‘authorial narration’ conceptualize ‘voice’?
– Can the claim that there need not be a fictional narrator in every work of
narrative fiction be reconciled with prevalent linguistic theories of sentence
meaning according to which an utterance context is indispensable for our
understanding of sentences?
– How are we to describe and make sense of utterances which do seem to make
a contribution to the content of the fiction and our world at the same time?
– In how far is the author/narrator distinction fruitful for the description of
genres other than narrative fiction (examples discussed in this volume are
lyric poetry and graphic novels)?
A more detailed survey of the questions asked by our contributors will be given in
the second part of our introduction, and we will also sketch some of their answers.
Before we take a closer look, however, we need to give a brief introduction into
the aspects of the author/narrator distinction that serve as a background to the
problems discussed in the articles.
I The Narratological Distinction of ‘Author’ and ‘Narrator’
The author of a literary work is the person who is responsible for it. His or her
responsibility has a number of different dimensions: first, the author of a work is
the one who created it and brought it into existence.3 Thereby, the author fixes
3 Note that the seemingly simple act of bringing a work into existence entails all kinds of
theoretical difficulties, see Peter Lamarque, Work and Object: Explorations in the Metaphysics of
Art, Oxford 2010, pp. 33–55.
Problems in the Constitution and Interpretation of Fictional Narrative 3
the boundaries of the work and, perhaps within certain limits, decides what is a
part of it and what is not.4 Second, being the author of a literary work comes with
certain rights and duties. For instance, authors are the initial copyright holders of
their works. Moreover, since in writing and publishing their works, they may
perform different kinds of speech acts, such as insulting or thanking or praising
someone, authors commit acts for which they can be held morally responsible,
and they may be prosecuted if they impinge upon someone else’s rights by
publishing a particular work. Third, authors are often regarded to be responsible
for the ‘meanings’ of their works. The responsibility in question here is some kind
of authority: for instance, when two interpretations of a literary work are in
conflict with each other, the author’s own interpretation of her text may be said to
be authoritative. Of course, this claim is as often disputed as it is endorsed –
intentionalism in interpretation has been one of the most controversial topics in
literary theory for decades.5
The three kinds of responsibility mentioned so far are only the tip of the
iceberg when it comes to issues surrounding ‘the author’ in literary studies and
related fields. Authors are the objects of investigations that may, for instance,
focus on a particular author’s vita, on the social history of writing, or on the
emerging autonomy of the institution of art. The objectives of these investiga-
tions, however, need not be rehearsed here.6 The present volume is concerned
with rather specific problems arising from the relationship between the concepts
of ‘author’ and ‘fictional narrator.’
Let us begin by introducing the concept of a narrator, leaving the trouble-
some qualification ‘fictional’ aside. Put simply, a narrator is a person who tells a
story or, in other words, relates a narrative. For a person to be a narrator, it
doesn’t matter whether she creates her story or merely retells it, and it also doesn’t
matter whether she believes the content of her story to be true. Classical narratol-
ogy, as has been outlined above, has originated the widely accepted idea that the
narrator of a literary work must be sharply divided from its author. This separa-
tion is a kind of First Principle, or dogma, of narrative analysis as it is commonly
taught at the moment. What exactly does this dogma amount to? In order to
understand its contours, scope and rationale, one needs to have a rough idea
4 This aspect is important for the editor’s job of establishing the authoritative version of a work,
which may have been handed down in different manuscripts. For some difficulties concerning the
identity of works of art, see Richard Wollheim, Art and Its Objects, 2nd Edition, Cambridge 1980;
Robert Stecker, Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, Lanham 2005, ch. 6.
5 For a book-length overview, see Carlos Spoerhase, Autorschaft und Interpretation: Methodische
Grundlagen einer philologischen Hermeneutik, Berlin 2007.
6 For references, see note 1 above.
about yet another core concept of the debate: that of fiction, and more precisely
that of (fictional) storytelling. Stories can be told with just about any intention. But
some stories are told with the particular intention that it be mutually understood
between tellers and listeners (or writers and readers) that the story told merely
looks as if it conveyed information about matters of fact. The teller does not
commit herself to the truth of what she is saying, and listeners agree to engage in
a game of make-believe about (instead of believe) what they are told. According
to Lamarque and Olsen, fictional storytelling exhibits the following three “main
features”:
1. A Gricean intention that an audience make-believe (or imagine or pretend) that it is

being told (or questioned or advised or warned) about particular people, objects,
incidents, or events, regardless of whether there are (or are believed to be) such people,
objects, incidents, or events;
2. The reliance, at least in part, of the successful fulfilment of the intention in (1) on
mutual knowledge of the practice of story-telling;
3. A disengagement from certain standard speech act commitments, blocking inferences
from a fictive utterance back to the speaker or writer, in particular inferences about
beliefs.7
Given that authors are sufficiently clear about their engaging in the practice of
fictional storytelling (for example by labeling their work as ‘a novel’), this affects
their above-mentioned responsibilities: for instance, they normally cannot be
blamed for uttering falsehoods. Moreover, since they usually do not inform about
existing “people, objects, incidents, or events,” they are often said to create not
only their stories, or works, but also the very people, objects, incidents, or events
their stories are about.8 In short, authors of fiction create fictional worlds.9
Worlds of fiction are worlds to be imagined. They come in all shapes and
sizes. Some of them are very much like our world, some are radically different. In
some of them, telling stories itself plays an important part. Thus the opening of
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby reads as follows:
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been
turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told
7 Peter Lamarque/Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspec-
tive, Oxford 1994, pp. 45f. For a critique of some of these assumptions, see Tobias Klauk’s
contribution to this volume.
8 For more details, see Adrian Bruhns’ contribution to this volume.
9 For a useful clarification of talk of ‘worlds of fiction,’ see Nicholas Wolterstorff, Works and
Worlds of Art, Oxford 1980, esp. Part 3, and Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the
Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge/London 1990.
me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that
you’ve had.”10
Fitzgerald’s novel creates the fiction that a man named Nick Carraway tells the
story of his encounters with the mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby. Carraway did
not write the novel The Great Gatsby – in his world, this novel does not exist at
all – but he relates the story of his encounters with Gatsby as something that in
fact occurred. Thus, in writing The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald wrote a first-person
fictional narrative, and in doing so, he created a fictional teller of matters of fact:
a fictional narrator.
Now we have the resources to specify the relationship between the concepts
of ‘author’ and ‘narrator’ that is at the center of the present volume. In literary
studies, the term ‘narrator’ usually denotes a fictional narrator, i.e. a narrator who
does not belong to our world but is part of the fiction. And given that fact, it is clear
that authors and narrators need to be kept apart: first, authors and narrators
belong to ontologically different categories.11 Nick Carraway has, in contrast to
F. Scott Fitzgerald, never enjoyed a spatiotemporal existence, and hence there
neither was nor is a way of causal interaction between the two of them. Meeting
Nick Carraway on the street is or was no more likely than meeting the number two,
or the law of gravity. It is, in short, impossible. Second, fictional narrators may
possess sets of properties which are radically different from the sets of properties
that can be possessed by authors of fiction. To name but a few, authors of fiction
are human beings. Fictional narrators need not be. Authors of fiction are limited to
human powers (of knowledge, memory, linguistic ability, etc.). Again, fictional
narrators need not be.12 Third, narrators are subject to none of the three responsi-
bilities mentioned at the outset of our introduction: they do not create the works of
fiction they are a part of, they do not hold the author’s rights and duties, and they
cannot be consulted in order to settle interpretive disputes. (Of course, in the
fiction things are different: It is fictional that Nick Carraway is the author of his
10 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, New York 1986, p. 1.

11 For elaboration, see Maria Elisabeth Reicher, “The Ontology of Fictional Characters”, in: Jens
Eder/Fotis Jannidis/Ralf Schneider (eds.), Characters in Fictional Worlds, Berlin/New York 2010,
pp. 111–133. It is important to note that by claiming that the narrator is part of the fiction one
characterizes his or her ontological status. In particular, this claim must not be conflated with
claims about the ‘diegetic level’ the narrator occupies within the fiction, or his or her relation to
his or her story; for elaboration on these categories, see Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An
Essay in Method, trans. by Jane E. Lewin, Ithaca/New York 1980, pp. 227–254.
12 See Brian Richardson, Unnatural Voices: Extreme Narration in Modern and Contemporary
Fiction, Columbus 2006.
story, and it may also be fictional that he is, after completing his story, blamed for,
or questioned about, what he has said. Since, however, the novel remains silent
about these and countless other things, we do not know them.)
In sum, conflating author and narrator is to make a category mistake,13 and
indeed we know of nobody in literary studies (or indeed elsewhere) who disputes
the necessity of differentiating between author and narrator in fictional story-
telling.14 Difficulties and disputes, however, arise when it comes to determining
the scope of the author/narrator distinction, its consequences, and some of its
details. The contributions to the present volume, to which we shall turn in the
next section, critically engage with these issues.
II The Contributions to the Volume
The first three articles explore different angles of a central point of debate:
whether every work of narrative fiction features a (fictional) narrator,15 or
whether it is at least adequate and helpful to posit that it does. T ILMANN K ÖPPE
und J AN S TÜHRING
TÜHR ING have already elsewhere argued for the so-called optional
narrator theory, i.e. the idea that it is not necessary for a fictional narrative to
feature a narrator.16 In their contribution to this volume, they tackle a particular
objection to optional narrator theory: the so-called ‘pragmatic argument’ for the
ubiquity of narrators, which comes in two variants. The first one claims that
assuming that there is a narrator in the fiction is a necessary requirement for
interpreting fictional narratives, while the second variant merely claims that the
assumption that there is a narrator provides useful guidance for any interpreta-
tion and hence should be maintained irrespective of its truth. Köppe and Stüh-
ring argue that both arguments fail on theoretical grounds. Moreover, they
13 The notion of a category mistake has been made prominent by Gilbert Ryle, see his The
Concept of Mind, Chicago 2002, pp. 16–18.
14 Interestingly, though, as with any dogma, the present one had to be invented first, and it took
some time for it to be generally accepted; see Monika Fludernik, Einführung in die Erzähltheorie,
3rd Edition, Darmstadt 2010, pp. 70f. See also Vincenz Pieper’s contribution to the present
volume.
15 For the sake of brevity, and unless otherwise indicated, we will stick to the terminology
prevalent in literary studies and take ‘narrator’ to mean fictional narrator throughout.
16 Note that claims for the ubiquity of narrators come in different varieties. Some theorists wish
to establish the modal claim that necessarily there is a narrator in every piece of narrative fiction
while others merely claim that as a matter of fact there is a fictional narrator in every piece of
narrative fiction. Similarly, some theorists wish to attack the modal claim and some the empirical
generalization.
provide a detailed interpretation of the short story “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by

Nathaniel Hawthorne. Their interpretation does not include any references to a
narrator, while at the same time it contains many claims about the story’s
themes, plot, and narrative structure. Accordingly, the interpretation provides
both a counterexample to the claim that it is impossible to interpret a fictional
narrative without making recourse to a narrator, and it illustrates how aspects of
the narrative such as commentary, evaluation, first personal pronouns or expres-
sive particles may be understood without assuming that they are attributable to
a narrator.
F RANK Z IPFEL puts forward an opposing view: in this contribution, he takes
issue with Köppe/Stühring’s and others’ attempts to refute the claim that there is
a narrator in every piece of narrative fiction. In particular, he maintains that
whether we assume that there is a narrator in every piece of narrative fiction
depends on how we conceptualize ‘fiction’ and ‘narration’ in the first place. Since
there are different ways of understanding these central notions, there are also
different ways of answering the question concerning the presence of a narrator.
Accordingly, Zipfel maintains that the concrete answers to this question are of no
real importance for narrative theory. Instead of trying to argue for the truth of
either the thesis that there is a narrator in every piece of narrative fiction or the
thesis that there is not, we should concentrate on laying bare the conceptual
schemes that underlie our assumptions concerning fictional narration. Moreover,
and against Köppe and Stühring, Zipfel maintains that at least some of the
critique that has been voiced against pan-narrator theories is misguided.
V INCENZ P IEPER , in turn, sets out to demonstrate in what ways the assumption
that there is a narrator in every piece of narrative fiction can seriously distort an
interpreter’s understanding of literary works. In his review of the interpretive
history of Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften, he argues that interpreters who do
find a narrator in the novel usually fail to back up their claims with textual
evidence. Moreover, they do not provide a rationale for the fictional entity they
claim to have detected. According to the view of literary interpretation as pro-
posed by Pieper, this is particularly unfortunate, for it is precisely the objective of
interpretation to identify what an author was aiming at, and hence doing, by way
of his artistic choices. Creating a narrator is a particularly noticeable artistic
choice, so interpreters ought to comment on its rationale. Pieper claims that the
focus on an alleged narrator has resulted merely in imprecise descriptions of the
novel’s narrative structure and actually obstructed interpreters’ access to some of
the work’s most characteristic, and hence interesting, features.
While the contributions by Köppe/Stühring, Zipfel and Pieper thus directly
intervene in the theoretical debate about the ubiquity of narrators in fictional
texts, Dorothee Birke and Julian Schröter are primarily interested in issues of
authorial self-fashioning and responsibility. They both present case studies of

texts in whose reception discussions of ‘narrative mediation,’ i.e. the rendering of
stories by fictional narrators, have loomed large.
D OROTHEE B IRKE revisits the central concept of authorial narration and re-
views two countervailing tendencies within narrative theory: understanding the
concept as a way of marking a strict analytical separation between author and
narrator, and a later trend, especially within feminist narratology, to reconsider
how ‘authorial voice’ can actually be said to make reference to the author and his
or her authority. Birke goes on to investigate the latter view in more detail and
insists that the problem of ‘authority’ needs to be discussed in a more differen-
tiated way than that suggested by feminist narratologists who see the authorial
voice as resting on male hegemony. Conspicuous instances of authorial narration
in particular, she argues, often serve to explore and defend rather than simply
assert different kinds of authority (e.g. moral or psychological expertise) that have
been associated with the novel as a genre. They can thus be understood as a
performance of authorship, a rhetorical stance the actual author of the work
assumes towards its readership. To bolster her claims, Birke presents a close
reading of a passage from Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones (1749), a work that
has traditionally been regarded as a (or even the) prototypical example of author-
ial narration.
J ULIAN S CHRÖTER ’s article engages with a recent controversy about a contem-
porary piece of narrative fiction: Christian Kracht’s novel Imperium (2012), which
has been perceived by some reviewers as reflecting racist attitudes on the part of
its author. Schröter presents a careful examination of a standard defense against
such a charge, namely the claim that Kracht’s detractors misread the novel by
failing to distinguish between its narrator (who is racist) and Kracht the author
(who is not). He argues that in interpretive practice, statements about the narrator
and the author are related in complex ways, and that Kracht himself foregrounds
and exploits such relations in his fictional writing, which is designed to resonate
with stances put forward in his non-fiction texts (in particular, the published
email correspondence Five Years). From the point of view of a theory of authorial
self-fashioning, Schröter concludes, a seemingly simple differentiation between
the two categories of texts – that the non-fiction reflects the author’s own
opinions in a serious way, while the fiction does not – appears as untenable. This
is because it fails to take into account the extent to which the utterances in both
works constitute a self-conscious form of “provocative posing,” i.e. a kind of self-
fashioning that invites the ascription of certain qualities to the author but at the
same time reveals these ascriptions to be misguided.
The three subsequent contributions by Adrian Bruhns, Regine Eckhardt and
Tobias Klauk each provide important building blocks for the larger debate by
furnishing in-depth considerations of central problems. As their articles demon-

strate, philosophical and linguistic approaches help to gain a deeper understand-
ing of the issues that are at stake.
A DRIAN B RUHNS in his contribution engages with the claim that as parts of
fictions, narrators must be understood as creations by their authors. Bruhns
examines how this claim relates to the claim that there is a narrator in every
narrative fiction. If the second claim is true, we have to assume that every author
of fiction somehow creates a narrator, whether they want to or not. Bruhns
discusses how this claim fits with two prominent theories about the creation of
fictional entities, namely Amy Thomasson’s and John Searle’s versions of Crea-
tionism.17 He concludes that, given that creating fictional entities is something an
author does consciously and on purpose, it is difficult to maintain that authors
cannot help but create narrators. But he also shows how defenders of the ubiquity
of narrators might amend their theories in order to make them compatible with
some versions of a creationist theory of fictional entities.
R EGINE E CKARDT identifies a seeming paradox resulting from the claim that
there need not be a narrator in every piece of narrative fiction. The paradox rears
its head once one takes into account that our best theories of meaning assume
that sentences can only be understood in context, that is, in relation to an
utterance time, place, utterer etc. It is easy to see that in many cases, the author of
the text cannot occupy the utterer’s role. Rather, the utterance context is part of
the fiction. So how can we possibly reconcile both that (a) we need the assump-
tion that there is a fictional utterer in order to understand the meaning of the
sentences and (b) we have good reasons to assume that sometimes there is no
utterer in the fiction? Eckardt solves this apparent paradox by explaining in some
detail what the claim that we need an utterance context in order to understand
the meaning of sentences amounts to within truth conditional semantics. It turns
out that the claim that there need not be a narrator in the fiction is indeed
compatible with these accounts of linguistic meaning. Truth conditional seman-
tics allows for (and indeed offers theoretical resources for explaining) cases in
which the sentences in question do not convey much information about their
utterance context and hence not enough information to give rise to the fiction of a
narrator. Eckardt predicts that it is precisely these cases literary theorists have in
mind when they talk of narratorless narrations.
The account of fictional storytelling sketched in section I has it that speakers
are freed from certain standard speech act commitments and readers are to make-
17 Creationism is but one family of theories of the ontological status of fictional entities. For an
introduction into other theories, compare again Maria Elisabeth Reicher, “Ontology”.
believe (rather than believe) what they hear. Thus, when speaking fictionally,
authors are understood as merely pretending to assert something about our
world, and what they say is instead understood as a contribution to the content of
the fiction. This is just another way of saying that authors of fiction do not
describe our world but rather make up a fictional world. In his contribution,
T OBIAS K LAUK challenges this assumption. He is particularly interested in cases
where an author both speaks in accordance with standard speech act commit-
ments and makes a contribution to the content of the fiction – at the same time.
Klauk argues that this is indeed possible. He identifies a number of conventions
which trump the disengagement of standard speech act commitments that is
constitutive of the institution of fiction. Moreover, he argues that sometimes it is
possible for authors of fiction to perform ‘serious’ speech acts (i.e. standard
speech acts constituted by the respective commitments) within their works with-
out being backed up by any such convention. All of this amounts to a refutation
of the claim that in works of fiction, serious speech acts can occur only within the
fiction, that is, as uttered by a narrator.
The volume’s final section pays tribute to the fact that there are also particu-
larly fierce and lively debates surrounding the question whether and how the
author/narrator distinction helps in the analysis of genres and media other than
narrative fiction.
C LAUDIA H ILLEBRANDT surveys the state of the art in narratological investiga-
tions of lyric poetry. In particular, she engages with the claim that an interpreter
who classifies a poem as narrative must also posit a narrator who utters this
narrative. Her assessment entails a discussion of recent attempts to distinguish
different levels of communication in poems, favoring the model suggested by
Winko/Borkowski, which specifies different possible relations of author and
speaker in a poem. Hillebrandt details different senses in which a poem can be
said to be narrative, acknowledging that it indeed makes sense to conceive of
many (though not all) lyrical poems as possessing a narrative structure, but
insisting that only some of these can adequately be described as featuring a
narrator who is distinct from the author.
M ARKUS K UHN and A NDREAS V EITS come to a differing conclusion with regard
to their object of interest: the graphic novel or comic. They outline how a model of
narrative mediation for narrative fiction can be expanded so as to describe the
medium’s specific strategies of representation. In analogy to a model introduced
by Kuhn for the analysis of narrative in film, they suggest the concept of a “visual
narrative instance” to describe how in addition to verbal forms of narration,
comics can narrate through images. The benefits of this multi-layered model are
then demonstrated in a case study, in which it is applied to Paul Hornschemeier’s
graphic novel The Three Paradoxes (2006). With its unusually complex and self-
reflexive structure, this work makes full use of the representative strategies
available to comic artists and, like many graphic novels, includes references to
the author’s own biography. It thus presents a particular challenge to the inter-
preter – and to the narratologist, an opportunity to show how a sophisticated
model of narrative mediation can be used to tease apart the various levels of
narration that are at play.
The volume closes with a selected bibliography compiled by J ULIAN S CHRÖTER ,
which gives an overview of studies that have explicitly engaged with the theore-
tical debate surrounding the relationship between the concepts of author and
narrator in literary studies. Schröter also identifies “classics of the debate,” works
that have fundamentally shaped the terms of today’s discussions.
This volume has its roots in a workshop conducted in Freiburg on September
13–14, 2012, by members of the Network “Foundational Concepts of Narratology.”
Some of the contributions are expansions of ideas first presented there; many
incorporate questions and insights resulting from our discussions. We would like
to thank all participants of the workshop. Our thanks also go to the Freiburg
Institute for Advanced Studies for sponsoring the meeting and this volume and to
the Courant Forschungszentrum “Textstrukturen” at Göttingen University for sup-
port of the editing process. Special thanks go to Annika Brunck, Nora Skorsinski,
Evelyn Waldt, Astrid Schwaner, Hanan Natour, Stefan Guse, Nikolina Hatton and
Charlotte Wolff for their help in proof-reading and formatting as well as to the
series’ editorial assistant, Sara Kathrin Landa.
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Tilmann Köppe and Jan Stühring, Göttingen
Against Pragmatic Arguments for Pan-
Narrator Theories: The Case of Hawthorne’s
“Rappaccini’s Daughter”
I Introduction
The pan-narrator thesis (PN) is the claim that it is impossible that a fictional
narrative does not have a fictional narrator. The optional-narrator thesis (ON) is
the claim that both fictional narratives with a fictional narrator and fictional
narratives without a fictional narrator are possible. There is a fictional narrator if,
and only if, in the fiction there is someone who tells the story that the reader
reads.1
On a previous occasion, we have argued at some length that ON is true
while PN is not.2 In response to this, we have often been confronted with the
claim that PN is somehow advantageous for the practice of literary interpretation
or, alternatively, the claim that PN is indeed necessary for that practice. Call
these pragmatic arguments in favor of PN. In this essay, we will prove them
wrong.
We will begin with a theoretical discussion of the pragmatic arguments
(section II). The bulk of this paper, however, is devoted to a case study. It is
obvious that the claim that fictional narratives can only be interpreted adequately
by positing a fictional narrator is false if there is an adequate interpretation of a
fictional narrative that does not posit a fictional narrator. And that is why, after
our theoretical discussion, we will give a fairly standard interpretation of what we
consider a fictional narrative which does not have a fictional narrator, namely
1 The claim that there is a fictional narrator if, and only if, in the fiction there is someone who
tells the story that the reader reads entails no commitment to substantial claims about this
‘someone’ other than that it is true of him, her, or even it that he, she or it narrates. In particular, it
is sometimes claimed that the fictional narrator can be a mere ‘voice’ or a ‘narrating instance’ that
is lacking any (other) personal (or indeed human) qualities. Obviously, these claims are meant to
convey that it is fictional that a voice narrates or that a narrating instance narrates, and this counts
as claiming that, in the fiction, there is a narrator.
2 See Tilmann Köppe/Jan Stühring, “Against Pan-Narrator Theories”, in: Journal of Literary
Semantics, 40/2011, pp. 59–80, for our discussion and refutation of the most common arguments
in favor of PN. For a brief evocation of the arguments we discuss at length in the present paper,
see ibid., pp. 72f.
14 Tilmann Köppe and Jan Stühring
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) (section III). Our interpre-

tation focuses on gender roles, it includes claims concerning what is the case in
the world of the fiction as well as claims concerning intertextual relations to the
biblical story of the Garden of Eden, and it identifies general themes or meanings
of the short story. None of these critical claims is formulated in terms of, or backed
up by, assumptions concerning a fictional narrator. In section IV, we shall take a
step back and explain why they need not be. We will close our discussion with a
brief conclusion (section V).
II Two Pragmatic Arguments for PN
There are two arguments for PN that might be called ‘pragmatic,’ since both refer
to the practice of literary interpretation. The first claims that we should adopt PN
because it is somehow advantageous for that practice (1), while the second claims
that PN is necessary for the practice of literary interpretation (2). Let us take a
closer look.
(1) The pragmatic argument from the advantageousness of a fictional narrator
for interpretation: proponents of PN might want to claim that PN is – irrespective
of its truth – pragmatically superior to ON, as it allows us to interpret all fictional
narratives adequately, while being easier to handle. The debate between suppor-
ters of PN and supporters of ON is ultimately irrelevant for the practice of literary
interpretation. PN, so its supporters claim, works fine and is thus all we need.
We would like to make five points in response to this argument.
The first thing to notice is that this argument is obviously not meant to
establish the truth of PN. Advocates of this argument simply urge us to assume
that there is a fictional narrator in every fictional narrative no matter whether this
is true or not. But our question is whether PN is true. So it is hard to see why
someone would confront us with this argument.
Second, even if PN was somehow advantageous for the practice of literary
interpretation this would not establish the truth of PN. Consider an analogy. It
might be quite advantageous for someone hiking in an area where a large number
of animals carry rabies to assume that every fox in that area is infected. (“Assume
that every fox has rabies! Don’t go near them!”) Obviously, the assumption is
reasonable. But this does not make it true. The debate between ON and PN is
about the truth of the claim that there necessarily is a fictional narrator in every
fictional narrative. As the first pragmatic argument does not establish the truth of
that claim it need not be of any concern to us.
Third, even if the debate between PN and ON turned out to be irrelevant for
the practice of literary interpretation, it is surely far from irrelevant for discussions
Against Pragmatic Arguments for Pan-Narrator Theories 15
of narrative communication in narratology. If PN is false, so are standard models

of ‘narrative communication.’3
Fourth, it is far from clear why PN should be advantageous for the practice of
literary interpretation and thus pragmatically superior to ON. Advocates of PN
might claim that it is easier to handle than ON. But ON is actually a very simple
claim: either a fictional narrative has a fictional narrator or it doesn’t. Neither
possibility can be discounted on theoretical grounds. And ON is very easy to
handle. In fact, ON is just as easy to handle as PN for, basically, there are the
following three options:
1. If there is good evidence that there is a person in the fiction who tells the story
the reader reads, then both proponents of PN and ON will say that there is a
person in the fiction who tells the story the reader reads.
2. If it’s undecided whether there is such a person in the fiction, then supporters
of PN and ON agree that it’s undecided whether there is such a person in the
fiction (and supporters of PN will hurry to add that in case there actually is no
such person in the fiction, then there is of course a ‘covert’ fictional narrator).
3. If there is no evidence that there is a person in the fiction telling the story the
reader reads, then proponents of ON and PN agree that there is no such
person in the fiction, but proponents of PN will add that there is of course a
covert fictional narrator.
How do any of these options make PN easier to handle?

Fifth, note that if PN is false, it is not possible for PN to allow us to interpret
every fictional narrative adequately. If every fictional narrative has a fictional
narrator, PN allows us to adequately interpret all fictional narratives. But if only
some fictional narratives have a fictional narrator, PN does not allow us to
interpret all fictional narratives adequately, for PN will then force us to make
wrong assumptions about what is the case in some fictional narratives. (If there is
no fictional narrator, then the assumption that there is one is simply a bad
3 See, e.g., the model provided in Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse. Narrative Structure in
Fiction and Film, Ithaca/London 1978, p. 267, and the references to such models in Uri Margolin,
“Narrator”, in: Peter Hühn/John Pier/Wolf Schmid/Jörg Schönert (eds.), Handbook of Narratology,
Berlin/New York 2009, pp. 351–369. Moreover, narratological discussions make it clear that the
truth of PN has bearings on the theory of fiction as conceived of by narratologists, see e.g. Matías
Martínez/Michael Scheffel, Einführung in die Erzähltheorie, München 1999, p. 14, p. 17; for critical
commentary, see Jan Gertken/Tilmann Köppe, “Fiktionalität”, in: Fotis Jannidis/Gerhard Lauer/
Simone Winko (eds.), Grenzen der Literatur. Zu Begriff und Phänomen des Literarischen, Berlin/
New York 2009, pp. 228–266, pp. 237–238, p. 250, pp. 260–262; and Köppe/Stühring, “Against”,
p. 67.
interpretation of the narrative.) So whether PN allows us to interpret all fictional

narratives adequately seems to depend on whether PN is true. It is therefore hard
to see how PN could allow us to adequately interpret all fictional narratives
irrespective of its truth.
(2) The pragmatic argument from the necessity of a fictional narrator for
interpretation: supporters of PN might want to claim that there necessarily is a
fictional narrator in every fictional narrative because it is impossible to ade-
quately interpret or correctly understand a fictional narrative without positing a
fictional narrator. Thus, we know that there is a fictional narrator in every
fictional narrative as a fictional narrator is a necessary prerequisite for literary
interpretation. The argument is a simple modus ponens: If we can interpret a
fictional narrative, then it has a fictional narrator. We can interpret all fictional
narratives. Therefore, all fictional narratives have a fictional narrator.
Our response to this argument is twofold. First, and most importantly, it is
simply not true that it is impossible to interpret a fictional narrative while assum-
ing that it does not have a fictional narrator. This is one of the things we will
demonstrate in section III. Second, to the best of our knowledge so far no one has
put forward an argument for the claim that it is impossible to interpret a fictional
narrative that does not have a fictional narrator. But this claim is far from self-
evident. As long as it is not backed up by a convincing argument there is no
reason to assume that it is true. And as long as there is no reason to assume its
truth there is no reason to accept the argument of which it is a premise.
III Intertextuality, Gender, and Some Meanings of

“Rappaccini’s Daughter”
As our discussion of the pragmatic arguments for PN has shown, it is already clear
from a theoretical point of view that both arguments fail to establish the truth of
PN (for the first pragmatic argument is probably not even meant to do that while
the second argument is based on a premise whose truth has not been estab-
lished). But in order to show that ON is easy to handle, that it does not make
literary interpretation impossible, and that it is, all in all, a jolly good fellow we
will now give an interpretation of a fictional narrative that does not have a
narrator. In our interpretation we shall use many propositions that might, suppo-
sedly, seduce proponents of PN into claiming that there is a fictional narrator
involved, concerning, inter alia, what is the case in the fiction, evaluations of
what is the case in the fiction, commentary on what is the case in the fiction, and
themes, meanings or morals of the story. In section IV, we shall address these
propositions and explain why we have formulated them the way we have.
There are a number of allusions – both explicit and implicit – to the biblical
story of the Garden of Eden in Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” We will
argue that Hawthorne’s story can be read as a discussion of and comment on one
of the central topics we find in the story of the Garden of Eden. Arguably, gender
plays an important role in both stories. Women are depicted as morally inferior
and rightfully subordinate to men in the story of the Garden of Eden. As we will
show, Hawthorne strongly disagrees with this.
Hawthorne’s story opens thus: “A young man, named Giovanni Guasconti,
came, very long ago, from the more southern region of Italy, to pursue his studies
at the University of Padua” (p. 1333).4 After having set foot into his room in Padua
for the first time, Giovanni notices Rappaccini’s garden, which is situated under
his window. While Giovanni is standing in his window Rappaccini enters the
garden and starts to examine the plants. He displays an extraordinary amount of
caution while doing this and gives the impression “of one walking among malig-
nant influences” (p. 1335). Shortly before we learn that Beatrice follows her father
into the garden the text reads:
It was strangely frightful to the young man’s imagination, to see this air of insecurity in a
person cultivating a garden, that most simple and innocent of human toils, and which had
been alike the joy and labor of the unfallen parents of the race. Was this garden, then, the
Eden of the present world? – and this man, with such a perception of harm in what his own
hands caused to grow, was he the Adam? (p. 1335)
Obviously, there are three explicit allusions to the story of the Garden of Eden in
this passage. “The unfallen parents of the race” refers, of course, to Adam and
Eve in their prelapsarian state. And that “Eden” and “Adam” refer the reader to
the Garden of Eden, respectively Adam, is hardly worth stating. Hawthorne could
hardly have made it clearer that his story is somehow related to the story of the
fall from grace. Once we take up this cue, a close reading of “Rappaccini’s
Daughter” reveals a vast number of implicit allusions to the story of Eden, and
many parallels, resemblances, and correspondences between the two stories. In
this section, we will first point out some of the parallels between the two stories.
This will serve as further evidence that Hawthorne wanted his story to be read and
understood against the background of the biblical story. Furthermore, it will set
the ground for the following discussion on how the way gender is represented in
4 All page references not otherwise marked are to Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daugh-
ter”, in: The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Nina Baym (ed.), 7th Edition, New York
2007, pp. 1333–1352.
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” relates to the problem of gender in the story of the

Garden of Eden.
One of the most obvious parallels between the two stories is, of course, that a
garden figures prominently in both of them. While in the biblical story it is God
who plants the garden and Adam who tends it, in Hawthorne’s short story the
garden is planted by Rappaccini and tended by both Rappaccini and his daughter
Beatrice. Another obvious similarity between the two stories is that there is a river
watering the Garden of Eden, and a fountain with an adjacent pool watering the
plants in Rappaccini’s garden. Furthermore, just as there are two trees at the
center of the Garden of Eden, there are a shrub and a fountain at the center of
Rappaccini’s garden. The two trees in the Garden of Eden are the tree of life and
the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eating of the tree of life brings
immortality, eating of the tree of knowledge ultimately brings death. Similarly,
the central fountain in Rappaccini’s garden gives life to the surrounding plants,
and the fruits of the central shrub cause death. Also, that there are some plants in
Rappaccini’s garden which creep “serpent-like along the ground” (p. 1334) is a
not too subtle reference to the serpent that seduces Eve. Just as God creates Eve so
that Adam is not alone (Gen. 2: 18), Rappaccini turns Giovanni into a poisonous
man so that Beatrice does not feel lonely (p. 1351). And just as God creates life,
Rappaccini creates new, poisonous life. God appoints Adam gardener (Gen. 2: 15).
Similarly, Rappaccini asks Beatrice to take care of (at least some of) the plants in
his garden (pp. 1335f.). It is, therefore, quite obvious that Hawthorne went to
some length in order to draw the reader’s attention to the story of the Garden of
Eden. Why did he do that? Our claim is that he did so because he wanted his story
to be understood as a comment on and discussion of the biblical story. Note also
that the most foregrounded intertextual references in Hawthorne’s story are to be
found at the beginning of the story: the explicit allusion to the Garden of Eden
and Adam and Eve, and the obvious similarities between the two gardens all
appear on the first pages of the story. Hawthorne thus establishes right at the
beginning of his story against which backdrop it is to be read.
Now let us turn to our discussion of gender in “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” As
Richard Brenzo puts it, it is the story of three men and a woman, “who, though
she never deliberately harms any of them, and though the men profess to have
her good in mind, is nevertheless destroyed by them.”5 This summary makes
Beatrice seem rather innocent and the male characters rather guilty. Of course, in
order to get a detailed and justified account of the representation of gender in
5 Richard Brenzo, “Beatrice Rappaccini: A Victim of Male Love and Horror”, in: American
Literature, 48/1977, pp. 152–164, p. 152.
“Rappaccini’s Daughter,” we have to look at how the different characters are

presented and at how they interact.
Beatrice’s first appearance in the story is when Giovanni sees her for the first
time. Roughly, this scene introduces three aspects of her character. First, she is a
young, beautiful woman. Second, she is dangerous. Third, she is caring, nurtur-
ing, and tender. Of course, there is some tension between the second attribute on
the one hand and the first and third attribute on the other hand. We will have to
say more about this tension later. Hawthorne puts quite some effort into making
sure that the reader’s first impression of Beatrice is that of a highly attractive,
young, fertile, and beautiful woman:
“Here I am, my father! What would you?” cried a rich and youthful voice from the window of
the opposite house; a voice as rich as a tropical sunset, and which made Giovanni, though
he knew not why, think of deep hues of purple or crimson, and of perfumes heavily
delectable. […]
Soon there emerged from under a sculptured portal the figure of a young girl, arrayed with
as much richness of taste as the most splendid of the flowers, beautiful as the day, and with
a bloom so deep and vivid that one shade more would have been too much. She looked
redundant with life, health, and energy; all of which attributes were bound down and
compressed, as it were, and girdled tensely, in their luxuriance, by her virgin zone. (p. 1335)
Note how Hawthorne establishes the fact that Beatrice is extremely attractive
several times, even giving the same information more than one time. First, he
introduces her voice as “rich and youthful,” only to claim next that it is “rich as a
tropical sunset” and makes Giovanni think of “purple or crimson, and of per-
fumes heavily delectable.” This establishes, first of all, that Beatrice is young – a
property often associated with female fertility and beauty. As sunsets are often
associated with romance, it is not implausible to claim that Hawthorne wants the
reader to associate romantic love with Beatrice. That her voice makes Giovanni
think of colors and odors introduces an element of sensuality. Now that the reader
has seen what only her voice can do to Giovanni, Beatrice is finally introduced in
person. It is stressed, for the second time, that she is young. Of course, she is
“beautiful as the day.” Also, she is “redundant with health, life, and energy,” all
of which are attributes easily associated with fertility. And her fertility is “bound
down and compressed, as it were, and girdled tensely, by her virgin zone.” She is
thus unmarried, and her virgin zone – the public sign of her being unmarried –
symbolically restrains her fertility. All this suggests that once she is married she
will give life to many healthy children. Shortly afterwards, the text reads:
Then, with all the tenderness in her manner that was so strikingly expressed in her words,
she busied herself with such attentions as the plant seemed to require; and Giovanni, at his
lofty window, rubbed his eyes, and almost doubted whether it were a girl tending her
favorite flower, or one sister performing the duties of affection to another. (p. 1336)
Obviously, these sentences establish that Beatrice is tender, nurturing, and affec-
tionate. Hawthorne thus goes to great lengths to make it clear that Beatrice is
young, beautiful, enticing, fertile, tender, nurturing, and affectionate. This, of
course, makes her something like a perfect woman. At the same time, however,
there is something dangerous about Beatrice. To Giovanni she seems “another
flower, the human sister of those vegetable ones, as beautiful as they – more
beautiful than the richest of them – but still to be touched only with a glove, nor
to be approached without a mask” (p. 1335). Of course, Giovanni’s impression is
not only that Beatrice is dangerous, but that she shares this attribute and her
beauty with the flowers in her father’s garden.
As our close reading of this scene shows, Beatrice is introduced to the reader
as a truly irresistible and dangerous woman. It might be argued that our analysis
fails to appreciate the fact that the analyzed passage is internally focalized from
Giovanni’s perspective. The only thing we know, so the objection goes, is that to
Giovanni Beatrice seems beautiful and dangerous. Of course, this objection gains
additional force when we take into consideration that Giovanni throughout the
story has great difficulty to understand exactly what kind of human being Bea-
trice is. Now, although it is true that the passage is internally focalized with
Giovanni being the focalizer,6 we don’t think there is any reason to doubt the
adequacy of his perception of Beatrice. His perception of Beatrice’s beauty is
validated when Baglioni says that “all the young men in Padua are wild about
her” (p. 1337). His perception of her being dangerous is validated when it becomes
clear that she can kill with her breath (p. 1339), and when Rappaccini asks her
whether she is not happy about her ability “to quell the mightiest with a breath”
(pp. 1351f.). Hawthorne’s short story does not at any point justify doubt concern-
ing the attributes Giovanni sees in Beatrice when she appears for the first time.
When Giovanni sees Beatrice for the second time, he is struck by the “expres-
sion of simplicity and sweetness” (p. 1338) on her face. This perception is slightly
6 That the whole passage where Giovanni sees Rappaccini and Beatrice for the first time is told
from Giovanni’s perspective is quite obvious. Consider how it begins: “While Giovanni stood at
the window, he heard a rustling behind a screen of leaves, and became aware that a person was at
work in the garden. His figure soon emerged into view, and showed itself to be that of no common
laborer […]” (p. 1334). What the reader is told is thus what Giovanni hears, what he becomes aware
of, and what he sees. This is a clear indication of internal focalization. Furthermore, when Beatrice
appears the reader is explicitly told what she makes Giovanni think of (p. 1335), which again
indicates that the passage is internally focalized.
at odds with the fact that just instants later her breath kills an insect, and that the
bouquet Giovanni tosses her withers immediately in her hands (p. 1339). This
juxtaposition of conflicting claims is indeed typical for the characterization of
Beatrice: she is very dangerous, yet innocent and of pure heart. How, then, does
Hawthorne establish her innocence? First of all, during their first meeting Giovan-
ni wants to pluck one of the blossoms from the garden’s central shrub. Beatrice
knows that this would kill him, and prevents him from doing so. She then hides
her face and runs away. In this scene, Beatrice gives the distinct impression that
she does not want Giovanni to come to harm and is very unhappy about the
poison she and the plants have been imbued with. Secondly, and again in order
to protect Giovanni, she never kisses him. Whenever he tries to kiss her, she “grew
so sad, so stern, and withal wore such a look of desolate separation, shuddering
at itself, that not a spoken word was requisite to repel him” (p. 1345). Clearly,
Beatrice suffers from her loneliness. Still, she does not allow Giovanni to come to
harm just to satisfy her desire for him. Third, once Giovanni himself has become
poisonous, Beatrice is shocked at this, and assures him that she is not to blame
(p. 1350). Finally, when Giovanni shows her the potion given to him by Baglioni
she drinks of it, telling him to wait for the result. She thereby saves Giovanni and
sacrifices her own life. As Brenzo points out, it “is unclear whether she knows that
drinking the antidote will be fatal, but the ‘peculiar emphasis’ she puts on the
words ‘I will drink – but do thou await the result’ (p. 1351) indicates that she
suspects it will be deadly and accepts her death quite happily while saving
Giovanni’s life at the same time.”7 To sum up, it is safe to say that Beatrice is
irresistibly attractive, and very dangerous, but also a good, kind, and innocent
person. Thus, although at her first appearance she seems to be a sort of femme
fatale, in the end she clearly is not “this kind of female, essentially malignant,
deliberately harmful to men.”8
We shall begin our discussion of the three male characters with Rappaccini.
One of the key scenes for an understanding of this character is his first appear-
ance in the story:
While Giovanni stood at the window, he heard a rustling behind a screen of leaves, and
became aware that a person was at work in the garden. His figure soon emerged into view,
and showed itself to be that of no common laborer, but a tall, emaciated, sallow, and sickly-
looking man, dressed in a scholar’s garb of black. He was beyond the middle term of life,
with grey hair, a thin grey beard, and a face singularly marked with intellect and cultivation,
7 Brenzo, “Beatrice Rappaccini”, p. 164.

8 Ibid., p. 154.
but which could never, even in his more youthful days, have expressed much warmth of
heart. (p. 1334)
These sentences establish three of Rappaccini’s core characteristics. First, as he is

“emaciated, sallow, and sickly-looking” he is obviously in poor health. Secondly,
he is a scholar, and a man of intellect. Third, he lacks “warmth of heart,” which
probably means that he lacks empathy, maybe has trouble connecting with his
emotions, and might not be too benign a man. In this scene, Hawthorne does not
only introduce Rappaccini but also one of the most important conflicts of his
story – that between intellect and feeling. Rappaccini squarely stands on the side
of intellect and cold reason. This fact is stressed by Hawthorne several times. When
Giovanni meets Baglioni by chance and Rappaccini walks past, Baglioni describes
the way Rappaccini gazes at Giovanni as “a look as deep as nature itself but without
nature’s warmth of love” (p. 1341). In a later conversation with Giovanni Baglioni
says about Rappaccini that “he is as true a man of science as ever distilled his own
heart in an alembic” (p. 1347). The heart, of course, is an established symbol of
feeling, emotion, and love. Apparently, Rappaccini lacks all of this. But Hawthorne
goes even further when he gives us the image of a scientist distilling his own heart.
Scientists distill substances in order to gain knowledge. During this process the
things distilled are destroyed. If the heart symbolizes emotion, and love, then the
process of distilling a heart is the symbolic destruction of these. If a scientist distills
his own heart, he destroys his ability to feel emotion and love. The image of science
that Hawthorne gives us is thus that of a man destroying his ability to feel love and
emotion in order to gain knowledge. Thus, Hawthorne does not only see love,
warmth of heart, and emotion as opposites to science and knowledge. He symboli-
cally says that science actually destroys all of these. If we are correct and this is
what Hawthorne had in mind, it is of course relevant for our understanding of
Rappaccini. He is a scientist. As such, he does not only lack warmth of heart, he
actively takes part in its destruction. This is Rappaccini’s fourth attribute.
Fifth, as Beatrice puts it, her father’s science is “fatal” (p. 1350). It his hardly
possible to overstate this point. Rappaccini creates poisonous plants and turns
Beatrice and Giovanni into human beings capable of killing with their breath.
Sixth, we need to discuss Rappaccini’s motivation. After all, what he does is
quite peculiar. He creates extremely poisonous plants, turns his daughter into a
poisonous woman, thereby isolating her from other humans, and then turns
Giovanni into a poisonous man so that Beatrice is no longer alone. He then tells
them to “pass on […] through the world, most dear to one another, and dreadful
to all besides!” (p. 1351)
The Garden of Eden is the cradle of humanity. Rappaccini’s garden is the new
Eden. So Rappaccini’s garden is the cradle of a new humanity. The new humans
are deadly to the old humans. Their creator, Rappaccini, knows this. Still, when
he sees the Adam and Eve of the new human race, he gazes at them with a
“triumphant expression […] as might an artist who should spend his life in
achieving a picture or a group of statuary and finally be satisfied with his success”
(p. 1351). His triumph is thus to have created a new human race that is deadly to
God’s creation.
In his interpretation of the short story Brenzo reasons about Rappaccini’s
motivation: “The exact nature of his schemes is unclear; are Giovanni and
Beatrice to be his agents in a play for some sort of social or even political power?”9
Furthermore, Brenzo thinks that Rappaccini is “ruthless, and cunning, but above
all he is obsessed with power, the power to intimidate and the power to con-
trol,”10 and he goes on to argue that “the poison [Rappaccini] loves and fears in
[Beatrice] is actually the destructive impulse in his own being.”11 We think that
Brenzo is quite right.12 Rappaccini’s last words to his daughter have a ring of
enthusiasm to them (of course, he does not know yet that she is dying):
Dost thou deem it misery to be endowed with marvelous gifts, against which no power nor
strength could avail an enemy? Misery, to be able to quell the mightiest with a breath?
Misery, to be as terrible as thou art beautiful? (pp. 1352f.)
This utterance is elegantly explained by the assumption that Rappaccini is

obsessed with power. Furthermore, these words make it clear that Rappaccini
thinks that what he has done is in the interest of his daughter and that she must
agree with him on that. Thus he projects his own obsession with power on
Beatrice.
To sum up, then, Rappaccini is an emaciated, sickly-looking scientist who
lacks “warmth of heart.” His scientific research has a destructive influence on his
soul, and results in plants and humans that are fatally poisonous. He is obsessed
with power, and projects this obsession on Beatrice. He is the most malignant
character in the story.
Baglioni’s first appearance, in contrast, makes him seem like a nice, benevo-
lent character. He is described as “an elderly personage, apparently of genial
nature, and habits that might almost be called jovial” (p. 1336). When he meets
9 Ibid., p. 162.
10 Ibid., p. 161.
11 Ibid., p. 163.
12 Alsen, in contrast, overstates his case by claiming that Rappaccini wants his new breed to
supersede God’s creation, see Eberhard Alsen, “The Ambitious Experiment of Dr. Rappaccini”, in:
American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography, 43/1971, pp. 430f.
Giovanni in the streets, he seems seriously concerned about him, and warns him
against Rappaccini: “I tell thee, my poor Giovanni, that Rappaccini has a scien-
tific interest in thee. Thou hast fallen into fearful hands!” He even seems resolved
to save Giovanni: “‘This must not be,’ said Baglioni to himself. ‘The youth is the
son of my old friend, and should not come to any harm from which the arcana of
medical science can preserve him’” (p. 1341). He holds Rappaccini’s scientific
achievements in great esteem, which becomes clear when he says about him that
“our worshipful Doctor Rappaccini has as much science as any member of the
faculty – with perhaps one single exception – in Padua, or all Italy” (p. 1337). But
he thinks little of his moral integrity: “he cares infinitely more for science than for
mankind. […] He would sacrifice human life, his own among the rest, or whatever
else was dearest to him, for the sake of adding so much as a grain of mustard-seed
to the great heap of his accumulated knowledge” (p. 1337). Furthermore, “there
was a professional warfare of long continuance between him and Doctor Rappac-
cini, in which the latter was generally thought to have gained the advantage”
(p. 1337). Apparently, there is strong professional competition between Baglioni
and Rappaccini, and the latter seems to outperform the former. It is, however,
likely that Baglioni does not think that Rappaccini is the better scientist. In fact,
when Baglioni says that Rappaccini “has as much science as any member of the
faculty – with perhaps one single exception – in Padua, or all Italy” (p. 1337, our
italics), the single exception he has in mind is probably himself. Be that as it may,
as Brenzo points out, Baglioni “seeks academic triumph and status.”13 In particu-
lar, he wants to score a triumph over Rappaccini. When he realizes that Rappacci-
ni is scheming against Giovanni he sees his chance to achieve such a triumph
over Rappaccini. He gives Giovanni an antidote, saying that it will bring “back
[Beatrice] within the limits of ordinary nature, from which her father’s madness
has estranged her.” (p. 1347) But when Beatrice drinks the antidote, she dies after
only a short time (pp. 1351f.). Baglioni’s reaction to this is quite peculiar. In a
“tone of triumph mixed with horror” he says to Rappaccini: “And is this the
upshot of your experiment?” (p. 1352). It is not entirely clear what Baglioni is
triumphant about and what he is horrified by. Maybe he wanted to kill Beatrice,
and now he is triumphant about having achieved this goal, foiling Rappaccini’s
plans. At the same time, however, he is horrified by what he has done. Or else, it
could be that he truly thought that the antidote would turn Beatrice into a normal
woman and is now horrified by this surprising turn. His triumph would then be
caused by his having achieved his goal, namely to make Rappaccini fail, while
the horror he feels would be caused by the way in which he achieved his goal. For

our view of Baglioni, this question is of central importance. After all, if he

intentionally killed Beatrice he is just as ruthless as Rappaccini. Unfortunately,
we see no way of deciding this matter.
Giovanni’s role in the story is probably the hardest one to assess. From the
first moment he sees Beatrice, he has an ambiguous attitude towards her. He is
“infatuated with her from the moment he first sees her in the garden below her
window. Yet he immediately senses something dangerous about her.”14 Maybe it
is partly this ambiguity, his incapability to truly know her, which keeps his
infatuation alive and makes it turn into obsession. Very soon, however, it does
not matter any longer “whether she were angel or demon; he was irrevocably
within her sphere” (p. 1342). As Brenzo correctly points out his “own fancy begins
almost immediately to influence his idea of the woman.”15 But it would be unfair
to Giovanni to claim that he constructs an image of Beatrice in his mind and
naively mistakes it for her. He is quite aware of the strange effect she has on him.
This becomes clear when he wonders whether his interest in her is “merely the
fantasy of a young man’s brain, only slightly, or not at all, connected with his
heart!” (p. 1342) That Giovanni ponders the possibility that his interest in Beatrice
is not “connected with his heart” obviously means that he deems it possible that
he is not in love with her. If we take into consideration that the text was written in
the nineteenth century and that Hawthorne was not at liberty to talk about sexual
and erotic matters as freely as authors do today, it is quite plausible to assume
that the “fantasy of a young man’s brain” refers to a sexual or erotic fantasy a
man might have of a woman he craves. According to this interpretation, Giovanni
at least suspects that he is not in love but only sexually obsessed with Beatrice.
It never becomes entirely clear whether he loves her, and if so whether it is
strong love he feels for her. After one of their meetings Giovanni is positively
enchanted with her. The text reads: “She was human: her nature was endowed
with all the gentle and feminine qualities; she was worthiest to be worshipped;
she was capable, surely, on her part, of the height and heroism of love” (p. 1344).
The first part of the sentence (up until “worshipped”) might be free indirect
monologue. In this case it would be Giovanni who thinks that Beatrice is worthy
of being worshipped. Unfortunately, it is not clear how the second part is to be
understood. Does this sentence express Giovanni’s joy over having found out that
Beatrice is able to love (and thus, able to love him)? Or does it simply establish a
fact? No matter how we understand this sentence, a man’s exclamation that a
14 Ibid., p. 154.
15 Ibid.
woman is worthy of worship might be an expression of love as well as sexual

infatuation.
There is some reason to suspect that Giovanni actually loves Beatrice. When
he confronts her with the fact that he has become poisonous too, he gets angry
and loses control over himself, he is “beside himself with passion” (p. 1350). This
is what happens after some time:
Giovanni’s passion had exhausted itself in its outburst from his lips. There now came across
a sense, mournful, and not without tenderness, of the intimate and peculiar relationship
between Beatrice and himself. They stood, as it were, in an utter solitude, which would be
made none the less solitary by the densest throng of human life. Ought not, then, the desert
of humanity around them to press this insulated pair close together? If they should be cruel
to one another, who was there to be kind to them? Besides, thought Giovanni, might there
not still be a hope of his returning within the limits of ordinary nature, and leading
Beatrice – the redeemed Beatrice – by the hand? (p. 1351)
There are many things to notice here. First, Giovanni feels some tenderness
towards Beatrice. Second, he understands that they are completely isolated, and
thinks that this is reason to be kind to one another. Of course, this is rather
pragmatic reasoning, which does not make him seem to be in love. Thirdly,
however, he still hopes that they might be cured. Interestingly, he wants to lead
her “by the hand” after they have been cured. Obviously, once they have been
cured the pragmatic reason to be with her does not exist any longer. In conjunc-
tion with the tenderness he feels towards her, this makes him appear to truly love
her. But this is how the text goes on:
Oh, weak, and selfish, and unworthy spirit, that could dream of an earthly union and earthly
happiness as possible, after such deep love had been so bitterly wronged as was Beatrice’s
love by Giovanni’s blighting words! No, no; there could be no such hope. She must pass
heavily, with that broken heart, across the borders – she must bathe her hurts in some fount
of Paradise, and forget her grief in the light of immortality – and there be well.
But Giovanni did not know it. (p. 1351)
Obviously, Beatrice loves Giovanni so much that his words have wounded her
fatally. He is unaware of this. But this does of course not mean that he does not
love her. Apparently, the point is that Giovanni’s preceding pragmatic reason to
be with Beatrice is “weak, and selfish, and unworthy.” This characterization of
Giovanni does not tally with the fact that he feels tenderness towards her, and
wants to be with her even after a potential cure. Furthermore, we have to take into
consideration why Giovanni uttered his “blighting words” in the first place.
Giovanni thinks that Beatrice is responsible for his having become poisonous:
“and finding thy solitude wearisome, thou hast severed me, likewise, from all the
warmth of life, and enticed me into thy region of unspeakable horror!” (p. 1350)
As this quote makes clear, he furthermore thinks that she has done this out of very
egoistic reasons, i.e. to escape her loneliness. Now, it could be held that Giovanni
should have known for some time that Beatrice is innocent and a thoroughly good
person. After all, he has “recollections which, had Giovanni known how to
estimate them, would have assured him that all this ugly mystery was but an
earthly illusion, and that, whatever mist of evil might seem to have gathered over
her, the real Beatrice was a heavenly angel” (p. 1349). But maybe knowing
Beatrice’s true essence at this point of the narrative is simply asking too much of
Giovanni. What Giovanni knows is this: the woman he cares about is so poisonous
she can kill with her breath.16 Also, he knows that the very same woman told him
not to trust his senses but her words (p. 1343). Furthermore, he knows that after
having spent a lot of time with her, he is now poisonous too. Hawthorne’s point
with regard to this might be that Giovanni needs to listen to his heart, which
might tell him the truth about Beatrice. We are not sure, however, that Giovanni
ever really has the opportunity to listen to his heart. Consider the following
passage:
“Forget whatever you may have fancied in regard to me. If true to the outward senses, still it
may be false in its essence. But the words of Beatrice Rappaccini’s lips are always true from
the heart outward. Those you may believe!”
A fervor glowed in her whole aspect, and beamed upon Giovanni’s consciousness like the
light of truth itself. But while she spoke there was a fragrance in the atmosphere around her,
rich and delightful, though evanescent, yet which the young man, from an indefinable
reluctance, scarcely dared to draw into his lungs. It might be the odor of the flowers. Could it
be Beatrice’s breath, which thus embalmed her words with a strange richness, as if by
steeping them in her heart? A faintness passed like a shadow over Giovanni, and flitted
away; he seemed to gaze through the beautiful girl’s eyes into her transparent soul, and felt
no more doubt or fear. (p. 1343)
The first thing that happens in this passage is that Beatrice tells him that he
should not trust his outward senses but her words. Given that Giovanni has
reason to believe that she can kill with her breath this might not be all too
convincing. The first sentence of the second paragraph tells the reader that
Beatrice, while speaking, is illuminated by “the light of truth itself.” But the next
sentence begins with “but,” indicating that there is some problem with this. There
is “a fragrance” which might be the “odor of the flowers” or “Beatrice’s breath.”
16 Does he really know this? Yes. Admittedly, when he sees Beatrice kill the insect with her
breath Giovanni is not sure whether he can trust his senses (p. 1339). But by the time he meets
Beatrice for the last time, he already knows for sure that he himself has become poisonous. He
simply does not have any reason any more to distrust his senses.
Now, at this point Giovanni already strongly suspects that both the flowers and
Beatrice’s breath are fatal. That “the light of truth” is accompanied by this smell
does not make it very trustworthy. Furthermore, Giovanni does not “gaze through
the beautiful girl’s eyes into her transparent soul” – he only seems to do so. That
“he seemed to gaze” into her soul probably means that it seems to him that he
gazes into her soul (as the story at this point is still internally focalized from his
perspective). This, of course, means that he does not know that he actually gets to
know her true self in this moment. Immediately before this he feels faint. This will
not necessarily make him more inclined to trust his impression either. All in all,
Giovanni does not seem to have overwhelming reason to assume that Beatrice
really is essentially innocent and benign.
Although, as we have argued, there is some evidence that Giovanni loves
Beatrice, there is also strong evidence that he does not love her. First, he himself is
not too sure that he is really in love with her. The relevant passage is, of course, the
one where he asks himself whether his interest in Beatrice is “only slightly, or not
at all, connected with his heart” (p. 1342). We discussed this passage above.
Secondly, as Brenzo points out, “Hawthorne hints that Giovanni feels only a
‘cunning semblance of love which flourishes in the imagination, but finds no depth
of root into the heart’ (p. 1345).”17 Does Giovanni love Beatrice? Or does he not? We
do not think that the matter is entirely clear. It is quite clear that his love is not as
strong and selfless as Beatrice’s. And maybe the affection he feels for her is not
strong enough to be called love at all. But he surely feels some affection for her.
What our detailed discussion of the four central characters of the story shows
is that although Beatrice is poisonous, she is the only character in the story whose
actions are completely unquestionable from a moral point of view. Her only
negative trait, namely that she is poisonous, is to blame on her father, not herself.
The true villain of the story is definitely Rappaccini, who creates a poisonous Eden,
turns his daughter into a poisonous woman, and then imbues Giovanni with
poison, and who seriously thinks the two – and especially Beatrice – should be
grateful for that. How the actions of Giovanni and Baglioni are to be evaluated from
a moral point of view is less clear. We do not know whether Baglioni wants to kill
Beatrice. But he is driven by obsessive competitiveness and envy of Rappaccini’s
successes. This alone makes his moral character less impeccable than Beatrice’s.
Furthermore, no matter what he intends, his actions ultimately lead to Beatrice’s
death. Though horrified, he is still triumphant when she dies. Thus, Hawthorne
obviously did not want us to think of Baglioni as ultimately benign. Of course,
none of the things Giovanni does are even remotely as evil as Rappaccini’s actions.

But Hawthorne definitely did not intend this character to be a prime example of
moral impeccability either. Giovanni does not seem to be able to love as deeply as
Beatrice. When Beatrice wants to drink the antidote, telling him to await the result,
he does not protest. And he does not offer to try it in her stead. Very often, what an
author does not make a character do is just as important as the things the author
makes the character do. Hawthorne does not give us any information about what
Giovanni is doing during Beatrice’s last moments. He remains silent, too, after her
death. Clearly, then, Hawthorne did not want us to think that Giovanni is as tender,
loving, and affectionate as Beatrice. All in all, Giovanni is far from being as
virtuous and impeccable as her. The true heroine of the story is therefore Beatrice.
She is characterized by a long list of positive attributes. None of the male characters
is even remotely as positive a character as she is.
As indicated, “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a story meant to be read against the
backdrop of the biblical story of Adam and Eve in Eden. Recall that the latter is an
obviously misogynist story.18 This suggests that Hawthorne wanted his short story
18 There is ample evidence for this view. First of all, note that God, the creator of earth and life, is
male. This, of course, is a powerful image of the preeminence of the masculine over the feminine.
Second, Adam is created before Eve. This might give you the idea that Eve is secondary or
subordinate to Adam. Third, when God creates Eve, he does so with the specific intention to have
someone help Adam and keep him company. Eve thus owes her existence to Adam’s needs. This
dependence is symbolically highlighted by the fact that Eve is created from one of Adam’s ribs.
Fourth, Eve’s function starkly contrasts with Adam’s function, which is to tend to God’s creation.
So, whereas Adam seems to fulfill an important function, Eve is only an assistant of sorts to him.
Fifth, it is Eve who succumbs to the seduction by the snake, thereby demonstrating irresponsi-
bility and indifference to God’s command. Sixth, one might blame Eve for giving the forbidden
fruit to Adam. All we know is that Eve approaches the tree of knowledge and that “she took of the
fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat” (Gen. 3: 6). It
is not clear whether Adam was aware of the fact that the fruit he was offered was a forbidden fruit.
Clearly, Eve should have made sure that he was. If she did not, her action was highly irrespon-
sible. Seventh, when Eve decides to ignore God’s command, she acts out of desire: she looks at the
tree of knowledge and sees that it is “a tree to be desired to make one wise” (Gen. 3: 6). In
Christianity desire has widely been seen as a sinister force within humans. It is desire that makes
humans susceptible to seduction by the devil and prone to sin and, in turn, it is the capability to
master one’s desires and to resist temptation that is of the utmost importance for Christians. Eve
displays a disastrous lack of this capability, and thus becomes an image of female weakness and
susceptibility to seduction. Eighth, God says that consumption of the forbidden fruit will lead to
death, while the snake denies this. Eve gives more credence to what the snake says than to what
God says. Instead of having faith in God, she chooses to distrust him. Ninth, and very importantly,
it seems that Eve is to blame for humankind’s expulsion from paradise and for humans being
mortal. Again, we do not know whether Adam knew what he was doing when he ate the forbidden
fruit. But that it is Eve who is seduced by the snake and gives the forbidden fruit to Adam makes it
rather plausible to assume that readers were supposed to get the impression that it was all Eve’s
to be understood as a comment on this theme in the story of the Garden of Eden.

Once we pick up this cue there are some aspects of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” that
make this interpretation even more plausible.
First, the story of the Garden of Eden is meant to establish that men are
morally superior to women, and that women are rightfully subordinate to men. In
Hawthorne’s story the most virtuous and benign character is a woman. What
Hawthorne does is thus a sort of gender reversal. He even creates a powerful
image of this reversal of roles. In the biblical story of Adam and Eve the fruits of
the tree of knowledge of good and evil mean death. It is Eve who picks them and
hands them to Adam, thereby committing the original sin. Arguably, what corre-
sponds to the tree of knowledge in Hawthorne’s story is the shrub at the center of
Rappaccini’s garden. The fruits of this shrub mean death. Now, in “Rappaccini’s
Daughter” the male character, Giovanni, reaches for the fruits of the shrub. And
Beatrice prevents him from picking them (which is maybe what Adam should
have done). So Hawthorne does not only reverse the roles – he goes one step
further, and lets the woman save the man.
Secondly, in the story of the Garden of Eden, the woman is created after the
man in order to keep him company. In Hawthorne’s story Rappaccini creates a
poisonous Eden and a poisonous woman. Only afterwards does he create a
poisonous man, who is intended to keep the woman company.
Third, whereas God appoints Adam to the important job of tending the
garden, Rappaccini asks Beatrice to tend the magnificent bush in the middle of
the garden.
We suggest that these reverse correspondences are meant to establish one
thing: Hawthorne wants to let us know how strongly he disagrees with the gender
hierarchy of the story of the Garden of Eden. Women are not morally inferior to
men, and they are not rightfully subordinate to them. This is one of the main
messages of “Rappaccini’s Daughter.”
IV Why Our Interpretation Doesn’t Feature a Fictional Narrator
Why does our interpretation not feature a fictional narrator? The easy answer is, of
course, that we do not believe that in the fiction there is someone who narrates the
fault. Tenth, as a punishment for her disobedience, Eve is sentenced to obey Adam. – In sum,
then, the whole text gives the strong impression that it was meant to establish three things. First,
women were secondary to men from the beginning. Second, wives have to obey their husbands.
Third, women are somehow to blame for the lamentable fact that humans do not dwell in paradise
any longer.
story that the reader reads. We do not believe this because, first, we do not think
that there are theoretical arguments showing that every fictional narrative has a
fictional narrator and, second, we do not think that this particular narrative has any
features that make it necessary to assume that it has a fictional narrator. We hold
that, as long as there is no reason to assume that a fictional narrative has a fictional
narrator, it does not have one. In other words, the default assumption is that a
fictional narrative does not have a fictional narrator. With any question regarding
the existence of an object the default assumption is that the object does not exist. If
there is no evidence to the contrary, we assume that dragons and wizards do not
exist. If there is no evidence to the contrary, we should also assume that dragons,
wizards, and a person telling the story of Giovanni’s experiences do not exist in the
fiction.
So why do we not think that there are any reasons to assume that “Rappacci-
ni’s Daughter” has a fictional narrator? In this section, we will take a look at what
might be thought are reasons to assume that “Rappaccini’s Daughter” has a
fictional narrator.
1. Our interpretation contains claims about what is the case in the fiction. We’ve
made plenty of claims about what is the case in the fiction. Do we need a fictional
narrator in order to establish these claims? We don’t think so. But let’s take a look
at some ideas that might encourage the belief that when making assertions about
what is the case in a fiction we have to assume that there is a fictional narrator.
Sometimes it is claimed that actual readers can only know what is going on in the
fiction if they are told about the fictional facts by a fictional narrator.19 But this is
not true. In fact, the claim is self-refuting. What a fictional narrator does is
fictional. Thus, if actual readers cannot know any fictional facts, they cannot
know what a fictional narrator says. On the assumption that actual readers can
only know of fictional facts if they are told the facts by a fictional narrator, actual
readers can never gain any knowledge of fictional facts. But it is clear that they
can. So the assumption is false.20 Another idea is that fictional facts are made, or
created, or determined by fictional narrators.21 If that is the case, any talk about
fictional facts presupposes that there is a fictional narrator. However, the idea is
clearly misguided. What is the case in a fiction depends on the text of the work of
fiction. But a work of fiction is an actual object, and fictional narrators cannot
19 This is the ontological gap argument. For a slightly more detailed discussion see Köppe/
Stühring, “Against”, pp. 64f.
20 To our knowledge this refutation was first given in Andrew Kania, “Against Them, Too: A
Reply to Alward”, in: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65/2007, pp. 404–408.
21 This is the argument from creation. For a more detailed discussion see Köppe/Stühring,
“Against”, pp. 67f.
make, create, or determine actual objects. What is the case in a fiction thus
depends on something that fictional narrator cannot make, create, or determine.
It follows that fictional narrators cannot determine what is the case in a fiction.
According to an influential view on the nature of fiction that has been
developed in great detail by Kendall Walton, fictional facts depend on prescrip-
tions to imagine. To say that a fictional fact obtains is to say that there is a
prescription to the effect that this fact is to be imagined. These prescriptions are
established by works of fiction. Works of fiction come into being by authors of
fiction who partake in the institution of fiction.22 Can the prescribed imaginings,
the prescriptions to imagine, the work of fiction, its author or the institution of
fiction be created by a fictional narrator? Surely they cannot. Fictional narrators
are themselves fictional entities. They are fictional facts, i.e. facts to be imagined.
Their very existence depends on prescriptions to imagine, works of fiction,
authors of fiction, and the institution of fiction. To claim that a fictional narrator
establishes a fictional fact is thus to put the cart before the horse. In order to
establish a fictional fact, you need to create or change an actual work of fiction.
Again, no fictional narrator can do that.23
2. Our interpretation contains claims about Hawthorne’s intentions. We have
repeatedly made claims that implicitly or explicitly refer to Hawthorne’s inten-
tions. For example, we claimed that “Hawthorne could hardly have made it
clearer that … ,” “Hawthorne’s point might be that … ,” “Hawthorne does not give
us any information about … ,” and even “But Hawthorne did definitely not intend
… .” Now, many people think that literary critics should never make any straight-
forward claims about what an author does, achieves, intends, thinks, tries to say,
and so on. It might be held that instead of attributing actions, achievements,
intentions, beliefs, and so on to Hawthorne, they should always be attributed to a
fictional narrator. So what we should have said is that the narrator could hardly
have made it clearer that …, or that the narrator does not give us any information
about …, or that the narrator does definitely not intend that, and so on. We would
like to say three things about these ideas.
First of all, statements about an author’s intentions and thoughts are some-
times very well warranted. It is possible to find out something about them by
reading a fictional narrative. Of course, we can never be sure about our findings,
but that does not mean that we never get it right, and it definitely does not mean
that we should not try. The claim that we can refer to the intentions of an author
22 See Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe. On the Foundations of the Representational

Arts, Cambridge 1990.
23 For a more extensive argument to this effect, see again Köppe/Stühring, “Against”, esp.
pp. 67f.
has been ably and convincingly defended by several authors and we do not have
anything to add here.24
Second, even if statements about what an author intends, means, or commu-
nicates were always false, this would not mean that we had to talk about what a
fictional narrator intends, means, or communicates instead. Take a look at the
following passage in our interpretation:
But Hawthorne did definitely not intend this character to be a prime example of moral
impeccability either. Giovanni does not seem to be able to love as deeply as Beatrice. When
Beatrice wants to drink the antidote, telling him to await the result, he does not protest. And
he does not offer to try it in her stead. Very often, what an author does not make a character
do is just as important as the things the author makes the character do. Hawthorne does not
give us any information about what Giovanni is doing during Beatrice’s last moments. He
remains silent, too, after her death. Clearly, then, Hawthorne did not want us to think that
Giovanni is as tender, loving, and affectionate as Beatrice.
Someone accepting the dogma of the intentional fallacy could simply rephrase
the passage this way:
But this character is definitely not a prime example of moral impeccability either. Giovanni
does not seem to be able to love as deeply as Beatrice. When Beatrice wants to drink the
antidote, telling him to await the result, he does not protest. And he does not offer to try it in
her stead. Very often, what a character does not do is just as important as the things the
character does. The text does not contain any information about what Giovanni is doing
during Beatrice’s last moments. He remains silent, too, after her death. Clearly, then,
Giovanni is not as tender, loving, and affectionate as Beatrice.
All the statements about Hawthorne are gone, yet there are no statements about a
fictional narrator. So even if we could never make any true statements about an
author’s intentions and actions, this would not mean that we would have to refer
to a fictional narrator’s intentions and actions, thereby assuming the existence of
a fictional narrator.
24 For some recent overviews, see, e.g. Paisley Livingston, “Intention in Art”, in: Jerrold Levinson
(ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics, Oxford 2003, pp. 275–290; Robert Stecker, “Interpreta-
tion and the Problem of the Relevant Intention”, in: Matthew Kieran (ed.), Contemporary Debates
in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, Malden, MA, 2006, pp. 269–281; Peter Lamarque, The
Philosophy of Literature, Malden, MA, 2009, pp. 115–131; Tom Kindt/Tilmann Köppe, “Concep-
tions of Authorship and Authorial Intention”, in: Liesbeth Korthals Altes/Gillis Dorleijn/Ralf
Grüttemeier (eds.), Authorship Revisited. Conceptions of Authorship around 1900 and 2000, Gro-
ningen 2010, pp. 213–227.
Third, some of the statements we made about Hawthorne could not truthfully
be made about a fictional narrator. For instance, we said that “very often, what an
author does not make a character do is just as important as the things the author
makes the character do.” That an author makes a character do things does not
mean that the author forces the character to do these things (or bullies the
character into doing these things). Rather, it means that the author writes a text,
thereby creating a fiction, thereby determining fictional facts, amongst them the
fictional fact that a character does certain things and does not do certain other
things. Thus, the author literally makes it the case that, in the fiction, a person
performs certain actions. This is something that the narrator cannot do. That is
because you can only create fictional facts by creating works of fiction. But works
of fiction really do exist in our world. And a fictional narrator cannot create
something that exists in our world. And that is why fictional narrators cannot
literally make something the case in a fiction. The upshot is that our statement
about Hawthorne could not truthfully be rephrased as a statement about a
fictional narrator.
3. The fictional narrative contains evaluations. We have been amply concerned
with evaluations of fictional facts, such as moral qualities of the characters’
deeds.25 We said that it is the text that establishes these facts. What we did not
claim is that a fictional narrator utters any such evaluations. Consider again the
following sentences, taken from Hawthorne’s story, and quoted in our interpreta-
tion:
Oh, weak, and selfish, and unworthy spirit, that could dream of an earthly union and earthly
happiness as possible, after such deep love had been so bitterly wronged as was Beatrice’s
love by Giovanni’s blighting words! No, no; there could be no such hope. She must pass
heavily, with that broken heart, across the borders – she must bathe her hurts in some fount
of Paradise, and forget her grief in the light of immortality – and there be well. (p. 1351)
Proponents of PN will not fail to claim that these sentences clearly express the
evaluative voice of a fictional narrator. They may also point out that thereby, the
short story in fact stages a polyphony of evaluative voices, prominent amongst
which is the narrator’s,26 and that a failure to acknowledge this amounts to an
25 For a more detailed discussion of evaluations in fictional discourse see Köppe/Stühring,

“Against”, pp. 71f.
26 See, e.g., Lois A. Cuddy, “The Purgatorial Gardens of Hawthorne and Dante: Irony and
Redefinition in ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’”, in: Modern Language Studies, 17/1987, pp. 39–53, p. 39,
passim; David Stouck/Janet Giltrow, “‘A Confused and Doubtful Sound of Voices’: Ironic Con-
tingencies in the Language of Hawthorne’s Romances”, in: The Modern Language Review, 92/
1997, pp. 559–572, p. 564, p. 567 (Fn. 2), p. 568, p. 570, passim.
underestimation of the complexity of the short story. And, finally, they will claim
that our stubborn reluctance to accept this fact commits us to the untenable
assumption that it is Hawthorne’s evaluative attitudes that are expressed by the
quoted sentences.
All these claims are false. But they need careful examination.
First, it is true that these sentences express an evaluation of fictional facts.
Giovanni’s words are said to be blighting, his spirit is said to be weak, selfish, and
unworthy, and all the rest. More explicitly, the sentences invite readers to imagine
that Giovanni’s spirit either could be said to be, or indeed is, weak, selfish, and
unworthy (and all the rest). This, we claim, is their function. The sentences are
meant to invite us to consider what has happened in the fiction in a particular
evaluative light, and they do so quite forcefully, as can be seen from the interjec-
tion, the exclamation mark, repetitions and other means of linguistic emphasis.27
They thereby do not establish the further fictional fact that a narrator judges these
things accordingly. Note that, if they did, this would not establish an additional
evaluative perspective. The perspective that is elicited by these sentences is fully
acknowledged by our interpretation.
Second: the ‘polyphony of voices.’ We’ve made it clear in our interpretation
that the protagonists have very different moral outlooks, and we have just pointed
out that readers are invited to evaluate these perspectives in turn. Moreover, some
fictional facts are hard to evaluate. This is true especially of Baglioni’s deeds and
also of Giovanni’s emotions. Readers are therefore meant to mull over these
things. There is a fictional polyphony, if you will, in the world of the story, and
another one of invited readerly responses. And, of course, it is possible to state
these things clearly, as we have done in our interpretation in section III, and
without making use of the potentially misleading metaphor of ‘polyphony’ in the
first place.
Third, do we, in the absence of a fictional narrator, have to assume that it is
Hawthorne who intrudes with his opinions? No. What we are committed to is the
claim that Hawthorne, by writing these sentences and making it clear that they
are to be taken as part of the fiction, invited us to imagine what they are about.
This imagination is on a par with all the other imaginations concerning fictional
facts, such as the beauty of Beatrice or her sorrow, in that it is guided by the
content of the sentences as well as their syntax, stylistic features, etc.28 Maybe
27 See Nicholas Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art, Oxford 1980, p. 233: Appreciators of
fiction are invited to “reflect on, to ponder over, to explore the implications of, to conduct
strandwise extrapolation on [certain states of affairs].”
28 We thus claim that stylistic features such as the exclamation (“oh”), the accumulation of
evaluative expressions or the exclamation mark are in the service of inviting evaluations too; in
Hawthorne indeed had some disdainful thoughts about Giovanni. But the point is
that we are in no way committed to asserting that he had.29
4. There is a speaker directly addressing the reader. Take a look at the follow-
ing sentence: “If the reader be inclined to judge for himself, we refer him to
certain black-letter tracts on both sides, preserved in the medical department of
the University of Padua” (p. 1337). Quite obviously, someone addresses the reader
directly and even refers to themselves by saying “we.” We think that it is perfectly
reasonable to assume that the person speaking to the reader is Hawthorne
himself. There is no reason to assume that it is impossible for an author of a
fictional narrative to address the reader in that narrative. As a matter of fact, we
are not even aware of any argument to the effect that it is impossible.30
5. The narrative contains temporal expressions that refer to a fictional act of
narrating. Take a look at the first sentence of Hawthorne’s short story: “A young
man, named Giovanni Guasconti, came, very long ago, from the more southern
region of Italy, to pursue his studies at the University of Padua” (p. 1333). It might
be claimed that this sentence makes the existence of a fictional narrator necessary
because of the temporal expression “very long ago.” The idea is that we can only
make sense of this temporal expression by assuming that there is someone for
whom it was very long ago that Giovanni went to Padua. This person has to be the
fictional narrator, as it cannot be the reader or the author, because from their
perspective the events in the story are fictional, which means that they do not
stand in any temporal relation to them. This argument is incorrect. It is perfectly
possible to make-believe that a specific event happened a long time ago. This
does not require make-believing that there is someone for whom the event
happened a long time ago. (You can try for yourself. Just imagine that a long time
ago there used to be unicorns. It works.) Note that making-believe that a long time
ago there used to be unicorns and making-believe that there is someone and that
a lot earlier there used to be unicorns are completely different. Also note that if we
introduce a fictional narrator we get a third thing to make-believe – namely
particular, these features could be said to emphatically invite an evaluation or to invite an

emphatic evaluation.
29 By the way, it is possible to assume that Hawthorne meant to express his opinion by way of
these sentences. We do not know. What we do know is that, however we decide on this question,
the result does not establish the presence of a fictional narrator.
30 See Jonas Koch, Erklären und Verstehen fiktionaler Filme. Semantische und ontologische
Aspekte [Diss.], Bremen 2012, p. 41, for another example and a discussion that is compatible with
our view. See also Carol Marie Bensick, La Nouvelle Beatrice: Renaissance and Romance in
‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’, New Brunswick, NJ, 1985, esp. Ch. III, for a discussion of the many real-
world references to be found in the story.
making-believe that there is someone who narrates that a long time ago there
used to be unicorns. So we have three different contents to imagine, all three of
which are possible to be entertained by readers, and all three of which can be
prescribed by authors of fiction.
V Concluding Remarks
So let’s take a step back and see what we have established. Firstly, we have shown
that the first pragmatic argument (The pragmatic argument from the advanta-
geousness of a fictional narrator for interpretation) is not meant to and in fact does
not establish the truth of PN. Secondly, we demonstrated that the second prag-
matic argument for PN (The pragmatic argument from the necessity of a fictional
narrator for interpretation), while being meant to, does not establish the truth of
PN (simply because it is unclear why its premise should be true). Thirdly, by
providing an interpretation of a fictional narrative that does not make use of the
notion of a fictional narrator, we proved wrong the claim that it is impossible to
adequately interpret a fictional narrative without positing a fictional narrator.
Fourthly, we have discussed in some detail aspects both of the short story and of
our interpretation that might prompt interpreters to think that there has to be a
fictional narrator, and we have argued that none of these aspects warrants this
thought.31
Now, in order to attack our argument proponents of PN have to do two things:
they have to show that our theoretical discussion of the two pragmatic arguments
is somehow flawed, and they either have to show that our interpretation is
inadequate or, alternatively, that there are other types of interpretive goals and
interpretive statements which make the fictional narrator indeed indispensable.
So we have given proponents of PN an ample zone of attack.
Will they make good use of it?
Appendix: On the Preface of “Rappaccini’s Daughter”
Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” first appeared in the 1844 issue of the

Democratic Review. Later he included the short story in his collection Mosses from
31 We believe that these aspects will be parts of many interpretations. So even if you do not like
our reading of “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” this does not invalidate the more general claim that
interpretive statements on what is the case in the fiction, on fictional commentary or evaluations,
or on the author’s intentions etc. are possible without making use of a fictional narrator.
an Old Manse, which first appeared in 1846. In the Democratic Review, “Rappacci-
ni’s Daughter” was accompanied by a preface under the title “Writings of Aubé-
pine.”32 Hawthorne did not include the preface in the 1846 and 1851 editions of
Mosses from an Old Manse.33
The fact that the short story was first published by Hawthorne with a preface
and then, later on, without a preface may be taken to mean different things. We
may hold that, irrespective of the presence of the preface, the short story constitu-
tes a literary work in its own right that, accordingly, can be interpreted in its own
right (without taking a preface into account, that is). Alternatively, we might hold
that by publishing “Rappaccini’s Daughter” with and without a preface,
Hawthorne in effect created two different works: one of them includes a preface
and the other one doesn’t.34 Either way, there is a literary work bearing the title
“Rappaccini’s Daughter,” written and published by Hawthorne, that does not
include a preface. It is this work that we refer to in our interpretation and that
proves the point that there is a fictional narrative without a fictional narrator that
can be properly interpreted without claiming that it does include a fictional
narrator (or so we have argued in this paper).
Having said this, the work (or version of the work) that does include a preface
raises some interesting issues for the debate between proponents of Pan-Narrator
32 According to Beverly Haviland, “The Sin of Synecdoche: Hawthorne’s Allegory against Sym-
bolism in ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’”, in: Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 29/1987,
pp. 278–301, p. 299 (Fn. 13), in the Democratic Review the title “Rappaccini’s Daughter” was
printed before the short story only and not before the preface. This strongly suggests that the short
story needs to be distinguished from the preface, a fact that has been obscured by the editors of
the Norton edition of “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (Hawthorne, “Rappaccini’s Daughter”), who added
the title “Rappaccini’s Daughter” before the preface (cf. p. 1332).
33 Cf. Haviland, “Synecdoche”, p. 282 (“Standard editions in print today most often choose to
omit [the preface], perhaps because the 1846 texts of the stories are considered authoritative”; cf.
ibid., p. 299, Fn. 14); Masahiro Nakamura, “The Removal of the Preface of Hawthorne’s ‘Rappacci-
ni’s Daughter’ and the Indian Question”, in: Bulletin of the Aichi University of Education, 53/2004,
pp. 93–101, http://repository.aichi-edu.ac.jp/dspace/bitstream/10424/918/1/kenjin5393101.pdf
(accessed July 16, 2013), p. 93. Amongst the editions which do not include the preface is also the
German translation by Ilse Krämer, see Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rappaccinis Tochter und andere
Erzählungen. trans. by Ilse Krämer, Zürich 1966. Scholars who interpret the preface seem to agree
that the ‘actual’ story is to be distinguished from it, see e.g. Margaret Hallissy, “Hawthorne’s
Venomous Beatrice”, in: Studies in Short Fiction, 19/1982, pp. 231–239, p. 236 (“As the story opens,
Giovanni Guasconti is a young man in a prelapsarian state of sexual innocence.”).
34 We could also say that by publishing “Rappaccini’s Daughter” with and without a preface,
Hawthorne created two different versions of the same work. This makes no difference for what
follows.
theories and proponents of Optional-Narrator theories. To some of these issues we

shall now turn, albeit rather briefly.
The preface from the Democratic Review edition starts thus:
We do not remember to have seen any translated specimen of the productions of M. de

l’Aubépine; a fact the less to be wondered at, as his very name is unknown to many of his
own countrymen, as well as to the student of foreign literature. As a writer, he seems to
occupy an unfortunate position between the Transcendentalists (who, under one name or
another, have their share in all the current literature of the world), and the great body of
pen-and-ink men who address the intellect and sympathies of the multitude. […] His
writings, to do them justice, are not altogether destitute of fancy and originality; they might
have won him greater reputation but for an inveterate love of allegory, which is apt to invest
his plots and characters with the aspect of scenery and people in the clouds, and to steal
away the human warmth out of his conception. (p. 1332)
The preface continues to give a list of French titles of Aubépine’s works and it
closes with a praise of “La Revue Anti-Aristocratique” and its editor, “the Compte
de Bearhaven.” (pp. 1332f.)
Did Hawthorne, by writing the preface, create a fictional narrator?
All scholars we have encountered seem to agree that by writing the sentences
“We do not remember to have seen any translated specimens of the productions
of M. de l’Aubépine …,” Hawthorne is writing about himself. “Aubépine” is the
French translation of “hawthorn.” Hawthorne used this not too subtle pseudonym
elsewhere, for instance when writing to Sophia Peabody.35 One may thus agree
with Robert S. Levine and Arnold Krupat, who, in their annotations to the preface
in the Norton edition, point out that Hawthorne gives a “tongue-in-cheek ac-
count” of his own career as a writer, including “mock bibliographical citations.”
(pp. 1332f.)36
35 Cf. Patricia Dunlavy Valenti, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne. A Life, Columbia 2004, p. 226 (“The
story [‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’] appeared under the playful pseudonym ‘M. de l’Aubépine’, the
French word for the hawthorn bush and a name with which Nathaniel had signed some love
letters to Sophia. As a pseudonym, de l’Aubépine failed (and was never intended) to conceal its
author’s identity.” Cf. already Dan McCall, “Hawthorne’s ‘Familiar Kind of Preface’”, in: ELH, 35/
1968, pp. 422–439, p. 423, passim. “La Revue Anti-Aristocratique” and “the Compte de Bearhaven”
are references to the Democratic Review and its editor, John O’Sullivan, respectively (cf. the Fns.
p. 1332f).
36 Cf. also McCall, “Hawthorne”, p. 427; Don Parry Norford, “Rappaccini’s Garden of Allegory”,
in: American Literature, 50/1978, pp. 167–186, p. 167, passim; Michael T. Gilmore, American
Romanticism and the Marketplace, Chicago/London 1985, pp. 62f., 67, passim; Frederick C. Crews,
The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes, New York 1966, p. 117; Hyatt H. Wagg-
oner, Hawthorne: A Critical Study, Cambridge, MA, 1963, p. 118; Judith Fryer, The Faces of Eve:
Women in the Nineteenth Century American Novel, New York 1976, p. 40; G. R. Thompson, The Art
Speaking tongue-in-cheek, or ironically, is not the same as speaking fiction-

ally. If Hawthorne speaks ironically about himself using a pseudonym, this does
not make it fictional that there is a person (a narrator) speaking about a French
author whose name is “M. de l’Aubépine.” In general, if you take another person’s
ironical remark to be a fictional utterance, you are very likely to get her completely
wrong.
Accordingly, there is an interpretation of the preface that does not include the
claim that by writing the preface Hawthorne created a fictional narrator.
This, however, need not be the last word on the matter. For maybe Hawthorne
meant to refer to himself by speaking fictionally. According to this proposal, the
preface is a piece of fiction by which Hawthorne meant to convey some self-related
insights. Surely this is possible.37 So let us see in some more detail what the claim
that the preface is a piece of fiction (hereafter: the preface-fiction) amounts to.
The preface-fiction introduces some fictional characters, amongst them a
first-person speaker (“we”) and the author M. de l’Aubépine. According to classi-
cal narratology, the first-person speaker is the (fictional) narrator, since she or he
is the one who relates the ‘story’ of M. de l’Aubépine and his career as a writer.38
Is the fictional narrator of the preface-fiction also the fictional narrator of the
story “Rappaccini’s Daughter” that is mentioned in the preface-fiction? Obviously
not. According to the preface-fiction, it is fictional that M. de l’Aubépine is the
author of a “tale” named “Béatrice; ou La Belle Empoisonneuse” which is trans-
lated under the title “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (p. 1333). The word “tale” may refer
to a story that is either fictional or factual. Accordingly, we do not really know
whether it is preface-fictional that Aubépine’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a
factual or fictional story.39 Let us consider both possibilities in turn.
According to the first interpretation, it is preface-fictional that Aubépine is
the author of a factual narrative called “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” Surely, there is
of Authorial Presence: Hawthorne’s Provincial Tales, Durham/London 1993, pp. 124f. Michael

Anesko and N. Christine Brooks, The French Face of Nathaniel Hawthorne: Monsieur de l’Aubépine
and His Second Empire Critics, Columbus 2011, p. 128 (Fn. 2).
37 See Walton, Mimesis, p. 78. It might also be possible to speak ironically and fictionally at the
same time. This possibility does not matter much for the following considerations.
38 Haviland, “Synecdoche”, p. 281 (passim), holds that the preface features a (fictional?) “trans-
lator,” who is the first-person speaker. John Downton Hazlett, “Re-reading ‘Rappaccini’s Daugh-
ter’: Giovanni and the Seduction of the Transcendental Reader”, in: ESQ: A Journal of the American
Renaissance, 35/1989, pp. 43–68, finds a “fictional editor” in the “story’s self-mocking, self-
advertising preface” (p. 43). See also Dennis Pahl, Architects of the Abyss: The Indeterminate
Fictions of Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville, Columbia 1989, p. 59, pp. 76f.
39 There are some hints, though, that the fictional narrator of the preface-fiction takes Aubépine
to be a writer of fiction, cf. p. 1332.
no reason to assume that this narrative features a fictional narrator. Factual

narratives in general do not feature fictional narrators.
According to the second interpretation, it is preface-fictional that Aubépine is
the author of a fictional narrative called “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” We can now
ask about this fiction within the fiction whether it has a fictional narrator.
Proponents of PN will of course hasten to assure us that it does have a fictional
narrator. We, however, do not see any reason why this fiction within a fiction
should have a fictional narrator. Accordingly, the quarrel between ON and PN
crops up again. We must not forget, however, where we are: We have, for the sake
of argument, assumed that the preface is a piece of fiction which makes it fictional
that a narrator relates the story of Aubépine’s history as a writer.40 So there is one
fictional narrator. Furthermore, we have assumed, for the sake of argument, that
Aubépine is a writer of fiction. The question now under discussion is whether his
fiction called “Rappaccini’s Daughter” features a fictional narrator.
At this point, dear Reader, we refer you to the beginning of this article. For,
by carefully reading it again, you will not fail to notice that there is abundant
reason to assume that is possible for a piece fiction not to feature a fictional
narrator. Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” is a case in point.41
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Narratorless Narration? Some Reflections on
the Arguments For and Against the Ubiquity
of Narrators in Fictional Narration
I Pan-Narrator Theories, Optional-Narrator Theories, No-

Narrator Theories – a Brief Introduction
In twentieth-century narratology and fiction theory there have always been scho-
lars – although only few – who rejected what nowadays is called the pan-narrator
theory of fictional narration (PN), i.e. the idea that every verbal fictional narration
has a narrator.1 During the last ten years, however, the attacks on the so-called
covert or effaced heterodiegetic narrator, but also on heterodiegetic narrators in
general, have become much more frequent and more vigorous.2 One can roughly
distinguish three different lines of argument that underlie the refutation of PN:
1. the use of language argument: fictional heterodiegetic narration is consid-
ered as a mode of presentation that is completely different from fictional
homodiegetic narration as well as from factual narration and is described as
a non-communicative use of language;
2. the transmedial narratology argument: due to the fact that parallels can be
drawn between story presentation in feature film3 and story presentation in
1 Cf. e.g. Käte Hamburger, Die Logik der Dichtung, 3rd Edition, Stuttgart 1977; Ann Banfield,
Unspeakable Sentences. Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction, Boston 1982;
Christine Brooke-Rose, “Ill Locutions”, in: Cristopher Nash (ed.), Narrative in Culture. The Uses of
Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy and Literature, London 1990, pp. 154–171; Klaus Weimar,
“Wo und was ist der Erzähler?”, in: Modern Language Notes, 109/1994, pp. 495–506; Dietrich
Weber, Erzählliteratur. Schriftwerk – Kunstwerk – Erzählwerk, Göttingen 1998.
2 Cf. e.g. Berys Gaut, “The Philosophy of the Movies: Cinematic Narration”, in: Peter Kivy (ed.),
The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, Malden, MA, 2004, pp. 230–253; Andrew Kania, “Against the
Ubiquity of Fictional Narrators”, in: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63/2005,
pp. 47–54; Katherine Thomson-Jones, “The Literary Origins of the Cinematic Narrator”, in: British
Journal of Aesthetics, 47/2007, pp. 76–94; Richard Walsh, The Rhetoric of Fictionality. Narrative
Theory and the Idea of Fiction, Columbus 2007; Gregory Currie, Narratives and Narrators. A
Philosophy of Stories, Oxford 2010; Tilmann Köppe/Jan Stühring, “Against Pan-Narrator The-
ories”, in: Journal of Literary Semantics, 40/2011, pp. 59–80.
3 There are of course feature films that make use of an explicit fictional narrator like e.g. a voice-
over narrator, but story-presentation in films can easily be accomplished, and often is, without an
explicit fictional narrator.
46 Frank Zipfel
verbal heterodiegetic narration and against the background that most film
theorists find it ill-advised to postulate that every feature film has a narrator,
there seem to be good reasons for the assumption that there are fictional
narrations (verbal ones as well as others) without a narrator;
3. the interpretation and fiction theory argument: this argument only refutes the
concept of effaced narrators, claiming that we should only talk about a
narrator when there are explicit features in the text that prompt the assump-
tion that there is a narrator. This position has been called optional-narrator
theory (ON).
The proponents of (1) and (2) mostly claim that heterodiegetic narrations do not
have narrators at all and thus advocate no-narrator theories (NN). Note that (1)
and (2) to a certain extent complement each other in isolating fictional heterodie-
getic narration from other kinds of verbal narration in the attempt to align specific
kinds of verbal narration with narratorial forms in other media. Note also that
within the differing lines of argument often similar points are made, although in
different contexts and from differing perspectives.
In this paper I will mainly discuss (3) because it entails a more modest claim
than (1) and (2): whereas the proponents of (1) and (2) often maintain that no
heterodiegetic fictional narration has a narrator, the defenders of (3) limit them-
selves to the claim that some heterodiegetic fictional narrations do not present a
narrator. But as some of the arguments proposed by (3) are similar to those
advocated in the other two approaches I will occasionally comment on some
aspects of (1) and (2) as well.
The most elaborate paper on (3) to my knowledge is an article that Tilmann
Köppe and Jan Stühring published in 2011. Köppe/Stühring want to show that the
basic assumption of PN, i.e. that every fictional narration necessarily has a
fictional narrator, is wrong. They structure their article by distinguishing different
arguments that have been brought forward in favour of PN.4 In the course of this
paper I will take up some of these arguments and discuss their refutation by
Köppe and Stühring. I will not, however, address every single argument they
present. Köppe/Stühring want to show that PN is wrong, and therefore they must
refute every argument that claims to show that PN is true. I only claim that PN is
tenable; consequently I only have to show that one or some of the refutations of
PN are not conclusive, but not that all the arguments that have been brought
forward to defend PN are sound or even helpful.
4 As Köppe/Stühring summarise and resume an ongoing debate it is not surprising that their list
of arguments is partially identical with those of other papers, e.g. Andrew Kania, “Ubiquity”.
Narratorless Narration? 47
Note, however, that the main goal of this paper is not to examine the
arguments that have been brought forward in defence of PN or their refutations –
although I often start from there – but to look at the basic concepts that lie behind
the different arguments. Therefore I will reflect upon some questions that in my
opinion are crucial for the discussion of PN, ON, and NN. These questions
constitute the headlines of sections III to VIII. Before discussing the answers to
these questions, however, I want to reflect upon the theoretical scope and frame-
work of my way of dealing with the discussion about PN, ON, and NN.
II Theoretical Framework: A Question about Truth?
In order to lay out the theoretical framework of my reflections I want to look at the
way in which the problem of the ubiquity thesis is usually phrased, i.e. the
question ‘Does every fictional narration have a narrator?’ In my opinion the
phrase ‘to have a narrator’ can be understood in at least two different ways. The
question of whether narrations have a narrator can be put
a) as the question of whether there is a fictional narrator in the text of every
fictional narrative (whatever that means) or whether the existence of a
fictional narrator in a text can be proved (in whatever way one can prove
fictional existence), or
b) as the question of whether it is legitimate, advisable or helpful to assume a
fictional narrator or a narratorial instance for each (verbal) fictional narra-
tion.
To me it seems that the way in which the problem is usually treated is mostly
directed at (a), whereas I would say that for the purposes of literary criticism (b) is
a much more interesting starting point for the discussion.
The distinction between (a) and (b) surfaces e.g. in the way Köppe/Stühring
address the problem. They believe that “[t]he debate between ON and PN is about
the truth of the claim that there necessarily is a fictional narrator in every fictional
narrative.”5 Their claim is that the truth of PN cannot be established, whereas
they believe to have established the truth of ON at the end of their article. My
approach is a different one: I agree with Köppe/Stühring that the truth (as they
understand it) of PN cannot be established (at least not with the arguments that
are usually brought forward to do so), but part of my argument will be devoted to
5 Tilmann Köppe/Jan Stühring, “Against Pragmatic Arguments for Pan-Narrator Theories: The
Case of Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’”, this volume, pp. 13–43, p. 14.
48 Frank Zipfel
showing that the truth of ON cannot be established either. Moreover, I want to

show that not only the truth but also the falsehood of PN cannot be established.
Note that in this view the falsehood of ON cannot be established either, but this
fact is of scarce interest for the following discussion. What I want to argue is that
the question whether ON or PN is true is in the end not a very helpful one.
When we look at the discussion about the ubiquity thesis in terms of truth, it
seems that there has to be a clear-cut answer: either all fictional narrations have a
fictional narrator or they do not. Note also that in order to put the problem in this
way we have to adhere to interpretation (a) of ‘to have a narrator’. Speaking of
truth seems to suggest that one thesis gets it right whereas the other gets it wrong.
Also, when we talk about truth in this context, we presuppose that it is possible to
show that one theory offers an adequate description of the literary phenomena in
question whereas the other does not; and the arguments for the truth of a specific
theory are often presented as if they were independent of the theoretical frame-
work that is adopted. My contention is that a considerable number of conceptual
decisions have to be made before we can even start to argue for or against the
ubiquity thesis. These decisions have a crucial impact on the way we look at the
problem and consequently on what we accept as a solution to it. Moreover, the
fact that these decisions are not always made explicit in the discussion leads to
theoretical impasses and to ill-justified claims.
Thus the main goal of the following sections is to lay bare the conceptual
preconditions of some of the arguments for the ubiquity thesis and of their
respective refutations. I will inquire in what way the conceptual decisions in the
background influence these arguments. The predominant question, then, is not
whether the ubiquity thesis is true or false, but what the frameworks within which
specific arguments are phrased entail and how we can evaluate the conceptual
frames and the arguments that are based on them together. Note that this strategy
also encompasses a move from interpretation (a) to interpretation (b) of ‘to have a
narrator’.
When, instead of asking whether a specific theory is true or false, we concen-
trate on laying bare the preconditions and conceptual frames that form the back-
ground of the debate, the controversy will become easier to handle. This does not
mean that as soon as we are not concerned with questions about truth we will
find clear-cut solutions to our problems. The purpose of moving the debate away
from a question about truth to questions about conceptual decisions is rather to
highlight the fact that the arguments and refutations presented so far are often
not as clear-cut as they claim to be and that clear-cut solutions may not be
available at all.
III What Does Narration Entail?
The first conceptual problem that lies behind the discussion about the ubiquity of
narrators evidently is the concept of narration. Pre-classical, classical and so-
called post-classical narratology has produced a multitude of differing definitions
of narration and narrative. Although the different approaches which try to clarify
the meaning of ‘narration’ overlap in many aspects, Livingston’s diagnosis that
“even with regard to the basic elucidation or construction of a reasonably well-
delimited concept of narrative, controversy reigns supreme”6 is still valid. The
ongoing discussion is not only concerned with features that might be necessary
or sufficient for something to be considered as narrative but also with the broader
category to which narration may belong. Moreover, it has often been noted that
the fact that ‘narration’ has made a multifarious transdisciplinary career has not
led to its clarification – to say the least.7 Undoubtedly the efforts that have been
made to come to terms with the concepts of narration and narrative during the
last fifty years have brought forward interesting and useful differentiations and
distinctions. Nonetheless an outside observer could come to the conclusion that
the discussion about what narrative is, instead of converging on a generally
accepted notion of narration, produces new concepts that are even more contro-
versial, e.g. narrativehood, narrativeness, narrativity or narratability.8
It would be far beyond the scope of this paper even to try to retrace the highly
complex debates about the concept of narration. In order to deal with the
question of whether ON or PN can be defended it is necessary, however, to recall
and briefly comment on the two ways of looking at narrative that are prevalent in
the philosophy of art and in transmedial narratology. Following Chatman and
Livingston, among others, I will call these two ways the narrow and the broad
concepts of narration.9 For narration in a narrow sense, communicative media-
6 Paisley Livingston, “Narrative”, in: Berys Gaut/Dominic McIver Lopes (eds.), The Routledge
Companion to Aesthetics, 2nd Edition, London/New York 2005, pp. 359–369, p. 362.
7 Cf. e.g. Livingston, “Narrative”; Marie-Laure Ryan, “Toward a Definition of Narrative”, in:
David Herman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, Cambridge 2007, pp. 22–35.
8 Cf. Gerald Prince, “Revisiting Narrativity”, in: Walter Grünzweig/Andreas Solbach (eds.),
Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext, Tübingen 1999, pp. 43–51; Gerald Prince, “Narra-
tivehood, Narrativeness, Narrativity, Narratability”, in: José Ángel García Landa/John Pier (eds.),
Theorizing Narrativity, Berlin 2008, pp. 19–27; H. Porter Abbott, “Narrativity”, in: Peter Hühn
et al. (eds.), The Living Handbook of Narratology, 2011, http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/
narrativity (accessed July 7, 2013).
9 Cf. Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film, Ithaca/
London 1990, Ch. 7. Chatman distinguishes between diegetic (narrow sense) and mimetic narra-
tion (broad sense). Cf. also Livingston, “Narrative”, p. 363; Uri Margolin, “Necessarily a Narrator
50 Frank Zipfel
tion is essential, and in this understanding mediation not only means the selec-
tion and organisation of events but the presentation of events by means of a
narrative agent or narrator. Thus narration in a narrow sense refers to the action
or result of the telling of a story by a teller or narrator. Narration in a broad sense,
in contrast, means nothing more than story presentation. In this understanding
all kinds of story presentation – with or without communicative mediation, with
or without teller/narrator – qualify as narratives. The term ‘narration’ can thus be
applied to story presentation in different genres (e.g. prose fiction or drama) and
in different art forms or media (e.g. theatre, comics, films or computer games).
Note that the two concepts stem from different traditions and serve distinct
functions. The narrow concept is solidly anchored in classical narratology and in
literary theory simply for the reason that one of its most important functions is to
distinguish between different literary genres, i.e. between various ways of verbal
story presentation, especially between narrative fiction and drama.10 The broad
concept is characteristic of transmedial approaches and its function mostly is to
draw attention to the similarities between the various ways of presenting stories
in different genres or media.11 From a historical point of view narration in the
broad sense can be seen as an extension of narration in the narrow sense to a
wider range of phenomena. Transmedial concepts of narration can be understood
as legitimate attempts to expand the domain of application of the concept beyond
the boundaries of verbal, textual narration to which it has been confined in
classical narratology.
Nonetheless, as the prototype definition of narration can be expressed with
the proposition “somebody tells other people something that happened”,12 the
or Narrator if Necessary: A Short Note on a Long Subject”, in: Journal of Literary Semantics, 40/
2011, pp. 43–57, p. 45.
10 Cf. e.g. Manfred Pfister, Das Drama. Theorie und Analyse, 11th Edition, München 2001, Ch. 1;
Gérard Genette, Nouveau discours du récit, Paris 1983; Chatman, Coming, p. 110; and also Irina
O. Rajewsky, “Von Erzählern, die (nichts) vermitteln. Überlegungen zu grundlegenden Annah-
men der Dramentheorie im Kontext einer transmedialen Narratologie”, in: Zeitschrift für Franzö-
sische Sprache und Literatur, 117/2007, pp. 25–68.
11 Cf. e.g. Chatman, Coming; Marie-Laure Ryan, “On the Theoretical Foundations of Transmedial
Narratology”, in: Jan Christoph Meister (ed.), Narratology beyond Literary Criticism. Mediality,
Disciplinarity, Berlin 2005, pp. 1–23; Marie-Laure Ryan, “Transfictionality across Media”, in: José
Ángel García Landa/John Pier (eds.), Theorizing Narrativity, Berlin 2008, pp. 385–417; Fotis
Jannidis, “Narratology and the Narrative”, in: Tom Kindt/Hans-Harald Müller (eds.), What is
Narratology?, Berlin 2003, pp. 35–54; Jan-Noël Thon, “Toward a Transmedial Narratology. On
Narrators in Contemporary Graphic Novels, Feature Films, and Computer Games”, in: Jan Alber/
Per Krogh Hansen (eds.), Beyond Classical Narration. Transmedial and Unnatural Challenges,
Berlin 2014, pp. 25–56.
12 Jannidis, “Narratology”, p. 44.
level of abstraction has to be considerably raised in order to bring films, theatre

performances, and other narratorless story presentation art forms under the
umbrella of narration. Rajewsky has tried to show that this extension is based on
an equivocation of the concept of mediacy and is liable to blur useful distinctions
for the sake of finding common features in art works stemming from fundamen-
tally differing genres and media.13 One could argue, however, that the concept of
mediacy that underlies the distinction drawn in literary theory between fictional
narration and drama is a rather narrow and deficient one, as it claims that story
presentation in drama (understood as literary text or as theatrical performance) is
unmediated because it lacks a narrator. A more adequate use of the term ‘medi-
acy/mediation’ with reference to story presentation might be to say that there is
no story presentation without mediation even though every genre and medium
has its specific ways of presenting and thereby mediating stories.14 Moreover
transmedial approaches have shown that a lot can be learned about the narrato-
logical specificities of different genres and media by comparing the various
possibilities of presenting a story that are embedded in each genre or medium.
However, it is also true that transmedial concepts naturally tend to increase the
level of abstraction in order to regroup phenomena from differing media into one
and the same category. Such concepts can create confusion when we do not keep
in mind that a transdisciplinary extension of concepts should always be highly
aware of the genre- and media-specific make-up of art works that originate from
different genres and media.15
In the present context a second aspect of the distinction between a narrow
and a broad concept of narration is noteworthy. Although by now most of the
scholars who use ‘narration’ in a broad sense are inclined to claim that there are
narratorless (literary) narrations, the choice to use the term in the broad or the
narrow sense does not determine the position adopted towards the ubiquity
thesis. Chatman, for example, advocates a broad concept of narration and at the
same time holds that the concept of narration necessarily entails a narrator:
I would argue that every narration is by definition narrated – that is, narratively presented –
and that narration, narrative presentation, entails an agent even when the agent bears no
sign of human personality. Agency is marked etymologically by the -er/-or suffix attached to
13 Cf. Rajewsky, “Von Erzählern”.

14 For an overview of the different understandings of mediacy cf. Jan Alber/Monika Fludernik,
“Mediacy and Narrative Mediation”, in: Peter Hühn et al. (eds.), The Living Handbook of Narratol-
ogy, 2011, http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/mediacy-and-narrative-mediation (accessed
July 6, 2013).
15 Cf. Rajewsky, “Von Erzählern ”; Marie-Laure Ryan, “Fiction, Cognition and Non-Verbal Media”,
in: Marina Grishakova/M.-L. R. (eds.), Intermediality and Storytelling, Berlin 2010, pp. 8–26.
52 Frank Zipfel
the verbs present or “narrate”. The suffix means either “agent” or “instrument,” and neither
need be human.16
Chatman starts out from a broad concept of mediacy, which encompasses telling
as well as showing (in a literal and in a figurative sense), but in his view any kind
of mediation entails a mediator. It follows that there can be narrations without a
teller but that by definition there cannot be narrations without a narrative agent.
In a more general way one could say that for Chatman there is no (story) presenta-
tion without (the assumption that there is) an agent to whom the presentation is
ascribed.
To bring these rather perfunctory remarks about some of the issues that
conceptualisations of narration are confronted with to a conclusion I would like
to draw attention to the fact that at this point a fundamental problem surfaces.
The major difference between PN and its opponents seems to be that for the
defenders of PN presentation cannot be conceived without a presenting agent,
whereas for the detractors of PN the fact that there is a presentation does not
entail that one has to assume a presenter. In my opinion the essential problem is
that both views on presentation can be defended. Thus, it seems to me that the
question whether presentation always entails a presenter is hard, if not impossi-
ble to settle. But be this as it may, we will have to bear in mind that the very
notion of narration can be understood in these different ways, because this
problem constitutes the overall background of the following sections’ discus-
sions.17
IV Is the Author the Narrator of His Fictional Narration?
The question dealt with in the previous section is closely linked to the question of
whether the author of a fictional narration can be called its narrator. Why this
question is so important will become evident when we look at the way Köppe/
Stühring try to refute some of the arguments in favour of PN. The first argument
16 Chatman, Coming, pp. 115f.

17 When against this background we look at Köppe and Stühring’s reasoning, it seems that they
favour an intermediate position. As they agree with the ‘analytical argument’ insofar as it
establishes specific features of verbal narration, they seem to understand narration in the narrow
sense and thus not to advocate a concept of narration that does not include a narrator as an
essential feature of narration. Still they come very close to theories that allow for non-narrated
narrations when they claim that there are fictional narrations without fictional narrators. (For a
brief outline of the analytical argument, see the following section.)
that they want to unhinge is the so-called ‘analytical argument’. They present it
as follows:
(P1) Narratives are speech acts.

(P2) Speech acts presuppose someone who utters them.
(P3) The utterer of a narrative is called ‘narrator’.
(C) There is a narrator for every narrative.18
Köppe/Stühring admit that, as it stands, the argument is conclusive, but they try
to show that it does not establish that every fictional narration has a fictional
narrator, because in their opinion “it is perfectly possible for a non-fictional
narrator to narrate a fictional narrative.”19 They believe that, since in literary
theory ‘narrator’ is commonly understood as meaning ‘fictional narrator’, the
argument involves an equivocation. I want to show that the premises as well as
the conclusions of Köppe and Stühring’s argument are questionable.
The analytical argument starts out with the proposition that narratives are
speech acts. Before we go on we should ask what this proposition means, which
is tantamount to asking: ‘What kind of speech acts are narratives?’ or: ‘How can
we establish a speech-act description of “narrative”’? Now there certainly are
different ways of answering these questions. What I want to elaborate on in the
following is one possible and, as I hope, coherent answer. I will call it an assertive
theory of textual narration (ATN).20 I do not claim that ATN is the only possible
way to conceive a speech-act approach to narrative and I am well aware that at
several crucial points of the argument different assumptions can be made that
would lead to other conclusions. Still I think that ATN is a coherent and legitimate
way of conceptualising ‘narrative’.
To start with I want to draw attention to the fact that Köppe/Stühring use the
word ‘utterer’ for the agent who is the originator of the speech act. When we look at
this term from the perspective of Searle’s speech act theory,21 it is of course true that
the originator of a speech act does, as a rule, utter it: he verbally expresses the
words or the sentence(s) the speech act is made of. But utterance in Searle’s terms is
only one aspect of a speech act, and it is a necessary but not a sufficient one. In
18 Köppe/Stühring, “Against”, p. 63.

19 Ibid., p 64. Cf. also Gaut’s similar conclusion that “the a priori argument if successful proves
the necessity of an actual author, not of a narrator.” (Gaut, “Philosophy”. Cf. also Kania,
“Ubiquity”, p. 48).
20 For a similar approach cf. René Rivara, La langue du récit. Introduction à la narratologie
énonciative, Paris 2002.
21 Cf. John R. Searle, Speech Acts. An Essay in the Philosophy of Language, Cambridge et al. 1969,
p. 24.
54 Frank Zipfel
order to perform a speech act, such as an assertion, a promise or a question, its

originator not only has to utter it, but she has to do so with specific intentions that
depend on the kind of illocutionary force with which she wants to invest her
utterance (and its propositional content). Thus the assumption that narratives are
speech acts not only presupposes that they are uttered but that they are performed
in the fullest sense of the word, i.e. that the originator commits himself to the rules
that define the kind of speech act he wants to convey. In my opinion the relevant
message in the proposition that narratives are speech acts is that they are invested
with an illocutionary logic that regulates their performance. Note also that in
specific contexts the utterer of a speech act can be different from the one who is to
be considered its originator in terms of illocutionary logic. Thus in a theatre
performance the assertions or promises a character makes are uttered by the actor,
but according to the theatrical conventions the illocutionary force of the speech act
is to be attributed to the character: whatever the actor utters will gain its significa-
tion as a speech act only within the game of the performance and as the speech act
the character supposedly performs.
Now what can we say about the illocutionary aspects of narratives? In order
to answer this question I will begin with factual narratives, which I regard as a
prototypical example of narratives.22 When we speak of verbal narratives, the first
thing we have to acknowledge is that narratives are textual speech acts.23 One can
imagine a narrative in one single sentence like the famous “The king died, and
then the queen died (of grief)”,24 but as a rule narratives present stories, a story
encompasses at least two states of affairs and more than one sentence is needed
to express the link between the two, even when this link is only temporal. Note
that Forster’s one-sentence narrative is actually composed of two sentences which
are combined into one.
Thus verbal narratives are complex illocutionary acts that come in the form of
texts. Moreover narrative texts are constituted of assertions. By that I mean that
firstly the sentences that are relevant for determining the speech-act category of
the text have the form of assertive sentences25 and that secondly these sentences
also fulfil the function of assertions, i.e. that the conditions for speech acts of the
22 Cf. Jannidis, “Narratology”, p. 40, Fn. 18.

23 Cf. Frank Zipfel, Fiktion, Fiktivität, Fiktionalität. Analysen zur Fiktion in der Literatur und zum
Fiktionsbegriff in der Literaturwissenschaft, Berlin 2001, pp. 58–60; Abbott, “Narrativity”.
24 E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, Orlando 1927, p. 86.
25 A narrative can of course encompass other speech act types like questions, invitations or
requests (addressed to the reader or listener), but the sentences that establish the overall speech
act type are assertions.
assertive kind obtain.26 The fact that narratives consist of assertions surfaces in
different ways in explanations of narration. Currie, for example, states that
“Narratives represent things as existing, and circumstances as being so.”27 An-
other way of putting this can be found in an article by Gerald Prince:
Narratives live in certainty: this happened and then that; this happened because of that; that
happened and it was linked to that. Though they need not preclude hesitations or specula-
tions or negations […] and though, at least in their verbal manifestations, they can be
hospitable to interrogative, conjectural, and negative sentences narratives can perish under
the effect of sustained indecision and ignorance.28
When Prince describes certainty as the natural and necessary habitat of narra-
tives, he ultimately tells us that narratives are based on assertive speech acts.
Thus, in a speech-act-theory approach one can say that narratives are complex
textual illocutionary acts of the assertive kind or, as Margolin puts it: “In terms of
linguistic pragmatics or speech act theory, any narrative, regardless of its length,
is a macro speech act of the constative type, claiming that such and such
happened.”29 Narrative in this sense is characterised by “a certain content (some-
thing happened) presented through a certain illocutionary mode (telling, a syno-
nym of asserting).”30
Moreover narratives as illocutionary acts have a specific function and the
most general way to lay out this function is to say that narratives tell a story. The
next step obviously would have to be to determine what exactly we mean by
story. But it is beyond the scope of this paper to enter the debate about minimum
requirements for something to count as a story.31 In fact the aspects in which the
various positions in the debate differ have no bearing on the argument I am trying
to get across. Note, however, that the felicity conditions for narratives entail those
for assertions because narratives are a complex kind of assertive illocutionary act,
and that at the same time the felicity conditions of narrations reach beyond those
26 Cf. John R. Searle, “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse”, in: New Literary History, 6/
1974–75, pp. 319–332.
27 Currie, Narratives, p. 7.
28 Prince, “Narrativehood”, p. 22.
29 Uri Margolin, “Narrator”, in: Peter Hühn et al. (eds.), The Living Handbook of Narratology,
2011, http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narrator (accessed July 5, 2013), p. 5. Cf. also Espen
Aarseth, “Quest Games as Post-Narrative Discourse”, in: Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narrative across
Media. The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln/London 2004, pp. 361–376, pp. 368f.
30 Marie-Laure Ryan, “Semantics, Pragmatics, and Narrativity: A Response to David Rudrum”,
in: Narrative, 14/2006, pp. 188–196, p. 192.
31 Cf. e.g. Zipfel, Fiktion, pp. 76f.; Ryan, “Transfictionality”, p. 412; Currie, Narratives, Ch. 2.
56 Frank Zipfel
of assertions and probably encompass some other aspects, such as, for instance,
narrativity or tellability.32
When we conceive ‘narrative’ in the way outlined in the previous paragraphs,
a sentence like “Of course it is perfectly possible for a non-fictional narrator to
narrate a fictional narrative”33 is not self-evident at all. In fact, when we say that a
non-fictional narrator narrates a fictional narrative the meaning of the term ‘narra-
tive’ shifts because in this understanding the felicity conditions of narrative have
changed.34 The sentence presupposes that there is an instance of narration in
which the assertive sentences of the narration are not to be considered as real
assertives because they are not meant to establish that the propositional content
they convey is true, or is believed to be true. Also, the claim that “every fictional
narrative is authored by some non-fictional narrator” becomes questionable.35 Of
course it is sensible to say that every fictional narrative has an author,36 but it is not
self-evident to say that the author of a fictional narrative is its narrator. In my
opinion, to claim that the author of a letter, novel, or poem is its “narrator in the
proper sense” because he is the person “whose intentions have to be understood if
we are to understand what is being communicated to us”37 is only one way of
looking at things. Another legitimate way to conceive of fictional narration is the
one Levinson advocates when he denies that the fact that John Barth and Charles
Dickens wrote fictional texts “licenses the conclusion that ‘Barth and Dickens are
telling fictional stories.’”38 Moreover, one could argue that if the author of a fictional
narration is called its narrator, this assertion would be valid for all fictional
narrations, whether homo- or heterodiegetic. Since hardly any narratologist seems
to deny that homodiegetic fictional narrations present fictional narrators, this puts
us in a strange situation, because we would have to admit that fictional homodie-
getic narratives have two narrators, a fictional one and a real one.39
There is of course a classical way out of this impasse: the assumption of an
implied author. According to this assumption, the act of narration (be it homodie-
32 Cf. e.g. Prince, “Narrativehood”; Ryan, “Foundations”.

33 Köppe/Stühring, “Against”, p. 64. Cf. for a similar approach Walsh, Rhetoric, Ch. 4.
34 This shift of meaning can be observed in almost all the critical statements about the so-called
analytical or a priori argument because most of them use the same strategy as Köppe/Stühring do,
cf. e.g. Thomson-Jones, “Origins”.
36 For this argument it does not matter that for some fictional narratives like folk stories or fairy
tales the author might not be known.
38 Kania, “Ubiquity”, p. 51.
39 Cf. a similar argument in George M. Wilson, “Elusive Narrators in Literature and Film”, in:
Philosophical Studies, 135/2007, pp. 73–88, pp. 80f.
getic or heterodiegetic) is attributed neither to the author nor to the narrator but to
this third instance called the implied author.40 But as the implied author is a very
controversial concept and as the function it is supposed to fulfil in the present
context, i.e. to serve as a communicative agent, is one of the most contested ones
in the debate, I do not see any point in discussing this possibility.41
Another attempt to answer the question whether the author can be called the
narrator of his fictional narration uses a strategy similar to the one involved in the
introduction of the implied author, but with a different result: Peter Alward has
tried to find an intermediate position between the defenders and the detractors of
PN by introducing a so-called nonactual fact-telling narrator.42 Alward proposes
two hierarchically structured distinctions: the distinction between actual narra-
tors (real persons) and nonactual narrators (narrators that are not real); within the
category of nonactual narrators he distinguishes between fictional narrators
(narrators that belong to the fictional world and thus are characters) and nonfic-
tional narrators (narrators that do no belong to the fictional world they are telling
us about).43 Alward argues that there is a narrator for every fictional narration,
but that this narrator is not always fictional; there are nonactual nonfictional
narrators, i.e. narrators who are neither real (not an author) nor fictional (not a
character). Nonactual nonfictional narrators do not inhabit the real world, but
they do not belong to a fictional world either; their speech acts “occur neither in
the actual world nor in fictional worlds”.44 I must admit that I do not know what
to make of this third realm, which is neither real nor fictional and from which all
heterodiegetic fictional narrations are supposed to be told. I think what Alward
does is to introduce a new meaning for the term ‘fictional narrator’; in his
40 Cf. e.g. Thomson-Jones, “Origins”, p. 89; Gaut, “Philosophy”, p. 247.

41 Cf. Genette’s perspicuous analysis: “un récit de fiction est fictivement produit par son narra-
teur, et effectivement pas son auteur (réel); entre eux, personne ne travail” (Genette, Nouveau,
p. 96), and the many other critics of the concept; e.g. Ansgar Nünning, “Renaissance eines
anthropomorphisierten Passepartouts oder Nachruf auf ein literaturkritisches Phantom? Überle-
gungen und Alternativen zum Konzept des ‘implied author’”, in: DVjs, 67/1993, pp. 1–25; Nilli
Diengott, “The Implied Author Once Again”, in: Journal of Literary Semantics, 22/1993, pp. 68–75;
Tom Kindt/Hans-Harald Müller, “Der implizite Autor. Zur Karriere und Kritik eines Begriffs
zwischen Narratologie und Interpretationstheorie”, in: Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, 48/2006,
pp. 163–90; Walsh, Rhetoric, pp. 82–84. For an attempt at a positive evaluation cf. e.g. Wolf
Schmid, “Implied Author”, in: Peter Hühn et al. (eds.), The Living Handbook of Narratology, 2011,
http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/implied-author (accessed July 12, 2013).
42 Cf. Peter Alward, “For the Ubiquity of Nonactual Fact-Telling Narrators”, in: The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65/2007, pp. 401–404.
43 In order to reduce the complexity of Alward’s thoughts I omit the distinction between fact
tellers and fiction tellers within the fiction, which in our context is of marginal relevance.
44 Alward, “Ubiquity”, p. 402.
58 Frank Zipfel
terminology ‘fictional narrator’ more or less conflates with what is usually called
‘heterodiegetic fictional narrator’. Moreover, he uses ‘nonactual narrator’ for what
otherwise has been called ‘fictional narrator’. Thus, rather than offering “solace”
to both parties, i.e. to the defenders and to the detractors of PN, and thus solving
the problem, Alward in my understanding takes the side of the defenders of the
ubiquity of fictional narrators.45
Let me summarise what has been elaborated so far in view of a speech-act
description of narration. One of the consequences of ATN is the claim that it is not
accurate to call the real producer of a fictional narration its narrator. In order to
avoid misunderstandings one can say that the author of a fictional narration is
not its narrator but its creator. Maybe one could say that the author narratively
generates a fictional narration.46 In the same way Margolin argues that “the
author is the mere producer of the words or sentences on the page which are
turned into propositions and utterances, claims and reports once they are as-
cribed to the textually inscribed speaker.”47 A similar view is endorsed by Alward,
who proposes to view literary and specifically fictional texts as word-sculptures:
“The guiding idea underlying this view is that the relation between authors and
readers is better modelled on the relation between sculptures and appreciators
than on the relation between speakers and listeners.”48
Alward’s starting point for drawing this analogy between literary fictions and
other sorts of art objects is that he conceives works of literary fiction as “artefacts
literally constructed out of words.”49 I must admit that I do not agree with every
aspect of Alward’s word-sculpture-theory; nonetheless I think that Alward lays
the ground for important insights about how to conceptualise literary fiction.
Alward’s theory is meant to present an alternative to speech-act approaches
to literary fiction. In his view these approaches fail “to adequately attend to the
distinction between acts of composition and story-telling performances.”50 Al-
45 Cf. Andrew Kania, “Against them, Too: A Reply to Alward”, in: The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism, 65/2007, pp. 404–408.
46 This attempt to put the relationship between the author and his fictional text into words is
inspired by sentences such as: “Denn der historische Autor macht keine Aussagen, d.h. er erzählt
nicht von den Figuren, sondern er bringt sie erzählend hervor.” (Michael Scheffel, “Wer spricht?
Überlegungen zur ‘Stimme’ in fiktionalen und faktualen Erzählungen”, in: Andreas Blödorn/
Daniela Langer/M.S. (eds.), Stimme(n) im Text. Narratologische Positionsbestimmungen, Berlin/
New York 2006, pp. 83–99, p. 87).
47 Margolin, “Narrator”, p. 44. Cf. also Rivara, Langue, Ch. 7.1.4.
48 Peter Alward, “Word-Sculpture, Speech Acts and Fictionality”, in: The Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism, 68/2010, pp. 389–399, p. 392.
49 Ibid., p. 390.
50 Ibid.
ward apparently wants to show (among other things) that speech-act approaches
fail because they try to explain the relationship between the author and the
fictional text he produces as a relationship between the author and the sentences
that constitute the fictional text. Alward argues that to conceptualise this relation-
ship between author and fictional sentences as a specific kind of (pretended)
illocutionary act is not helpful at all, and I would add that this strategy may be
partly responsible for the fact that authors have been called the narrators of their
own fictional narratives, and for some of the inferences related to this idea. In
contrast to Alward, however, I am not inclined to dismiss speech-act approaches
as such. I have argued elsewhere that in order to explain fictionality it makes
much more sense to use speech act theory on the level of texts than on the level of
sentences.51 Thus, we need to take into consideration the author’s illocutionary
attitude towards the whole text, rather than towards specific sentences. Whatever
Alward’s overall goal is when he compares fictional literature with sculptures,52
one of the outcomes of his theory is that it blocks speculations about what speech
acts authors of fictional narrations perform when writing particular sentences.
Thus, although for an institutional theory of fiction it is important to explain what
it means that an author intends a specific work to be read as fiction, i.e. what kind
of illocutionary force the text is invested with, the question of what the author
does while composing his work is of no importance whatsoever and belongs to
the realm of psychological speculation.53 And according to this view it would not
make much sense to call the author of a fictional narration its narrator.
Against this background one can argue that fictional and factual narratives,
although they may in practice have many aspects in common, need to be carefully
kept apart on a theoretical level. Moreover, it can be argued that what the author
of a factual narrative performs in terms of textual illocutions is sufficiently
different from what the author of a fictional narrative does to warrant the use of
two different terms or at least to heighten the awareness that the fact that one
uses the term ‘narrator’ for both rests on an equivocation. Incidentally, Köppe/
Stühring are aware of the fact that there are (at least) two different meanings of
narrator involved, as they speak of ‘narrator’ in a weak sense (meaning fictional
or real narrators or real authors of fictional narrations) and ‘narrator’ in a strong
sense (meaning only fictional narrators). From the point of view of ATN, however,
this equivocation is precluded, for it is not legitimate to use ‘narrator’ as a term
51 Zipfel, Fiktion, pp. 190f.

52 Unfortunately Alward does not explain why he chooses this particular art form for his
analogy.
53 To a certain extent this approach is based on Currie’s explanation of fictional discourse, cf.
Gregory Currie, The Nature of Fiction, Cambridge 1990, Ch. 1.
60 Frank Zipfel
for an author performing a fictional narration. Moreover, Köppe and Stühring’s

reconstruction of the analytic argument seems to rely upon a further assumption
concerning the concept of utterance. In their theory ‘utterer’ seems to mean
somebody who actually pronounces or writes down or in some other ways dis-
plays a text. Now, when we look at the argument that Köppe and Stühring criticise
from the perspective of ATN, ‘utterer’ has another meaning and is understood as
the instance responsible for the speech act. Thus according to ATN there are two
readings of the analytic argument, one for factual narrations and another one for
fictional narrations. In the reading concerning fictional texts, P2 and P3 express
that in fictional narratives there is a fictional narrator, who counts as the instance
responsible for the narrative act in terms of the illocutionary logic of the text. In
this version of the argument, it is not true that “if we read ‘narrator’ in the strong
sense throughout the argument, P3 is false.”54
To summarise, one needs to distinguish between two conceptions of ‘narra-
tor’. In a narrow understanding, following ATN, ‘narrator’ designates the agent
that, according to speech-act logic, is to be considered as performing the narrative
act, i.e. the subject who is intentionally responsible for the illocutionary act of
narration, either in the real world or in a fictional one. In this view, factual
narrations have real narrators, whereas fictional narrations have fictional narra-
tors. In a broad sense, ‘narrator’ designates several different things: real produ-
cers of narrative texts, regardless of whether the text is factual or fictional, and
fictional story-tellers in homodiegetic narrations and in heterodiegetic narrations
with overt narrators. There are probably good reasons to adopt each of these
views, even though I must admit that I am more inclined to the first one. For my
argument, however, the following is sufficient: If both views are legitimate, then
Köppe and Stühring’s criticism of the analytical argument does not establish that
PN is not true but only that PN is not true according to a specific way of looking at
narrations, namely according to the view in which ‘narrator’ is understood in the
broad sense.
Let us now turn to the so-called ontological gap argument. In brief, this
argument claims that fictional narration must have a fictional narrator because
real authors cannot have access to fictional worlds. I agree with Köppe/Stühring
that this argument conceived in the way they present it does not help us to
establish that every fictional narrative has a fictional narrator. Moreover, this
argument seems to entail the strange consequence that real readers cannot have
access to fictional worlds. In my opinion, problems about ‘access’ only occur
because of a metaphysical misinterpretation of the concept of fictional worlds.

62 Frank Zipfel
V What Kind of Imaginings Does an Institutional Theory of

Fiction Entail?
There would be a lot to say about how our specific conception of an institutional
theory of fiction (ITF) influences our arguments pro and con the ubiquity thesis; I
limit myself to some brief remarks. Köppe and Stühring suggest that an institu-
tional theory of fiction is neutral with regard to the question of whether there is or
is not a fictional narrator in every fictional text. Moreover, they claim that “the
concept of narrator does not figure substantially in ITF.”58 The problem with this
claim is that it is based on Köppe and Stühring’s own interpretation of an
institutional theory of fiction. In their view, the theory is characterised by two
rules:
R1: Readers of fictions are invited to engage in an imaginative activity based on the
sentences of the text.59
R2: Readers of fiction are neither justified, solely on the basis of the fiction, in regarding as
true what they are authorized to imagine, nor are they justified, solely on the basis of the
fiction, in ascribing such beliefs to the author of the work.60
I do not want to discuss the several advantages that Köppe and Stühring ascribe
to this way of phrasing an institutional theory of fiction. What is important in our
context is that Köppe und Stühring claim that there are two ways in which R1 can
be realised: readers are either invited ‘to imagine that N narrates that …’ or they
are simply invited ‘to imagine that …’. The second realisation of R1 thus says that
there are texts which invite their readers to engage in an imaginative activity that
is based on the sentences of the text but that does not entail a narrator. Now, as
far I can see, Köppe and Stühring give no reason for the soundness of this
stipulation other than an example of a text in which they do not detect a narrator.
The problem here is that there are other ways of conceptualising ITF. I
mention only one example. Starting from Kendall Walton’s theory of fictionality,
Alexander Bareis argues that the assumption that the narration is narrated by a
fictional narrator is an integral part of the game of make-believe readers play with
fictional narrations. In Bareis’ view, readers have to assume that the narration is
mediated by a narrative agent in order to understand and process a text as a
fictional narration, i.e. in order to engage imaginatively with the story. The
assumption of a fictional narrator is thus considered as a precondition for infer-
58 Ibid., p. 61.
59 Ibid., p. 60.
60 Ibid., p. 61.
The question of how a real person can have (epistemic) access to a fictional world
seems to be based on a strange understanding of fictional worlds, according to
which these worlds are conceived as some kind of spatial or temporal entities
which are beyond the (mental) reach of real human beings. But “a fictional world
is not like a distant planet that we need some magical telescope to find out about.
Its nature is just as stipulated as that of any possible world we might propose.”55
Thus ‘fictional world’ is only a metaphorical term to designate the fact that the
world depicted in a fictional narrative can and will be different from the real
world. It is nothing more than a shorthand term for all the states of affairs that are
mentioned in the text or can be inferred according to it. So it seems rather mean-
ingless to speak about fictional worlds as if they were outer space planets to
which access can be gained or not.
Looked at from a different perspective, however, the ontological gap argu-
ment can be seen as a maybe clumsy but nonetheless legitimate expression of
what I have tried to elaborate in this section. From the perspective of ATN, the
claim that every narration has a narrator makes sense only if ‘narrator’ and
‘narration’ are conceived of as being on the same pragmatic level. Thus I would
agree with Wilson’s interpretation of what Levinson wants to say with the ontolo-
gical gap argument: “His idea would be that we cannot make coherent sense of a
reader’s epistemic access to the fictional facts without assuming that it is fictional
in the world that some narrator asserts that these facts obtain.”56 In this under-
standing the main claim of the ontological gap argument is not actually con-
cerned with the ontological difference between real authors or real readers and
fictional worlds but it is directed at the pragmatics of fictional discourse or, more
precisely, at the speech-act logic of fictional narrations. Köppe/Stühring come to
a very similar reconstruction of Levinson’s argument:
Maybe Levinson thinks that narration is always […] the presenting of what the narrating
agent takes to be fact. In this case, it would indeed be conceptually true that the narrator has
to partake in the fictional world. Thus, the reader of a fictional narration could not, on pain
of incoherence, imagine being told the story by a narrator who is not part of the fictional
world.57
In their view, however, this way of looking at fictional narration is wrong because
it is not consistent with the core propositions and assumptions of an institutional
theory of fiction. It is this claim that I want to address in the following section.

56 Wilson, “Elusive Narrators”, p. 80.
62 Frank Zipfel
V What Kind of Imaginings Does an Institutional Theory of

Fiction Entail?
There would be a lot to say about how our specific conception of an institutional
theory of fiction (ITF) influences our arguments pro and con the ubiquity thesis; I
limit myself to some brief remarks. Köppe and Stühring suggest that an institu-
tional theory of fiction is neutral with regard to the question of whether there is or
is not a fictional narrator in every fictional text. Moreover, they claim that “the
concept of narrator does not figure substantially in ITF.”58 The problem with this
claim is that it is based on Köppe and Stühring’s own interpretation of an
institutional theory of fiction. In their view, the theory is characterised by two
rules:
R1: Readers of fictions are invited to engage in an imaginative activity based on the
sentences of the text.59
R2: Readers of fiction are neither justified, solely on the basis of the fiction, in regarding as
true what they are authorized to imagine, nor are they justified, solely on the basis of the
fiction, in ascribing such beliefs to the author of the work.60
I do not want to discuss the several advantages that Köppe and Stühring ascribe
to this way of phrasing an institutional theory of fiction. What is important in our
context is that Köppe und Stühring claim that there are two ways in which R1 can
be realised: readers are either invited ‘to imagine that N narrates that …’ or they
are simply invited ‘to imagine that …’. The second realisation of R1 thus says that
there are texts which invite their readers to engage in an imaginative activity that
is based on the sentences of the text but that does not entail a narrator. Now, as
far I can see, Köppe and Stühring give no reason for the soundness of this
stipulation other than an example of a text in which they do not detect a narrator.
The problem here is that there are other ways of conceptualising ITF. I
mention only one example. Starting from Kendall Walton’s theory of fictionality,
Alexander Bareis argues that the assumption that the narration is narrated by a
fictional narrator is an integral part of the game of make-believe readers play with
fictional narrations. In Bareis’ view, readers have to assume that the narration is
mediated by a narrative agent in order to understand and process a text as a
fictional narration, i.e. in order to engage imaginatively with the story. The
assumption of a fictional narrator is thus considered as a precondition for infer-
58 Ibid., p. 61.
59 Ibid., p. 60.
60 Ibid., p. 61.
ring fictional truth even for those texts in which the narrator is ‘effaced’.61 More-
over, only those texts that can be ‘naturalised’ as being narrated by a fictional
narrator qualify as fictional narrations.62 According to Bareis, R1 of ITF can only
have one realisation, and that is the one that assumes a narrator, and the
interpretation of R1 as simply “imagine that p” (in contrast to “imagine that N tells
p”) is wrong.63 Thus in this view the make-believe game always entails imagina-
tion de re and not only imagination de dicto,64 and this is also true for texts with
so-called effaced narrators. This shows that the soundness of the conclusions
drawn by Köppe and Stühring is dependent on their understanding of imagina-
tion as part of the ‘fictional stance’,65 an understanding they themselves inserted
into ITF. The whole argument depends on the way we understand the make-
believe game that underlies and defines ITF. I do not think that it can be argued
that in this point the understanding that Bareis and others have brought forward
is less coherent than the one advocated by Köppe/Stühring. With this in mind let
us look back at the discussion of the criticism of the ontological gap argument at
the end of the previous section. The point I want to make is that when we do not
conceptualise ITF in the way Köppe and Stühring do, but in the way Bareis does,
the ontological gap argument can be understood as an argument about the
pragmatic correlation between narration and narrator and is therefore perfectly
sound.
61 Cf. the similar argument in Alward’s defense of the narrator: “if unexpressed fictional truths
are generated by pragmatic implicature […] they can be discerned only by supposing (or imagin-
ing) that the text is told by a fact-teller.” (Alward, “Ubiquity”, p. 403).
62 Cf. J. Alexander Bareis, Fiktionales Erzählen. Zur Theorie der literarischen Fiktion als Make-
Believe, Göteborg 2008, Ch. 3.3. Cf. also Alexander J. Bareis, “Mimesis der Stimme. Fiktionstheo-
retische Aspekte einer narratologischen Kategorie”, in: Andreas Blödorn/Daniela Langer/Michael
Scheffel (eds.), Stimme(n) im Text. Narratologische Positionsbestimmungen, Berlin/New York
2006, pp. 101–122.
63 Cf. also Zipfel, Fiktion, Ch. 6.2.
64 For the distinction between different kinds of imagination cf. Peter Alward, “Leave Me out of
It. De Re, but Not De Se. Imaginative Engagement with Fiction”, in: The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism, 64/2006, pp. 451–459; and Leslie Stevenson, “Twelve Conceptions of Imagination”,
in: British Journal of Aesthetics, 43/2003, pp. 238–259. Bareis, like Walton, argues that make-
believe entails imagination de se. I do not want to discuss this further claim because it is not
relevant in our context.
65 About the difficulties with establishing the meaning of “imagination” cf. Stevenson,
“Twelve”.
64 Frank Zipfel
VI What are Fictional Illocutions?
In this section I want to discuss several problems that arise with the so-called
blocked-inference argument and with Köppe and Stühring’s refutation of it. The
argument is presented as follows:
(P1) All fictional illocutions have to be attributed to someone.

(P2) Fictional illocutions have to be attributed either to the author or to the narrator.
(P3) Fictional illocutions cannot be attributed to the author.
(C) Fictional illocutions must be attributed to a fictional narrator and, therefore, PN is
correct.66
Köppe/Stühring detect an equivocation in P3, namely a double meaning of

‘fictional illocution’. In their view, to call a sentence a fictional illocution can
mean either “Fictionally, S utters p.” (I1), or “S utters that, fictionally p.” (I2).
Köppe/Stühring argue that P3 is false under I2. Moreover, they argue that for the
blocked inference argument to be sound it would be necessary to show that all
sentences of a fictional text have to be interpreted according to I1, and that this
cannot be done on pain of petitio principi. I partly agree with Köppe/Stühring that
the blocked inference argument understood in this way does not establish PN, but
I do so for different reasons, and these reasons actually call into question the way
in which they discuss the argument.
My first problem is that I find it difficult to make sense of how Köppe/
Stühring use the term ‘fictional illocution’; I actually find both interpretations (I1
and I2) wanting. In order to explain what I mean, I briefly have to elaborate on
ITF as I understand it. According to ITF, a fictional narrative text is one that is
dealt with according to the conventions of the institutional practice of fictional-
ity. This as a rule means that such a narrative has been composed and published
by the author with the specific intention that an audience uses the work as a prop
in a game of make-believe, and audiences will actually adopt the so-called fictive
stance towards the narration because they recognise this intention. To function
as a prop in a game of make-believe usually means that readers are invited to an
imaginative activity based on the text (or its sentences), and that they are not
justified in regarding as true what they read nor in ascribing such beliefs to the
author.
In my opinion a link can be established between an institutional theory of
fiction conceived in this way and what I have tried to develop in section III.
According to ITF, the author presents a fictional text to the audience as one that

should be dealt with according to the conventions of the institutional practice.

This is what I would call a fictional illocution, and for the following reason: it is a
verbally based action of the author, this action is accompanied with certain
intentions, and these intentions are backed up by the institution for which the
text is destined. Again, I do not think that it is helpful for an understanding of
fictional texts to look for illocutionary acts of the author on the level of single
sentences. In contrast, I would argue that the intention which is specific for
fictional narrations is one that is best described on the level of the text – very
much in the same way that the intention to produce a detective story is not an
intention linked to sentences but an intention linked to a text.
Moreover, to explain fictionality on the sentence level leads to major pro-
blems when we try to describe the illocutionary force of sentences that are, or
could be, true about the real world. Several years ago Dietrich Weber put forward
a distinction that is similar to the one Köppe/Stühring advocate. Weber holds that
an author can do two different things:
1. pretend to narrate (play a game of narration),
2. pretend to let somebody else narrate.
The result of the first activity is a text that has no fictional narrator. There is only
the author who engages in playing a certain textual game: he performs the
assertions in the text in a ludic or pretence mode. Moreover, the pretence or game
does not have to encompass the whole text.67 Thus, in a fictional narrative there
are sentences that are uttered in pretence and others that are uttered seriously.
Like Searle, Weber believes that sentences that express general truths about the
real world, such as the speculations about happy and unhappy families at the
beginning of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, are serious assertions and thus uttered
outside the fiction-game.68 Such theories lead to questions such as: How many
non-fictional sentences can there be in a fictional text? or: How many fictional
sentences do we need to make a text fictional?69 and also: How do we distinguish
between fictional and non-fictional sentences? Unfortunately, these questions
cannot be answered within the theories that prompt them. So if it is sound to
assume a fictionality-operator or a fictional-game-operator, as I think it is, I
advocate understanding this operator as applicable only to texts and not to single
sentences. In this view fictional illocutions are indeed to be attributed to the
67 Cf. Dietrich Weber, Der Geschichtenerzählspieler. Ein Begreifbuch von höheren und niederen
Erzähl-Sachen, Wuppertal 1989; Weber, Erzählliteratur.
68 Cf. Searle, “Logical Status”.
69 Cf. Christopher New, Philosophy of Literature. An Introduction, London 1999, p. 40.
66 Frank Zipfel
author, but this claim, taken by itself, does not say anything about whether PN is
correct or not.
Against this background I would advocate that indeed ‘fictional illocution’
can have two meanings, but my distinction is different from the one Köppe/
Stühring propose. As I see it, the two meanings of ‘fictional illocution’ are:
1. speech acts that create fictional texts/worlds,
2. speech acts within fictional texts/worlds.
As far as I see, the two meanings Köppe/Stühring distinguish are situated within
(1). After what has been said I contend that Köppe and Stühring’s conception of
fictional illocution is not very helpful because they try to describe speech acts that
bring into being fictional texts on the sentence level, whereas in my opinion the
only level on which fictional illocution in the first understanding makes sense is a
textual one. Note that in this view the blocked inference argument does not make
much sense either because P3 would have to be altered into ‘Fictional illocutions
are to be attributed to the author’. The argument would stop there and say
nothing about the ubiquity of narrators.
The analysis of the blocked inference argument can of course be carried out
in a different way, i.e. according to my second meaning of ‘fictional illocution’ (2).
If we take the term ‘fictional illocution’ as referring to sentences within a fictional
narrative, then the blocked inference argument comes down to the pragmatic
interpretation of the ontological gap argument elaborated in section IV. Or to put
it differently: under ATN the assertions of the blocked inference argument are
perfectly sound. In this understanding, however, the argument does not show or
prove anything, but is a corollary of a specific way (fictional) narratives are
conceived under ATN.
VII Is There a Narrator in This Text? And How Can I Detect it?
When we look at the two questions that constitute the headline of this section it
might seem that the answers will be based on nothing but uncontroversial
empirical data drawn from literary texts. Therefore, one might expect that these
questions will lead us to ineluctable conclusions. The sad truth, however, is that
these assumptions are false, and in this section I will try to show why.
VII.1 The Question of the Effaced Narrator and the Past Tense
I start with one of the basic arguments against PN that seems to be anchored on
textual data. Köppe/Stühring argue that in texts with a so-called effaced narrator
no traces of the narrative agent can be found and that therefore it is not legitimate
to imagine that, fictionally, the story is mediated by a narrator. In a similar way,
Galbraith argues that “narrators as fictional beings must be created by the text.
They do not spring automatically to life as part of the reader’s fixed cognitive
model of fictional structure.”70
But this claim is not as obvious as it seems and can be questioned. Indeed it
can be argued that in every verbal fictional narrative there are features that make
it sound to assume a fictional narrator. One of the most promising such features is
the fact that in verbal narrations stories are usually presented in the past tense. A
traditional way of interpreting this is to say that in contrast to the way the fictional
story came into being71 – i.e. the author produces the fictional text and thereby
creates the story (for original inventions) or his version of the story (for a retelling
of an already known one) – the fictional text mimics the order of production of
factual narrations, i.e. the narrative represents events that have happened, and
naturally represents them after they have happened. The past tense, then, is the
natural expression of the view that narrative representations inform the hearer/
reader about events that have happened in the past. Note that even factual
narratives written (partly) in the present tense are usually not to be interpreted as
relating events that happen while the narration is produced (which is virtually
impossible anyway) but as texts reporting past events and using the present tense
to create an illusion of immediacy, to make the representation more vivid or to
foreground certain events.72 Therefore, ‘representation of past events’ has often
been considered as one of the core features of narration – as the prototype
definition by Jannidis quoted earlier paradigmatically shows.73 For the realm of
fictional narration, one of the most striking observations in this context is that
even narrations with stories set in the future (from the perspective of author) are
70 Mary Galbraith, “Deictic Shift Theory and the Poetics of Involvement in Narrative”, in: Gail
A. Bruder/Judith F. Duchan/Lynne E. Hewitt (eds.), Deixis in Narrative. A Cognitive Science Per-
spective, Hillsdale, NJ/Hove 1995, pp. 19–59, p. 46.
71 Cf. Margolin, “Necessarily”, p. 47.
72 For the functions of the historical present cf. e.g. Laurel J. Brinton, “The historical present in
Charlotte Brontë’s novels: Some discourse functions”, in: Style, 26/1992, pp. 221–244.
73 Weimar e.g. claims that one can narrate only what has happened in the past or what is posited
as having happened in the past (Cf. Klaus Weimar, “Kritische Bemerkungen zur Logik der
Dichtung”, in: DVjs, 48/1974, pp. 10–24, p. 20). Cf. also Weber, Erzählliteratur, pp. 24f.
68 Frank Zipfel
told as if they had already happened and thus through a narrative act that takes
place after the events.74 To sum up this view, one can say that the simple past is
the conspicuous sign of the narrator in the narration, because it is uttered from
his perspective.75
In a recent book G. Currie tries to refute the argument that the past tense is an
indicator of a narrating act and of the presence of a narrator. He puts forward the
example of a story set in the future and argues that we should simply deny that in
such cases “the use of the past tense requires us to understand the act of narration
to be in the future of the story’s events.”76 He stipulates that the past tense is “just
one more example of failure of representational correspondence”77 and that its
use simply does not have “the same representational function that it would have
in non-fictional discourse.”78 Questions about what the past tense expresses in the
logic of the narrative discourse, questions that would lead to the assumption of a
post fact narrator are thereby discarded as silly questions, i.e. as questions that are
not helpful or legitimate in the context of an interpretation of fictional texts.79
In Currie’s view the reason for the use of the past tense in fictional narration
is that factual narrations are bound to use it and that readers do not wish to have
(too many) explicit markers of a narrative’s fictional status. To me, this seems to
be a rather ad hoc argument. Moreover one could argue that if it is true that the
past tense is used in order to avoid putting the fictionality of the narration on
display, then this aspect of the narrative discourse tries to convey the illusion of
factual narration. This illusion, of course, encompasses the idea that the narration
takes place after the events and that the depicted events are recounted by a
narrator (who has knowledge of them).80 Of course, as a matter of fact fictional
74 Cf. Currie, Narratives, p. 78.

75 Cf. Weimar, “Kritische”, p. 20.
77 Ibid., pp. 78f. According to Currie, failures of representational correspondence occur because
“[f]or a given representational work, only certain features of the representation serve to represent
features of the things represented. In opera, the singing of a performer does not represent the
singing of a character, characters in Shakespearian drama are not, or not always, represented as
possessing extraordinary powers of poetic expression, despite the fact that they are represented
as uttering just those combinations of words the actors playing them do utter, where those
combination are, in fact, highly poetic” (ibid., pp. 59f.).
78 Ibid., p. 79.
79 Cf. section V of this paper.
80 Cf. Bareis’ claim that every literary representation evoking mimesis of discourse is based on
the observation that it is verbal (Bareis, Erzählen, pp. 158f.). For a slightly different but still similar
approach cf. also René Rivara, “A Plea for a Narrator-Centered Narratology”, in: John Pier (ed.),
The Dynamics of Narrative Form. Studies in Anglo-American Narratology, Berlin/New York 2004,
characters, fictional stories or fictional worlds are called into existence (if they
come to some kind of existence) as the actual author invents them or sets the
words which describe them on the page, but that does not preclude that they are
depicted as if they had existed before they were talked about. One can argue that
the illusion that fictional entities and events exist before they are told is a core
feature of fictional narration.81
Moreover, Currie’s move to discard the past tense as a marker of a narrative
act that encompasses a narrator is not a new one. In narratological discussions
the thesis that the past tense in heterodiegetic fiction does not express that the
related events are set in the past is inextricably linked to Käte Hamburger’s Die
Logik der Dichtung. Hamburger’s claim that in heterodiegetic narration the past
tense loses its function of representing a temporal relationship between the
related events and the moment in which they are told, however, has been widely
criticised. It would be beyond the scope of this paper to reproduce a discussion
that by now has been going on for more than fifty years. However, a standard
interpretation of Hamburger’s famous example of free indirect speech (Morgen
war Weihnachten) is to say that the temporal adverb represents the point of view
of the character and the past tense represents the point of view of the narrator.82
But of course this interpretation is available only to those who are willing to
accept that there is a narrator.
Let us now compare the two ways of dealing with the past tense in heterodie-
getic narration. On the one hand we have theories claiming that the fact that the
events are related in the past tense is to be seen as some kind of failure of
representational correspondence, on the other hand we have theories claiming
that this same fact indicates that the text is to be read as representing events that
took place in the past and that it establishes a temporal relationship between the
events and the narrator who relates them. What strikes me is that both explana-
tions rely on an assumption which its detractors will regard as unwarranted by
the text: One can say that there are no indications of a narrator in texts with a so-
called effaced narrator, but there aren’t any textual features either that necessa-
pp. 81–113. Cf. also Prince, who claims that “narrative is etymologically linked to knowledge, a
narrator being ‘one who knows’” (Prince, “Revisiting”, p. 49).
81 Cf. Walsh’s opposite view when he argues (not very convincingly) that “to treat the repre-
sented instance of narration as ontologically prior to the language doing the representing is to
press the logic of representation beyond representation itself” (Walsh, Rhetoric, p. 80).
82 Cf. e.g. Gisa Rauh, “Tempus und Erzähltheorie”, in: Werner Hüllen/Rainer Schulze (eds.),
Tempus, Zeit und Text, Heidelberg 1985, pp. 63–81; Weimar, “Kritische”; Weber, Erzählliteratur,
pp. 26f.
70 Frank Zipfel
rily prompt us to assume a shift of meaning for the past tense.83 So both theories
seem to go ‘beyond the text’ in one way or another.
A similar argument can be made for the use of personal pronouns, other
deictic expressions (considering time and space), and proper names.84 It can be
argued that the fact that in a text characters are designated by ‘he’ or ‘she’ or
identified by means of a proper name presupposes that there is an ‘I’ who refers to
those characters or performs the identification.85 Hence, the use of past tense,
personal pronouns and proper names could be seen as constituting an essential
difference between verbal narration and filmic narrations. In contrast to verbal
narrations the visual narrative discourse of movies does not ‘say’ ‘he’ or ‘she’,
there is no equivalent of the past tense in visual narration and the visual presenta-
tion itself does not identify characters via names (spectators usually are informed
of characters’ names by other characters using them).86 On these grounds one
could argue that verbal fictional narration naturally allows for the assumption of
a fictional narrator, whereas filmic narrations do not.87
Note also that theories which try to circumvent the assumption of a narrator
for certain forms of verbal narrations often use expressions that stem from
descriptions of pictorial representation when characterising fictional narratives.
This strategy can be detected in widely accepted narratological distinctions, such
as the one between telling and showing. Even if the latter term does not necessa-
rily entail no-narrator theories of narration, it opens a path for them. The strategy
is most prominent in elaborations like K. Hamburger’s when she postulates a
“narrative function, which the narrative poet manipulates as, for example, the
painter wields his colours and brushes.”88 I do not mention these points because
83 This kind of criticism not only pertains to Hamburger’s theory but also to similar approaches
to heterodiegetic fiction, for example the approach Banfield advocates in her Unspeakable
Sentences, or the one brought forward by Kuroda in his “Reflections on the foundations of
narrative theory”, in: Teun A. van Dijk (ed.), Pragmatics of Language and Literature, New York
1976. pp. 107–140. (Cf. also Galbraith, “Deictic Shift” and, for a critical discussion of Banfield:
Brian McHale, “Unspeakable Sentences, Unnatural Acts: Linguistics and Poetics Revisited”, in:
Poetics Today, 4/1983, pp. 17–45.)
84 Cf. Rauh, “Tempus”.
85 Cf. Genette’s opinion that all narrations ultimately are first-person narrations (Genette, Nou-
veau, p. 65).
86 Naturally all these features of verbal representations can be present in voice-over narration
simply because this narratorial strategy is a verbal and not a pictorial one.
87 It would be interesting to investigate whether the fact that pictures cannot convey assertions
has some bearing on the way narration in film can be conceptualised, but that lies beyond the
scope of this paper (cf. Sol Worth, “Pictures Can’t Say Ain’t”, in: S.W., Studies in Visual Commu-
nication, Larry Gross (ed.), Philadelphia 1981, pp. 162–184; Ryan, “Foundations”).
88 Hamburger, Logic, p. 136.
I want to discredit the use of metaphors for describing verbal narration, but
because I want to draw attention to the fact that we should be aware that such
metaphors are liable to blur essential distinctions between media-specific ways of
presenting stories.
The crucial question regarding the issues discussed in this section is how we
can establish which states of affairs a fictional text prompts us to imagine. This
point is rather well illustrated by one of Currie’s arguments against PN. The
argument is supposed to prove that statements in the vein of the analytical
argument are wrong and it comes to the conclusion that, despite the fact that
what we read when we read a fictional narrative are assertive sentences, we are
not supposed to imagine the narrative as being asserted by a narrator: “we may
imagine the propositions of the work to be assertions, without imagining any-
thing about how they got to be asserted.”89 The problem is that we must take
Currie’s word for the fact that we are not invited to imagine the assertions in a
fictional text as being asserted (see sections IV and V). I think that the first clause
of Currie’s sentence can be completed quite differently but equally soundly in the
following way: we imagine the propositions of the work to be assertions, therefore
it is natural to imagine them as being asserted by some kind of asserter, who is
the fictional narrator. Actually, what Currie shows is that maybe we are not bound
to imagine an asserter for every assertion. However, what Currie does not show is
that it is not legitimate to imagine an asserter for every assertion. Thus Currie in
the end does not manage to refute PN. This does not mean that PN is true, but that
it simply cannot be proven to be false or inadequate in this way.
A similar point can be made regarding another of Currie’s claims about how
we read fictional texts: “the basic project is to imagine in accordance with what is
true in a fiction, and the sentences of the fictional narrative are a guide to what is
true in the fiction.”90 According to ATN one could go on reasoning that, as the
sentences that determine the genre of the narrative are assertions, it is legitimate
and well-advised to imagine that the narrative is asserted by someone. As accord-
ing to ATN the illocutionary act of asserting the states of affairs of the fictional
world cannot be attributed to the author, it will have to be attributed to a fictional
entity, i.e. the narrator.

90 Ibid., p. 81.
72 Frank Zipfel
VII.2 The ‘Reality Principle’
In this context another argument that can be brought forward in favour of PN

should be mentioned. This argument draws on the reality principle, more pre-
cisely on a particular interpretation of this widely discussed principle of inferring
fictional truth. In brief, the reality principle highlights the fact that the reader’s
appreciation of a fictional narration is guided by the principle not to assume
differences between the fictional world and the actual world, providing they are
not explicitly mandated by (an interpretation of) the text. It is beyond the scope of
this paper to retrace the discussions concerning the reality principle and similar
principles like the mutual belief principle, the presumption of verisimilitude or
the principle of minimal departure.91 Moreover, many of the difficulties that are
usually associated with the reality principle as a guide for interpretation (such as
the so-called overpopulation of fictional worlds) can be circumvented when we
take the reality principle as a strategy to block unreasonable departures from the
actual world in the construction of a fictional world and not as a strategy to
import actual states of affairs to a fictional world.92 Thus, the reality principle in
its traditional meaning refers to inferences about the fictional world and is
conceived as an interpretation device on the story level of a narration.
One can argue, however, that the reality principle can be understood not
only as a principle that guides our interpretation on the level of narratorial
content but also as a principle that underlies our interpretation on the discourse
level. When understood in this way, the reality principle states that we should
not assume that the way in which a fictional narration is told is different from the
way factual narrations are usually told unless such a difference is explicitly
mandated by the text. Against this background, detractors of PN would have to
answer questions such as: ‘How do texts mandate that readers do not understand
the past tense as referring to past events?’ or ‘How do texts manage that readers
do not assume an assertive agent for the assertions made in the text?’ It would
thus be argued that just as factual narrations necessarily have productive agents,
fictional narrations should also be conceived as being told by the same kind of
productive agent, i.e. a fictional one. Bortolussi/Dixon hold a similar position
when they claim:
[R]eaders assume that a story is being told and construct some representation of the teller
who is doing the telling. […] [A]lthough there is no real communication in the linguistic,
91 Cf. Frank Zipfel, “Fictional Truth and Unreliable Narration”, in: Journal of Literary Theory, 5/
2011, pp. 109–130, pp. 110–117.
92 Cf. ibid., p. 113.
conversational sense, we argue that readers treat narrators as if they were conversational
participants. […] Further, we suspect that this may be a very natural process, and it is
possible that people have an almost inevitable tendency to deal with language in this way.93
Note that to a certain extent this view is an expansion of the argument presented
in section V.
What is more, the fact that recent theories of unreliable narration incorporate
the Gricean maxims of communication that have been established for factual
language use as a way to detect and to describe unreliable narration94 may
indicate that something like the reality principle on the discourse level is actually
assumed by readers and, consequently, by theorists who try to explain how
readers come to terms with (unreliable) narration.
VII.3 Narrators and their Capacities
To close this section, let me briefly dwell upon an argument that has often been
brought forward in attempts to establish a no-narrator theory of heterodiegetic
narration.95 The argument claims that it is not sound to read a fictional hetero-
diegetic narration as if it were told by a narrator because it is impossible for
anybody to acquire the knowledge that the alleged fictional narrator is supposed
to have. In this way Currie questions the assumption of a fictional narrator: “In
these stories, a good deal is said that no ordinary mortal, however reliable and
insightful, would be likely to know, and that may be one indication that there is
no internal narrator.”96 In the same line Gaut asks:
93 Marisa Bortolussi/Peter Dixon, Psychonarratology. Foundations for the Empirical Study of

Literary Response, Cambridge 2003, pp. 73f. For a discussion of Bortolussi and Dixion’s approach
cf. Nilli Diengott, “Some Problems with the Concept of the Narrator in Bortolussi and Dixon’s
‘Psychonarratology’”, in: Narrative, 12/2004, pp. 306–316, and Marisa Bortolussi/Peter Dixon,
“Methods and Evidence in ‘Psychonarratology’ and the Theory of the Narrator: Reply to Diengott”,
in: Narrative, 12/2004, pp. 317–325.
94 Cf. Theresa Heyd, “Understanding and Handling Unreliable Narratives: A Pragmatic Model
and Method”, in: Semiotica, 162/2006, pp. 217–243; Tom Kindt, Unzuverlässiges Erzählen und
literarische Moderne. Eine Untersuchung der Romane von Ernst Weiß, Tübingen 2008, pp. 66f.
95 The following discussion is concerned with an argument that has mostly been raised in the
context of NN, but some defenders of ON also use it.
74 Frank Zipfel
How could a mere human being gain access to all this knowledge, often the most intimate
thoughts of people which they do not tell anyone? Or consider a novel about someone who
dies alone, and we read of their dying thoughts; how could the narrator know such things?97
These authors conclude that because the question ‘How does the narrator know?’
cannot be answered, the assumption that the narration is being told by a narrator
must be wrong.
There are at least two problems with this argument. Firstly: Why should it be
problematic that the narrator of a fictional narration has superhuman or super-
natural powers? Various characters in fictional stories are endowed with unnatu-
ral capacities.98 Secondly: the argument is also valid for homodiegetic narrations.
It is not unusual for homodiegetic narrators to depict actions and dialogues
faithfully and with all details even decades after those events took place. There
seems to be a consensus that homodiegetic narrators may have a more than
human capacity of remembrance and that their knowledge thus considerably
deviates from the knowledge we would accept when we deal with real persons.
Since hardly any narratologist denies that it is legitimate to assume that there is a
fictional narrator in homodiegetic narrations, the problem arises where to draw
the boundary between those kinds of information that allow for the assumption
of a narrator and those kinds that do not. Why are the superhuman skills of
homodiegetic narrators less problematic than those of heterodiegetic narrators?
Why is it less acceptable to say that heterodiegetic narrators know the most
intimate thoughts of the fictional characters they tell about than to say that
homodiegetic narrators have a potentially unlimited memory? Or to say it differ-
ently: If the tellers of homodiegetic narrations are similar enough to tellers of
factual narrations to be called narrators, then it can be argued that the same is
true for heterodiegetic narrations.
VIII What is a Silly Question?
The reflections of the last section lead us to more fundamental considerations.

Fictional narration is often (implicitly or explicitly) described with reference to its
specific similarities and dissimilarities to factual narration. The controversy be-
tween PN, ON and NN partly stems from the fact that the different theories locate
the dissimilarities on different levels. NN and ON seem to assume that a fictional
97 Gaut, “Philosophy”, p. 247. Cf. also Kania, “Ubiquity”, p. 49; Walsh, Rhetoric, p. 73.
98 Cf. Alber/Fludernik, “Mediacy”, Par. 19.
narrator can in no way be different from an actual one and therefore advocate that
(some) heterodiegetic narrations do not have a narrator; as a consequence they
construe the act of telling a fictional story as completely different from the act of
telling a real one. PN, in contrast, claims that the act of telling a fictional narration
should be imagined in a way that is as similar as possible to the act of telling
factual narrations and that for this purpose it is legitimate to assume a fictional
narrator who can deviate from an actual one in the same way that fictional worlds
deviate from the real one. Thus the answer that is given to the question whether
there is a narrator in every narration depends upon where we are willing to locate
the deviation of fictional narrations from factual ones.
Looking at the same impasse from a different perspective one can say that the
whole problem revolves around the concept of silly questions: Which questions
are considered to be silly in an interpretation of a fictional text and for what
reasons? Now there are of course questions which are obviously silly in the
context of an interpretation of an art work, for example: Why are Shakespeare’s
characters such skilfull verse-makers? Why have all the apostles in Leonardo’s
painting The Last Supper chosen a seat on the same side of the table? What makes
a character in an opera express in singing what she wants to say? These questions
are silly because they are of no use for the interpretation of the respective art
works, and they are of no use because they do not take into account the represen-
tational conventions of the respective art forms.99 However, there are other ques-
tions that are less easy to evaluate in terms of silliness: Why does Desdemona
drop her handkerchief in Act III, Scene 3 in Othello? Some would say that this is a
silly question because seen from the inside of the story she drops it inadvertently
and seen from the outside this inadvertence is a strategy Shakespeare uses to
promote the story he wants to tell.100 Others, however, base an entire interpreta-
tion of the play and its characters on the fact that the handkerchief is dropped.101
When we return to the question whether it is legitimate to assume a narrator
for heterodiegetic narration there are two ways of reasoning:
99 Cf. e.g. Kendall L .Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe. On the Foundations of the Representa-
tional Arts, Cambridge 1990, pp. 174–183; Gaut, “Philosophy”, p. 244; Currie, Narratives, Ch. 3.4.
100 For the distinction between the perspective from inside and the perspective from outside cf.
Ben Levinstein, “Facts, Interpretation, and Truth in Fiction”, in: British Journal of Aesthetics, 47/
2007, pp. 64–75, p. 68; Alexander J. Bareis, “Was ist wahr in der Fiktion? Zum Prinzip der
Genrekonvention und die Unzuverlässigkeit des Erzählers in Patrick Süskinds ‘Die Geschichte des
Herrn Sommer’”, in: Scientia Poetica, 13/2009, pp. 230–254.
101 Cf. e.g. Harry Berger Jr., “Impertinent Trifling. Desdemona’s Handkerchief”, in: Shakespeare
Quarterly, 47/1996, pp. 235–250.
76 Frank Zipfel
1. The question ‘Who narrates the narration?’ is a silly one, either for all hetero-
diegetic narrations because it would lead us to assume superhuman narra-
tors, or for some heterodiegetic narrations because it would lead us to assume
covert narrators. As a consequence all or some heterodiegetic narrations are
considered to be narratorless, on the fictional level at least.
2. The question ‘who narrates’ needs an answer because it is implausible to
assume that there are verbal narrations without a narrator on the same
pragmatic level. The fact that the narrator is not explicitly mentioned is not a
problem, because the assumption that there is a fictional narrator is part of
the concept of narration and also of the way readers perceive assertive texts.
The fact that sometimes we have to construct these narrators as omniscient,
i.e. endowed with superhuman knowledge or (and maybe better) as capable
of providing information linked to perspectives that are not possible in
factual narration, is not a problem either, but simply a convention of fictional
narration.
Even when we construe the narrator as someone who tells what he knows, we do
not have to ask how the narrator came to know or what superhuman capacities
are necessary to collect the information he provides us with. Chatman, for
example, adopts the view that “[h]ow the narrator came to ‘know’ the provided
information seems a nonquestion.”102 Kania, by contrast, finds that “this is a
curiously sudden loss of interest”103 and that theorists who feel bound to assume
narrators should explain their superhuman capacities.
Thus detractors of PN will say that in the absence of very explicit traces of a
narrating agent it is a silly question to ask who is responsible for the assertions of
the narration, whereas the proponents of PN will find this question legitimate, but
will consider questions that arise from the assumption of a narrator (for example:
How can he know?) to be silly, because the fact that the narrator is capable of
giving certain information does not entail that we have to know or inquire how he
got this information (maybe in the same way as it would be silly to ask how the
wolf in the fairy tale learned how to speak).
102 Chatman, Coming, p. 130.

IX Concluding Remarks
What I have tried to show in the previous sections amounts to the following:
Whether the truth of PN or the truth of ON can be established is dependent on
how we answer the crucial questions that form the headlines of the different
sections of this paper. The way we look at PN, ON or NN particularly depends
upon how we frame the concept of narration that underlies our reasoning. More-
over, it is contingent on how we generally conceive ITF. It also depends upon
what kind of imaginings we postulate in the context of the ITF, and finally it is
dependent on what we are willing to accept as textual features that prompt the
assumption of a narrator. All these decisions, then, determine what kind of
theoretical or empirical questions we regard as worth pursuing or as silly.
The proponents of ON and NN explicitly or implicitly answer the questions
dealt with in this paper in a specific manner that makes PN look unacceptable.
Therefore I also tried to show that the questions of my headlines can be answered
in a way that makes PN completely acceptable. It probably has become obvious
that I am not indifferent when it comes to deciding which of the outlined
approaches is more promising and that I favour the conceptual framework in
which PN is an adequate description of fictional narration. The less satisfying
result of this paper, however, is that unfortunately, for the moment it seems that
no consensus can be reached about the concepts underlying an adequate descrip-
tion of fictional narration. So I agree with Wilson, who advocates that no a priori
or conceptual reflections are likely to settle the controversy about the ubiquity of
fictional narrators and that it does not seem likely that “some kind of non-
question-begging experimental strategy is going to elicit compelling evidence one
way or another in the debate.”104
Works Cited
Aarseth, Espen, “Quest Games as Post-Narrative Discourse”, in: Marie-Laure Ryan (ed.), Narra-
tive across Media. The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln/London 2004, pp. 361–376.
Abbott, H. Porter, “Narrativity”, in: Peter Hühn et al. (eds.), The Living Handbook of Narratology,
2011, http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/narrativity (accessed July 5, 2013).
104 Wilson, “Elusive Narrators”, p. 83. Cf. also Currie, Narratives, p. 85 and Uri Margolin,
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Vincenz Pieper, Göttingen
Author and Narrator: Observations on
Die Wahlverwandtschaften
According to a common though not universally accepted opinion, works of

narrative fiction are made up of statements uttered by a fictional narrator who
must be distinguished from the author.1 In what follows, I demonstrate that this
assumption has led to misinterpretations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s novel
Die Wahlverwandtschaften. In the first section, I examine the view, held by several
distinguished scholars, that there is a fictional narrator in Die Wahlver-
wandtschaften. Two main problems of the respective interpretations are exposed.
First, they fail to substantiate their claims about the existence and particular traits
of the narrator. Second, they fail to clarify the very point of introducing him. In the
second section, I challenge the general assumption that it is reasonable to
postulate a narrator while ignoring, temporarily or permanently, the author’s
purposes. The third section suggests that it is rather misleading to apply the term
‘narrator’ to the author of the novel. One may of course call Goethe the ‘narrator’
of Die Wahlverwandtschaften, but there is little point in doing so. In the final
section, I draw attention to some aspects of Goethe’s novel that have previously
been neglected and that can be more easily recognized once one refrains from
assuming that there is a fictional narrator in the novel.
Die Wahlverwandtschaften (1809) is, among many other things, a study of pas-
sions.2 Goethe says that his ongoing scientific activities gave rise to the novel’s
1 See Wolfgang Kayser, “Wer erzählt den Roman?”, in: W. K., Die Vortragsreise. Studien zur
Literatur, Bern 1958, pp. 82–101; Matías Martínez/Michael Scheffel, Einführung in die Erzählthe-
orie, 9th Edition, München 2012, pp. 19–21, p. 71.
2 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Die Wahlverwandtschaften”, in: Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen
seines Schaffens, Münchner Ausgabe (MA), Karl Richter et al. (eds.), 21 Vols., München 1985–98,
Vol. 9: Epoche der Wahlverwandtschaften 1807–1814, Christoph Siegrist et. al. (ed.), München
1987. I have used Judith Ryan’s translation: “Elective Affinities”, in: Goethe’s Collected Works, Vol.
11: “The Sorrows of Young Werther”, “Elective Affinities”, “Novella”, David Wellbery (ed.), New
York 1988, pp. 89–262.
82 Vincenz Pieper
“strange title.”3 ‘Wahlverwandtschaft’ (elective affinity) is a technical term drawn

from chemistry. The dissolution of a compound body effected by the stronger
attraction of one of its elements to a third substance has a resemblance to choice
in voluntary agents and is therefore called elective attraction. Goethe transfers the
expression back to the social sphere: The compound body is the married couple
Eduard and Charlotte. Their bond is dissolved when Eduard is irresistibly at-
tracted to Ottilie. His blind passion has disastrous consequences and finally ruins
both himself and Ottilie.
In what follows, I shall give a short account of some of the interpretations
that have identified a fictional narrator in the novel. I will
1. cite the relevant claims concerning the fictional narrator
2. report any evidence that is brought forward for the fictional narrator’s very
existence in the novel and
3. ask whether the critics explain the point of Goethe’s decision to introduce a
fictional narrator in the novel.
We shall see that the critics that I have picked out take it for granted that there is a
fictional narrator in the novel and make substantial claims about his alleged
traits. Yet they remain largely silent on (ii) and (iii).
The first scholar who was convinced that the story of Die Wahlverwandtschaf-
ten is told by a narrator who must be separated from the author was Paul Stöck-
lein.4 His essay includes some very shrewd remarks on Goethe’s manifested
personality and narrative technique. He was, however, persuaded by Käte Friede-
mann and Wolfgang Kayser that every work of narrative fiction has a fictional
narrator. As a result, he invites us to “feel” the narrator’s presence: “Es gilt vor
allem, den Erzähler zu fühlen.”5 In fact, he is so confident about his ability to
discern the narrator that he comments on his hair color and physiognomy: “ein
grauhaariges, gepflegtes, vornehmes, faltengeprägtes Gesicht, fraglos noch aus
dem 18. Jahrhundert, dem eleganten und rationalen, vergleichbar dem des Abbé
aus den ‘Unterhaltungen’, doch weitläufiger, härter und geheimnisvoller.”6
Stöcklein provides no textual evidence to confirm this characterization.
Harry Barnes follows Stöcklein’s lead in claiming that the novel has a fictional
narrator. His study, while providing many true and important observations, also
3 MA 9, p. 285, (Ryan’s translation does not include Goethe’s ‘Selbstanzeige’ which appeared in
the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, 4 Sept. 1809).
4 See Paul Stöcklein, “Stil und Sinn der Wahlverwandtschaften” [1949], in: P. S., Wege zum
späten Goethe, 2nd Edition, Hamburg 1960, pp. 9–80.
5 Ibid., p. 10.
6 Ibid., p. 11.
comprises some rather dubious ones, and it is on the latter that I shall concentrate.
Barnes praises the narrator, rather than Goethe, as “a penetrating psychologist with
a skeptical view of man” who “presents an unsparing analysis of human passion.”7
At the same time, the narrator is said to exhibit a tendency “to propagate false
judgments on the main characters.”8 Barnes claims that the narrator may have
picked up the story from Charlotte and the Hauptmann, for this would explain why
he constantly judges them favorably, while he “almost maliciously” ascribes less
reputable traits to Eduard.9 Barnes looks at Eduard with more sympathy while
charging the narrator with “moralism.”10 Yet Barnes does not attempt to explain
the point of introducing a biased narrator. Barnes also maintains that the narrator
tries to rationalize what is, for Goethe, a mysterious process of nature.11 There is,
however, no discussion of Goethe’s opinions in Barnes’s interpretation.
Roy Pascal, following Barnes and Stöcklein, describes the fictional narrator of
Die Wahlverwandtschaften as “an elderly, urbane, rationalistic but tolerant man of
the world and elegant stylist, writing about persons he has known, to whom he is
bound with affection.”12 He suggests that the inaccessibility of Ottilie’s inner life
at the end of the novel might be the result of the fictional narrator’s “spiritual
limitations.”13 Moreover, we must not ascribe the narrator’s opinions and judg-
ments to the author, since he “belongs to the same social group [as the characters]
and shares their evaluations.”14 Pascal does not indicate how Goethe’s own
evaluation of the story might be retrieved, but he makes it look quite attractive:
“we flounder much deeper in ambiguity and irony than suits most critics.”15 Like
Barnes, Pascal does not discuss the artistic purpose of introducing a fictional
narrator who purportedly obscures the author’s judgments.
According to Eric Blackall, the fictional narrator tries to explain what is inex-
plicable, and he tries to comment on something that “allows of no commentary.”16
Still, Blackall admires Goethe’s “very skillful and effective use” of his narrator.17
7 H.G. Barnes, Goethe’s ‘Die Wahlverwandtschaften’. A Literary Interpretation, Oxford 1967, p. 7.

8 Ibid., p. 27.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., p. 13, pp. 104–105.
11 See ibid., p. 104.
12 Roy Pascal, “Free Indirect Speech (‘erlebte Rede’) as a Narrative Mode in Die Wahlver-
wandtschaften”, in: C.P. Magill (ed.), Tradition and Creation. Essays in Honour of Elizabeth Mary
Wilkinson, Leeds 1978, pp. 146–161, p. 147.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Eric Blackall, Goethe and the Novel, London 1976, p. 187.
17 Ibid., p. 185.
84 Vincenz Pieper
Goethe’s intention, Blackall claims, is to demonstrate the futility of giving rational

explanations.18 Thus, the narrator’s “incompetence”19 is rather effective since it
serves to indicate the “unnarratability of what he is narrating.”20 The “very con-
trived, formal, sometimes even ponderous tone” achieves “an extraordinarily dis-
tancing effect”21 that is supposed to mitigate the disturbing effect of “das Dämo-
nische.”22 Blackall comes to the conclusion that Goethe uses an imperfect narrator
to avoid “a full, frank expression of the daemonic nature of his subject.”23 However,
neither does Blackall examine how the narrator’s “incompetence” is revealed, nor
does he explain Goethe’s own conception of the events.
Matías Martínez agrees with Blackall that the events are not fully understood
by the fictional narrator. He argues that by means of recurring motifs a “hidden
meaning” is tacitly communicated to the reader, bypassing, as it were, the
narrator who does not seem to recognize that there is a “mythische[r] Motivations-
zusammenhang.”24 Nonetheless, Martínez attributes what he thinks is the novel’s
“Darstellungsstrategie”25 to the fictional narrator, namely the technique of hold-
ing in tension two conflicting conceptions of reality. According to Martínez, this
deliberate ambiguity shapes the whole novel. Yet Martínez does not attempt a
thorough examination of the narrator’s opinions, evaluations, and purposes.
Arguably, this can be seen in his failure to take into account the careful prepara-
tion of the child’s death in chapter 13 of part II.26 Martínez’s discussion of how the
drowning of the child is motivated omits not only the exposition of Eduard’s
insanity (2.12), but also his presence at the lake preceding the accident (2.13). In
these passages, the novel exhibits less ambiguity than Martínez seems to take for
granted. Similarly, the construal of Ottilie’s death as “Übergang in eine mythische
(durch den Tod in ein neues Leben führende) Geborgenheit”27 appears to neglect
the impious way the Christian view of life is psychologically explained. The first
two chapters of part II are designed to show that the “afterlife” is a creation of the
imagination and the human passions. Like the common tendency to think of dead
persons as sleeping in their graves, hinted at in chapter 1 of part II, the notion of a
18 See ibid., p. 187.

19 Ibid., p. 186.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid., p. 187.
22 Ibid., p. 186.
23 Ibid., p. 187.
24 Matías Martínez, Doppelte Welten. Struktur und Sinn zweideutigen Erzählens, Göttingen 1996,
p. 57.
25 Ibid., p. 53.
26 See ibid., p. 56.
27 Ibid., p. 81.
future life arises, as Charlotte’s words suggest, from the denial of personal
annihilation.28 The excerpt from Ottilie’s diary indicates that life beyond the grave
is merely a comforting image.29 Thus, Martínez disregards the interests and
judgments unambiguously displayed in many places in order to preserve the
hypothesis that there is a “doppeltes Rezeptionsangebot.”30 Some parts of the
work are, without doubt, calculated to baffle the reader, but there is little plausi-
bility in the claim that it offers a pious interpretation.
There are several other scholars who agree that the story is told by a fictional
narrator not to be confused with Goethe himself.31 The narrator is regarded as self-
important, prejudiced, inconsistent, or elusive. However, I wish to maintain that
any interpretation that identifies a fictional narrator in the novel is incomplete
unless it also specifies why Goethe makes the narrator do this and not that. An in-
terpretation that does not clarify the rationale of creating a narrator is incomplete.
28 Charlotte thinks very little of “dieses eigensinnige, starre Fortsetzen unserer Persönlichkeiten,
Anhänglichkeiten und Lebensverhältnisse” (MA 9, p. 405), “this stubbornly rigid attempt to
continue our personages, dependencies, and circumstances” (Ryan, p. 177). In the ‘Selbstanzeige’
(MA 9, 285) Goethe had announced that the novel’s central theme is volitional necessity resulting
from a judgement that is clouded by emotions (“trübe leidenschaftliche Notwendigkeit”) – a
conception of bondage that is probably influenced by part four of Spinoza’s Ethics. Goethe seems
to portray the denial of personal annihilation as a striking example of man being a slave to his
passions. As far as the characters are concerned, Goethe suggests that in some cases only God
(“eine höhere Hand”) could provide remedies for the bondage of the passions. This is another way
of saying that there is no such remedy.
29 “Wenn man die vielen versunkenen, die durch Kirchgänger abgetretenen Grabsteine, die über
ihren Grabmälern selbst zusammengestürzten Kirchen erblickt; so kann einem das Leben nach
dem Tode doch immer wie ein zweites Leben vorkommen, in das man nun im Bilde, in der
Überschrift eintritt und länger darin verweilt als in dem eigentlichen lebendigen Leben. Aber auch
dieses Bild, dieses zweite Dasein verlischt früher oder später. Wie über die Menschen so auch über
die Denkmäler läßt sich die Zeit ihr Recht nicht nehmen.” (MA 9, pp. 411–412) “When one sees the
many sunken gravestones worn thin by steps of churchgoers, the churches themselves fallen into
ruin above their tombs, then life after death can seem like a second life entered as if into a picture
whose inscription lingers longer than in the real life we live. But even this picture, this second
existence vanishes sooner or later. Time will not be robbed of its rights – over monuments as over
human beings.” (Ryan, p. 181) Goethe took an anthropological interest in these representations of
a second life. But he clearly did not take them at face value.
30 Martínez, Doppelte Welten, p. 53.
31 See H.B. Nisbet/Hans Reiss (eds.), “Introduction”, in: Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Oxford 1971,
pp. i–liii, p. xxii; Franz K. Stanzel, “Goethes Die Wahlverwandtschaften. Kein doppelter Eheb-
ruch”, in: F.K.S., Telegonie – Fernzeugung. Macht und Magie der Imagination, Wien 2008,
pp. 134–143; Helmut Hühn, “Ein ‘tragischer Roman’? Überlegungen zu einem Romanexperiment”,
in: H.H. (ed.), Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften. Werk und Forschung, Berlin 2010, pp. 149–168,
p. 168.
86 Vincenz Pieper
What is more, none of these critics appears to support the claim that Goethe
introduces a narrator by citing textual evidence. Thus, Ignace Feuerlicht is right
to point out that a fictional narrator, as some of the critics have described him,
would have been noticed by Goethe’s contemporaries.32 But the evidence sug-
gests that they did not distinguish the narrator, who speaks and relates the
narrative, from the author who created the work. For Böttiger, Abeken, Solger,
and Conz, amongst others, the story is narrated by the poet in his own person.33
Friedrich Spielhagen and Walter Benjamin, too, refer only to the poet and his
characters.34 This is quite remarkable: Stöcklein, Barnes, Pascal, Blackall, Martí-
nez, and others, claim to find something in the novel that none of these previous
readers suspected to be there. Has narratology provided, as it is sometimes
supposed to have done, a set of tools enabling critics to discover what previously
escaped even some of the most attentive and well-informed readers?
Before I turn to this question, let me summarize the points that I have hinted
at so far: First, while most critics tend to take a fictional narrator’s existence for
granted, they actually need to provide textual evidence for a fictional narrator’s
presence in the novel. Second, one needs to specify the rationale for depicting a
fictional narrator; in particular, one needs to indicate what the author achieves in
doing so. I will explain both these points in more detail in the following section.
II
The proposition that Goethe was indeed free to introduce a narrator appears
innocent enough, but it was disputed, at least implicitly, by some distinguished
scholars who were convinced that a novelist inevitably creates a narrator. The
doctrine was first put forward by Käte Friedemann and Wolfgang Kayser. It was
then accepted by Franz Stanzel and subsequently acquired the status of an
unchallenged assumption. Today, the notion that there is a fictional narrator in
every work of narrative fiction is often presented as an important theoretical
32 See Ignace Feuerlicht, “Der ‘Erzähler’ und das ‘Tagebuch’ in Goethes ‘Wahlverwandtschaf-
ten’”, in: Goethe-Jahrbuch, 103/1986, pp. 316–343, p. 318.
33 Cf. Heinz Härtl (ed.), ‘Die Wahlverwandtschaften’. Eine Dokumentation der Wirkung von
Goethes Roman 1808–1832, Berlin 1983.
34 See Friedrich Spielhagen, Neue Beiträge zur Theorie und Technik der Epik und Dramatik,
Leipzig 1898, pp. 91–122; Walter Benjamin, “Goethes ‘Wahlverwandtschaften’” [1924/1925], in:
W. B., Gesammelte Schriften, Rolf Tiedemann/Hermann Schweppenhäuser (ed.), Vol. I.1, Frank-
furt/M. 1974, pp. 123–201.
achievement.35 According to Stanzel, Friedemann and Kayser were the first critics
to distinguish the heterodiegetic narrator from the author’s personality and thus
made him “accessible to interpretation.”36 It is important to realize, however, that
this was not an empirical discovery. It was in fact a stipulation that profoundly
changed the habits of reading and asking questions.
The appeal of the doctrine that every work of narrative fiction has a fictional
narrator is perhaps best explained by reference to a preconceived picture of
literary works. Many scholars and critics are inclined to think of literary works as
things ‘separated’ from their authors.37 Käte Friedemann states that the poet is
“standing outside the work,” whereas the narrator is an “organic part” of it.38
Similarly, Wolfgang Kayser declares that the author is “not contained” in the
object of literary criticism.39 Both think of the literary work as an isolated struc-
ture. This image is very powerful, especially when combined with the notion that
the author’s thoughts, feelings, and intentions are contained in his ‘mind’ (or
head). It leads almost naturally to the conclusion that a work of literature is a
separate thing, only causally related to the author’s activities.
A strikingly similar model is taken for granted in the writings of William
Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley. They envisage the author’s mind as a “private,
individual, dynamic, and intentionalistic realm.”40 A work of literature “is de-
tached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to
intend about it or control it.”41 Beardsley advances the “simple”42 and deceptively
innocent thesis that the work ‘in itself’ and the author ‘behind the work’ are to be
carefully distinguished. He then goes on to insist that one has to study them
separately: “It is not the interpreter’s proper task to draw our attention off to the
psychological states of the author […]. His task is to keep our eye on the textual
meaning.”43 The critic is, after all, “a poem-reader, not a mind-reader.”44 How – we
are invited to ask – could one possibly disagree?
35 See, for example, Silke Lahn/Jan Christoph Meister, Einführung in die Erzähltextanalyse,
Stuttgart 2008, p. 62.
36 Franz K. Stanzel, Theorie der Erzählung, Göttingen 1989, pp. 27–29.
37 See Colin Lyas, Aesthetics, London 1997, pp. 135–158.
38 Käte Friedemann, Die Rolle des Erzählers in der Epik [1910], Darmstadt 1965, p. 26.
39 Wolfgang Kayser, Das sprachliche Kunstwerk, Bern 1961, p. 17.
40 William Wimsatt, “Genesis: A Fallacy Revisited”, in: David Newton-de Molina (ed.), On
Literary Intention, Edinburgh 1976, pp. 116–138, p. 116.
41 William Wimsatt/Monroe Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy”, in: W.W., The Verbal Icon.
Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, Lexington 1954, pp. 3–18, p. 5.
42 Monroe Beardsley, Aesthetics. Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, Indianapolis 1981, p. 18.
43 Monroe Beardsley, Possibility of Criticism, Detroit 1970, p. 34.
44 Ibid., p. 33.
88 Vincenz Pieper
There are, of course, numerous scholars and critics who claim that in order to
make sense of literary works one has to recover the author’s intentions. Still,
many of them picture the literary work as a sequence of isolated signs to which
‘meanings’ have to be ‘attached’. In so doing they disconnect the work from the
author’s purposes. As a consequence, even scholars who disagree with Beardsley
may be led to believe that a description of the narrator in the work, as opposed to
the author outside the work, is a good starting point, if not an indication of
scientific rigor.
The idea, though, that words need supplementation with meanings is mis-
conceived.45 Meaning, like purpose, is not something correlated with signs or
added to them by interpretation. To learn the meaning of a word is to learn how it
is used – this is what Wittgenstein and his followers remind us of.46 Kayser,
Beardsley, and other scholars invoke a self-sufficient structure as a model for
thinking about literary works. That model leads them to disregard the fact that
readers approach literary works as a “display of the artist’s agency.”47 Readers do
not interpret isolated, intrinsically meaningless signs, but live sentences in which
words are being actively employed.
What an author is doing in writing, what his operating with words amounts to,
can be described on various “levels of sophistication.”48 On a low level of sophisti-
cation (under a ‘thin’ description) he may use words to compose sentences. On a
higher level he may, for example, construct a speech and give clues that he is not
speaking in his own person. On still higher levels of sophistication he may let a
speaker tell a story and convey judgments about his reliability. Corresponding to
the levels of sophistication, we may distinguish levels of understanding.49
The decisive point is that, in any case, readers are faced with employments of
words. Their reading of the text is governed by their conception of what the author
is doing in writing. Hence, statements about an invented narrator are ‘thick’
descriptions. They depend on assumptions about the author’s coordinated use of
words. A reader who claims that the story is told by a narrator has to assume that
45 Cf. Jeff Coulter/Wes Sharrock, “The Hinterland of the Chinese Room”, in: John Preston/Mark
Bishop (eds.), Views into the Chinese Room. New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence, Oxford
2002, pp. 181–200; Hans-Johann Glock, Quine and Davidson on Language, Thought and Reality,
Cambridge 2003, pp. 189f.
46 Bede Rundle, “Meaning and Understanding”, in: Hans-Johann Glock (ed.), Wittgenstein: A
Critical Reader, Oxford 2001. pp. 94–119; Peter Hacker, Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning.
Part 1: Essays, Oxford 2005, pp. 1–28, pp. 129–158.
47 Noël Carroll, On Criticism, London 2009, p. 66.
48 Gilbert Ryle, Collected Papers, Vol. 2, Julia Tanney (ed.), London 2009, pp. 479–510.
49 See Oliver Scholz, Verstehen und Rationalität. Untersuchungen zu den Grundlagen von Herme-
neutik und Sprachphilosophie, Frankfurt/M. 2001, pp. 294–312.
the author introduces a narrator. He has to correctly identify an “artistic act”50

that involves doing something with words in a given context. The narrator’s
opinions, intentions, and faults are determined by the author’s decisions, for the
author makes him do whatever he does. He is accurate or unreliable only if the
author guides us to make these judgments. Thus, readers have to understand
what the author is doing in order to ‘understand’ the narrator.
Some scholars might be inclined to disagree with the idea that ‘using a
narrator’ is amongst the things an author accomplishes in writing, for they wish
to avoid statements about the author in the context of interpretation altogether.
In order to do so, they introduce an ‘implied author.’ “Positing an implied
author,” says Seymour Chatman, “inhibits the overhasty assumption that the
reader has direct access through the fictional text to the real author’s intentions
and ideology.”51 Chatman seems to suggest that we would have to look ‘behind’
the work and read the author’s mind to say anything about the ‘real’ Goethe. Yet,
the use of words is not determined by the “state of mind”52 accompanying their
inscription, as Chatman supposes, but by the circumstances of their use and facts
about their user.53 We may indeed “distinguish between a real author’s activity
and the product of that activity: the text before us.”54 But the sentence ‘Hume
undermines the doctrine of a future state’ describes both Hume’s linguistic
activities as well as his work Of the Immortality of the Soul.55 Where and when
Hume discredits the arguments that had been advanced in support of the doctrine
of the immortality of the soul is where and when the words he uses occur. Thus, it
may be difficult to ascertain the author’s purposes and opinions, but to posit an
‘implied author’ does not help us in any way.56
50 Guy Sircello, Mind and Art. An Essay on the Varieties of Expression, Princeton 1972; Berys Gaut,
Art, Emotion and Ethics, Oxford 2007, pp. 71–73; Noël Carroll, On Criticism, pp. 48–83.
51 Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film, Ithaca 1990,
p. 76.
52 Ibid., pp. 83–84.
53 Cf. Peter Hacker, Understanding and Meaning, p. 77.
54 Ibid., p. 82.
55 Some scholars maintain that “Dickens” in the sentence “In Little Dorrit Dickens seeks to
demonstrate the power of social constraints” refers not to the real author but to the implied author
conceived as “the product of ideas about the work’s purpose developed by the reader” (Monika
Fludernik, An Introduction to Narratology, London 2009, p. 26.) I disagree. We have to distinguish
between the ideas someone has about the author’s purposes and the author’s purposes. It is true
that the sentence expresses the former, but it clearly purports to describe the latter.
56 See Tom Kindt/Hans-Harald Müller, The Implied Author. Concept and Controversy, Berlin/New
York 2006.
90 Vincenz Pieper
Whether the poet “introduces himself as an historian,”57 as Kames puts it, or

whether he introduces a fictional narrator, is not a matter to be settled by a
priori generalization. An author may pretend to be a faithful chronicler of the
events, but that does not mysteriously turn him into a “gedichtete Person,”58 a
part of the fictional world. It is moreover important to bear in mind that suppress-
ing opinions, concealing parts of one’s personality, and speaking ironically are
perfectly compatible with speaking in propria persona.59 Changing tone and
attitude according to one’s purposes is to be distinguished from introducing a
fictional narrator. Goethe may speak in his own person or he may not. He may
choose to reveal himself or he may choose not to do so. It all depends on what he
is doing in writing. Perhaps Gerwin Marahrens is right that in Die Wahlver-
wandtschaften Goethe appears “calmer, clearer, more unperturbed and ‘intellec-
tual’”60 than in his letters and diaries. However, this does not support the claim
that Goethe invented a narrator who wrote the novel for him. Even if he did, we
would still have to examine what Goethe tried to do in his novel in order to make
sense of the narrator, since an invented narrator cannot, by definition, be under-
stood and explained independently from the author’s purposes.
Incidentally, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries there was no
convention requiring the introduction of a narrator. Pace H.B. Nisbet and Hans
Reiss, Goethe did not use “the conventional narrator of eighteenth-century Eur-
opean fiction.”61 In fact, there was no such thing. From Plato and Aristotle to
Friedrich von Blanckenburg and the Schlegels it was commonly accepted that, at
least in some works of narrative fiction, the poet relates the events partly in his
own person. Goethe himself would have classified passages in which he did not
make his characters speak as ‘speaking in his own person.’ And he expected that
readers would treat them accordingly.
There is no reason a priori why a poet should not narrate in his own person.62 If
we accept that there is no textual evidence that Goethe wanted to use a narrator,
57 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism [1785, 1st Edition 1762], Peter Jones (ed.), Vol.
2, Indianapolis 2005, p. 649.
58 Wolfgang Kayser, “Wer erzählt den Roman?”, p. 91.
59 See Irvin Ehrenpreis, “Personae”, in: Carroll Camden (ed.), Restoration and Eighteenth-Century
Literature. Essays in Honor of A.D. McKillop, Chicago 1963, pp. 25–37; John Reichert, “Do Poets
Ever Mean What They Say?”, in: New Literary History, 13/1981, pp. 53–68.
60 Gerwin Marahrens, “Narrator and Narrative in Goethe’s ‘Die Wahlverwandtschaften’”, in:
Michael S. Batts/Marketa Goetz Stankiewicz (eds.), Essays on German Literature in Honour of
G. Joyce Hallamore, Toronto 1968, pp. 94–127, p. 127.
61 H.B. Nisbet/Hans Reiss (eds.), “Introduction”, p. xx.
62 Cf. Tilmann Köppe/Jan Stühring, “Against Pan-Narrator Theories”, in: Journal of Literary
Semantics, 40/2011, pp. 59–80.
then it is difficult to maintain the view that there is a fictional narrator in the novel.
What I want to suggest here is that the very idea of postulating a narrator and
describing him independently from the author’s purposes is misguided. The first
question to ask is not ‘who speaks?’ but ‘what is the author doing in writing?’.63
III
I will now briefly consider whether it is appropriate to treat Goethe as the narrator
of Die Wahlverwandtschaften. The first thing to note here is that it did not occur to
Goethe’s contemporaries to address the ‘Dichter’ exclusively in his function as
‘Erzähler.’ They categorized as “Erzählung des Dichters”64 only those parts of the
novel in which the poet relates something. Other parts, in which he presents
conversations, letters, or excerpts from Ottilie’s diary, would not be counted as
‘Erzählung.’ His comments and sententious observations are called “Bemerkun-
gen” and ascribed to “Herr von Göthe selbst.”65 Representing characters, evaluat-
ing them, using similes and maxims, creating complications, preparing and bring-
ing about a satisfactory conclusion – these are things the poet does both by
speaking in his own person and by letting his characters speak. This perhaps
explains why contemporary readers did not find it appropriate to use the term
‘narrator’ to designate the author. Critics may, of course, use the term ‘narrator’
differently than Goethe and his contemporaries did – there is nothing wrong with
that. Still, some of the things called ‘narration’ by critics can in fact be described
more accurately.66
Hans Rudolf Vaget, Arthur Henkel, Stuart Atkins, Dieter Borchmeyer, and
Hans-Jürgen Schings use the terms ‘author’ and ‘narrator’ more or less inter-
changeably.67 One might suspect that they do so in order to avoid pointless
63 Cf. Dietrich Weber, “Sub-Ego-Fiktionen. Zu-Sätze zur Theorie der Erzähl- und Storyliteratur”,
in: Susanne Gramatzki/Rüdiger Zymner (eds.), Figuren der Ordnung. Beiträge zu Theorie und
Geschichte literarischer Dispositionsmuster, Köln 2009. pp. 231–242, p. 242.
64 Heinz Härtl (ed.), ‘Die Wahlverwandtschaften’, Nr. 420, p. 187.
65 Ibid., Nr. 420, p. 183.
66 Cf. Dietrich Weber, Erzählliteratur. Schriftwerk, Kunstwerk, Erzählwerk, Göttingen 1998.
67 Hans Rudolf Vaget, “Ein reicher Baron. Zum sozialgeschichtlichen Gehalt der ‘Wahlver-
wandtschaften’”, in: Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 24/1980, pp. 123–161; Arthur
Henkel, “Beim Wiederlesen von Goethes ‘Wahlverwandtschaften’”, in: Jahrbuch des Freien
Deutschen Hochstifts, 1985, pp. 1–20; Stuart Atkins, “‘Die Wahlverwandtschaften’. Novel of Ger-
man Classicism”, in: S.A., Essays on Goethe, Jane K. Brown/Thomas P. Saine (eds.), Columbia
1995, pp. 137–181; Dieter Borchmeyer, Goethe der Zeitbürger, München 1999, pp. 66–92; Hans-
Jürgen Schings, Zustimmung zur Welt. Goethe-Studien, Würzburg 2011, pp. 325–343.
92 Vincenz Pieper
controversy. Nonetheless, it would be desirable to distinguish author-narrators

clearly from other kinds of narrators. To think of the author-narrator as “an
instance that tells or transmits everything”68 or as a “Vermittlungsinstanz”69 is
misleading, for it leads us to dissociate the narrative discourse from the creation
of the story. The narrating author does not just “tell and transmit everything.” He
makes his personages speak and act as he pleases. He invents and represents the
events according to his needs. It is very likely that these artistic acts are not
clearly recognized and made sense of if one does not carefully distinguish the
narrating author from an omniscient narrator. There are, then, two reasons to
avoid the term ‘narrator.’ First, there are things Goethe does that are not narration
proper. Secondly, to think of the narrating author as “an instance that transmits
everything” obscures the purposes and interests revealed for example in making
the characters speak as they do.
IV
Goethe scholars have done surprisingly little to illuminate the interests and
judgments that are expressed in Die Wahlverwandtschaften. For instance, they
rarely appreciated the purposes revealed in the character’s speeches. Thus, many
of them have not noticed that Charlotte is used by the author as a “fallible
paragon”70 throughout the novel. Her superiority is established in the first chap-
ter. This is achieved by inventing a dispute, in which her clear reasoning is
favorably compared to Eduard’s manifest lack of good sense. Eduard typically
ignores the point of his interlocutor’s speeches. He lets Charlotte speak at some
length, and she reminds him with clarity and fairness of the arrangement they
previously agreed upon: “Laß uns […] einen Blick auf unser gegenwärtiges, auf
unser vergangenes Leben werfen, und du wirst mir eingestehen, daß die Berufung
des Hauptmanns nicht so ganz mit unsern Vorsätzen, unsern Planen, unsern
Einrichtungen zusammentrifft.”71 But his dismissive response shows that even
68 James Phelan/Wayne Booth, “Narrator”, in: David Herman/Manfred Jahn/Marie-Laure Ryan

(eds.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London 2005, pp. 388–392, p. 388.
69 Michael Scheffel, “Erzählen”, in: Gerhard Lauer/Christine Ruhrberg (eds.), Lexikon Literatur-
wissenschaft. Hundert Grundbegriffe, Stuttgart 2011, pp. 84–87, p. 84.
70 Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief. A Study of Henry Fielding with Glances at Swift,
Johnson, and Richardson, California 1966, pp. 110–162.
71 MA 9, p. 289f. “So let us take a look at our present and past life and you will admit that inviting
the Captain does not quite fit in with our original intentions, plans and arrangements.” (Ryan,
p. 95)
when he lets an interlocutor speak, Eduard is not listening properly: “Da das
Zusammenhängende, wie du sagst, eigentlich euer Element ist, […] so muß man
euch freilich nicht in einer Folge reden hören, oder sich entschließen, euch Recht
zu geben”72. He assumes, unreasonably, that Charlotte’s plans are inimical to
sociability: “Was ich im Garten leiste, du im Park, soll das nur für Einsiedler getan
sein?”73 The comedy of the scene lies in his stubborn refusal to be moved by, or
even to listen to, Charlotte’s calm advice. Eduard offers no arguments against
Charlotte other than an assertion of his expectations. Goethe drives the exchange
to a climax in which Eduard resorts to lot-drawing: “Die Gründe dafür und
dagegen haben wir wechselweise vorgebracht; es kommt auf den Entschluß an,
und da wär’ es wirklich das beste, wir gäben ihn dem Los anheim.”74 He rejects,
by such irrational means, Charlotte’s patient attempts to reason with him. The
comedy derives from the revelation that, when faced with a difficult decision,
Eduard uses methods of divination like drawing lots or rolling dice. Thus Char-
lotte helps the reader to see Eduard’s folly. In presenting the conversation, Goethe
provides the motivation for the subsequent action and prepares the ground for
Eduard’s downfall in the last chapter of the novel.
From now on, Goethe conveys many of his judgments about the other charac-
ters through Charlotte’s words and deeds. Her fallibility is revealed when she is
“aus der Fassung gebracht,”75 an important phrase for Goethe, who is, as one can
learn inter alia from the Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten, interested in
the workings of the passions, especially with respect to deliberation and self-
control. Already slightly confused by her impetuous husband, Charlotte is exposed
to Mittler who, asked for advice, irresponsibly indulges in fatalism: “Tut, was ihr
wollt: es ist ganz einerlei!”76 It is left to the reader to notice that Charlotte is infected
by Mittler’s fallacious reasoning: “Alle solche Unternehmungen sind Wagestücke.
72 MA 9, p. 291. “Since, as you say, the broader connections are really women’s natural element,
[…] we men are not obliged to listen to you when you develop an argument or to bring ourselves to
admit that you are right” (Ryan, p. 96, modified translation).
73 Ibid. “Are my gardening and your landscaping to be for hermits only?” (Ryan, p. 96)
74 MA 9, p. 292. “We’ve each had our turn to put the arguments for and against; all we have to do
is decide, and really the best thing would be to toss a coin.” (Ryan, p. 97)
75 “Auf eine solche Weise brachte er [Eduard] Charlotten diesen Morgen erst in die heiterste
Laune, dann durch anmutige Gesprächswendungen ganz aus der Fassung, so daß sie zuletzt
ausrief: Du willst gewiß, daß ich das was ich dem Ehmann versagte, dem Liebhaber zugestehen
soll.” (MA 9, p. 294, emphasis added) “Thus it was that on this morning he first got Charlotte into
a most cheerful mood, then contrived through winning turns of phrase to quite disarm [confuse,
fluster] her, with the result that she finally exclaimed: ‘You doubtless want me to grant my lover
that which I denied my husband.’” (Ryan, p. 99, emphasis added)
76 MA 9, p. 299. “Do what you wish: it’s all the same!” (Ryan, p. 102)
94 Vincenz Pieper
Was daraus werden kann, sieht kein Mensch voraus.”77 Goethe immediately high-
lights that she is acting against her better judgment by inserting into her speech a
self-explanation: “Ich fühle mich nicht stark genug, dir länger zu widerstehen.”78
Charlotte, after all, has to surrender in order to advance the story. Nevertheless,
Goethe continues to use her to establish what is wise or foolish. Thus her reaction to
the young lawyer’s speech (2.1) confirms the impression that Goethe intends to
ridicule the sentimental affectation of the family who opposes the dislocation of the
monuments. We find the lawyer speaking of death in terms of sleep and rest to
vindicate his client’s concerns: “Sie sollen das schmerzlich süße Gefühl entbehren,
ihren Geliebten ein Totenopfer zu bringen, die tröstliche Hoffnung, dereinst unmit-
telbar neben ihnen zu ruhen.”79 Charlotte is unconvinced, since she does not share
the optimistic ideas about the posthumous fate of the dead. She expresses concern
for the present (“die Gegenwart recht zu ehren”80) and condemns the facile activ-
ities in favour of the dead (“meist nur ein selbstischer Scherz”81). I think it is crucial
to realize that the poet who makes Charlotte bring out the self-regarding desires
that give rise to the primitive conception of an afterlife in the grave is identical with
the narrator who concludes the story with a sardonic allusion to the doctrine of
bodily resurrection: “So ruhen die Liebenden nebeneinander […], und welch ein
freundlicher Augenblick wird es sein, wenn sie dereinst wieder zusammen erwa-
chen.”82
More generally speaking, the poet is constantly guiding the reader’s reactions
to the characters and events represented. The construction of the novel can thus
be explained by reference to what the poet finds suitable, desirable, or satisfying.
To discover Goethe’s “preferred set of cognitive, evaluative, and emotional re-
sponses,”83 we have to follow him with close attention and examine what he was
trying to do. A fairly obvious example of what Goethe presumably found satisfy-
ing is Eduard’s madness. Goethe enjoys exposing Eduard’s foolishness and wisely
suspects that his readers will do too. He dwells with recognizable satisfaction on
his incompetence, his self-indulgence, and his superstitious beliefs – mischie-
77 MA 9, p. 300. “All such undertakings are risky. No one can predict what will come out of
them.” (Ryan, p. 103)
78 Ibid. “I don’t feel strong enough to deny your request anymore.” (Ryan, p. 103)
79 MA 9, p. 404. “They are deprived of the sweet sorrow of bringing a tribute to the dead and of
the hope and comfort of resting beside them in the course of time.” (Ryan, p. 177)
80 MA 9, p. 406, “how hard it is for us to do proper justice to the present” (Ryan, p. 178).
81 MA 9, p. 407, “mostly just vain egotism” (Ryan, p. 178).
82 MA 9, p. 529. “So the lovers rest side by side […], and what a charming moment it will be when
in time to come the two awake together.” (Ryan, p. 262)
83 Gregory Currie, Narratives and Narrators. A Philosophy of Stories, Oxford 2010, p. 86.
vously called “Saat eines großen Schicksals.”84 Goethe would not have put so
many “Sophistereien” and “künstliche Argumente”85 into Eduard’s mouth had he
not positively enjoyed these things.
Goethe’s interest in what might be called the sophistry of passion affects the
construction of his novel. He felt no need to change Eduard’s speeches, for
example to make them more credible or moving, because he wanted them to be as
ingeniously foolish as they are. Some of Eduard’s attempts to justify his fatal
course of action are quite outrageous: “Durch Überlegung wird so etwas nicht
geendet; vor dem Verstande sind alle Rechte gleich, und auf die steigende
Waagschale läßt sich immer wieder ein Gegengewicht legen.”86 The poet invites
his readers to detect the foolishness and join him in his delight. As far as I know,
the novel’s humorous charms have not been sufficiently appreciated yet,87 and
that may be, as I have suggested, partly because scholars have focused their
attention on a fictional narrator instead of asking what Goethe was trying to do in
his novel.
Works Cited
Atkins, Stuart, ‘Die Wahlverwandtschaften’. Novel of German Classicism, in: S.A., Essays on
Goethe, Jane K. Brown/Thomas P. Saine (eds.), Columbia 1995, pp. 137–181.
Barnes, H.G., Goethe’s ‘Die Wahlverwandtschaften’. A Literary Interpretation, Oxford 1967.
Beardsley, Monroe/William Wimsatt, “The Intentional Fallacy”, in: W.W., The Verbal Icon. Studies
in the Meaning of Poetry, Lexington 1954, pp. 3–18.
84 MA 9, p. 413, “the seed of a powerful fate” (Ryan, p. 182).

85 Goethe uses these terms (“sophisms”, “manipulative arguments”) in Unterhaltungen
deutscher Ausgewanderten (MA 4.1, p. 501, p. 503) to describe the same kind of unsound argument
that he employs in Eduard’s speeches. Inventing and depicting fallacious reasoning is indeed one
of Goethe’s specialties. It is, moreover, an underappreciated part of dramatic poetry (cf. Sister
Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language, New York 1947, pp. 190–203).
86 MA 9, p. 490. “This sort of thing does not come to an end by reflection; all things are equal in
the eye of reason, and we can always find a counterweight for the lighter scale.” (Ryan, p. 234)
87 Barnes correctly observes that one of Eduard’s speeches “verges on the burlesque” (Goethe’s
‘Die Wahlverwandtschaften’, p. 107). In discussing another passage, he remarks: “The narrator
heightens this impression to one of burlesque” (p. 121). Unfortunately, Barnes is not able to
appreciate these qualities and consequently does not know how to make sense of the respective
passages. He even claims that one of the most delightful details should have been removed, for it
is, according to him, just another instance of the narrator’s bias towards Eduard (p. 114). Stuart
Atkins enumerates, in a long footnote, some examples of “straightforwardly humorous moments”
(Novel of Classicism, p. 177). I have not encountered any discussion of Goethe’s interest in those
qualities other than that.
96 Vincenz Pieper
Beardsley, Monroe, The Possibility of Criticism, Detroit 1970.

Beardsley, Monroe, Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism, Indianapolis 1981.
Benjamin, Walter, “Goethes ‘Wahlverwandtschaften’” [1924/1925], in: W.B., Gesammelte Schrif-
ten, Rolf Tiedemann/Hermann Schweppenhäuser (eds.), Vol. I.1, Frankfurt/M. 1974,
pp. 123–201.
Blackall, Eric, Goethe and the Novel, London 1976.
Borchmeyer, Dieter, Goethe der Zeitbürger, München 1999.
Carroll, Noël, On Criticism, London 2009.
Chatman, Seymour, Coming to Terms. The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film, Ithaca 1990.
Coulter, Jeff/Wes Sharrock, “The Hinterland of the Chinese Room”, in: John Preston/Mark Bishop
(eds.), Views into the Chinese Room. New Essays on Searle and Artificial Intelligence, Oxford
2002, pp. 181–200.
Currie, Gregory, Narratives and Narrators. A Philosophy of Stories, Oxford 2010.
Ehrenpreis, Irvin, “Personae”, in: Carroll Camden (ed.), Restoration and Eighteenth-Century
Literature. Essays in Honor of A.D. McKillop, Chicago 1963, pp. 25–37.
Feuerlicht, Ignace, “Der ‘Erzähler’ und das ‘Tagebuch’ in Goethes ‘Wahlverwandtschaften’”, in:
Goethe-Jahrbuch, 103/1986, pp. 316–343.
Fludernik, Monika, An Introduction to Narratology, London 2009.
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Dorothee Birke, Freiburg
Author, Authority, and ‘Authorial Narration’:
The Eighteenth-Century English Novel as a
Test Case
‘Authorial narration’ is one of the more contested terms in narrative theory.
Coined by the Austrian theorist Franz K. Stanzel to describe a narrative as being
told by “a highly audible and visible narrator who tells a story cast in the third-
person” and “sees the story from the ontological position of an outsider”,1 the
phrase itself seems to go against the grain of a tenet emphasised by Stanzel: that
the ‘voice’ of the ‘authorial narrator’ (German: ‘auktorialer Erzähler’) must not be
confused with the author’s. In this essay, I will first revisit countervailing posi-
tions within narrative theory. On the one hand, there is a strong tendency, in the
tradition of Stanzel’s formulation, to regard the persona of the ‘authorial narrator’
as a theoretical instrument that allows scholars to keep the author (and thus her
evaluations, responsibility, intentions and so forth) out of the analysis of the text.
The authorial narrator is taken to be a fictional entity ‘within’ the text and hence
cut off from its author/creator. On the other hand, there is a later tendency,
especially within rhetorical and feminist narrative theory, to reconsider in what
ways the voice in authorial narration should be understood as making reference
to the author.
I will discuss the advantages of the latter view, especially with respect to a
further concept that is frequently explicitly or implicitly introduced into the
discussion: the concept of authority. The feminist narratologist Susan Lanser has
done pioneering work in this area by exploring the connections between author-
ship and authority as they manifest in what she calls the ‘authorial voice’. I will
follow Lanser’s cue in examining such connections, but suggest that they need to
be discussed in an even more differentiated way which pays attention to the fact
that there are different kinds of authority claims. Pace Lanser I will argue that
conspicuous instances of authorial narration in particular often serve to explore
and defend rather than simply assert some kinds of authority that have been
associated with the novel as a genre. They can thus be understood as a perfor-
mance of authorship, a rhetorical stance the work’s author assumes towards its
readers. I will illustrate my views with a close reading of a passage from Henry
1 Manfred Jahn, “Narrative Situations”, in: David Herman/M.J./Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Rout-
ledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, Abingdon/New York 2005, pp. 364–366, p. 364.
100 Dorothee Birke
Fielding’s novel Tom Jones (1749), a work that has traditionally been regarded as
a (or even the) prototypical example of authorial narration.
I Putting the Author Back into Authorial Narration?
Stanzel in a Theory of Narrative, which still holds a central place as one of the
most influential classics in the field, represents the separation between author
and narrator as one of the central achievements of narrative theory:
The differentiation of the figure of the authorial narrator from the author is still a relatively
recent accomplishment in narrative theory – it began to become accepted around the end of
the 1950s: the authorial narrator, as we meet him in Tom Jones or The Magic Mountain (Der
Zauberberg), for instance, is, within certain limits, an independent character who has been
created by the author (just as the other characters of the novel have been) and with whose
own peculiar personality the reader and critic are confronted.2
It is hardly surprising, then, that objections have been raised to the adjective
‘authorial’, for example by Gérard Genette, who in a discussion of Stanzel’s model
and Dorrit Cohn’s modifications proposes to replace the label “authorial third-
person” with that of “narratorial third person”.3 In definitions such as that by
Manfred Jahn in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory (2005) cited
above, references to the ‘author’ are conspicuously absent.
However, Stanzel’s choice of term could also be read as an indication that he
himself somewhat overstates his case when he insists that a novel like Tom Jones
should be seen as being narrated by an instance comparable to an “independent
character who has been created by the author” like other characters in the same
novel. The ‘I’ of authorial narration, after all, is a very different case from the ‘I’
employed by a homodiegetic or an intradiegetic narrator. More recently, a few
scholars of narrative have insisted that the special functions of this ‘I’ actually
cannot be grasped without reference to the work’s author. In her influential
outline of a feminist narratological approach, Susan Lanser defends the use of the
term ‘authorial voice’ to describe a type of narration that includes “extrarepresen-
2 Franz K. Stanzel, A Theory of Narrative, trans. by Charlotte Goedsche, with Preface by Paul
Hernadi, 2nd rev. Edition, Cambridge 1984, p. 13.
3 Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. by Jane E. Lewin, Ithaca/New York 1988,
p. 118. This is not his only objection; in another place, he also objects to describing a narrative
situation as in Tom Jones as “third-person”, due to the use of a first-person pronoun, and famously
suggests the distinction between homo- and heterodiegetic to designate whether a narrator is
present or absent as a character in the story (Genette, Narrative Discourse, p. 244).
Author, Authority, and ‘Authorial Narration’ 101
tational acts”, that is, “reflections, judgements, generalizations about the world
‘beyond’ the fiction, direct addresses to the narratee, comments on the narrative
process, allusions to other writers and text”.4 Lanser proposes to employ the term
not to imply an ontological equivalence between author and narrator but to suggest that
such a voice (re)produces the structural and functional situation of authorship. In other
words, where a distinction between the (implied) author and a public, heterodiegetic
narrator is not textually marked, readers are invited to equate the narrator with the author
and the narratee with themselves. This conventional equation gives authorial voice a
privileged status among narrative forms […].5
Lanser’s emphasis on the relation between authorial narrator and author is

illuminating with regard to a point that is often made, but left unexplained in
those narratological accounts that try to separate the two entities: the correlation
of authorial narration and authority. Manfred Jahn, to return to the Routledge
Encyclopedia, describes the authorial narrator as someone who “sees the story
from the ontological position of an outsider, that is, a position of absolute
authority which allows her/him to know everything about events and characters,
including their thoughts and unconscious motives”.6 Monika Fludernik, in simi-
lar terms, envisages a
prominent narrator persona who tells us quite explicitly what is what, […] evaluating the
dramatis personae with no uncertain strokes of the pen […]. He functions like the Lord of
Creation surveying his world, knows the past, present and future of his characters, can move
between different locations at different ends of the fictional world, and has unlimited access
to characters’ minds.7
The authority of authorial narration, the wording of these accounts might sug-
gest, is grounded in the status of a personalised narrator as a kind of superman
who can read minds and look into the future.8 Lanser’s theory offers a convincing
explanation of where the authority that is ascribed to the authorial narrator comes
4 Susan Lanser, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice, Ithaca/London 1992,
pp. 16f.
5 Ibid., p. 16.
6 Jahn, “Narrative Situations”, p. 364, my italics.
7 Monika Fludernik, An Introduction to Narratology, London 2009, p. 124.
8 This is in fact precisely how quite a few narratologists do see authorial narration – Jan Alber,
for example, has recently argued that “the authorial narrator’s mind-reading abilities are not only
improbable but also impossible; they involve superhuman or telepathic qualities and hence the
unnatural” (Jan Alber, “Pre-Postmodernist Manifestations of the Unnatural: Instances of Ex-
panded Consciousness in ‘Omniscient’ Narration and Reflector-Mode Narratives”, in: Zeitschrift
für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2/2013, pp. 137–153, p. 143).
102 Dorothee Birke
from: not the planet Krypton, but an association with the production of the text.
No superhuman power needs to be evoked; what is at stake are the human powers
connected with storytelling, acts of invention, selection, and persuasion.
II Authority Claims and the Performance of Authorship
I want to build on Lanser’s insight into the close relation between authorial
narration and the author of a text. Instead of centring on an ‘authorial narrator’ as
a personalised entity with distinct abilities, values and opinions, however, I am
interested in ‘authorial narration’ as a process or rhetorical strategy which, in
various ways, foregrounds the logic of the text’s production. Thus the point of
authorial narration is not what kind of persona it creates (or even whether such a
persona is created at all),9 but how it functions as a performance of authorship,
enacting a rhetorical stance the actual author of the work assumes towards its
readership. This interest coincides with a recent trend in studies of authorship to
focus on “acts of authorship as, at least in part, culturally constructed as perfor-
mances that are enabled and constrained by social norms and different media
configurations”, as Ingo Berensmeyer, Gert Buelens and Marysa Demoor put it in
their programmatic introduction to a volume entitled Authorship as Cultural
Performance.10
As part of a performance of authorship, I want to argue in the following,
authorial narration is not primarily an act of asserting or exercising control over
the reader, but a bid or claim which typically involves different kinds of authority.
This is where I part ways with Lanser, who sees prototypical authorial narration
as an expression of patriarchal hegemony. Authorial narration has traditionally
been a problem for female writers, she argues, because all authors are not equal:
for female writers of fiction, putting forward authority claims has been more
conflict-laden than for male authors. On the one hand, authorial narration “has
allowed women access to ‘male’ authority by separating the narrating ‘I’ from the
9 A very strong stance against speaking of a personalised authorial narrator has recently been
taken by Richard Walsh, who questions the practicability of the author-narrator distinction in
general: “fictions are narrated by their authors, or by characters. […] Extradiegetic heterodiegetic
narrators (that is, ‘impersonal’ and ‘authorial’ narrators), who cannot be represented without
thereby being rendered homodiegetic or intradiegetic, are in no way distinguishable from
authors” (Richard Walsh, The Rhetoric of Fictionality, Columbus 2007, p. 84).
10 Ingo Berensmeyer/Gert Buehlens/Marysa Demoor, “Authorship as Cultural Performance: New
Perspectives in Authorship Studies”, in: I.B./G.B./M.D. (eds.), Authorship as Cultural Performance.
Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 60/2012, pp. 5–29, p. 10.
female body.” On the other hand, “when an authorial voice has represented itself
as female, it has risked being disqualified.”11 Female authors such as Jane Austen
or George Eliot, as Lanser sees it, have thus had to develop their own “authorial
voice(s) within and against the narrative and social convention of their time and
place.”12 Vera Nünning has recently offered an update on Lanser’s argument,
concluding that those female authors in the 18th century who privilege female
experience do so by less obtrusive techniques than their male counterparts.13
While these studies offer very interesting insights into the different functions
of the authorial voice, the interest in specifically female narrative strategies also
creates problems: both Lanser and Nünning have a tendency to depict the
authorial voice as employed by male authors as a monolithic foil. They also
suggest that the impression of stable authority increases with the number of
extrarepresentational acts (or, as one might also put it, with the degree of an
authorial narrator’s overtness). By contrast, I want to argue that authorial voice in
general often tends to be, as Lanser has put it for the case of female authors, “a
site of crisis, contradiction, or challenge.”14 The authority that is claimed in and
through authorial narration, then, is far from an unproblematic expression of
control over a text’s meaning and the functions it is supposed to fulfil. Rather
than understanding authorial narration as primarily expressing a stable sense of
authority, I see it as an act of rhetorical positioning, as putting forward a bid for
establishing authority claims.
What Lanser calls ‘discursive authority’ is an even more contested business
than she envisages because it involves different kinds of authority (defined by the
Oxford English Dictionary as “the power to influence action, opinion, belief”),
which do not necessarily reinforce each other. One type of authority (I will label it
‘narrative authority’) comes as part and parcel of creating a work of fiction: it is
the power to influence the reader’s beliefs with regard to what happens in the
story, what characters do and think and so on. Narrative authority is an integral
part of the institution of fiction – being accepted as an author of fiction, whether
male or female, means being able to put forward such authority claims, which
cannot be contested.
However, extrarepresentational acts extend beyond the facts of the fictional
world: they involve, for example, claims with regard to the psychological cred-
11 Lanser, Fictions of Authority, p. 18.

12 Ibid.
13 Vera Nünning, “Voicing Criticism in Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women: Narrative At-
tempts at Claiming Authority”, in: Wolfgang Viereck (ed.), English Past and Present: Selected
Papers from the IAUPE Malta Conference in 2010, Frankfurt/M. et al. 2012, pp. 81–107.
104 Dorothee Birke
ibility of the characters that are portrayed, or with regard to the moral implica-
tions of the story. Such claims go beyond the specific cases to which they are
attached. They can be linked to larger ideas about the purpose and potential of
fictional writing, for example the notion that novels can give particular insights
into the human psyche, or that they can function as models for morally sound
behaviour, etc. Whether authors of fiction are regarded as authorities with regard
to moral or psychological questions is obviously a contested and also historically
variable issue. An author’s gender, or other known autobiographical facts, can
certainly have an impact on his or her credibility as an authority in these
matters – in this point, I am in full agreement with Lanser. However, I think what
is even more significant than the personalised credibility assigned to an indivi-
dual author are more general notions about the expertise of novel writers, and the
potential of fictional representations. At different times in the history of the novel
as a genre, there have been different prevalent beliefs in the particular benefits
(or dangers) it can offer to its readers, which involves images of the author such
as (for example) a specialist in matters of the human heart (a belief – or PR
strategy – exemplified in the poetics of the sentimental novel).
Furthermore, claims to kinds of authority other than narrative authority have
a somewhat contradictory aspect insofar as the more explicitly they are put
forward, the more they expose themselves to potential scrutiny and criticism. In
contrast to the fictional facts themselves, the reflections offered in commentary
are subject to discussion – in a sense, many of these utterances can be read as
partial answers to the question ‘why should I read this book?’. By spelling out a
particular position, the extrarepresentational act also opens up the possibility of
contradiction, and thus, ultimately, the question of whether the story should have
been told differently (or even not at all). It is in this sense that narratorial
comments raise the problem of authorial control at the exact time at which they
are invoking it.
III Authority as a Problem in Tom Jones
In the following, I want to illustrate the theses developed in the previous section
with the help of a close reading. As a sample, I have chosen Fielding’s Tom Jones –
a work by an author who, in Lanser’s terms, can be regarded as expressing the
very kind of comfortable authority that female authors cannot fully project. His
novels feature an elaborate employment of commentary, complete with reader
addresses and asides in the first person. The view of Fielding’s narrative style as
expressing mastery – and not just aesthetic mastery – is by no means an invention
of feminist criticism; it has been a dominant view in narratological accounts of his
work. Wayne Booth, to name but one other prominent voice, cites a passage from
Tom Jones to elucidate authorial narration’s ability to manoeuvre the reader into
“the moral attitudes Fielding desires.”15 In my own reading, I trace different kinds
of extrarepresentational acts in Fielding’s novels and examine the different
authority claims they put forward. Fielding’s novels, I will argue, evince anxieties
about authority – anxieties that are not grounded in the person of the author (e.g.
his sex), or in his relation to previous authors (as in Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influ-
ence’), but in the as yet unstable status of the novel as a genre.
The passage I have selected from Tom Jones starts out as a commentary on
one of the minor characters’, Bridget Allworthy’s, mutterings about her brother’s
wish to take an orphaned child into his house:
(1) With Reflections of this nature she [Bridget Allworthy] usually, as hath been hinted,
accompany’d every Act of Compliance with her Brother’s Inclinations; and surely nothing
could more contribute to heighten the Merit of this Compliance, than a Declaration that she
knew at the same time the Folly and Unreasonableness of those Inclinations to which she
submitted. (2) Tacit Obedience implies no Force upon the Will, and consequently may be
easily, and without any Pains, preserved; but when a Wife, a Child, a Relation, or a Friend,
performs what we desire, with Grumbling, and Reluctance, with Expressions of Dislike and
Dissatisfaction, the manifest Difficulty which they undergo, must greatly enhance the
Obligation. (3) As this is one of those deep Observations which very few Readers can be
supposed capable of making themselves, I have thought proper to lend them my Assistance;
but this is a Favour rarely to be expected in the Course of my Work. Indeed I shall seldom or
never so indulge him, unless in such Instances as this, where nothing but the Inspiration
with which we Writers are gifted, can possibly enable any one to make the Discovery.16
The extrarepresentational acts in this excerpt include all three kinds of narratorial
commentary that Ansgar Nünning lists in his discussion of the main functions of
comments (1998). Part (1) is what he terms an ‘analytical’ comment, which
furnishes explanations and evaluations regarding particular characters or events
in the fiction, in this case Bridget Allworthy’s behaviour towards her brother.17 I
will relabel it as ‘diegetic’ comment, as I find the analytic/synthetic distinction
somewhat confusing. Part (2), as the shift into the gnomic present signals, no
15 Wayne C. Booth, “The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before ‘Tristram Shandy’”
[1952], in: Wolfgang Iser (ed.), Henry Fielding und der englische Roman des 18. Jahrhunderts,
Darmstadt 1972, pp. 408–436, p. 429.
16 Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling, Martin C. Battestin (ed.), Oxford 1974,
pp. 46f.
17 Ansgar Nünning, “Die Funktionen von Erzählinstanzen: Analysekategorien und Modelle zur
Beschreibung des Erzählerverhaltens”, in: Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 30/1997,
pp. 323–349, p. 336.
106 Dorothee Birke
longer focuses on a particular fictional character but offers a more general state-
ment or maxim (Nünning calls this “synthetic”,18 I will term it ‘gnomic’, derived
from ‘gnome’ in the sense of a “pithy statement of a general truth”19). Finally, part
(3) reflects on the act of narration as well as on the reader’s reaction, which is a
type of commentary that can be labelled ‘metadiscursive’.20 While the reference
to the author and the design of his work is most visible – because explicitly
referred to – in part (3), the commentary in the first two parts also contributes to
the performance of authorship in important ways.
In part (1), the description of Bridget Allworthy’s behaviour is complemented
with a moral assessment. In conjunction with the many other passages in this novel
which work in a similar way, the casual and conversational manner in which the
narration slides from description into fairly elaborate moral analysis (“as hath been
hinted”; “surely nothing could more contribute”) suggests that this kind of evalua-
tion should be regarded as a self-evident purpose of the representation of fictional
lives. The implicit performance of authorship that is involved in rating the “Merit”
of Bridget’s actions, then, involves a claim to authority with regard to issues of
morality. The concomitant positioning of the projected reader at the receiving end
of this wisdom implies an asymmetrical relationship (the reader is instructed). Part
(2), by adding a more general observation, reinforces this impression and repre-
sents the little episode as a parable for (im)moral human behaviour, thus even more
strongly foregrounding the notion that moral-didactic guidance is a prime function
of fictional writing. Part (3) comments on this very point and explicitly points out
the asymmetrical distribution of competence such a notion of exchange is built on
(“one of those deep Observations which very few Readers can be supposed capable
of making themselves”).
In this tripartite structure, the claims to authority connected with the produ-
cer of narrative fiction themselves gradually come into the focus of the commen-
tary. However, the explicit references to the roles of author and reader in part
(3) – the most conspicuous extrarepresentational utterances in the passage – do
not constitute a straight-forward intensification of the authority claims put for-
ward in (1) and (2). Instead, I would argue, they reflect on an issue that is posed
by the transition from (1) to (2). The diegetic commentary in (1) could by itself
almost be read as limiting itself to narrative authority, that is, putting forward
‘truths’ that only pertain to a fictional character’s behaviour. That this evaluation
18 Ibid., p. 338.
19 Oxford English Dictionary.
20 Nünning calls them “vermittlungsbezogen” (“mit primärem Bezug zum Erzählvorgang und
zur eigenen Kommunikationssituation auf der Ebene der erzählerischen Vermittlung”, Nünning,
“Funktionen von Erzählinstanzen”, p. 339).
does in fact imply claims that go beyond the fictional world is true, but only
foregrounded in the gnomic statements in (2).
Interestingly, part (2) not only makes a much more explicit claim to moral
authority than (1), but at the same time introduces ambiguity, that is, invites
doubt as to whether the kind of authority that is claimed here really pertains to
the introduction of moral models. The utterances in (2) raise the question what
exactly the “deep Observations” evoked in part (3) refer to. While at first sight part
(2) merely appears to generalise the normative points introduced in part (1) into a
general exemplum, it could also be seen as shifting the focus of the authority
claim itself. The “must” in the last sentence, in particular, when closely exam-
ined, does not seem to formulate desired moral values as much as an insight into
the psychology of human relations, in which behaviour is often calculated to-
wards achieving a certain kind of effect. One of the many ironies that resound in
the passage is that, depending on the people involved, this typical kind of
behaviour probably misses its object: it seems very doubtful that the sense of
“Obligation” felt by the party whose wishes are being followed is in fact much
increased by the other party’s grumblings (even in the case of a person as good-
natured as Mr. Allworthy).
What seems a fairly clear-cut case on the level of moral evaluation, then (the
grumbling, obviously, does not enhance the moral value of the grumbler’s ac-
tions), is more complicated on the level of psychology: the passage elucidates on
a typical kind of manipulative behaviour, but a kind whose success seems highly
doubtful (as it is not manipulative enough to anticipate the emotions on the other
side). I am emphasising this point because I think the passage suggests two
different conclusions about the primary function of fiction: is it to give moral
guidance, or to illustrate the intricacies of human behaviour? Do the two func-
tions mutually enforce or subvert each other? And does the performance of
authorship actually make an effective claim for authority for these two realms, or
at least for one of them? Part (2), in short, presents a complex web of possible
lessons a reader may learn from the preceding representation of Bridget All-
worthy – however, lessons that neither fit together nor point towards the same
kind of authority claim. What is important to note is that it is not this complication
itself that creates the problem, i.e. the fact that moral and psychological authority
claims are not covered by narrative authority and thus need to be backed up in
other ways. Rather, I see the complex and ambiguous interlacing of different
authority claims as a rhetorical strategy that serves both to foreground the
problem and, simultaneously, to deflect it by making it hard to pinpoint exactly
what kind of authority claim is put forward here.
A similar argument can be made concerning the ironic stance which pervades
the passage. An interpretation of Fielding’s use of irony that is often put forward
108 Dorothee Birke
is that it serves to cement the consensus of a moral majority by implying a tacit

understanding between author and (preferably male) reader.21 The examination
of the rhetorical stance taken in this passage might at first sight confirm this
impression – however, as I want to show in the last part of my discussion, it can
also be read as another strategy that allows to simultaneously invite and deflect
criticism of authority claims that are put forward. To see how, it is helpful to
consider a view of irony that serves to explain the link between irony and
authority in general, and thus to elucidate both readings of irony in Fielding
mentioned above, and their interconnection: Linda Hutcheon’s conceptualisation
of irony as an inherently social phenomenon.22 Hutcheon describes irony as both
made possible by the existence of differing kinds of community, and as itself
producing communities. To put it in a nutshell, then, irony is as much about the
negotiation of relationships as it is about establishing or obscuring a specific
meaning in language. One of the social effects of irony, which Hutcheon calls
“aggregation”, can be understood in terms of exclusion – as an elitist stance, and
as designed to stage the ironist as “a kind of omniscient, omnipotent god-figure,
smiling down […] upon the rest of us”.23 However, it may also function as an
inclusionary force – as calling for “collaboration, even collusion” between ironist
and addressee.24 And it may, finally, combine these two – “as implying an
assumption of superiority and sophistication on the part of both the ironist and
the intended (that is, comprehending) interpreter – at the expense of some
uncomprehending and thus excluded audience.”25
This interplay of inclusion and exclusion characterises parts (1) and (2) of the
above passage. The reader is projected as part of an in-group through the invita-
tion to join into the ridiculing of Bridget’s behaviour implied by the rather
obviously ironic ‘approval’ of her pretensions to unselfish compliance and moral
superiority. The collusive effect becomes even more pronounced in the second
part, through the use of the pronoun “we”. I do not see a very pronounced
exclusionary elitist in-group that is created by the irony itself. Its detection does
not require any specialised information or extraordinarily subtle reading meth-
ods, so that any but the most naïve actual reader is included in the invitation to
21 See e.g. James Kim, “Mourning, Melancholia, and Modernity: Sentimental Irony and Down-
ward Mobility in ‘David Simple’”, in: Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 22/2010, pp. 477–502, esp.
p. 479. Kim defines Henry Fielding’s use of what he calls “satiric irony” as a foil to describe his
sister Sarah’s different use of “sentimental irony”.
22 Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony, London 1995.
23 Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, p. 54.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., p. 55.
laugh at its “target” Bridget.26 All the same, beyond that simple effect of irony the
aggregation that is suggested by the passage also does have an exclusionary
aspect, which in this case is rather obviously gendered. The reference to “a Wife,
a Child, a Relation, or a Friend” suggests a male perspective, which can claim
rationality and sober judgement, in contrast to Bridget’s (and, as the general-
isation suggests, typically feminine and/or immature) “Folly and Unreasonable-
ness”.27 This gendered assignation of authority is of course reinforced by the
content of the passage, which is, after all, about the patriarch Squire Allworthy’s
right to assert his wishes against his sister’s selfish and improper preferences. So
far, then, the employment of irony in the passage seems to fit with the traditional
view of satirical irony as cementing the consensus of a moral majority.
Part (3), however, seems to sever the comfortable aggregation between author
and colluding projected reader: now, it is the gap between the two that is
emphasised. The hyperbole in this part again suggests that it is suffused with
irony: is the observation really that “deep”? Is the authorial audience really
supposed to be “incapable” of detecting moral or psychological implications? In
any case, the “rare” favour of an intrusive comment is already repeated on the
next page. But what does this imply? The focus here has shifted to an explicit
characterisation of the relationship between author and reader, but it is hard to
pinpoint how this relationship is supposed to be envisaged. Hutcheon lists a use
of irony that she labels “self-protective”, which can be interpreted either in a
“positive” way, as “self-deprecating”, or in a “negative” way, as “indirect self-
promotion, even arrogance.”28 Part (3) makes a joke of the claims to authority that
can be made by the creator of the narrative text, but without really rejecting or
undermining them. To my mind, it perfectly fits Hutcheon’s description of a kind
of irony that constitutes “a deliberate attempt to render oneself invulnerable”.29 It
anticipates a challenge a reader or critic could launch against the authority
expressed in the first two parts.
26 In Hutcheon’s terms, the use of irony has a “target” (something or someone that is ridiculed or
evaluated in a negative way), but as a mode of communication it may also have a “victim”: it can
function to exclude and embarrass those who do not attribute it correctly and take what was being
said at face value (ibid., p. 15, pp. 42f.).
27 These observations are indebted to Kate Flint’s analysis of gendered reader address in W.
M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (see Kate Flint, “Women, Men and the Reading of ‘Vanity Fair’”, in:
James Raven/Helen Small/Naomi Tadmor (eds.), The Practice and Representation of Reading in
England, Cambridge 1996, pp. 246–262).
28 Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, p. 50.
29 Ibid.
110 Dorothee Birke
The irony in this part particularly gives rise to the impression that the
metadiscursive comment in part (3) is supposed to be a reaction to (or forestalling
of) possible queries or challenges about this way of writing on the part of the
actual reader. Such an implicitly dialogic character of the diegetic and gnomic
comments, I would argue, is not a rare characteristic specific to this passage only,
or to texts employing irony, but a quality shared by all such comments. The
metadiscursive comment provides a reaction (if not an answer) to the tacit ques-
tions the first two passages raise. I think this is a possible explanation for an
interesting phenomenon noted by Fludernik: that metadiscursive comments are
often tagged onto diegetic or gnomic ones.30 By making the bid for invulnerability
so transparent, Fielding implicitly raises the very issue of the novelist’s vulner-
ability to criticism. In its progression from diegetic to gnomic to metadiscursive
commentary, and in its uses of irony, this passage humorously stages the obliga-
tion to explain and justify both content and form of the fictional work.
IV Concluding Remarks
The “authoritative aura of the male pen” that Lanser attributes to Fielding and
others turns out to be shaped by the consciousness of the need to explain
oneself.31 From a historical perspective, it seems hardly surprising that such an
elaborate employment of extrarepresentational acts is found in eighteenth-cen-
tury fiction, a time when the novel as a genre was establishing itself but was not
yet a fully accepted cultural main medium. Tom Jones may be a special case with
regard to both the number of narrative comments it features as well as to their
degree of elaborateness. It is not, however, singular with regard to the function of
these comments: they are a prime way of registering and engaging with expecta-
tions and problems assigned to the writing and reading of fiction at a particular
point in time.
In arguing that the authorial voice as employed in Tom Jones does not hold
up as the model of stable authority as which it has been presented, I have been
arguing for a more general adjustment of the understanding of authorial narra-
tion. One of the central functions of extrarepresentational acts – in particular,
those of the metadiscursive kind – is to negotiate the status of fictional narrative
and its authors at a particular time. Authority claims that are put forward – other
30 Monika Fludernik, “Metanarrative and Metafictional Commentary: From Metadiscursivity to

Metanarration and Metafiction”, in: Poetica: Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, 35/
2003, pp. 1–39, p. 27.
than claims to narrative authority – cannot be taken as straight-forward assess-

ments of a truth but should be read as rhetorical strategies employed in the
service of such negotiations.
Works Cited
Alber, Jan, “Pre-Postmodernist Manifestations of the Unnatural: Instances of Expanded Con-

sciousness in ‘Omniscient’ Narration and Reflector-Mode Narratives”, in: Zeitschrift für
Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 2/2013, pp. 137–153.
Berensmeyer, Ingo/Gert Buehlens/Marysa Demoor, “Authorship as Cultural Performance: New
Perspectives in Authorship Studies”, in: I.B./G.B./M.D. (eds.), Authorship as Cultural Per-
formance. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 60/2012, pp. 5–29.
Booth, Wayne C. “The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before ‘Tristram Shandy’” [1952],
in: Wolfgang Iser (ed.), Henry Fielding und der englische Roman des 18. Jahrhunderts,
Darmstadt 1972, pp. 408–436.
Fielding, Henry, The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling, Martin C. Battestin (ed.), Oxford 1974.
Flint, Kate, “Women, Men and the Reading of ‘Vanity Fair’”, in: James Raven/Helen Small/Naomi
Tadmor (eds.), The Practice and Representation of Reading in England, Cambridge 1996,
pp. 246–262.
Fludernik, Monika, “Metanarrative and Metafictional Commentary: From Metadiscursivity to
Metanarration and Metafiction”, in: Poetica: Zeitschrift für Sprach- und Literaturwis-
senschaft, 35/2003, pp. 1–39.
Fludernik, Monika, An Introduction to Narratology, London 2009.
Genette, Gérard, Narrative Discourse Revisited, trans. by Jane E. Lewin, Ithaca/New York 1988.
Hutcheon, Linda, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony, London 1995.
Jahn, Manfred, “Narrative Situations”, in: David Herman/M.J./Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge
Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, Abingdon/New York 2005, pp. 364–366.
Kim, James, “Mourning, Melancholia, and Modernity: Sentimental Irony and Downward Mobility
in ‘David Simple’”, in: Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 22/2010, pp. 477–502.
Lanser, Susan, Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice, Ithaca/London 1992.
Nünning, Ansgar, “Die Funktionen von Erzählinstanzen: Analysekategorien und Modelle zur
Beschreibung des Erzählerverhaltens”, in: Literatur in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 30/
1997, pp. 323–349.
Nünning, Vera, “Voicing Criticism in Eighteenth-Century Novels by Women: Narrative Attempts at
Claiming Authority”, in: Wolfgang Viereck (ed.), English Past and Present: Selected Papers
from the IAUPE Malta Conference in 2010, Frankfurt/M. et al. 2012, pp. 81–107.
Stanzel, Franz K., A Theory of Narrative, trans. by Charlotte Goedsche, with a Preface by Paul
Hernadi, 2nd rev. Edition, Cambridge 1984. [German original: F.S., Theorie des Erzählens,
Göttingen 1979.]
Walsh, Richard, The Rhetoric of Fictionality, Columbus 2007.
Julian Schröter, Würzburg
Interpretive Problems with Author, Self-
Fashioning, and Narrator: The Controversy
Over Christian Kracht’s Novel Imperium
This paper will examine interpretive or inferential relationships between the
narrator’s and the author’s public images, which are widely considered to be the
products of impression management and self-fashioning. The specific case I will
deal with is the public controversy surrounding the Swiss writer Christian Kracht
and two of his texts: the novel Imperium and Five Years, a published collection of
email correspondence with David Woodard. Since my interest here is in the
practice of interpretation and issues of theory, I will start with a description of the
case in order to shed some light on several aspects that still await theoretical
investigation.
I The Controversy
On February 13, 2012, three days before Kracht’s Imperium was published, Georg
Diez, a journalist for the news magazine DER SPIEGEL, preventively warned
readers about racist or at least right-wing ideas in the novel. Diez based his claim
on several embarrassing comments contained in the email correspondence be-
tween Kracht and Woodard, which was published in 2011 by two scholars of
German literature.1
Diez’s reproach was itself then harshly criticized by various columnists and
even by an association of well-known writers who declared their indignation at
Diez in an open letter. “Statements made by literary narrators and characters are
regularly ascribed to the author and taken as proof of a dangerous political
attitude.”2 The obvious criticism of Diez remained implicit. He had broken the
common and basic rule that one is not allowed to ascribe properties of fictional
entities to the actual author. At the same time, most critics and many scholars
1 Christian Kracht/David Woodard, Five Years, Johannes Birgfeld/Claude D. Conter (eds.),

Hannover 2011.
2 Open letter from Katja Lange-Müller, Daniel Kehlmann, Elfride Jelinek et al. with reference to
Christian Kracht and Georg Diez addressed to the editorship of DER SPIEGEL, http://www.kiwi-
verlag.de/news/17022012-offener-brief-an-die-spiegel-chefredaktion-zu-kracht (accessed April 1,
2013).
114 Julian Schröter
agree with Wayne C. Booth that reading a work of fiction gives us an idea of its
author.3 Diez’s opponents thus insinuate that he derived a false idea of Kracht
from Imperium and Five Years. If this is true, the question that presents itself is
how Diez could have avoided this error. Should he have struggled for a more
accurate idea of Kracht or should he simply have refrained from making any
assumptions about Kracht’s personality? Most theoretical investigations into this
issue of making assumptions about the author on the epistemic basis of reading
literary fiction are offered by the different strands of so-called hypothetical inten-
tionalism. In the following, I will rely on the hypothetic-intentionalistic intuition
that making assertions about the personal qualities of an author based on reading
his text is a matter of justifying interpretive statements.4 Accordingly, I will in the
following try to elucidate the relation between interpretive arguments and state-
ments concerning the personality of Kracht.
The argument offered by Diez can be charitably reconstructed as follows:
1. There are racist utterances and highly provocative expressions within the
novel.
2. The novel as a whole remains opaque as regards the overall meaning and
status of these utterances.5
3. This interpretive uncertainty necessitates recourse to knowledge of the
author’s personality.6
4. The email correspondence Five Years gives direct access to Kracht’s beliefs
and desires.7
3 I will not repeat here the history and controversies surrounding the concept of implied author
introduced by Wayne C. Booth,The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago 1961. For further investigation see
Tom Kindt/Hans-Harald Müller, The Implied Author, Berlin/New York 2006, and their list of
references, pp. 185–224.
4 I follow Kindt/Müller, “Implied Author”, pp. 171–176, who provide an interpretation-theoretic
concept of the “implied author” on the basis offered by Jerrold Levinson, The Pleasures of
Aesthetics. Philosophical Essays, Ithaca/London 1996.
5 Georg Diez, “Die Methode Kracht”, in: DER SPIEGEL, 07/2012, pp. 100–103, p. 102: “Which
objective does Kracht pursue by this provocation? Imperium and the other novels are only of
limited use in answering this question.”
6 Ibid.: “However, there is an interesting email correspondence between Kracht and Woodard.
Five Years in a certain manner describes preliminary work for the novel that would finally become
Imperium.”
7 Ibid: “These emails show the dark side of the novel and give immediate access to the thoughts
as well as to the writing of Kracht and are not to be separated from the novel.” The quotes in
footnotes 5 to 7 (my translations) are taken from the same passage, which in the German original
reads thus: “Aber was will er mit dieser Provokation? Bei dieser Frage, stellt man irgendwann fest,
hilft ‘Imperium’, helfen die Romane nur bedingt weiter. […] Interessant ist aber ein E-Mail-
Wechsel zwischen Kracht und […] Woodard […]: ‘Five Years beschreibt in gewisser Weise Vor-
Interpretive Problems with Author, Self-Fashioning, and Narrator 115
5. Based on the insight in (4), the ambiguity of the novel can be resolved as
follows: Kracht himself has racist attitudes which are introduced deliberately
into the novel.
This structural reconstruction allows for a more precise explanation of the objec-
tions to Diez’s allegations. Statement (1) seems to be in accordance with many
other people’s readings of the novel. However, (2) is a disputable interpretive
hypothesis that is ignored by most of the critics who rejected Diez’s allegation. In
chapter V, I will propose an interpretation which admits that several expressions
seem to be mysterious at first glance but appreciates this mysteriousness as an
aesthetic element of the work. Thesis (3) might be rejected by several ‘post-
auctorial’ approaches but is in principle in accordance with neo-hermeneutic
interpretations. I shall be concerned with thesis (4) in the following and with
thesis (5) at the end of this paper.
II Five Years as a Work of Fiction?
The editors of Five Years, Johannes Birgfeld and Claude D. Conter, suggest read-
ing the email correspondence as a literary work and – surprisingly – as a work of
fiction.8 They claim that Kracht’s utterances are not to be understood as serious.
Diez and many other critics explicitly reject this suggestion.9 Birgfeld and Conter
give two reasons for it. They claim that the act of publishing separates the
correspondence from its original communicative situation and that the remarks
therefore lose their reference to any actual context or to the correspondents.10 I
would argue that this conclusion does not follow from the premises. Not knowing
the conversational contexts does not mean that an actual event of conversation
did not take place. Of course, one can read any text with the intention of abstain-
ing from inferring anything about actual people. According to Kendall L. Walton’s
theory of fiction, this means that one is merely imagining things in the ‘story’
arbeiten zum Roman, der ‘Imperium’ wurde. Diese E-Mails zeigen die dunkle Seite des Werks, sie
führen direkt ins Denken und Schreiben von Christian Kracht und sind von dem Roman nicht zu
trennen.’”
8 See Johannes Birgfeld/Claude D. Conter, “Vorwort”, in: Kracht/Woodard, Five Years, p. VIII:
“Denn unabhängig von seinen unbekannten ursprünglichen Intentionen wird der Briefwechsel
im Moment der Veröffentlichung zu einem Rätseltext, zu einem Werk potenzierter Vieldeutigkeit;
er wird für den Leser zur Fiktion.”
9 See Georg Diez, “Meine Jahre mit Kracht”, in: DER SPIEGEL, 09/2012, pp. 124–128, p. 126.
10 See Birgfeld/Conter, “Vorwort”, p. VI.
instead of believing them.11 Modifying Coleridge’s phrase, one may call this some
kind of ‘willing suspension of belief.’ For the purposes of this essay, it is important
to note only that this argument is not very forceful, but merely recommends
adopting a stance that will allow the book to appear in a presumably attractive
light. Thus, Birgfeld and Conter’s claim that Five Years should be read as fiction
does not yet serve as a strong argument against Diez’s thesis (4).
However, Birgfeld and Conter have a second argument, which foregrounds
the idiosyncratic playfulness of Kracht’s public behavior. Kracht is well known for
his self-fashioning, including that he at times makes statements so inconsistent
that it seems impossible to distinguish whether a specific sentence is meant
seriously or in an ironic manner. This argument seems to warrant the assumption
that all we get is an image of Kracht but by no means a truthful characterization of
the real Kracht himself.12
Whereas the first argument claims that the accessibility and even identity of
person and personality is generally an illusion, the second argument attempts to
explain why making inferences about Kracht’s and Woodard’s characters is mis-
leading in this specific case. Remarkably, both arguments by Birgfeld and Conter
pose questions as to the relationship between text and contexts. And in the
following, I will try to address the extent to which Five Years can serve as a
context for interpreting Imperium. A sophisticated conclusion will have to take
self-fashioning and the artificiality of authorial images into account.
III Types of Self-Fashioning
Kracht’s reputation as one of the most obviously self-fashioning writers in con-

temporary German-language literature is largely due to his first novel Faserland
(1995), which is considered to have initiated the second generation of German pop
literature, and also to Tristesse Royale (1999), a published conversation between
five so-called pop writers, which is widely regarded as a demonstration of a
dandyish and fin de siècle lifestyle. Kracht and his followers used the same public
platforms as famous pop stars, such as talk shows, advertisements for lifestyle
products and fashion. However, journalistic and academic discussion of self-
fashioning in the context of pop culture involves several quite different aspects
which have not yet been very clearly differentiated. I will distinguish two main
11 See Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, Cambridge 1990, p. 40.

12 See Birgfeld/Conter, “Vorwort”, p. VIII.
types and four subtypes of imaging and self-fashioning by formulating them in

intentionalist terms.13
III.1 Intentionality and the Criterion of Explicitness
In the following, I will use the term ‘self-fashioning’ to refer to the purposive
shaping of people’s beliefs about one’s own character traits. An adaption of
Peircean semiotics suggested by Wolf Schmid can be modified to elucidate this
definition. Schmid assumes that any text can be taken as a series of natural signs
indicating several characteristics on the part of the author.14 Whether a person is,
for example, shy, smart or polite, is normally indicated by involuntary aspects of
their behavior. In contrast, self-fashioning means that a person purposely dis-
plays a certain behavior so as to have people ascribe the concomitant attributes to
them.15 Remarkably, the indexical sign becomes part of an intentional behavior
and can, as I will argue, become part of a complex symbolic rational communica-
tion. The following explications are formulated in terms of the intentions of the
self-fashioning person.
According to the traditional distinction between explicit and implicit charac-
terization, there are two types of self-fashioning acts.
SF-explicit-0: An utterer U explicitly claims that p. The proposition p says that U possesses
certain character traits c. U claims that p with the intention that the audience shall believe
that U possesses c.
SF-implicit-0: U performs an action a with the intention that the audience A shall believe
that U has the character trait c.
Implicit is meant here in a merely formal manner as non-explicit. According to this

nominal definition of implicit, action a must not be an explicit claim that U
possesses c. Otherwise this would be a case of (SF-explicit-0). However, this
13 This intentional approach is compatible with most recent studies about self-fashioning, which
are mostly based on Bourdieu’s field theory. See, e.g., Christine Künzel, “Einleitung”, in: C.K./Jörg
Schönert (eds.), Autorinszenierungen. Autorschaft und literarisches Werk im Kontext der Medien,
Würzburg 2007, pp. 9–24; Dirk Niefanger, “Provokative Posen. Zur Autorinszenierung in der
deutschen Popliteratur”, in: Johannes G. Pankau (ed.), Pop, Pop, Populär. Popliteratur und Jugend-
kultur, Bremen 2004, pp. 85–101.
14 See Wolf Schmid, Elemente der Narratologie, 2nd Edition, Berlin/New York 2011, p. 46.
15 Schmid admits that the purposiveness of indexical personal traits has to be taken into account
in order to investigate authorial images. See Schmid, Elemente, p. 83. However, he does not give
any hint as to how intended indexicality could be modeled.
formulation does not yet specify the way in which A arrives at the belief that U has
c. There are at least two different ways of arriving at this belief.
SF-implicit-1 (pretended instinctiveness): U wants A to come to believe that U has c based on

A’s assumption that a is some kind of natural behavior indicating c.
U wants the audience to go on to believe that a represents involuntary behavior

indicating a certain character trait. Obviously, this type of self-fashioning is
deceptive with regard to Aʼs being misled about Uʼs actual intention.
III.2 Feigning Character Traits
The most prevalent subtype of deceptive self-fashioning entails feigning character

traits which one actually does not possess. The term ‘self-fashioning’ is often used
to indicate that the image is a copy or counterfeit of the presupposed but mostly
unknown original. This use of the term highlights a presumed divergence be-
tween the actual person and his artificially staged image. The most obvious cases
of such a divergence are blatant falsehoods such as Karl May’s claim that he
himself was the model for his heroic character Old Shatterhand and the accom-
panying pretence that he possessed Old Shatterhand’s gun, the so-called “Hen-
rystutzen”. In such cases a person does not actually possess the character traits c
but either explicitly claims to possess c or performs certain actions a so as to have
the audience believe that he possesses them. It is important to note that the
conceptual tradition of the term ‘image’ itself suggests a dichotomy between an
original and a derivative or indeed deviant copy. In this case there is additionally
the ontic claim that U does not actually possess the fashioned character trait.
Thus I formulate this type of deceptive self-fashioning as follows:
SF-implicit-2 (feigning a false character trait): U performs an action a with the intention that
the audience A shall believe that U has c.
In reality, U does not possess c (ontic claim).
The same holds for the explicit counterpart:
SF-explicit-2: U claims that he possesses c, but in reality, U does not possess c.
The ontic claim in both the explicit and implicit types of (SF-1a) makes it clear that
these types of deceptive self-fashioning should be restricted to cases where we
have strong evidence that U does not actually possess the feigned character trait.
Of course, there are certain epistemic problems concerning the audience

insofar as U wants to keep the audience in the dark concerning the intentionality
of his performing a in the general case of (SF-implicit-1), and the falsity of
fashioning c in the specific case of (SF-implicit-2). However, there must be another
audience who is able to recognize U’s behavior as a purposive act and to recog-
nize U’s behavior as a type of self-fashioning. From this arises the question of how
members of the audience react when they recognize U’s intentions.
It seems that recognizing the performativity of a feigned natural behavior
normally prevents A from ascribing c to U. When we recognize that U is displaying
a certain behavior because he wants to appear intelligent, honest, or reliable, we
conclude that U is not actually intelligent, honest, or reliable. However, there may
also be cases where we ascribe attributes such as being intelligent, honest, or
reliable despite recognizing U’s intention of performing a in order to appear
intelligent, honest or reliable. It has to be taken into account that the many
different types of personal character traits will be ascribed to someone for differ-
ing reasons. Temperaments, skills or shortcomings will be ascribed to someone to
the extent that his actions or the products of U display them. Shortcomings are
ascribed to someone when his actions or the products of U are expected to have
these qualities but are regularly found to be lacking them. The ascription of these
various characteristics seems to be based on quite rough normative folk-psycho-
logical assumptions.16 But leaving aside how these ascriptions could be modeled
in detail and how reliable they are, the fact that these temperaments, skills or
shortcomings are taken into account places a restriction – important from a
theoretical perspective – on the proposed intentionalist conception. My hypoth-
esis is that the ascription of character traits often does not depend on U’s
intentions, but takes place on so-called independent or external grounds. How-
ever, I maintain that there are cases where recognizing U’s intention is essential
for the functioning of behavior usually labeled self-fashioning. In the following,
some of these cases will be shown to be types of rational communication.
III.3 Rational Communication: Fashioning as Authentic Behavior
Scholars of contemporary literature and popular culture tend to reject concepts of

deception, inauthenticity, lies, falsehoods, and counterfeits in favor of the concept
of authentic self-fashioning. The idea is that self-fashioning is part of a contempor-
16 See Fotis Jannidis, “Zwischen Autor und Erzähler”, in: Heinrich Detering (ed.), Autorschaft.
Positionen und Revisionen, Stuttgart/Weimar 2002, pp. 540–556, pp. 548f.
ary postmodern way of life and therefore part of postmodern identity. Claims such
as the following are often quoted in order to document this concept of fashioned
realities: “We live in [sic!] the surface of things, we make up this surface, there is
nothing on the other side – the back is empty.”17 A similar claim by David Hockney
is quoted at the beginning of Kracht’s collection of travel reports Der gelbe Bleistift:
“Surface is an illusion, but so is depth.”18 It is important to note that the concept of
authentic self-fashioning is less an analytical result than the adoption of several
claims made by prominent representatives of popular culture.
The important point about this supposed authenticity is that these claims can
be understood as acts of positioning in an intellectual quarrel about value
judgments with regard to concepts of personality. In book reviews as well as in
journalistic writing in general, Christian Kracht is often accused of brashly dis-
playing aestheticism, dandyism, and affluence. The discomfort this can elicit is
related to both the properties displayed and the provocative act of publicly
presenting them. Moreover, the dandified image is itself image-oriented. Image-
seeking behavior is thus considered to be one aspect of superficiality. This kind of
dandyism is often regarded with discomfort because it is seen as egocentric,
irresponsible, apolitical, unengaged and anti-intellectual. Dandyism, so the accu-
sation goes, is thus both one type of authorial image, and, moreover, a prototype
for self-fashioning and an image-oriented character. The above-quoted claims are
thus to be understood as replies to these accusations. Kracht dismisses depth as
an illusion and affirms surface as the sole reality.19
In more structural terms, the particularity of this kind of imaging can be
expressed as follows:
17 This statement by Rolf Dieter Brinkmann, most prominent exponent of the first generation of
German pop literature, is cited by Gerd Gemünden, Framed Visions. Popular Culture, American-
ization, and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination, Ann Arbor, MI, 1998, p. 43.
German Orig.: Rolf-Dieter Brinkmann, Der Film in Worten. Prosa, Erzählungen, Essays, Hörspiele,
Fotos, Collagen 1965–1974, Reinbek 1982, p. 215.
18 The quote is part of the title of a film by David Hockney, A Day on the Grand Canal with the
Emperor of China, or Surface is Illusion, but so is Depth, 1988. See also Frank Finlay, “‘Surface is an
Illusion but so is Depth’: The Novels of Christian Kracht”, in: German Life and Letters, 66/2013,
pp. 213–231. Finlay offers an interpretation of all of Kracht’s novels according to Hockney’s
statement.
19 The controversial and itself provocative interview with Christian Kracht and Benjamin von
Stuckrad-Barre, “Wir tragen Größe 46” in: DIE ZEIT, 37/1999 (September 23, 2008), can be taken
as a condensation of the described accusations and the replies, http://www.zeit.de/1999/37/
199937.reden_stuckrad_k.xml/seite-1 (accessed May 3, 2013).
SF-rational-3: U performs a with the communicative intention I that A shall come to believe
that U possesses c. U wants A to recognize I and to take this I as the primary reason to believe
that U possesses c.
Of course, this type of rational self-fashioning is implicit, insofar as action a does

not entail explicitly claiming what U intends to communicate. In contrast to
ascriptions of the type outlined above, A has some reason to believe that U
possesses c because A recognizes U’s intention. A’s recognizing U’s intention is in
this instance the reason for ascribing c to U. This would be a case of Gricean
rational communication with several inverse higher-order intentions of U with
regard to A’s reactions.20
This approach raises certain theoretical difficulties. The most obvious pro-
blem is that Grice himself precluded several intended effects such as amusing,
annoying or offending someone from being rationally communicable.21 At first
glance, the same seems to hold for character traits such as being intelligent,
reliable, or honest, since we refuse to ascribe these traits to U on the grounds that
U intends us to believe that he possesses these qualities. However, as I will
demonstrate, there is good reason to take cases of Gricean rational communica-
tion into account in several cases of self-fashioning in popular culture. Klein’s
assumption that self-fashioning is considered to lie at the core of postmodern
authenticity means that U intends to communicate that his fashioned personality
should be acknowledged as his actual personality.22
Kracht’s self-fashioning behavior can therefore be reformulated as follows:
SF-rational-3a (authentic self-fashioning): Just as in (SF-implicit-1), U wants A to come to

believe that U possesses c.
In contrast to (SF-implicit-1), U wants A to recognize, that a, which normally indicates c, is
performed by U with the intention of fashioning c.
Additionally, c counts – by cultural convention – as a surface attribute aiming at the ‘out-
side’ instead of the ‘inside.’
U has the specific intention of communicating to A that performing a is in accordance with
U’s character.
20 Since I do not make any semantic and larger philosophical commitments here to Grice’s
theory, I will not explicate this point at length. However, the whole design of the distinction
between natural and unnatural signs and the purpose of explicating processes of interpersonal
communication in terms of inverse intentions owes much to the thoughts developed in Herbert
P. Grice, “Meaning”, in: Philosophical Review, 64/1957, pp. 377–388.
21 See Herbert P. Grice, “Utterer’s Meaning and Intention”, in: The Philosophical Review, 78/
1969, pp. 147–177, pp. 151f.
22 See Gabriele Klein, “Pop leben. Lebensstil als Inszenierungsstrategie”, in: Pankau (ed.), Pop,
pp. 17–26, p. 22.
One interesting consequence of this type of self-fashioning is that U suggests that

there is no difference between fashioning c and possessing c. Several attributes
such as being decent, rich, honest, and pretty would then be described as
fashioned-as-decent, fashioned-as-rich, fashioned-as-honest, and fashioned-as-
pretty.
III.4 Provocative Posing
From this concept of authentic self-fashioning it is only a small step to a further

type which is highlighted by Niefanger. He claims Kracht’s self-fashioning should
be understood as a form of ostentatious posing which highlights the artificiality,
rhetoricity, and theatrality of every act of self-presentation.23 What is unique to
this fourth type is that it presumes neither a divergence between original and
image, nor certain fashioned properties, but that the performative act of posing is
intended to expose every kind of personality as self-fashioned. As a consequence,
every concept of authenticity, even such traditional concepts as artistic unsocia-
bility, can be explained as a conventionalized strategy of self-fashioning. Thus
Kracht would not aim at portraying a certain image of himself, but put on the act
of fashioning in order to foreground the act of fashioning itself. The basic message
of this type is to point out that, in principle, any character trait and any person-
ality is a fashioned trait or personality. The intentional structure of this type of
self-fashioning is more complex in that it has a reflexive dimension:
SF-rational-3b (provocative posing): U performs an action a with the intention that A

recognizes that a under normal circumstance indicates the character trait c.
U does not want a certain character trait c to be ascribed to him, but has the specific
intention of communicating that any personal attributes should be considered as fashioned
character traits.
What I presented here as subtypes (3a) and (3b) of self-fashioning as rational

communication serve Niefanger as the differentia specifica between the first and
second generation of German popular art. Whereas representatives of the first
generation, such as Brinkmann, fashioned several personal surface attributes
according to (3a) as part of their authentic personality, Kracht exposes even
authenticity as a kind of artificial performance (3b).24 In Niefanger’s view, how-
ever, this gesture does not aim at any return to authenticity but at a breakdown of
23 See Niefanger, “Provokative Posen”, p. 97.

24 Ibid., p. 97.
the conceptual dichotomy between authenticity and artificiality.25 Of course,

Niefanger’s interpretation is an intellectual and literary re-evaluation of Kracht’s
strategies of self-fashioning according to Jacobson’s poetic function insofar as this
strategy consists of the artistically performative aspect of structures used to
construct personality.
There is an important difference between the subtypes (3a) and (3b): in (3a),
U wants A to ascribe a certain trait c to U, whereas in (3b), U wants A to recognize
certain properties of any act of self-fashioning by implicitly ‘saying’ something
about the relationship between character traits and self-fashioning. In (3a), A’s
willingness to ascribe a trait c to U is based on A’s acceptance of U’s further
communicative claim that possessing c means successfully fashioning c. Whether
an act of fashioning is successful in turn depends on A’s willingness to ascribe c
to U. (3a) can thus be understood as rationally communicating certain character
traits c, whereas (3b) is a form of ‘saying’ something about self-fashioning by
using behavioral patterns of self-fashioning. As is shown by the categorical
heterogeneity of the factors distinguishing between these types of self-fashioning,
the proposed distinction is neither mandatory nor comprehensive. In particular,
(SF-rational-3a) and (-3b) are reformulations of specific observations by Niefanger
and Klein. Thus, the set of types outlined is not intended to be an analytically
complete tableau but only to serve my aim of outlining both the concepts of self-
fashioning relevant here and the relationship between image and interpretation
in the specific case of the controversy surrounding Kracht.
IV Self-Fashioning in Five Years
In theoretical terms, my investigation examines the way in which reading and

interpreting a certain work of fiction relies on the public image of the author and
the author’s self-fashioning. The issue in the relation between the novel Imperium
and the correspondence Five Years can be delineated as follows. It has been argued
in the course of the controversy that Five Years, being a manifestation of Kracht’s
self-fashioning behavior, does not allow the reader to ascribe any actual personal
character traits to Kracht himself. However, the discussion of self-fashioning and
authorial images means ascribing intentions and pragmatic strategies to the
author. If Five Years is to be interpreted according to one or several of the types
explained, then particular intentions must also be ascribed to him. In the following
I propose an interpretation of Five Years based on the idea of self-fashioning as
25 Ibid., p. 98.
rational communication. If one accepts this interpretive approach, one must also
accept several inferences about the person Christian Kracht. In chapter V, I will
address how these inferences relate to the interpretation of the novel Imperium.
In the context of type (SF-rational-3a), one might ask whether Kracht aims at
presenting himself as a surface-oriented aestheticist and dandified writer. A
quantitative analysis of the frequency of words derived from ‘aesthetic’ and
‘dandy’ and of attributes such as ‘nice’, ‘beautiful’, and ‘ugly’ proves insignif-
icant.26 However, attempts to define Kracht’s implicit manner of treating, charac-
terizing, and presumably of perceiving other people and things might well corre-
spond to established prejudices of superficiality, although there are several
methodological and empirical reasons for not taking such definitions as a proof
of Kracht’s character. The following warning, expressed seven years to the day
before Diez’s allegations, might be seen as an instance of Kracht’s orientation on
mere appearance even in the context of issues acknowledged to be questions of
politics and ethics:
Any contextual rapprochement with fascism, even if only implied by the media, usually
means instant excommunication in Germany. No more agent, no more publisher, no more
magazine, no more readers, no more media exposure, book banning. Instant death. One has
to tread very, very carefully here, as I’m sure you know.27
Based on the third type, one might want to allege that Kracht merely cares about
his own and Woodard’s public profiles. The quotation can be seen as implying
that, for Kracht, statements concerning racism and fascism are neither matters of
political conviction, nor an ethical problem of reasonability, but are seen merely
in terms of their effect on his public profile and economic success. This inference,
however, is based on a questionable presumption, namely that caring about
aspects of one’s own public profile automatically implies indifference to any kind
of content or meaning associated with those aspects.
In view of the second type of self-fashioning or rather, as an inversion of it,
another, more charitable, interpretation seems feasible. Maybe Kracht wanted to
warn Woodard about being misunderstood by the public. His statement would
then be an almost prophetic anticipation of what took place in the arts sections of
German newspapers exactly seven years later. Kracht seems to suggest that he
and Woodard were of course neither fascists nor racists, but that people could be
26 I will not elaborate this in detail here. The attribute ‘aesthetic’ is uttered only once when
Kracht admits that he bought his cell phone merely for aesthetic reasons, see Kracht, Five Years,
email 165, p. 86. The attributes ‘nice’ and ‘beautiful’ are used mainly to characterize books and
works of art.
27 Kracht, Five Years, email 43, February 13, 2005, p. 26.
tempted to consider them as such. For Kracht, this type of misinterpretation is due
to a hypersensitivity inherent in German society in particular. Merely being
interested in fascist ideologies is seen as an indication of fascist attitudes. If
interpreted like this, Kracht’s warning turns out to be against unintentionally
giving rise to an inaccurate and economically damaging public image. Diez and a
blogger28 who discusses the cited passage acknowledge that this kind of warning
is perhaps what Kracht actually means. They both ultimately reject it as an
adequate interpretation, however, since they cannot recognize any real motiva-
tion behind the ostensible enthusiasm for or interest in fascist ideologies. Of
course, there are also readers who vindicate David Woodard as a sober observer
of varying ideologies. As far as I can ascertain, most of the attempts to defend
Woodard in effect come from commentators who seek to claim Kracht and
Woodard as representatives of the intellectual right.29 However, ascribing to
Kracht a desire to position himself politically proves inadequate in the context of
an interpretation along the lines of the fourth type of self-fashioning.
Niefanger’s description of Kracht’s self-fashioning as “provocative poses”
leads me to a different understanding of the quoted statement. Kracht’s warning
about “excommunication” implies the desire not to become excommunicated
from the German literary market. Consequently, one should expect Kracht himself
to treat the issues of racism and fascism as carefully as possible. However, most
readers agree that Kracht provokes the suspicion that he sympathizes with right-
wing or even totalitarian ideas. The following quote from Kracht is mentioned by
Diez and many other critics.
I would like you to meet Alexander Prokhanov, who is great friend of mine and would like to
meet you. He is a National Bolshevist much aligned to Khodorkovsky, oligarch, now wrongly
in prison.30
Diez and several other readers found it suspicious that Kracht is not only a friend
of nationalists but also publicly acknowledges the friendship.31 The subsequent
28 Michèle Roten in Das Magazin, February 22, 2012, http://blog.dasmagazin.ch/2012/02/22/

kracht-vi-seiten-26-69/?goslide=0 (accessed March 28, 2013).
29 Such an occupation can for example be found in the contested right wing platform called
“Sezession im Netz”, http://www.sezession.de/30107/christian-kracht-und-die-methode-diez.
html; http://www.sezession.de/30406/diez-vs-kracht-zweite-runde-oder-whats-right.html (ac-
cessed March 29, 2013).
30 Kracht, Five Years, email 283, March 30, 2006, p. 138.
31 I treat the issue of the public accessibility of an intimate correspondence and its interpret-
ability below.
e-mail from Kracht is more provocative still and probably more interesting. Kracht
corrects his spelling of the name of a National Bolshevist mentioned in a preced-
ing e-mail:
Sorry , “Dugin”, not “Dulgin”, as I spelled it yesterday. Their flag is rather brilliant.
And Francis Parker Yockey’s book “Imperium”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Parker_Yockey
C.32
Kracht’s e-mail is puzzling in at least three respects. Firstly, the comment about
the flag of the National Bolshevik Party, which imitates the National Socialist flag
with the swastika, can be interpreted according to the first and the third type of
self-fashioning. Kracht seems to take into account merely the superficial aesthetic
properties of things. This behavior is provocative because of its reference to the
National Socialist swastika. This type of provocativeness is similar to a case
elucidated by Niefanger, when Kracht discussed the “insignificant outwardness”
of Hitler’s Mein Kampf on his website and compared its style with that of his own
books.33
Secondly, the manner of discussing the issue of National Bolshevism seems
quite odd. On the one hand, Kracht himself appears to be an expert on the said
movement and finds factual errors within the sources he mentions, but on the
other hand he mainly mentions Wikipedia as his source of information.34 The
exchange of Wikipedia links sheds a bizarre light on the ‘expert’ correspon-
dence,35 as it can hardly be taken seriously as a method of sharing information.
Instead, it can be charitably interpreted as ironically feigning an exchange
between experts, something intended not primarily as an act of informing but as
an act of parodying the act of informing.
Thirdly, the reference to Parker Yockey’s book Imperium remains puzzling, in
particular because of the conjunction “and.” One may wonder whether Kracht
means that Parker Yockey’s book is “rather brilliant” or whether Parker Yockey is
implicated in National Bolshevism. A look at the former version of the Wikipedia
article from March 20, 2006,36 proves that the latter probably is the case, as there
is a link to an article about Parker Yockey entitled “An American National Bolshe-
32 Kracht, Five Years, email 284, March 31, 2006, p. 139.

33 Niefanger, “Provokative Posen”, p. 97.
34 See Kracht, Five Years, emails 282 to 284, pp. 138f.
35 I cannot really assess whether the reference to Wikipedia was not yet trivial in 2006, but I
assume that these references are used by Kracht in an ironical manner.
36 See http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Francis_Parker_Yockey&oldid=44702988 (ac-
cessed April 1, 2013).
vik.” Regardless of any actual relationship between Parker Yockey and National
Bolshevism, the conversational style suggests that Kracht is merely mentioning
nationalist ideologies and their proponents rather than discussing them in depth.
The correspondence then appears as mere name-dropping regardless of the con-
tent of the ideologies in question. Thus, the correspondence does not allow us to
determine Kracht’s political position. Nor does it prove whether Kracht is at all
interested in radical and totalitarian regimes and ideologies, as is often assumed.
It seems more likely that he is merely feigning an interest in these ideologies.
This likelihood can be interpreted according either to (SF-implicit-0) or to a
conjunction of (SF-rational-3a) and (-b) as elaborated above. Based on (SF-impli-
cit-0), Kracht’s conversational behavior would be a Peircean index expressing
Kracht’s superficial, dandified and aestheticist character. According to (SF-ra-
tional-3a), Kracht is rationally attempting to communicate that he possesses these
character traits. According to (-3b), Kracht is exploiting his image as an aestheti-
cist dandy in order to provoke his audience. His behavior is provocative because
mentioning totalitarianism in our culture always seems to require maintaining a
responsible critical distance. The provocative nature of his statements becomes
even more striking in the following correspondence about the rejection of a report
on the Holocaust denier Ernst Zuendel, which Woodard had wanted to contribute
to the magazine DER FREUND. Kracht writes:
I am sorry but I will not print your text on Ernst Zuendel’s trial. While I like the style and
certain parts a lot, it is very antisemitic in tone and I am a zionist & DER FREUND is a Zionist
magazine. Dr. Nickel concurs with me on this.37
Instead of rejecting anti-Semitism as out of question or in reference to political

responsibility or at least to correctness, as one might expect in contemporary
culture, Kracht rejects the text with another political incorrectness. This is a
blatant burlesque of a political statement, which on the one hand can be
explained with regard to its pragmatic context as a facetious attempt to overcome
the awkwardness of rejecting Woodard’s contribution. On the other hand the
statement seems to have a political dimension given that the two correspondents
intentionally published Five Years, in which this statement appears. However,
any attempt to interpret the political dimensions of Kracht’s statement requires
further preliminary theoretical reflection on the fact that this published exchange
was originally intended as an intimate conversation between two persons.
In particular, the question of who the audience is and what different levels
the conversation has requires us to distinguish between situational-conversa-
37 See Kracht, Five Years, email 307, p. 146.

tional intentions and more general strategic intentions with regard to publishing
the correspondence. It is one of the achievements of a Gricean account that it
incorporates the concept of an intended audience. This is specifically relevant to
the case of Five Years. With regard to each specific email, the primary intended
audience is of course the other correspondent. At the same time, we can assume
that there is a secondary communicative level in which a public audience is
intended. However, there is a danger of over-interpretation in shifting the con-
crete conversational intentions behind individual statements to the more general
but only hypothetical level of communication with a public audience.
Thus I suggest a distinction between two possible kinds of public-oriented
intentions: On the one hand, one can in principle ask whether individual state-
ments in the correspondence are made with regard to a public audience. On the
other hand, one can assume that the correspondence as a whole and as a written
result is used intentionally for certain publishing-oriented purposes. Accordingly,
it may make a difference under certain interpretive circumstances whether Kracht
made these statements with the aim of provoking, or whether he subsequently
used the apparently provocative content of his emails to induce certain reactions
in his audience. In principle, the latter interpretive strategy is more modest or at
least seemingly more intuitive.
Kracht’s posing can thus be explained as follows. Even in intimate situations,
Kracht probably behaves as if placing a specific fashioned image in front of a
public audience. Even his intimate behavior is determined by his play with his
established image as an aesthetician. His behavior can thus be understood in
accordance with two general rules. The first rule says that Kracht behaves in
accordance with his image along the lines of type (-3a) of authentic self-fashion-
ing as a form of rational communication. The second rule says that Kracht uses
this image for politically provocative effect in line with (-3b). These are the rules
by which he already communicates in personal and intimate situations, whatever
the additional concrete content of the messages. Thus my thesis is that the email
exchange is not to be read as fiction, i.e. as the invitation merely to make believe
this conversation took place, but as a series of communicative events that actually
took place and were directed by the outlined behavioral codes of posing and
provoking. The conversation is at every moment a kind of etiolated aestheticist
and dandified image with a provocative effect on an imagined public that ascribes
to cultural codes of politically correct behavior. This behavioral framework can be
seen as the actual communicative environment in which Kracht and Woodard let
their interpersonal exchange unfold.
V The Narrator and the Problem of Interpreting Imperium
Kracht’s manner of treating racist, fascist, nationalist, and totalitarian ideologies

by referring to Wikipedia articles can and probably should be understood as
parodying an interest in these issues. As no inferences can therefore be made
from this about Kracht’s political position or his ethical stance, it seems quite
absurd to base an interpretation of the novel Imperium on any concomitant
assumptions about Kracht. However, Niefanger’s thesis of “provocative poses”
does allow us to carry out an interpretation of Imperium’s narrator, widely
considered one of the novel’s most conspicuous elements. If we accept that self-
fashioning is underpinned by intention, an examination of the narrator also helps
us to clarify the inferential relationship between the act of characterizing the
fictional narrator and that of ascribing intentions, beliefs, dispositions, and
presumed character traits to the author of Imperium.
In defense of Kracht, the journalist Iris Radisch and the writer Uwe Timm
claim that the narrator and several characters in the novel are racist, but that
Kracht is certainly not racist.38 In his review of February 12, 2012, four days before
the novel was published, Peter Richter expected that some readers would assume
that the narrator, the character of Engelhardt or Kracht himself were Nazis.39
Unfortunately, Richter does not explain to what extent these allegations are
prefigured in the novel. In the following, I shall attempt to provide such an
analysis with regard to the narrator and the author Christian Kracht.
The term ‘racism,’ as it is used in the controversy, is obviously ambiguous,
and serves more as a cudgel of political accusation than as a well-defined
criterion for textual analysis. For my present purposes, it will suffice to distin-
guish between two aspects of racism.40 The weaker form is the tendency to
perceive and think in a binary opposition between one’s own ethnicity and the
foreign, where one’s own as well as each foreign race is characterized by specific
biologically stable properties. The novel clearly does portray non-European char-
acters in this manner. They are generally introduced by being assigned to their
national origin. In many cases, this characterization can be interpreted as having
been focalized through certain characters, primarily August Engelhardt. The
following passage from the first chapter is clearly an example of this:
38 See Iris Radisch/Uwe Timm, “Der Verdacht. Ist Christian Krachts Roman ‘Imperium’ rassis-
tisch?”, in: DIE ZEIT, 08/2012, February 16, 2012, http://www.zeit.de/2012/08/Spitze-Kracht (ac-
39 See Peter Richter, “Prüder zur Sonne”, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, February
12, 2012.
40 See Anja Weiß, Rassismus wider Willen, Wiesbaden 2013, pp. 24f.
Engelhardt addressed a seaman whose origin (Greek? Portuguese? Mexican? Armenian?)

could, due to an unfortunate case of facial paralysis on one side, not be deciphered merely
by assessing his physiognomy.41
The question marks behind the designations of the four possible nationalities
indicate that it is Engelhardt’s thoughts which are represented here. However,
there are at least two further instances that can hardly be considered internal
focalization. In these cases there is no focalizer but the narrator himself. The first
sentence of the novel contains the striking attribute “malayischer Boy” (Malay
servant). The Anglicism “boy” is used in the sense of ‘servant,’ a usage common
at the beginning of the 20th century but which has disappeared in contemporary
contexts. In combination with “boy” and many other linguistic and rhetorical
peculiarities, the attribute “Malay” indicates an old-fashioned style of narrating.42
At the end of the novel, when this sentence is repeated as a mise en abyme on the
discourse level and as a film script on the story level, the term “malayischer Boy”
is replaced with its politically correct substitute “dunkelhäutiger Statist” (“dark-
skinned extra”). This modification, along with further significant congruencies
and deviancies between the first and last sentence of the novel, allow the
narrative style to be interpreted as the artificial construction of one typical of the
age of European colonialism, one which is saturated with expressions and state-
ments that today count as politically incorrect. Particularly in light of the (fic-
tional) fact that the narrator is a member of the second postwar generation, the
question arises: why did Kracht choose (or let his narrator choose) this ‘colonialist
style’ of narrative discourse? The simplest explanation would rest on the concept
of reality effect as introduced by Roland Barthes. The style allows the reader to
become immersed in the narrated colonialist world. However, there is a catch to
this explanation, because the style of the narrative discourse is disconcerting to
such an extent that is also has a distancing effect.
I would suggest instead, based on my reading of Five Years, that the narrative
style is designed to provoke. The following two passages support my thesis. The
first is a narratorial comment on the situation when Engelhardt arrives at the
island he has just bought:
41 Kracht, Imperium, p. 33 (my translation). (“Engelhardt […] sprach einen Seemann an, dessen
Herkunft (Grieche? Portugiese? Mexikaner? Armenier?) aufgrund einer bedauerlichen halbseiti-
gen Gesichtslähmung durch Taxierung seiner Physiognomie allein nicht zu entschlüsseln war.”)
42 See e.g. the archaic terms or the archaic spelling of several terms in ibid., “weiland”, p.81,
“radebrechte”, p. 114, “Choc”, p. 215.
From the point of view of the black men in the boat and the few natives who had arrived at
the beach with a certain phlegmatic curiosity (one of them even had a bone fragment in his
lower lip as if he was parodying himself as well as his race), it looked as if it was a pious man
of God who prayed in front of them, whereas it reminds us civilized people of a depiction of
the disembarkation of the conquistador Hernán Cortes at the virgin beach of San Juan de
Ulúa, painted alternatingly, if it were possible, by El Greco and Gauguin.43
We are concerned here not with the interesting, anachronistic and contrafactual
ekphrasis, but with the comment in parentheses. It is arguable whether or not the
character of Engelhardt can be seen here as the one who thinks this thought. This
thought would be at odds with the humorless character of Engelhardt in general
and a fortiori with the concrete context of his engrossed and “overwhelmed”
(“überwältigt”) arrival. Nor can the natives be considered as the focalizers of this
thought. Closer examination thus endorses the prima facie supposition that this
must be a narratorial comment. If so, it is extremely provocative to suggest that the
‘piercing’ of a native is a parody of the pierced native as well as of his “race” as a
whole. This bracketed thought is a moment of flagrant mockery in that it refuses to
acknowledge certain customs as serious cultural traditions. This seems therefore
to be an instance in which foreign people are ridiculed for their specific customs,
and to operate on the cliché that natives have a stereotypical appearance.
The word “race” seems to indicate some kind of axiological unreliability on
the part of the narrator, since it exposes the narrator as being inclined to indulge
in making derisive racist comments. However, the tradition of the Boothian
concept of the unreliable narrator highlights that the norms represented by the
narrator must deviate from the norms of the work, or in Boothian terms, from the
norms of the implied author. Tom Kindt eliminated the widely contested Boothian
formulation of the implied author and gives the following definition of axiologi-
cally unreliable narration: “A narrator is axiologically reliable if and only if he/
she speaks for and/or acts in accordance with the norms of the work, he/she is
axiologically unreliable if and only if he/she does not.”44
43 Ibid., pp. 65f. (my translation). (“Und für die schwarzen Männer im Boot und die paar Eingebo-
renen, die sich mit einer gewissen phlegmatischen Neugier am Strand eingefunden hatten (einer
von ihnen trug gar, als parodiere er sich selbst und seine Rasse, einen Knochensplitter in der
Unterlippe), sah es aus, als sei es ein frommer Gottesmann, der dort vor ihnen betete, während es
uns Zivilisierte vielleicht an eine Darstellung der Landung des Konquistadoren Hernán Cortés am
jungfräulichen Strande von San Juan de Ulúa erinnert, allerdings gemalt, falls dies denn möglich
wäre, abwechselnd von El Greco und Gauguin, die mit expressivem, schartigem Pinselstrich dem
knienden Eroberer Engelhardt abermals die asketischen Züge Jesu Christi verleihen.”)
44 Tom Kindt, “Werfel, Weiss and Co: Unreliability in the Austrian Novel of the Interwar Period”,
in: Elke D’hoker (ed.), Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-Person Novel, Berlin/
New York 2008, pp. 129–146, p. 133.
In the case of Imperium, the narrator can be either reliable or unreliable,

depending on whether one regards making racist jokes as being in accordance
with the norms of the work.
The following narratorial statement can be interpreted as an indication of
unreliability:
Thus, Engelhardt had unwittingly become an anti-Semite, just like most of his contempor-
aries, like all members of his race he had sooner or later arrived at the conviction that the
existence of the Jews was a proven cause of any inconvenience suffered.45
The narratorial accusation of anti-Semitism is itself based on an underlyingly

racist thought. Statements of the form ‘every member of race x has property y’ are
the most common sort of racism, in particular when race-specific properties are
played off against each other in order to value certain races more highly than
others. This is the typical, second (as distinguished from that discussed above)
and stronger form of racism.46 In line with the provocative tone, the narrator
seems to insinuate that all ‘Aryans’ are anti-Semitic due to their racial origin. The
narratorial statement quoted from the novel is similar in its structure to Kracht’s
ironic Zionist confession in that it contrasts a racist stance with an implicit racist
allegation. This second and ‘actual’ sort of racism also seems to be a tongue-in-
cheek response to the narratorial comment about self-parodying natives in that it
not only supposes that natives have a typical appearance (bone in the lower lip)
but also insinuates that this appearance is ridiculous.
However, we still do not have any definite indication of the narrator’s
axiological unreliability, since I did not determine any norms of the work that are
not in accordance with the narrator’s tone. Quite the contrary – several passages
in the novel give sufficient evidence that the narrator is acting in accordance with
the norms of the work. There is, for example, a narratorial flashback to an
instance of cannibalism which transcends the relatively weak attribution of
provocativeness in that it accords the racist provocativeness a poetic and aes-
thetic dimension. A missionary who has violated a wooden idol by chopping off
its ear is killed, cooked and eaten. “The grandee, who was definitely not lacking
in humor, did not abstain from having the missionary’s crispy roasted ear for
45 Kracht, Imperium, p. 225 (my translation). (“Ja, so war Engelhardt unversehens zum Antisemi-
ten geworden, wie die meisten seiner Zeitgenossen, wie alle Mitglieder seiner Rasse war er früher
oder später dazu gekommen, in der Existenz der Juden eine probate Ursache für jegliches erlittene
Unbill zu sehen.”)
46 See Fn. 43.
dessert.”47 Here, Kracht takes the metaphor revenge is sweet literally by portray-
ing an act of revenge qua delicious dessert. Instead of taking blind vengeance,
the natives are presented here as being brutal in an ironic, self-distanced man-
ner. Not only does the narrator invite the reader to regard cannibalism from an
aesthetic perspective but arouses the reader’s sympathy for it. He does this by
clearly opposing it to the coarse brutality of western civilization, as represented
by the Australian soldiers, who laughingly and for no valid reason play football
with a plucked swift.48 Plucking birds and selling their plumes is in turn depicted
as the business model of German colonialism at the beginning of the novel. The
act of cannibalism is presented as reasonable and deliberate compared with the
senseless bouts of violence on the part not only of the crude Australian soldiers
but also of the drunken missionary who violates the idol. The arousal of the
reader’s sympathy coincides with a certain aesthetic behavior and has the effect
of marking distanced aestheticism as a positive attitude according to the norms
of the novel.
Kracht uses and etiolates racist dichotomies in order to invert them and
assign the aesthetics of distanced brutality to the natives in contrast with the
crude brutality of western civilization. At the end, the novel plays these contrary
kinds of brutality off against each other. The aesthetic, distanced and ironic
brutality assigned to the native cannibals can be interpreted as representing,
within the diegetic sphere, the poetics of the novel itself. There is a frequently
cited passage in the novel where the Holocaust is described by means of a striking
and highly rhetorical tricolon: The Third Reich “could be considered as a comedy
if it had not involved such unimaginable cruelty: bones, excreta, smoke.”49 This
sentence can be seen as an attempt to consider the atrocities of the Holocaust if
not from a comic perspective, then at least in rhetorical and aesthetic language.
Within the novel, such aesthetic brutality is opposed with crude and non-aes-
thetic brutality.
With regard to the accusations of racism, we can note that the novel does
indeed use racist binary oppositions in order to establish its poetical concept within
the diegetic sphere. At the same time, the use of racist ideologies is ironized on the
discourse level or the level of Genette’s narration only insofar as it is marked as an
intended provocation which proves similar to the tone in Five Years. Since this
47 Kracht, Imperium, p. 121 (my translation). (“Jener Grande, dem es durchaus an Humor nicht
fehlte, ließ es sich nicht nehmen, zum Dessert das Ohr des Missionars auf einem Holzspieß
knusprig rösten zu lassen, quid pro quo sozusagen.”)
48 See ibid., p. 232.
49 Kracht, Imperium, p. 79 (my translation). (“Komödiantisch wäre es [das dritte Reich, J.S.] wohl
anzusehen, wenn da nicht unvorstellbare Grausamkeit folgen würde: Gebeine, Excreta, Rauch.”)
provocativeness can be interpreted as an important part of the compositional

strategy of the novel as a whole, the concept of unreliability does not apply here.
Instead, the fictional narrator of Imperium is just as provocative as Kracht in Five
Years in that the statements infringe upon current norms of political correctness.
VI Concluding Considerations
Let us conclude with some theoretical reflections on the relation between narra-
tor, author, and authorial self-fashioning with regard to practices of interpreta-
tion. In a constructivist approach, as offered prominently by Nünning, which
highlights the importance of the reader’s own norms, the suspicion of narratorial
unreliability is based on the narrator’s infringement of norms of political correct-
ness as introduced by the individual reader.50 However, this can serve only as a
starting point, and a heuristic one at that. Ultimately, a narratorial infringement
of norms of political correctness is not necessarily at odds with the norms of the
work. The apparently racist statements made by the narrator are used to raise
aesthetic issues rather than political and ethical ones. The behavior of the narra-
tor can, however, be read along the lines of Five Years as a form of provocative
posing which unfolds an aesthetics of distanced and ironic brutality.
However, if one takes the passages in the novel that involve explicit pronom-
inal self-references as references to the real author, my reading would be compa-
tible with no-narrator approaches as recently defended by Köppe and Stühring.51
Thus, my thesis could be transformed into the thesis that Kracht does not invent a
provocative narrating character, but presents a provocative style.
50 See Ansgar Nünning, “Unreliable Compared to What? Towards a Cognitive Theory of Unreli-
able Narration: Prolegomena and Hypotheses”, in: Walter Grünzweig/Andreas Solbach (eds.),
Grenzüberschreitungen: Narratologie im Kontext/Transcending Boundaries: Narratology in Context,
Tübingen 1999, pp. 53–73, p. 61. In his more recent contribution “Reconceptualizing the Theory,
History and Generic Scope of Unreliable Narration: Towards a Synthesis of Cognitive and Rheto-
rical Approaches”, in: Elke D’hoker (ed.), Narrative Unreliability in the Twentieth-Century First-
Person Novel, Berlin/New York, pp. 29–76, Nünning aims at a synthesis of reader-oriented (cogni-
tive) and intentionalist (rhetorical) approaches, which is more in line with the interpretive strategy
I pursued in this paper.
51 See Tilmann Köppe/Jan Stühring, “Against Pan-Narrator Theories”, in: Journal of Literary
Semantics, 40/2011, pp. 59–80. For the said passages within the novel see Kracht, Imperium, p. 90
(“I”), p. 230 (“my grandparents”). The reference to the grandparents could indeed be read as an
autofictional reference since Kracht’s grandparents actually lived in Hamburg at the time in
question. This statement poses intriguing interpretive questions if it is read as an autofictional
allusion.
The theoretical framework elaborated in section III offers a typology of

relevant types of self-fashioning in communication-theoretical terms of the ut-
terer’s or fashioner’s intentions. A reading of Five Years according to the types of
self-fashioning elaborated – by distinguishing explicit from non-explicit, decep-
tive from non-deceptive, and communicative from non-communicative acts –
allows us to draw distinctions with regard to the question of provocativeness. One
can then ask whether Kracht simply has a provocative character, whether he has
the intention of provoking his audience, or whether he is pursuing certain
communicative aims by displaying provoking behavior. According to my inter-
pretation, several communicative intentions can be ascribed to Kracht. In the case
of Five Years, the communication is addressed not only to David Woodard but
also to a potential public. The intentions expressed by this communication prove
similar to the artistic and creative intention realized in the novel Imperium. Based
on a heuristic reference to Five Years as a context for Imperium, I arrived at the
thesis that the narrator’s racist provocativeness is part of the provocativeness of
the whole novel’s compositional strategy.
Since no inferences can be made either about Kracht’s political stance or the
racist attitudes of the fictional narrator’s in Diez’s traditional terms of right and
left, neither the concept of narratorial unreliability as claimed by Radisch and
Timm nor Diez’s reproach are adequate in the case of Imperium. Of course,
Kracht’s manner of treating political issues can be criticized in ethical as well as
in political terms. However, the formulation of such criticism (which is beyond
the scope of this article) should take into account the complexity of Kracht’s
specific manner of treating political issues in a non-political and provocative
manner. With regard to theory, this paper has demonstrated how interpretive
statements about the fictional narrator and the author are linked in the practice of
interpretation, in due consideration of a theoretical framework of authorial self-
fashioning.
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Adrian Bruhns, Göttingen
Fictional Narrators and Creationism
For every fictional story there is a fictional narrator who tells that story. That
assumption has been popular among narratologists and literary scholars for
decades now. Let’s call that assumption pan-narrator theory. A fictional narrator,
of course, should not be equated with or mistaken for the author of a text, the
latter being actual1 and not fictional. For some fictional texts the existence of a
fictional narrator is indisputable, for instance in cases of first-person narratives.
Fictional narrators can be just as fleshed out as any other character about whom
they tell a story. Some fictional stories, though, do not feature an overt fictional
narrator who is akin to fictional characters. In these cases advocates of a pan-
narrator theory still assume the existence of fictional narrators, often describing
them as impersonal entities responsible for a text’s narrative structure that remain
in the background, almost unnoticeable.2 No matter what or who narrators are
exactly, all brands of pan-narrator theories have in common that they hold them
to be fictional in the same way a character like Sherlock Holmes is fictional.
Various arguments in defense of pan-narrator theories have been brought
forward. For instance, some narratologists claim that fictional narrators are a
logical necessity of fictional speech.3 At the same time arguments brought for-
ward to defend pan-narrator theories have been attacked by others who claim
that there is no good reason to stipulate a fictional narrator where none is overtly
recognizable.4 It is no objective of my paper, though, to take sides in that dispute
or to bring forward additional arguments for or against pan-narrator theories.
What I want to take a look at is whether pan-narrator theories are consistent with
certain ontological assumptions about fictional entities. If they are not, one would
have to give up either the ontological assumption or stop accepting the pan-
narrator premise. The consistency of pan-narrator theories and ontological as-
sumptions about fictional entities is thus a relevant question for both ontology as
1 The term actual in metaphysics is often used as a counterpart to possible. I do not want to put
any metaphysical weight on my use of actual in this instance though. It is merely meant to mean
non-fictional here.
2 See e.g. Wolf Schmid, Elemente der Narratologie, 2nd Edition, Berlin 2008, p. 73.
3 See e.g. Marie-Laure Ryan, “The Pragmatics of Personal and Impersonal Fiction”, in: Poetics,
10/1981, pp. 517–539.
4 See e.g. Tilmann Köppe/Jan Stühring, “Against Pan-Narrator Theories”, in: Journal of Literary
Semantics, 40/2011, pp. 59–80.
140 Adrian Bruhns
well as literary theory since arguments from each field may be brought to bear on
the respective other field.
I Creationism Concerning Fictional Entities
Consider the sum of everything there possibly is. This huge set of things contains
you, the book or screen in front of you, the chair you are sitting on, etc. All of
these are physical things of extended matter. Besides physical things such as
chairs and pieces of paper, there are other kinds of entities we usually treat as
existing, for example mathematical entities such as numbers, but also social
institutions, among them marriage, laws, and limited liability corporations. The
sum of everything should encompass them, too.
Categorizing entities into physical and non-physical things is based on their
ontological status. The ontological status of an entity is roughly the sum of those
of its attributes that are necessarily linked to its very existence. Stating an object’s
ontological status entails answering at least two questions: What has to be the
case for it to come into existence? And what is needed for it to remain there? The
conditions for something to come into existence are called existence conditions
while the conditions for its remaining there are called survival conditions. For
example, the chair you are sitting on is dependent on physical matter. For it to
exist it needs to occupy some location in space. Also, it is a contingent object that
depends on the creative act of some chair-builder. These and maybe more are its
existence conditions. To survive, the chair’s physical matter has to remain in a
specific formation. You could remove its arms and it would remain a chair, but
you could not take it apart completely without the chair ceasing to exist. The
existence and survival conditions of a non-physical thing are different. Take a
look at the institution of marriage. It is not directly dependent on physical matter.
Neither does it have to occupy any location in space. It does share with the chair
the need to be created, though. But unlike the chair’s, its survival is dependent on
the recognition of the institution by a sufficient amount of people; otherwise it
will just disappear.
Based on these and more basic ontological distinctions, the entities making
up the sum of everything can be categorized into ontological categories. The
category of created things contains both the chair and the institution of marriage.
That category can be further split up into concrete created things, which occupy
some space, and abstract created things that are nowhere to be found, with the
chair falling into the first and the institution of marriage into the latter category.
None of these or any other ontological category is undisputed. Some would argue
there are no chairs, only elementary particles. Some metaphysically more lenient
people, on the other hand, even accept the existence of the most peculiar kinds of
things such as impossible entities. There is not that much dispute, though, about
entities we frequently seem to encounter, such as chairs. Neither is there much
dispute about those we never come in contact with such as impossibilia. The more
marginal a metaphysical claim becomes, the less dispute there is, since people
tend not to argue about things they do not take seriously. Consequently, the most
heated debates concentrate not on relatively sure cases on the margins of the
ontological spectrum but on the middle, one of them being fictional entities. Over
the last decades, discussions about the ontological status of Sherlock Holmes and
others of his kind became increasingly extensive.
In this paper, I want to take a look at two closely related claims about the
ontological status of fictional entities that are popular among literary scholars
and investigate their implications for pan-narrator theories. As I pointed out, pan-
narrator theories assume the existence of a fictional narrator for every fictional
story. They hence claim the existence of a number of specific fictional entities.
Thus, for them to be correct, the existence conditions for these fictional entities
have to be fulfilled. I will have a look at two theories about the ontological status
of fictional entities and ask whether the existence conditions they postulate really
are fulfilled across the board of every fictional story in a way that makes it the
case that there is a fictional narrator. If so, these two particular theories are
consistent with pan-narrator theories. If not, they are not.
The two ontological theories I will consider are similar in that they share a
central premise, but they spell it out differently. Both claim that fictional entities
are abstract things that have to be created by someone in order to exist. Theories
holding that claim are called creationist theories. My aim is neither to advocate
nor to defend that premise but only to examine its narratological implications
with regard to pan-narrator theories.
II Artifactualism
Artifactualism is what Amie Thomasson calls her specific brand of creationist

theory about the ontological status of fictional entities. As Sainsbury points out, it
is “probably the currently most popular version of realism” about fictional enti-
ties,5 and it might even be the currently most popular ontological theory about
fictional characters, whether realist or not. Thomasson holds that fictional entities
are ontologically on a par with laws, marriages, and limited liability corporations.
5 R. Mark Sainsbury, Fiction and Fictionalism, London 2010, p. 91.

142 Adrian Bruhns
They are abstract artifacts. They are abstract not in a platonistic sense, belonging
to an eternal realm of necessary ideals, but in the less metaphysically dubious
way of just lacking a spatiotemporal location. Just like there are such things as
laws, there are such things as fictional characters. While ontologically it may or
may not be reasonable to assume the existence of entities such as laws and
fictional characters, it sure seems intuitively right to consider them as part of the
same extended ontological family if they existed. Belonging to that family, they
share a second trait besides being abstract: They are artifacts, i.e. someone
created them.
So far, Thomasson’s account is just the default creationist view. Its unique-
ness is grounded in her reasons to assume the truth of the creationist premise and
in how she spells out the act of creation, the latter being of interest for my
investigation. The process of creation, Thomasson argues, has to be understood
exactly in the terms we use in everyday conversations about fictional entities.
People tend to say an author came up with something, and that is what Thomasson
assumes is the main existence condition for any fictional entity: An author must
have come up with the entity by making a story about it. The existence of e.g.
Hans Castorp is thus dependent on the existence of a story about him, while that
story in turn is dependent on an author writing it. For Thomasson, these condi-
tions combined are both necessary and sufficient for the existence of a fictional
entity. She claims: “The dependencies on literary works and authors exhaust the
immediate dependencies of fictional characters,”6 making stories about them
necessary conditions; and: “An author’s creative acts and a literary work about
the character are also jointly sufficient for the fictional character,”7 making these
two conditions everything there is to the creation of fictional entities.
Thomasson illustrates this act of creation with an example: “If there is no
preexistent object to whom [Jane] Austen was referring in writing the words
[‘Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich’], writing those words brings
into existence the object therein described.”8 Writing a certain kind of story thus
can make it the case that there is a fictional character, just like writing a certain
kind of document can make it the case that there is a limited liability corporation.
Neither the corporation nor the fictional character is identical with the text that
has been written about it, but both are dependent on that specific act of writing as
well as the continued existence of some copy of that text. In Thomasson’s Emma-
Woodhouse-example, the aboutness that is necessary for the entity to come into
6 Amie L. Thomasson, Fiction and Metaphysics, Cambridge 1999, p. 36.

7 Ibid., p. 39.
8 Ibid., p. 13.
existence is established by reference to that entity. This example, however,

illustrates merely one possible way of writing about something. Aboutness isn’t
always established by reference. For example, a fictional story about the psycho-
logical scarring by abusive parents may be able to establish its central theme
through the behavior of its protagonist, such as her reactions to other people’s
parents, without ever making reference to her own. Likewise, an author may be
able to write a fictional story narrated by a fictional narrator who never refers to
herself but still is an overt part of the story, expressed through her judgments or
ironic undertones. According to Thomasson’s view, that narrator surely is one of
the fictional entities the author came up with and wrote about. Still, neither does
that narrator ever refer to herself using pronouns, her name, or some definite
description, nor does the author.
The acts of coming up with and writing about, unlike the continued existence
of a copy of that story, establish what Thomasson calls a historic dependency. The
act of creation is part of the existence conditions but not of the survival condi-
tions. Once the entity is established it remains in existence without some contin-
ued creative force. The dependency is thus historic as opposed to constant.9 The
dependence on some copy of the relevant story for a fictional entity to remain in
existence, on the other hand, is a constant dependence, one that is not only part
of the existence conditions but also of the conditions for survival of that entity.
Thomasson claims:
Clearly the dependence of a fictional character on the intentional acts of its creator or
creators is a rigid historical dependence. Its historical dependence on certain forms of
intentionality signals it as an artifact, an object created by the purposeful activity of humans
(or other intelligent beings).10
There are several claims coming together here. First, Thomasson claims the act of
creation to be an intentional act.
Intentionality is the aboutness or directedness of mind (or states of mind) to things, objects,
states of affairs, events. So if you are thinking about San Francisco, or about the increased
cost of living there, or about your meeting someone there at Union Square – your mind, your
thinking, is directed toward San Francisco, or the increased cost of living, or the meeting in
Union Square. To think at all is to think of or about something in this sense.11
9 See ibid., p. 29.

10 Ibid., p. 35.
11 Charles Siewert, “Consciousness and Intentionality”, 2002, substantive rev. 2006, in: Edward
N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2011 Edition, http://plato.stanford.
edu/archives/fall2011/entries/consciousness-intentionality (accessed September 23, 2013).
144 Adrian Bruhns
Intentionality is a feature of the mind. An intentional act, however, is not the

same as an intended act, the latter being both intentional and on purpose. Surely,
coming up with something is an intentional act in that the mind has to entertain
ideas and representations to come up with something. So the existence of, say,
Hans Castorp is dependent on Thomas Mann coming up with the idea of Hans
Castorp. Aboutness is closely linked to intentionality. It certainly seems true that
one cannot write a story without intentionality being involved. A random line in
the sand that by pure coincidence forms a sentence isn’t about anything, exactly
because it is lacking intentionality. Coming up with a fictional entity is an
intentional act, and so is telling a story about that entity.
In a second step, Thomasson claims the dependence on that kind of inten-
tional act signals the entity to be an artifact. An artifact is something that would
not exist without someone doing something to make it come into existence. If
fictional entities are dependent on an act of intentionality, they need some
intelligent being that is capable of intentional acts doing something for them to
exist. Thus the dependence on an intentional act necessarily implies that fictional
entities are artifacts since there cannot be any without the involvement of some-
one who is capable of intentional acts. In that sense, the dependence of fictional
entities on intentionality indeed signals them to be artifacts.
In a third step, Thomasson claims that artifacts are “created by the purposeful
activity of humans.”12 Here things start to become more complicated. Thomasson
does not elaborate on what exactly it is that has to be on purpose. Two activities
are necessary for the existence of a fictional entity. An author has to come up with
a fictional entity and she has to write (or tell, or think) a story about it. So either
coming-up-with, or writing-about, or both have to be on purpose. The fact that
both activities are intentional acts does not imply that they have to be purposeful,
though. If I mutter something in my sleep, whatever I am saying is not as random
as a line in the sand, forming sentences only by coincidence. I might not have
meant what I said and I certainly did not say anything on purpose, but still,
intentionality was involved.13 Not every intentional act is on purpose. But maybe
coming up with a fictional entity by telling a story about it is. What if Thomas
Mann accidentally misspelled Hans Castorp’s name, alternating between Hans
and Franz, in a way that makes the story seem to be about two characters? Would
there be two? Only if he did not just write about Franz, but also came up with him.
Having come up with something and having written about something both
are relational predicates. Someone (a) wrote about (X) something (b), or someone
12 Thomasson, Fiction, p. 35.

13 That is why intentional acts should not be confused with intended acts!
(a) came up with (Z) something (b). For example, “Thomas Mann wrote about
Hans Castorp” has the logical structure X(a,b). The act of writing certainly is a
purposeful activity. The purposefulness, however, only extends to the X-part, the
predicate, and not necessarily to the b-part, i.e. the content of the activity. It
seems perfectly plausible that an author purposefully writes about some state of
affairs from which one can draw conclusions about some entity in that same story
without the author intending the possibility of such a conclusion. For example,
there could be a story about a child that is afraid of a shadow on his room’s walls.
The existence of that shadow suggests both a source of light and some object
whose shadow the kid sees. By implication, the story about the shadow is also a
story about the object throwing that shadow.14 It seems perfectly possible though,
that the author writing that story did not think about that. She wrote (X) purpose-
fully, but not everything she wrote about (b) was on purpose, so the b-part
partially is not covered by the purposefulness.
The relational property of having-come-up-with-something (Z) has the same
logical structure as writing-about (X), but it requires an even lesser degree of
purposefulness. Sometimes an idea just happens to come to your mind without
any purposeful deliberation. Moreover, while in the case of writing-about-some-
thing the purposefulness can, but does not have to extend to the b-part, in case of
coming-up-with, the b-part is necessarily not on purpose. Coming up with some-
thing (Z) produces a content (b), for example a specific fictional character such as
Hans Castorp. If I want to come up with a fictional character I can do so on
purpose by sitting down and combining some attributes. But I cannot purpose-
fully come up with a specific previously not existing idea. Thomas Mann could not
have sat down with the plan to come up with specifically Hans Castorp, since in
that scenario, the b-part Hans is already specified going into the activity and
could consequently not be the result of the activity. Of course it is possible to
purposefully flesh out some sketchy idea of a fictional character, but it seems to
be impossible to purposefully come up with the initial idea of something.
The ‘purposeful activity’ Thomasson talks about thus seems to be only the act
of storytelling itself, without necessarily extending to the whole content. Still,
coming up with something without doing so on purpose, is something very
different from unknowingly coming up with something. Is it really possible to have
an idea and not know it?
It seems plausible that one can accidentally write about something, but is it
also possible to thereby come up with that thing without even realizing it? Only if
it is possible to do so, one can create a fictional entity without knowing it (on
14 Example by Tobias Klauk.

146 Adrian Bruhns
Thomasson’s account). Going back to the fictional shadow on the wall: Does the
implication of an object throwing that shadow just establish aboutness, or does it
also mean that the author of that story came up with that object, whether she
realized it or not?
The answer to that question is debatable. It seems strange to me, though, to
claim that in this particular story there is just a shadow and nothing that throws it
because the author did not think of that object. It seems to me that she wrote
about that unspecified object by implying its existence, thereby coming up with
and thus creating that fictional entity, whether she knows it or not. In cases in
which an author claims not to have established a certain fictional entity, follow-
ing Thomasson’s view, the existence of that fictional entity hinges precisely on
the question if one can or cannot come up with something without realizing it.
Let’s go on and ask what the different answers to that question mean for the
narratological point of my paper.
Possibility 1: One can unknowingly come up with something by accidentally
writing about it. In that case, it is possible for an author to create a fictional
narrator (or any other fictional entity) while being unaware of that fact. That
assumption certainly is a prerequisite for any feasible pan-narrator theory, con-
sidering that there are authors of fiction claiming they did not introduce a
fictional narrator to their story, who have to be mistaken about that fact for any
pan-narrator theory to be correct. Consequently, the possibility-one-interpreta-
tion of artifactualism is logically consistent with pan-narrator theories. Of course,
that has no bearing on the correctness of either artifactualism or pan-narrator
theories. It only points to the possibility of advocating both without contradicting
oneself. Any successful argument for the pan-narrator premise would still have to
bring forward a reason why every fictional narrative is about a fictional narrator
whether its author knows it or not. That claim reasonably would have to follow
from some larger theory of fictionality. While that task may be difficult, it is not
metaphysically impossible; so no compatibility issues here.
Possibility 2: One cannot unknowingly come up with something. In different
words, if you ask someone whether she introduced a specific idea to a certain text
and she says no, without knowingly lying, there is no way she could be wrong
about that, no matter what she actually wrote, whether accidentally or on
purpose. Thus it just could not be the case that an author unknowingly comes up
with some fictional narrator. In that case, any author of fiction truthfully claiming
she did not introduce a fictional narrator to her story disproves pan-narrator
theories. Consequently, this interpretation of artifactualism is incompatible with
pan-narrator theories, given that there is at least one author truthfully claiming to
have written a fictional story without introducing a fictional narrator. Anyone
holding one of these theories cannot consistently hold the other.
I do not want to argue for any of the two possibilities. It seems to me, though,
that if possibility one is correct and unknowing coming-up-with is possible, Tho-
masson would have to exclude that kind of creation from the existence conditions
for fictional entities she stipulated. Thomasson’s ontological enterprise is to em-
phasize the creative acts of authors, in accordance with the way we commonly
speak about them. Her starting point in developing artifactualism thus is the on-
tological implication of every-day conversations about fictional entities and their
authors.
We do not describe authors of fictional works as discovering their characters […]. Instead,
we describe authors as inventing their characters, making them up, or creating them, so that
before being written about by an author, there is no fictional object. Taking authors to be
genuinely creative as they make up fictional characters is central to our ordinary under-
standing of fiction. […] Thus, if we are to postulate fictional characters that satisfy our
apparent practices regarding them, it seems that we should consider them to be entities that
can come into existence only through the mental and physical acts of authors.15
Whether unintended, unknowing coming-up-with is possible or not, including it

in the existence conditions for fictional entities surely does not agree with
Thomasson’s plan to emphasize the way we ordinarily view authors’ ‘genuinely
creative’ acts when they bring a fictional entity into existence. These creative
acts, for Thomasson, are not just creativity at work, but they are acts of creation
in a deliberate sense. Interpreting Thomasson’s view based on possibility one
does not clash with anything she explicitly says, but it does go against the gist
of her proposal, in that it diverges from her emphasis on the creativity of
authors.
III Pretended Reference
Thomasson’s account is both the most popular creationist account at the moment
as well as probably the one that puts most emphasis on the way we ordinarily
treat fictional entities. It heavily relies on implicit assumptions about fictional
entities most people share, making it an especially interesting view for literary
scholars. Depending on the interpretation of the predicate to-come-up-with one
agrees with, as I have shown, her artifactualism can be consistent with pan-
narrator theories. Thomasson’s view is the evolution of the creationist theory
Searle advocates in his influential 1975 paper “The Logical Status of Fictional
15 Thomasson, Fiction, p. 6.

148 Adrian Bruhns
Discourse”16 which, unlike Thomasson’s account, cannot easily be made compa-

tible with pan-narrator theories. Like Thomasson after him, Searle states that we
can refer to fictional characters because “the author has created” them “out of
thin air.”17 At first glance, this act of creation looks similar to the kind of creation
Thomasson talks about. For Searle, it is an effect of pretended reference to a
certain character that brings it into being: “it is the pretended reference which
creates the fictional character.”18 Note that Searle differentiates between the
kinds of reference authors and readers employ when they talk about fictional
characters. It is only the author who has to employ pretense. Since the original act
of pretended reference establishes the fictional character, all future references to
that character by readers talking about it can be genuine. As Searle puts it: “I did
not pretend to refer to a real Sherlock Holmes; I really referred to a fictional
Sherlock Holmes.”19
Searle’s and Thomasson’s accounts differ with regard to two things: For
Thomasson, authors establish fictional entities by talking about them. For Searle,
they do so by pretending to refer to them. So in Searle’s case pretense is involved,
in Thomasson’s it is not; and while Thomasson claims that the existence of
fictional entities is dependent on the aboutness of some story, Searle points to
reference.
So what does a pretended reference look like? On the face of it, it looks just
like any regular reference. “The author pretends to perform illocutionary acts by
way of actually uttering (writing) sentences […]. The utterance acts in fiction are
indistinguishable from the utterance acts of serious discourse.”20 Consequently,
looking at a sentence cannot tell you whether it is employed in a pretended or a
genuine speech act. That is why lies are not immediately recognizable as such.
What separates the lie from a genuine (though false) statement of the same form
is the speaker’s intention. Similarly, it is the speaker’s intention that separates a
fictional sentence from a non-fictional sentence. But wherein lies the difference
between lie and fiction? Searle points to a further intentional state to distinguish
between the two:
lying consists in violating one of the regulative rules on the performance of speech acts […].
What distinguishes fiction from lies is the existence of a separate set of conventions which
16 John R. Searle, “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse”, in: New Literary History, 6/1975,
pp. 319–332.
17 Ibid., p. 329.
18 Ibid., p. 330.
19 Ibid., his emphasis.
20 Ibid., p. 327.
enables the author to go through the motions of making statements which he knows to be
not true even though he has no intention to deceive.21
Lying thus comes with the intention to make someone assume a statement is in
accordance with the conventions of statement-making while in fact it is not.
Fictional utterances on the other hand are spoken with the intention of making
someone believe that the statement is purposefully not following these rules
(which is made possible only by a second set of conventions enabling such
utterances).
The pretended references that come with fictional discourse spawn the actual
fictional entities that ultimately enable genuine reference. Where Thomasson
needs an author telling a story about something that does not exist, Searle needs
an author pretending to refer to something. In Thomasson’s case, the question
whether there can be unintended fictional entities depends on the question
whether one can talk about something without intending to do so, and thereby
come up with and thus create that entity. In Searle’s case we have to ask whether
one can pretend to refer to something without intending to do so.
Let’s take a step back first and ask whether it is at all possible to pretend to do
anything by accident. Here is an example:22 Someone asks me to pretend to be a
rhinoceros. I begin to form my arms into an elephant’s trunk and then realize I got
the animal wrong. For a brief second there I accidentally pretended to be an
elephant. What I got wrong, though, is the animal but not the pretending itself. I
did not pretend something without wanting to, but I pretended to be one thing
while actually wanting to pretend to be something else. But is it also possible to
accidentally pretend to do something instead of actually doing it? Can you try to
cook dinner but accidentally just pretend to do so? I don’t think you can.
But what about pretending to refer? To create any fictional entity, on Searle’s
view, an author has to pretend to refer to that entity. The examples given above
suggest that one can accidentally pretend to do one thing while thinking that one
pretends another thing, but not accidentally pretend to do something while trying
to do the real thing. In case of an accidental pretended reference the mistake
would have to be regarding the reference part. Just like I pretended to be an
elephant while trying to pretend to be a rhino, an author may be trying to pretend
to refer to something while either accidentally pretending to do something else
than referring, or while pretending to refer to the wrong thing. The first of these
two possibilities is of no concern here. Pretended reference is needed to establish
21 Ibid., p. 326.
22 Example by Jan Stühring.
150 Adrian Bruhns
a fictional entity. So if an author pretended to do something other than referring,

that may be an interesting phenomenon, but it is none that could potentially
establish the existence of any fictional entities on Searle’s account.
The second case is of more interest, though. Here, an author tries to pretend
to refer to x but accidentally pretends to refer to y. That case is very similar to the
aboutness case on Thomasson’s account. However, it does not apply to the
accidental introduction of a fictional narrator where the author didn’t want one. It
may be possible that Thomas Mann wanted to pretend to refer to Hans Castorp
and accidentally pretended to refer to Franz Castorp. But consider an author
contemplating a story she wants to write, sketching it out on a flip-board, and
purposefully and consciously deciding that she does not want to introduce a
fictional narrator to that story. Having in mind that it seems implausible (if not
impossible) to accidentally pretend to do something while engaging in some
activity that is not supposed to involve pretense, could she accidentally pretend
to refer to a fictional narrator against her explicit plans? Someone holding both a
pan-narrator theory and Searle’s brand of creationism would have to argue that
not only is it possible to accidentally pretend to do something while actively
trying not to, but also that every author of a fictional narrative that ever tried not
to establish a fictional narrator could not help but do so anyway.
Besides the implausibility of accidental pretended reference, there are count-
less narratives that do not make any reference to a narrator at all. Any pan-
narrator theorist who, for such cases, assumes the existence of some implied
impersonal entity as the fictional narrator thus would clash with a literal inter-
pretation of Searle’s account that points to pretended reference only. The implied
existence of some entity is not a reference to that entity. For example, every
mention of a person in a non-fictional statement implies the existence of someone
who gave birth to that person. Still, the statement did not make reference to that
person’s mother. In a fictional context, given Searle’s account is adequate, there
would thus be no fictional entity identical with that person’s mother because of
the lack of a pretended reference to her. Likewise, if an author at no point
pretends to refer to a narrator, for example by making her refer to herself, she
does not exist. An implied impersonal entity cannot be stipulated in that case,
since the existence conditions for fictional entities Searle points to are not
fulfilled.
IV Conclusion
Fictional narrators are fictional entities. The claim that every fictional narrative
also has a fictional narrator thus implies the assumption that for every such
narrative the existence conditions for a fictional entity that is identical with the
narrator are fulfilled. As Kripke points out in his 1973 Locke Lectures, on a
creationist view it is ultimately an empirical question whether there is a certain
fictional character or not, since its existence is dependent on the relevant condi-
tions, whose fulfillment is itself an empirical question.23
In the case of Thomasson’s theory, that empirical datum mainly is the about-
ness of a text and the author’s coming up with a corresponding entity. Whenever
an author fictionally writes about something she came up with that does not exist,
a fictional entity comes into existence. In the case of Searle’s theory, it is an
author’s pretended referring that lets fictional entities come into existence.
Depending on the interpretation of these theories, acts of creating fictional
entities are something authors do consciously and on purpose. Any ontological
theory about fictional entities that stresses acts of creation that involve planning
and conscious, purposeful reference or aboutness will end up being incompatible
with pan-narrator theories.
That incompatibility probably will not convince anyone to give up either pan-
narrator theories or creationist views, but it may at best move them to adopt minor
changes within those theories to make them more compatible. Besides adopting
the possibility-two-interpretation of artifactualism, one could view the act of
creation as an interactive project that involves not only authors but readers as
well (or maybe even just readers).24 For example, the premise that existential
quantifications in intersubjectively accepted interpretations of fictional texts
spawn fictional entities could be successful in maintaining a creationist view in
combination with pan-narrator theories. A convincing argument that for any
fictional text the most acceptable interpretation of that text makes reference to a
fictional narrator could consequently establish that narrator as an existing fic-
tional entity.
Whether the incompatibilities I tried to point out are convincing or not, hope-
fully they support one further claim I want to make with this paper: Ontological
theories of fiction are not just a philosophical enterprise that has no bearing on
narratology and literary criticism. On the contrary, narratology and theories of
fiction are very much interdependent, and anyone working in one of these fields
can get fruitful impulses by testing their theories against the backdrop of the
other.
23 Saul A. Kripke, Reference and Existence: The John Locke Lectures, Oxford 2013, p. 71.
24 See e.g. Peter van Inwagen, “Fiction and Metaphysics”, in: Philosophy and Literature, 7/1983,
pp. 67–77.
152 Adrian Bruhns
Works Cited
Inwagen, Peter van, “Fiction and Metaphysics”, in: Philosophy and Literature, 7/1983,
pp. 67–77.
40/2011, pp. 59–80.
Kripke, Saul A., Reference and Existence: The John Locke Lectures, Oxford 2013.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, “The Pragmatics of Personal and Impersonal Fiction”, in: Poetics, 10/1981,
pp. 517–539.
Sainsbury, R. Mark, Fiction and Fictionalism, London 2010.
Schmid, Wolf, Elemente der Narratologie, 2nd Edition, Berlin 2008.
Searle, John R., “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse”, in: New Literary History, 6/1975,
pp. 319–332.
Siewert, Charles, “Consciousness and Intentionality”, in: Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2002, substantive rev. 2006, in: Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2011 Edition, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
fall2011/entries/consciousness-intentionality (accessed September 23, 2013).
Thomasson, Amie L., Fiction and Metaphysics, Cambridge 1999.
Regine Eckardt, Göttingen
Speakers and Narrators
The paper investigates a seeming paradox. Formal theories of meaning stan-
dardly assume that sentences – in real communication or in fiction – are evalu-
ated relative to utterance contexts. Therefore, such theories lead us to expect that
texts in fiction always refer to speakers, which come as part of these utterance
contexts. Intuition, on the contrary, tells us that many stories do not create the
impression that there is someone who is telling us all this. I will discuss how this
paradox can be resolved within formal semantics.
I Introduction
Who tells us the works of literary fiction? Since the invention of print, the tradition
of story-telling in the marketplace has been replaced by stories in written form.
But who is the person telling us such a story? Leaving folk epics aside, we can
assume that every piece of fiction was written by an author. Does this mean that
every such story has a narrator?
This does not follow, at least not in a simple manner. Clearly, the author and
the person who tells us a work of literature cannot be simply equated. For
instance, first-person narratives usually have a narrator who is clearly distinct
from the author of the story. The Sherlock Holmes stories are told by Holmes’s
friend Dr Watson but were written by Arthur Conan Doyle, who is an altogether
different person. But even stories without a first-person narrator can communi-
cate beliefs and attitudes on the part of a narrating person which are not shared
by the author. Hence, author and narrator must be kept separate.
Given that author and narrator are not necessarily identical, one might go
further and ask whether it could happen that a story has an author but no
narrator. Several answers to this question have been defended.
According to one position, a story always has a narrator. This position is not
only preferable for the sake of generality. It also seems to find support by the
following formal argument: Every sentence (in languages like English, German,
French etc.) is specified for tense. Tense morphology of the verb relates the
content of the sentence to utterance time. Past tense morphology codes that the
events in question happened before utterance time, future forms code that they
will take place later, and present tense morphology codes that events happen as
they are being reported (historical present). All sentences of stories carry tense.
Therefore, all stories need an utterance time to be interpreted. If there is an
154 Regine Eckardt
utterance time, then there is an utterance situation. If there is an utterance

situation, there is someone who makes an utterance. Hence we have a narrator.1
According to an opposing position, there could be stories without a narrator.
Intuitively, there are stories that give us no clue about the person who might be
telling it. Such stories should most appropriately be classed as stories without a
narrator. Hence, we should try to get rid of the idea that there is always a
speaker.2
The question is whether and how these two positions can be reconciled.
Proponents of narrator-free stories will have to spell out how an utterance can
depend on utterance time without the notion of someone uttering. Proponents of
uniform context dependence and ubiquitous speakers have a hard time explain-
ing what kind of speaker we are supposed to imagine for a story that gives no clue
of such a person, apart from the fact that it is told after some given series of
events. In this paper, I propose how these two intuitions can be accounted for in a
uniform theory of meaning for sentences and text.
The paper is structured as follows. In section II, I recapitulate the classical
notion of sentence meaning in possible-world semantics in the philosophical
tradition going back to Montague, Lewis, Stalnaker, and Davidson. This includes
a model for information update which captures how the reader gains information
while s/he reads a text. The model can be applied to fiction as well as informative
text. In section III, this basic theory is extended by reference to utterances,
making use of Kaplan’s theory of context. I argue that the content of fiction must
be modelled by what authors after Kaplan called the diagonal (of sentences/
texts), or utterance content.3 This may be surprising, in view of the fact that texts
of literary fiction, if anything, are hardly ever “uttered” in the physical sense of
1 Restricting attention to formal semantic theory, this position is entailed by the joined body of
literature about tense, context, and context dependence e.g. David Kaplan, “Demonstratives”,
in: John Almog/John Perry/Howard Wetterstein (eds.), Themes from Kaplan, Oxford 1989,
pp. 481–563; combined with Arnim von Stechow, Tenses in Compositional Semantics [Ms. Uni-
versity of Tübingen], 2009, http://www.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de/~astechow/Aufsaetze/Approaches.
pdf (accessed August 2013).
2 This position has been defended e.g. in Andrew Kania, “Against the Ubiquity of Fictional
Narrators”, in: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63/2005, pp. 47–54; Thomas E. Warten-
berg, “Need there be implicit narrators of literary fictions?”, in: Philosophical Studies, 135/2007,
pp. 89–94; or Tilmann Köppe/Jan Stühring, “Against Pan-Narrator Theories”, Journal of Literary
Semantics, 40/2011, pp. 59–80.
3 Ede Thomas Zimmermann, “Kontextabhängigkeit”, in: Dieter Wunderlich/Arnim von Stechow
(eds.), Semantics/Semantik. Ein Internationales Handbuch, Berlin 1991, pp. 156–229; Ede Thomas
Zimmermann, “Context dependence”, in: Klaus von Heusinger/Claudia Maienborn/Paul Portner
(eds.), Semantics. An International Handbook, Vol. 3, Berlin 2012, pp. 2360–2407.
the word. Section III concludes with a brief survey of different sources of informa-
tion about the speaker. Section IV takes a closer look at a specific linguistic way
to convey speaker information: speaker-oriented expressions. These expressions
play an important role in literary texts. Their function will be illustrated in various
modes of literary writing, we will look at their semantic values, and explain how
they differ from traditional indexical expressions like I, you or now. Section V
combines all these points and addresses the question “How much does the text
tell us about the person speaking?” It illustrates speaker information in the
present analysis, on basis of a range of sample text passages. We can trace
sources of information about the speaker and the effects they have on the
semantic representation of the text. Section VI, finally, returns to the speaker/
narrator puzzle. We will combine two main slogans of the analysis: First, all
sentence contents are represented by sets of worlds/people/contexts about which
they are true. Second, sentences which cover many worlds/people/contexts are
sentences which convey little information. This correlation between many options
and little knowledge is a standard pattern used in theories of semantic content.
Applied to the narrator/speaker question, we predict that many options for
possible speakers reflect that we don’t know much about the speaker. The fiction
of a narrator, however, requires some contentful restrictions on possible speakers.
The greater the number of possible speakers, the less lively our sense of a
narrator. In the extreme case, the fictional narrator (in the sense that the reader is
led to imagine that someone is telling the story) can be completely absent.
II Worlds and Story Content
The present section introduces a first analysis of sentence content and story
content based on possible worlds. We will also spell out how the literal story
content interacts with the reader’s knowledge, and how stories are enriched by a
reader’s expectations.4
What happens when we read and understand a novel, story or other piece of
fiction? A gripping novel can lead us away from our own world, carry us into new
worlds, and offer us new, exciting experiences. Many people describe this experi-
ence as the reader “immersing herself into the world of the story.”
4 The analysis goes back to Robert Stalnaker, “Assertion”, in: Peter Cole (ed.), Syntax and
Semantics, Vol. 9, New York 1978, pp. 315–332; Robert Stalnaker, Context and Content, Oxford
1999; Robert Stalnaker, “Common Ground”, in: Linguistics and Philosophy, 25/2002, pp. 701–721;
and was discussed for the case of fiction in David Lewis, “Truth in Fiction”, in: American
Philosophical Quarterly, 15/1978, pp. 37–46.
156 Regine Eckardt
For any given story, however, different readers can have different opinions on
what the world of the story should look like. Different readers imagine parts of the
story in very different ways, depending on their expectations and experiences.
Usually, these different ways to imagine the story-world are equally well sup-
ported by the text. Stories can simply leave aspects of the world undetermined.5
In search of an intersubjective notion of sentence content, semanticists and
philosophers put to use possible worlds in a different manner. They propose that
sentence meanings are characterized by their truth conditions. For instance, a
sentence like ‘ravens are black’ is true in exactly those worlds where ravens
actually are black.6 The meaning of a sentence can be characterized as the set of
all those imaginable worlds in which the sentence is true. For instance, ‘ravens
are black’ denotes the set of all those worlds w where ravens are indeed black.7
Stalnaker extended this notion of sentence meaning to a model of information
update and information increase.8 He argued that no human possesses complete
knowledge about the actual world. This means that for many imaginable worlds w
we cannot tell whether w is the actual world or not. At best, we can decide that w
coheres with all we know about the actual world (it could be the real world), or
that it doesn’t. For any person A, the set of worlds which, according to A’s knowl-
edge, could be the actual world, is also called the epistemic alternatives of A.
Epi(A) ≔ {w | A thinks that w could be the world he really lives in}
A can acquire more information when he hears a sentence and believes that it is
true. Imagine, for instance, that A so far has no beliefs about the color of ravens.
His epistemic alternatives include worlds w1 where ravens are red, worlds w2
5 Sometimes, experts can argue that ways of reading a story are ‘wrong’ because the author could
not have intended this way of enriching the plot. I will not attempt to spell out the exact borderline
between permissible and false enrichments here. Note that Lewis, “Truth” emphatically sides with
those who only allow interpretations which are in the spirit of the author.
6 Donald Davidson, “Truth and Meaning”, in: Synthese, 17/1967, pp. 304–323.
7 My language use deviates from the philosophical standard. I will use the term imaginable
worlds for philosophers’ “possible worlds” and reserve the term possible worlds to talk about
worlds in which a story possibly could take place. Of course, I do not suggest that the range of
imaginable worlds depends on any specific person’s power of imagination. They cover exactly
what Lewis would call “possible worlds.” Paul Portner, What is Meaning? Fundamentals of Formal
Semantics, Malden, MA, 2005, offers an accessible introduction to the basic assumptions of truth
conditional semantics; see also Irene Heim/Kai von Fintel, “Intensional Semantics”, in: Online
Textbook, 2007, http://semantics.uchicago.edu/kennedy/classes/s08/semantics2/vonfintel+hei
m07.pdf (accessed December 29, 2011).
8 See Stalnaker, “Assertion”; Stalnaker, “Common Ground”.
where they are multi-colored like parrots, worlds w3 where they are black, and so
on. Now, an informed and trustworthy biologist B tells A the following:
Ravens are black.
B thereby invites A to update his epistemic alternatives with the set of worlds
denoted by this sentence. If A believes B’s claim, he should restrict his epistemic
alternatives to those worlds where Ravens are black is true.
Updated epistemic alternatives of A:
Epi(A)new ≔ { w | A thinks that w could be the world he really

lives in, and ravens are black in w }
= Epi(A)old ∩ { w | ravens are black in w }
We intersect the epistemic alternatives of A with the set of worlds which represents
the sentence Ravens are black. Update with sentences S for A is tantamount to
restricting his former epistemic alternatives to those in which S holds true. The
more knowledge A possesses, the smaller is the range of imaginable worlds w which
he thinks could be the actual world. An increase in knowledge is reflected by a
decrease of options. This pattern will be used at many later points in this paper.
Stalnaker was mainly concerned with information exchange and increase of
knowledge. Yet, his analysis can be extended to fictional texts.9 The content of
fiction is not supposed to increase our knowledge about the actual world. Hence,
the content of sentences in fictional stories should not update the reader’s
epistemic alternatives (or else, we’d predict that the reader takes the content of
the story as literal truth about the world). Fiction invites the reader to construct a
new set of imaginable worlds, the worlds which are such that the story could have
taken place in them. Let us assume that the reader, at the beginning of a story,
supplies an initial set of worlds of the following kind:
Story(A)0 = {w | the present story could have happened in w}
Even the most widely conceived sets of story-worlds obey certain restrictions
which reflect the expectations of A about the story. Usually, A will assume that
the laws of physics hold true in all story worlds w (unless the story is science
fiction). If the story was written 200 years ago, A will assume that the story worlds
w do not contain things like cars, nuclear power plants or electric razors. These
9 See Lewis, “Truth”.

158 Regine Eckardt
restrictions are not imposed by the literal content of stories but by the reader’s
knowledge. We will likewise assume that Story(A)o excludes the real world right
from start. This ensures that fiction is never misinterpreted as information about
the real world, even if the content of the story incidentally happens to match
actual events in the real world.10
Different readers will start reading with different expectations. An expert on
Indian jungles will read Kipling’s Jungle Book with more specific knowledge than
a reader who lacks this background. While Story(A)o may not be too close to the
belief worlds of the reader – after all, the reader expects fiction to deviate from
the real facts of the world – it may become clear over time that the author
intended some facts and generalizations to pattern with those of the real world.
For instance, an author can write about a fictitious politician in such a way that
typical psychological features of people in politics can best explain the charac-
ter’s actions, even though the story itself does not contain an explicit lecture on
the psychological profile of politicians. This could be one of the ways in which we
can find truth in fiction.
The reader A might need some time to figure out the intended possible worlds
which the story starts from. I will use Story(A)o in this more flexible manner as a
label for the background information supplied by reader A, and allow that this
information can become more specific as the story unfolds. For the sake of the
present paper, it will be sufficient to assume that Story(A)o can be corrected and
adjusted over time. A detailed analysis of a story, sentence by sentence, might
require a truly dynamic update of background and story content in alternation, a
problem that will be left aside here.
Stalnaker’s theory of information and information update can now be ex-
tended to the case of fictional texts. Once again, each sentence of the story denotes
the set of worlds in which that sentence holds true. As before, the reader updates
her information background with each sentence in sequence. The reader’s set
Story(A)0 is reduced step by step to those worlds where all sentences of the story
hold true. However, it will always be clear that the set of worlds which emerges is
not a set of worlds which is supposed to include the actual world. It is also under-
stood that this set of worlds belongs to that particular story and is not supposed to
be combined with the sets of possible worlds which belong to other stories.11 At the
10 Lewis, ibid., argues that the telling of fiction is an act of make-believe assertion: the speaker
acts as if she was reporting real knowledge, which she isn’t. He concludes that for this reason
alone, the worlds described in fiction can never be the actual world, even if some story by chance
actually happened in the way reported in fiction.
11 Sequels are an obvious exception; see Lewis, “Truth” for careful ways to deal with inter-story
inconsistencies and information transfer.
end of the story, the range of imaginable worlds that the story could be about has
become much smaller than the original set Story(A)0. Increase of information is
again reflected by a decrease of options. The meanings of sentences are stable
objects, no matter whether the sentence occurs as part of TV news or part of a novel.
The content of sentences contributes to different sets of worlds; this is how the
analysis captures the difference between news and fiction.
Finally, Stalnaker’s account of information update can be generalized to a
theory of information about discourse referents, as exemplified in Discourse
Representation Theory,12 File Change Semantics,13 and Dynamic Montague Gram-
mar.14 In order to capture anaphoric cross-references in story texts, these frame-
works propose that sentence and story content should be represented by sets of
discourse referents.15 These are used to reflect possible groups of protagonists
about which a sentence or text conveys true information. As in Stalnaker’s
account, an increase in information about discourse referents is reflected by a
decreasing choice of imaginable people (and things) about which the story could
truthfully be told. Example (1) illustrates the basic idea.
1 A woman arrived at Heathrow Airport. She was wearing red shoes.
The first sentence restricts the set of imaginable people to female persons who
arrive at Heathrow Airport (at some salient time). This, obviously, leaves us with
many possibilities. The second sentence adds more information about the person
in question: She moreover wears red shoes. Taking these two properties together
will lead to a much more restricted set of women the story could be about. Each
subsequent sentence will offer further restrictions about the woman, her previous
or subsequent behaviour, her clothes, other people she interacted with and so on.
At the end of the story, we might still not know the one and only imaginable
person that the story is about. But we have got a pretty specific idea what kind of
12 Hans Kamp, “A Theory of Truth and Semantic Representation”, in: Jeroen Groenendijk et al.
(eds.), Formal Methods in the Study of Language, Amsterdam 1981, pp. 1–41; Hans Kamp/Uwe
Reyle, From Discourse to Logic, Dordrecht 1993.
13 Irene Heim, “File Change Semantics, and the Familiarity Theory of Definiteness”, in: Rainer
Bäuerle/Christoph Schwarze/Arnim von Stechow (eds.), Meaning, Use and Interpretation of Lan-
guage, Berlin 1982, pp. 223–248.
14 Jeroen Groenendijk/Martin Stokhof, “Dynamic Montague Grammar”, in: L. Kalman/L. Polos
(eds), Proceedings of the Second Symposion on Logic and Language, Budapest 1990, pp. 3–48,
http://dare.uva.nl/document/3702 (accessed March 30, 2013).
15 Formally, discourse semantic theories propose that the meaning of a sentence or text corre-
sponds to the set of variable assignments which map the set of active discourse referents to a
group of people/things such that the story holds true for this group.
160 Regine Eckardt
person she might be. Once again, the increase in information is mirrored by a
reduction of choices of imaginable persons who fit the content of the story.
I concede that our subjective impression, when reading textoids like (1) or
even longer stories, is not that we are talking about sets of women. Every reader of
(1) will imagine his or her own, more or less detailed picture of a woman arriving
at Heathrow. Practically every reader will fill in details which are based on her
own experiences and expectations. However, none of these details are suggested
by the text alone. The literal content of (1) warrants very many subjective pictures
of women at Heathrow Airport. This intersubjective variability in story content is
captured by the possible-worlds framework.
III Sentences and Utterance Contexts
The preceding section introduced a basic framework to represent the content of

sentences, of information update and of story content. The basic framework
considered sentence content in a ‘lab situation’, so to speak, disregarding factors
like utterance context, speaker, utterance time etc. Utterance contexts are ob-
viously a necessary factor in order to understand the meaning of indexical words
like I, you or now. Moreover, as I will argue in this paper, reference to utterance
contexts is an indispensable ingredient of the meaning of fictional texts. There-
fore, the present section will extend the basic framework by reference to utterance
situations. We will start by considering the simple case of indexical words.
The meaning of indexicals like I, you, here depends on the situation in which
they are uttered. The meaning and truth value of the following sentence depend
on whether it is uttered by the author of the present paper or by the German
chancellor in summer 2013.
2 My name is Angela Merkel.
Kaplan proposed that the meaning of linguistic expressions generally depends on

utterance contexts c.16 An utterance context specifies at least a speaker S P (c), an
addressee A D (c), a time T IME (c), a place L OC (c), and a world W ORLD (c). There are
various ways to implement this idea. Following Kaplan, I will assume a domain of
contexts c which are themselves without internal structure. There are functions A D ,
S P , T IME , L OC , and W ORLD , which are defined for all contexts c. Each of these
functions maps each context onto some value in the appropriate domain. For
16 See Kaplan, “Demonstratives”.

example, we might have a context c5 which is mapped by S P to Angela Merkel,

which means that c5 is a context where Angela Merkel is the speaker. Each context
defines a unique speaker, addressee, time, place, and world. We will also assume
that no two contexts may be different and yet share speaker, addressee, time, place,
and world. Kaplan discusses a wide range of examples which illustrate this basic
framework. For example, the sentence in (2) depends in meaning on the speaker.
Once the speaker has been determined, we can decide in which imaginable worlds
the sentence is true.
c1 (S P (c1) = A.M.):
‘My name is Angela Merkel’ is true in all worlds w where the person A.M. carries the name
‘Angela Merkel’.
c2 (S P (c2) = R.E.):
‘My name is Angela Merkel’ is true in all worlds w where the person R.E. carries the name
‘Angela Merkel’.
Kaplan proposed that semantic interpretation proceeds in two steps: First, we

resolve context-dependent expressions. Second, we evaluate the resulting clause
against all imaginable worlds and determine in which ones it is true. This second
step carries us back to the notion of content proposed in section II.
However, when a speaker makes a claim in an actual utterance situation,
there seems to be a connection between these two steps. In a context c where I
stand in front of you and assert (wrongly) ‘My name is Angela Merkel,’ I’d invite
you to believe the following:
the world of this context c is such that

the speaker of this context c (i.e.: R.E.)
carries the name ‘Angela Merkel’
at the time of this context c.
The speaker makes a claim in context c about the world of context c. We could
paraphrase this intention as “let me tell you something about the world in which
we are.” Scholars in analytic philosophy have isolated this special kind of mean-
ing as the utterance meaning, and coined the term diagonalization for the way in
which utterances in contexts are about contexts.17 To flesh out this idea, let me
give some more examples.
3 My hair needs a cut.
17 See Philippe Schlenker, “Indexicals”, in: Sven O. Hansson/Vincent F. Hendricks (eds.), Hand-
book of Formal Philosophy, Dordrecht 2010, for an excellent survey of data and proposals in the
literature.
162 Regine Eckardt
Imagine that I utter this sentence in a context c where I talk to my husband in

Frankfurt on August 2, 2013. What I am communicating is this: We are in an
utterance context c where the world of that context W ORLD (c) is such that the hair
of S P (c) (i.e. myself) at T IME (c) is too long. Re-rendering this in the language of
sets, this is my message:
3.a We (I, the speaker, and you, the addressee) are in one of these:
ORL D (c), the hair of S P (c) at T IME (c) is too long}
{c | in W ORLD
Note that our epistemic uncertainty remains. When I talk to you, we might have
the feeling that we know very well in which local situation c we are. Still, we do
not exactly know which imaginable world w is behind the horizon of our local
speech situation. More formally, we don’t know the value W ORLD (c) of c, and in
this sense don’t know what c we are in. Hence, sets like (3.a) will always contain
many, possibly infinitely many contexts c, even though speaker, addressee, time,
and place can be fixed, as in my conversation with my husband.
Next, imagine that I continue our conversation with (4)
4 I was at the hairdresser’s 2 months ago.
Again, I communicate a restriction on our utterance contexts. This will add (4.a)
to the restrictions in (3.a).
4.a We are in one of these:

ORL D (c), S P (c) was at hairdresser’s 2 months before T IME (c)}
{c | in W ORLD
As in the preceding section, these two restrictions together will narrow down the
range of imaginable contexts c in which we might be.
4.b {c | in W ORLD
ORL D (c), the hair of S P (c) at T IME (c) is too long, and
in W ORLD (c), S P (c) was at hairdresser’s 2 months before T IME (c)}
This set adds to the information that the interlocutors have about their utterance
context at the beginning. If we call the latter Contexto, we can spell out my and
my husband’s common information state after the little exchange as follows.18
18 I assume that we both are fully aware of our identities, the place, and the time.
Contexto = {c | R.E.=S P (c) and M.K.=A D (c), and T IME ( c)=2.8.2013, and P LACE ( c)=FfM, and
laws-of-physics hold in W ORLD (c), and FfM is in Germany, and Germany is
in Europe and …}
Update by (4.b) yields
{ c | R.E.=S P (c) and M.K.=A D (c), and T IME ( c)=2.8.2013, and P LACE ( c)=FfM laws-of-physics
hold in W ORLD (c), in W ORLD
ORL D (c), the hair of S P (c) at T IME (c) is too long, in W ORLD (c), S P
(c) was at hairdresser’s 2 months before T IME (c) }
In section II, we restricted attention to context-independent utterances and there-

fore used sets of imaginable worlds to model meaning. The present section takes
into account the fact that content depends on speaker, hearer, time and place.
These are added to the world dimension and generalize the account of section II.
What remains stable is the idea that the more information we get, the narrower
will be the range of imaginable contexts which could be the ones described by the
text.
I took the case of real, direct face-to-face assertion as my starting case. What
would happen if we took the little textoid (3)–(4) as part of a fictional story?
Imagine a person A who reads (5) as part of a novel.
5 My hair needs a cut. I was at the hairdresser’s 2 months ago.
Given that we are dealing with fiction, A will again assume that the set of
utterance contexts under consideration cannot include the context c in which A
actually finds herself. The intended contexts c are part of worlds W ORLD (c) which
are not the real world, and they therefore cannot be the real utterance context. A
is invited to imagine utterance contexts c. These are characterized by (5.a), the
literal content of (5), as in our earlier example.
5.a { c | in W ORLD (c), the hair of S P (c) at T IME (c) is too long and
in W ORLD (c), S P (c) was at hairdresser’s 2 months before T IME (c) }
These contexts are imaginary in that the worlds behind the horizon are not the
actual world. Likewise, the update does not affect the set of contexts which A
believes she is in. As in section II, this information will update the initial set
which represents A’s expectations about the story he will read.
Story(A)0 = { c | the present story could be told in c about W ORLD

ORL D (c), by
S P (c) at T IME (c) … }
164 Regine Eckardt
If we compare the set of initial possible contexts Contexto in real communication

with this set Story(A)0, we see that the set Contexto is more limited in that all its
contexts c single out the same speaker S P (c), the same hearer A D (c), the same
time, and the same place. This reflects the fact that we normally know where we
are, and who we are talking to.19 Story(A)0 contexts may yield just any individual
as potential speaker. After the update of Story(A)0 with the content of (5), the
choice of potential speakers is already more limited.
Story(A)0 ∩ (5.a)
= { c | the present story could be told in c about W ORLD ORL D (c), by
S P (c) at T IME (c) and
in W ORLD (c), the hair of S P (c) at T IME (c) is too long and
in W ORLD (c), S P (c) was at hairdresser’s 2 months before
T IME (c) }
This concludes our formal account of story content. Building on earlier theories, I
assume that story content is interpreted as utterance content where the reader (of
the story) has to make a guess about what kind of utterance situation she finds
herself in. Sequences of sentences will serve to restrict the choice of possible
utterance situations. For one thing, they will delimit the range of imaginable
worlds w which could possibly be the world of the story. But they will also delimit
the choice of possible speakers S P (c) who could be telling the story. As before,
increased information is reflected by a decreased choice of contexts (incl. context
worlds) the reader might be in. As in all fiction, it is clear that these worlds, and
contexts, are not the actual world/context.
We have covered some examples which illustrated how the hearer or reader
of a text can gather information about context. In the following section, I give a
more comprehensive survey of sources of information about the utterance con-
text, including information within and beyond language. Section IV will select
one of the linguistic sources, speaker-oriented expressions, and investigate these
in more detail.
III.1 Context Information
The present section surveys different ways in which texts give us information
about the speaker in contexts c.
19 This is obviously not always so, e.g. in telephone calls, mail, in confessions and other
anonymous communication. I am not concerned with assertion in anonymous speech situations.
True and direct communication. When a real person A reports to another real
person B and both know each other, the utterance content of the sentences of the
story will update a set Contexto = {c | SP (c) = A and A D (c) = B, and T IME (c) = t, and
P LACE (c) = p …} which ideally codes full information about the local speech
situation. The report can convey information about the speaker A which B did not
know before, but the identity of speaker and hearer is fixed from the very begin-
ning.20 Note that in spite of the fact that the local speech situation can be fully
known to both interlocutors, Contexto will nevertheless contain many contexts c,
at least because A and B don’t know which imaginable world is the one of ‘their’
context, i.e. the value of W ORLD (c). I adopt the common assumption in the litera-
ture that W ORLD is a function on contexts. Hence, each context c will map to exactly
one imaginable world. If the same local speech situation could be part of two
different imaginable worlds w1 and w2, this formally requires two contexts c1, c2
which have the same local speech situation but map on these two different worlds.
The context situation remains essentially the same if A tells B a fictional
story. The initial set of contexts to be updated will be Storyo = {c | SP (c) = A and
A D (c) = B, and W ORLD ( c) is not the actual world, and …}. Hence, A and B engage
in a kind of as-if play. They act as if they were in one of the worlds where the story
is true. The present analysis entails that the immersion in other imaginable worlds
start right at the beginning of fiction-telling, an assumption which was proposed
informally by Lewis.21
First-person narrated fictional text. If a reader B reads and interprets sentences

of a fictional first-person narrative, the text offers maximal and maximally explicit
information about the speaker in contexts in which the text could be uttered. The
reader will start with a comparatively large set of possible utterance contexts.
These generalize the initial set of worlds that was discussed in section II.
Story(B)0 = { c | the story could be told in c about W ORLD

ORL D (c), by
S P (c) at T IME (c) … }
Story(B)o contains contexts with different speakers, i.e. there are c, c’ in Story(B)o
such that S P (c) ≠ S P (c’). By and by, the text eliminates many of the initial contexts
20 The present proposal adopts the view that individuals have a world-independent existence
(Kripke style approach) beyond possible worlds, even though their properties can change from
world to world. An alternative way to model individuals-across-worlds makes use of a counterpart
relation. In this spell-out, all speakers of contexts in Storyo are counterparts of A, and all
addressees are counterparts of B.
21 See Lewis, “Truth”.
166 Regine Eckardt
because their speaker value does not match the content of the text. For example,
Story(B)o will normally contain both contexts with a male speaker and contexts
with a female speaker. If the story reveals that the first-person narrator is female, all
contexts c for which S P (c) is male will be discarded. Nevertheless, even stories with
a first-person narrator can leave the identity of the narrator underdetermined, and
in this sense, even the final set of contexts can contain contexts with different
speakers. Only very special kinds of stories will result in a set of contexts which all
share the same speaker. For instance, if the narrator is supposed to be a real
historical person, all contexts will arguably have that person as their speaker. In
contrast, if the narrator carries a name but is not a historical person, it can be argued
that there might be different individuals who could carry that name, and hence
different contexts which fit the story could exhibit different values S P (c).
It might be useful to remind ourselves that even if the speaker S P (c) is fully
determined by the story, and hence the same for all possible contexts, this does
not entail that all properties of the speaker are also fixed, or that the speaker in
the story can only have properties which the actual historical person had as well.
The properties of S P (c) are still determined by the worlds of context W ORLD ( c),
and these imaginable worlds can show us the speaker with fictitious properties,
even if the fictitious speaker is supposed to be a historical person. (Among other
things, the individual will have the property of telling a story which, in actual
fact, the historical person never told.)
Speaker-oriented expressions. Even texts which don’t use the first-person

pronoun I can give information about the speaker. Emotive interjections (thank
heavens!, damn!, oh my god!), evaluative adverbs (luckily, sadly), epistemic ad-
verbs, modals, and particles (perhaps, maybe, certainly, ‘wohl’), emotive expres-
sions (at last!, X was SO smart/SUCH an idiot, What a dancer he was!) as well as
questions (Was he mad?) literally convey information about the person who
counts as the speaker of a sentence. In literary texts, this can either be the speak-
er-in-context (and usually, such words quickly create the impression of a narra-
tor) or it can be a protagonist, if the expression is used in direct speech or in (free)
indirect discourse. Both cases will be discussed in more detail in section IV. The
semantic analysis of these terms relates to the speaker, just as the semantic
analysis of the pronouns I and you relates to the speaker and addressee in the
utterance context. While we will sort out a few differences between these two
kinds of indexical reference, all such expressions and words convey information
about the speaker. For instance, consider a fictional story which starts with the
following sentence.
6 How lovely Panama is!

A reader A of (6.) will initially maintain the set of contexts Story(A)0 = {c | the
story could be told in c about W ORLD (c), by S P (c) at T IME (c) …} as usual. After
interpreting (6.) and updating Story(A)o with its content, A will have reduced the
set of all possible utterance contexts c to such ones where S P (c) is a great fan of
Panama in W ORLD ( c). Similar considerations hold for other expressions, and the
next section takes a closer look at them and the kind of information they con-
tribute to the meaning of an utterance or text.
There is an intuitive difference between first-person narratives/texts and
third-person narratives/texts where the speaker offers only indirect evidence
about his emotions and attitudes. In the first case, the text establishes a discourse
referent for the speaker, turns him officially into a member of staff, so to speak. In
the latter case, the speaker is not a member of staff, but the set of contexts c which
are such that the story could have been uttered there will reflect restrictions on
the speaker value. This difference can be reflected in discourse representation
theories, which were briefly mentioned at the end of section II.
Speaker-neutral fictional texts. Finally, there are fictional texts which use no
words or expressions which refer to S P (c) in any way. In this case, the set of
contexts which reflect the content of the story can cover any value for S P ( c). More
formally, neutral stories give rise to sets of contexts with the following property:
A story is speaker-neutral if for any context c in Story(A)n with speaker S P (c) = x, and
arbitrary other person y, there is a context c* in Story(A)n with S P (c*) = y, but W ORLD (c*) =
22
ORL D ( c), T IME (c*) = T IME (c), A D (c*) = A D (c), P LACE (c*) = P LACE (c).
W ORLD
This property reflects the intuition that the person who tells us the story could be
just any person at all. The text imposes no restrictions whatsoever on the possible
options for a speaker. The final set of contexts Story(A)n is ‘big’ in the sense that
for each of the worlds w which adhere to the story content, there are as many
contexts which could be those where the story was told as there are people in the
world – and each of these persons could have been the one who told us the story.
Remember that, like at earlier points, many options mean little information.
Story(A)n covers particularly many speakers simply because there is so little
information in the text as to what kind of person the speaker might be.
22 Literally the condition is too liberal. It must be ensured that y, like x, lives at a time which
coheres with the temporal information conveyed by in the story; i.e. y lives after the events of the
story if the story is written in past tense, etc. For the sake of clarity, I leave out these requirements.
168 Regine Eckardt
IV Information about the Speaker
This section takes a closer look at words and constructions which convey informa-
tion about the speaker, and do so without making use of the first-person pronoun
I/ich. We will first revisit a range of examples both in English and German. I will
then argue that the information conveyed is part of the literal content of sen-
tences. Finally, I sketch how they can be integrated into the analysis of story
content in section III.
Consider the following first two sentences of Thomas Mann’s novel Joseph
und seine Brüder (Joseph and his brothers).
7 Tief ist der Brunnen der Vergangenheit. Sollte man ihn nicht unergründlich nennen?
(lit: Deep is the well of past. Should not one call it bottomless?)
This short passage conveys information about the speaker-in-context: Whoever it

may be, the person establishes a bond with the addressee beyond mere informa-
tion transfer. He asks a rhetorical question. A question indicates that there is
someone who lacks knowledge and asks to be informed – even if only rhetori-
cally. As a result, the reader immediately is invited to imagine a narrator. The
novel consistently uses the pronoun we in reflective passages, which conveys the
fiction that reader and narrator are engaged in a four-volume long reflection on
the biblical story.23 The English translation renders the question in a form that
makes this reader-narrator company explicit from the very beginning:
8 Deep is the well of the past. Should not we call it bottomless?
With or without the use of a first-person pronoun, questions in texts convey the
information that the speaker, whoever it may be, is asking for information.
Let us look at more indications for speakers’ attitudes. The following sen-
tences are the beginning of Selma Lagerlöf’s tale The Adventures of Niels (Niels
Holgersson’s underlige resa genom Sverge) in the German and English version.
9 Es war einmal ein Junge. Er war ungefähr vierzehn Jahre alt, groß und gut gewachsen
und flachshaarig.
23 It remains to be discussed whether the reader, more concisely, imagines that Thomas Mann
wants to engage in a four-volume discussion with her. Even this Thomas Mann will be hypothe-
tical, though, a Thomas Mann in counterfactual worlds where true two-way exchange between
reader and narrator is possible.
10 Once there was a boy. He was – let us say – something like fourteen years old; long and
loose-jointed and towheaded.
Both passages express uncertainty about the age of the boy. The German passage
uses ungefähr (‘roughly’), which leaves it open whether the speaker has to guess the
age or considers the exact age to be irrelevant for the reader. The English passage is
more explicit in its reference to the speaker, as it uses the phrase let us say, which
contains the pronoun us (even though it can be debated whether the pronoun
actually refers to the speaker in a phrase like this). The entire novel conveys the
sense that some narrating individual is responsible for the selection of information,
comments, and evaluatives. Interestingly, the German version of the novel never
uses second-person pronouns to locate the speaker, whereas the English transla-
tion occasionally refers to “us” or “we”. The next passages offer more examples. In
(11), both English and German implicitly refer to the speaker’s epistemic back-
ground. In (12), the German version makes pronoun-free reference to the speaker
whereas the same passage in English makes reference to the narrator explicit.
11 (The boy watches his parents leave for church and believes that they congratulate
themselves for having ordered him to read the Bible.)
German version: Aber der Vater und die Mutter wünschten sich sicherlich
nicht Glück, sondern sie waren ganz betrübt.
English version: But his father and mother were certainly not congratulating themselves
upon anything of the sort; but, on the contrary, they were very
much distressed.
12 (Wild geese are flying over Niels Holgersson’s farm.)

English version: It was, as we have said, an uncommonly fine day, with an atmosphere
that it must have been a real delight to fly in, so light and bracing.
German version: Es war, wie gesagt, ein überaus schöner Tag, und die Luft war so frisch
und leicht, dass es ein Vergnügen sein musste, darin zu fliegen.
The German parenthetical in (12) does not use the pronoun we but nevertheless
conveys a speaker commentary. The speaker refers back to an earlier statement
and takes it up again to continue the story. The English phrase “as we have said”
does the same, yet more explicitly.
A comparison with the Swedish original shows that Lagerlöf’s own reference
to the speaker was as implicit as in the German translation, at least in the
passages in (10) and (12).
13 a. Det var en gång en pojke. Han var så där en fjorton år gammal, lång och ranglig och
linhårig, (…).
lit: “… he was so there some fourteen years old”
170 Regine Eckardt
b. Det var, som sagt, en ofantligt vacker dag med en luft, som det måtte ha
varit en sann glädje att flyga i, så frisk och så lätt.
lit: “It was, as said, an uncommonly fine day …”
These examples suggest the following:

– Languages provide means to report comments by the speaker, with or without
the use of first-person pronouns.
– Different languages can omit pronominal reference to different degrees.
While German (and possibly, Swedish) often leaves the speaker implicit,
English tends to use more pronouns.24
But even English has speaker-oriented expressions which implicitly refer to the
speaker. One type of writing where such expressions occur with high frequency is
free indirect discourse. In such passages, speaker-oriented expressions report
feelings and comments of the speaking/thinking protagonist. The following ex-
amples illustrate this type of speaker reference. All are taken from Katherine
Mansfield’s short story “Miss Brill.” In each case, the speaker-oriented expres-
sion, used in free indirect speech, reflects Miss Brill’s thoughts.
14 She glanced, sideways, at the old couple. Perhaps they would go soon.
→ epistemic modals
15 Oh, how sweet it was to see them snap at her again from the red eiderdown!
→ exclamatives
16 [The nose] must have had a knock, somehow.

→ epistemic modality
17 Now there came a little “flutey” bit – very pretty! – a little chain of bright drops.
→ interjective evaluatives
18 The old people sat on the bench, still as statues. Never mind, there was always the crowd
to watch.
→ comparison, evaluation of contrasting assertions
19 …and such a funny old man with long whiskers hobbled along in time to the music and
was nearly knocked over by four girls walking abreast.
→ evaluative such-constructions
24 This is not intended as a characterization of English in general. What we can assess, at this
point, are preferred choices of professional translators of literature as to the stylistically optimal
way to render the content of a passage in English.
20 No doubt somebody would have noted if she hadn’t been there (…) No wonder! (…)
→ commentary by local speaking protagonist: Miss Brill.
In Mansfield’s short story, none of these expressions offer us information about

the narrator of the story. They are all couched in free indirect discourse and are
oriented to Miss Brill, the main character. This use is in fact quite typical for
speaker-oriented expressions in literary texts. They are frequently used in indirect
discourse in order to indicate that the passage has to be attributed to some
speaker. Usually, the content of the expression suggests that this speaker is not
supposed to be the narrator but, more plausibly, a protagonist. In free indirect
discourse, speaker-oriented expressions convey information about some speaker,
even though this is not the narrator. Yet, this confirms their function to convey
information about the speaker of a sentence.
While we cannot go through a comprehensive survey of all speaker-oriented
words of English, this list of examples should be sufficient to illustrate the
phenomenon. Of course, the novel also uses meta-linguistic means to indicate
passages reflecting Miss Brill’s thoughts: lack of words (a something, what was it?),
repetitions (or even – even cupboards!), self-corrections (no, not sadness), sound
imitations (tum-tum-tum tiddle-um!) as well as Miss Brill’s quoting other persons
around her. I will leave such speaker indicators aside. While their use indeed can
tell us something about the speaker (and in particular, indicate that the speaker is
most likely not the narrator at that point), they do so at a meta-level and not by
their literal meaning. For instance, there is nothing in the meaning of a something
which indicates that the speaker is lacking words.
Could not the expressions in (14)–(20) be meta-linguistic signals? If they
were, they might contribute to our knowledge about the utterance situation like
other meta-linguistic or non-linguistic signals do. For instance, a smile or a frown
can tell us a lot about the speaker’s attitude, and thereby narrow down the range
of possible utterance situations without counting as part of the utterance itself.
However, I propose that the expressions in (14)–(20) are part of the utterance and
add information to the utterance content:
– Many of them belong to grammatical categories which are well-integrated
into clause structure: adverbials, modal verbs, wh-constructions, and others.
– They all take part in semantic composition insofar as they take arguments
which are contributed by other parts of the sentence.
– Finally, they can be bound by quantifiers when they occur in examples like
the following:
21 Every one of the children called and reported ...
that, perhaps, they would come home soon
how sweet it was to be here
172 Regine Eckardt
that they must have gotten lost, somehow

that there was such a funny old man
that no doubt they would get home soon.
The examples show that the speaker parameter can be quantified over in the
matrix clause. In (21.a), we understand that each child individually expresses
epistemic uncertainty (‘perhaps’), (21.b) attributes individual surprise at the
sweetness, (21.c) individual epistemic necessity, etc. Quantificational dependen-
cies offer evidence that the respective parameter must be accessible in the logical
form of the sentence. We can conclude that the listed expressions refer to the
speaker at a linguistic level.
As a final type of speaker-oriented items, let me add German particles
(‘Abtönungspartikeln’). This category is widely used in German and more or less
absent in Modern English. German particles code intricate beliefs on the part of
the speaker about her own knowledge, the addressee’s knowledge, the current
train of thought, and rhetorical intentions. The following examples illustrate this.
22 Peter hat ja ein Auto. Er kann die Ski transportieren.

‘Peter owns ja a car. He can transport the skis.’
Contribution of ja:25
i. epistemic: the speaker believes that the addressee might know that Peter owns a
car.
ii. rhetorical intention: the speaker draws attention to the (possibly known) fact in
order to support an adjacent claim or proposal.
23 Wieso will Peter die Ski nicht bringen? Er hat doch ein Auto.
‘Why doesn’t Peter want to bring the skis? He owns doch a car.
Contribution of doch:26
25 The paraphrase summarizes various proposals in the literature, e.g. Angelika Kratzer, “Be-
yond ‘oups’ and ‘ouch’. How Descriptive and Expressive Meaning Interact”, Talk, Presented at the
Cornell Conference on Theories of Context Dependence, 1999. Available at Semantics Archive; Malte
Zimmermann, “Zum Wohl: Diskurspartikeln als Satztypmodifikatoren”, in: Linguistische Berichte
199/2004, pp. 1–35; Malte Zimmermann, “Discourse Particles”, in: Klaus v. Heusinger/Claudia
Maienborn/Paul Portner (eds.), Semantics. An International Handbook, Vol. 2, Berlin 2012,
pp. 2012–2024; Regine Eckardt, “Particles as Speaker Indexicals in Free Indirect Discourse”, in:
Lotte Hogeweg/Eric McCready (eds.), International Journal for Language Data Processing: Formal
Approaches to Discourse Particles and Modal Adverbs, 1/2012, pp. 99–119; and more. For German
particles in general, see Renate Pasch, Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren, Berlin 2003.
26 Drawing on Markus Egg, “Discourse Particles at the Semantics-Pragmatics Interface”, in:
Werner Abrahm/Elisabeth Leiss (eds), Modality and Theory of Mind Elements across Languages,
Berlin 2012, pp. 297–333; Zimmermann, “Particles”; Patrick Grosz, “German ‘doch’: An Element
that Triggers a Contrast Presupposition”, in: Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 46/
Speaker acknowledges that the host sentence ‘Peter owns a car’ conflicts with another
salient proposition in context, here plausibly ‘Peter doesn’t want to bring the skis’.
In the final part of this section, I will briefly sketch semantic analyses for a few
speaker-oriented items, and spell out in what respect such speaker-oriented items
differ from personal pronouns (I/ich, we/wir), aiming at an integrated theory of
reference to the speaker. As in earlier sections, I will assume a domain of contexts
Dc and functions S P , A D , N OW , H ERE , W ORLD that map each context c to its
speaker, its addressee, its time, its place, and the world in which it occurs.
We will first consider speaker-oriented items which comment on the whole
sentence S. (24) illustrates this with the German adverb leider and English regret-
tably.
24 Leider hat Peter kein Auto.

Regrettably, Peter does not have a car.
The message of these sentences is two-fold. They are used to assert the content of
S (“Peter does not have a car”) and they report the speaker’s momentary attitude
about this fact.
24.a Regrettably + “Peter does not have a car”

asserts:
ORL D ( c) is such that Peter does not have a car at N OW (c)
W ORLD
In W ORLD (c), S P (c) regrets at N OW (c) the content of “Peter does not have a
car”.
The same analysis applies to German leider. The contribution of (24.) to a story in
German or English will hence consist in the following two restrictions on the sets
of contexts in which that story might be told:
{ c | W ORLD ( c) is such that Peter does not have a car at N OW (c)}

{ c | In W ORLD (c), S P (c) regrets at N OW (c) the content of “Peter does not have a car”.}
Epistemic modal expressions relate the content of the sentence S to the speaker’s
beliefs.
2010; Elena Karagjosova, “Adverbial ‘doch’ and the Notion of Contrast”, in: B. Behrens/C. Fabri-
cius-Hansen (eds.), Oslo Studies of Language 1: Structuring information in discourse: The explicit/
implicit dimension, Oslo 2009, pp. 131–148; and others.
174 Regine Eckardt
25 Perhaps, Peter does not have a car.

Peter might not have a car.
Vielleicht hat Peter kein Auto.
These sentences convey the following content:27
25.a In W ORLD (c), the worlds which S P (c) believes could be the real world include some w’
where Peter does not own a car in w’.
This is the restriction on possible contexts that emerges:
{c | W ORLD (c) is such that the worlds which S P (c) believes could be the real world include
some w’ where Peter does not own a car in w’}
Obviously, this information may trigger further inferences by the reader. If the
speaker is reliable and trustworthy, the reader will infer that the context itself
might be such that Peter does not own a car in W ORLD (c).
The contribution of ja illustrates that commentaries can also refer to the
addressee, or at least the speaker’s beliefs about the addressee.
26 Peter hat ja ein Auto.

Peter has ja a car.
This is the content of (26.):
26.a W ORLD
ORL D (c) is such that Peter owns a car at N OW (c)
ORL D (c) is such that S P (c) believes that A D (c) could know ‘that Peter owns a car’
W ORLD
S P (c) plans to use the fact ‘that Peter owns a car’ to support another claim.
The particle ja expresses that the speaker is highly aware of the details of the on-
going conversation, and is planning the course of argumentation. A wide range of
particles in German convey the speaker’s awareness of the utterance situation.
Emphatic intensifiers like be so smart or be such an idiot have been analysed
as expressing the speaker’s surprise or emotional involvement about qualities.28
Let us take a look at an example:
27 I am adopting a standard treatment of modality in terms of possible worlds. For an accessible

introduction see Paul Portner, Modality, Oxford 2009.
28 For a detailed analysis, the reader is referred to Jessica Rett, “A Degree Account of Exclama-
tives”, in: Proceedings of SALT, 18/2008, pp. 601–618, and references therein.
27 Peter was SO smart.
The use of SO conveys the following content (which compositionally builds on the
meanings of “Peter”, “was” and “smart”):
27.a W ORLD
ORL D (c) is such that Peter exhibits smartness to a high degree d
S P (c) believes that d is a high degree of smartness, and is emotionally moved
in W ORLD (c) at time N OW ( c) about d.
Again, we see how sentence (27) contributes facts about the world in which the
story is told (Peter is very smart) and at the same time facts about the interlocu-
tors, specifically the speaker and her surprise.
Speaker commentaries in English have not so far been extensively discussed
in the literature. Let me therefore speculate about the contribution of an expres-
sion like no wonder to the utterance “No wonder, S”. The message is more
elaborate than a plain “S holds true, which does not surprise me”. This can be
tested when we try to use ‘no wonder’ in various contexts.
Imagine that you are visiting England. You wake up in the morning and open
the curtain. It is raining. You have strong beliefs about the English climate, and
have been told that it rains most of the time. So the weather does not surprise you.
Still, you could not in this situation utter (28).
28 #No wonder it is raining.
# is used to mark that the sentence is grammatical but would be inappropriate in

the described situation.
If we study the kind of situation in which no wonder can be used appropriately,
the following picture emerges. The expression indicates a complex inferential
process in the speaker’s mind. The speaker must have known S before (even if she
may not have asserted it so far). The speaker has just learned another fact. And this
new, other fact makes S much more plausible, less surprising than it was without
this other piece of information. An appropriate situation to use (28) could look as
follows: You have strong beliefs about the English climate and have been told that
it rains all the time. You are on a trip around the world under the care of your well-
organized partner. You have just landed in a country the name of which you don’t
know. The weather, obviously, is awful. The pilot of the aircraft announces: “We
have now safely landed at Heathrow airport. Welcome to England.” At this point, you
put two and two together and utter (29).
29 No wonder it is raining.
176 Regine Eckardt
The paraphrase in (29.a) spells out the content of “no wonder” in terms of speaker
belief.
29.a No wonder S
asserts:
S is true in the utterance context c.
S P (c) knew that S.
S P (c) has just learned or found out something T which makes S much more likely.29
As (29.a) reveals, the English no wonder conveys very private information about
the speaker and his increased knowledge. If a fictional text were to use the
expression, the reader would immediately understand that the evoked utterance
situation is one where the fictitious speaker gains new insights while speaking.
This restriction on possible speakers in c could be sufficient to create the fiction of
a narrator even without the use of pronouns I or we.
Pronouns like I and we have long been discussed as indexical expressions
which refer to the speaker. In the present section, we have seen speaker-oriented
expressions of a different kind. Even though they clearly refer to the speaker of the
utterance (and sometimes even the addressee), they are not traditionally listed in
the literature on indexicality. Let me end this section by comparing classical
indexicals (in languages like English and German) to speaker-oriented items. One
major property of indexicals in English and German is that they never shift
reference. Wherever they are used, they always refer to the “true external” speaker.
30 I love chocolate.
Peter said that I liked chocolate.
Tom believes that I like chocolate.
Sue claimed that Tom believes that I like chocolate.
Sue hesitated. I seemed to like chocolate, she thought.
The pronoun I refers unambiguously to the person who utters the sentence. The
same holds true for you, for the use of the third-person feature (and for utterance
time, which, however, requires a more extensive discussion). The sole exception
is posed by quoted speech – which, naturally, depicts the exact words of another
person and hence constitutes a different case.
Matters are very different when we consider the use of a speaker-oriented
commentary like regrettably in embedded speech contexts.
29 Readers who love probability theory could spell this out as P(S|T) > P(S): the conditional
likelihood of S, given that T, is higher than the likelihood that S.
31 a. Peter said that, regrettably, I liked chocolate.

b. Sue claimed that Tom, regrettably, believed that I like chocolate.
c. Sue hesitated. Regrettably, I seemed to like chocolate, she thought.
What we observe is that the experiencer of regret can be Peter in (31.a), can be Sue
in (31.b) and must be Sue in (31.c). Unlike in the case of true indexicals, the
orientation of commentaries can shift away from the person who “really” utters
the sentence.
If we want to devise a full analysis of how sentence content refers to the context
of utterance, we have to implement context dependence in two different modes.
One mode will have to follow Kaplan and others who restrict attention to indexicals
which determine reference, based on utterance contexts.30 This mode must always
rigidly refer to the external utterance context. The other mode has to allow for more
flexibility, including the option to shift reference to other speakers, and including
the option to quantify over these speakers. The effect is once again illustrated in
(32), whereas first person pronouns in (33) do not show this dependency.
32 Every guest called and said that regrettably, his room was the worst.
= different regrets, different rooms for different guests
33 Every guest called and said that my room was the worst.
= only one room: the external speaker’s
A full analysis of two modes of context sensitivity will require spelling out the
exact treatment of context parameters at the interface between syntax and mean-
ing. We need to ensure that eventually, all context-referring expressions are
attributed to the correct kind of context, and offer information about the right
kind of speaker. While such a treatment is feasible, its details do not contribute to
the topic of the present paper.31
30 See Kaplan, “Demonstratives”.

31 Examples of possible mappings from syntax to semantics/pragmatics have been spelled out in
Philippe Schlenker, “A Plea for Monsters”, in: Linguistics & Philosophy, 26/2003, pp. 29–120;
Philippe Schlenker, “Context of Thought and Context of Utterance. A Note on Free Indirect
Discourse and the Historical Present”, in: Mind and Language, 19/2004, pp. 279–304; Yael Sharvit,
“The puzzle of free indirect discourse”, in: Linguistics and Philosophy, 31/2008, pp. 353–395.
Eckardt, “Particles”; the empirical challenges posed by shiftable indexicals are discussed in
Philippe Schlenker, Propositional Attitudes and Indexicality (A Cross-Categorial Approach) [Diss.
MIT], 1999; Schlenker, “Indexicals”; as well as in the literature on sign language where indexicals
show patterns of use which differ substantially from those common in spoken languages.
178 Regine Eckardt
V Story Contents
This section aims to illustrate the proposed analysis on the basis of a small sample
of texts. We will look at texts without reference to the speaker, texts which use first-
person pronouns, and texts which use speaker-oriented expressions. I will more-
over illustrate how the same text differs in content, depending on whether it is part
of a real face-to-face communication or read as fiction. Finally, we return to the
question how the present analysis can reconcile the universal use of contexts with
the observation that sometimes, but not always, a text creates the fiction of a
narrator.
Our starting point will be another brief passage from the book The Wonderful
Adventures of Nils (Nils Holgersson’s underbara resa genom Sverige) by Selma
Lagerlöf. The novel is written in a manner which creates the strong impression of
being told by someone, without explicit reference to a narrator by first-person
pronouns (at least in the Swedish original, as well as the official German transla-
tion). Going through the text, it becomes clear that Lagerlöf achieves this effect by
the occasional use of speaker-oriented expressions. The basic passage in (34)/(35)
was chosen because it contains two such expressions, both epistemic modals in
English; the German version contains one modal particle and a modal adverb.
The English passage provides more context.
34 [Nils Holgersson] waded forward between some white anemone-stems – which were so
high they reached to his chin – when he felt that someone caught hold of him from behind,
and tried to lift him up. He turned round and saw that a crow had grabbed him by the
shirt-band. [a] He tried to break loose, but before this was possible, another crow ran up,
gripped him by the stocking, and knocked him over. [b] If Nils Holgersson had immediately
cried for help, the white goosey-gander certainly would have been able to save him; but the
boy probably thought that he could protect himself, unaided, against a couple of crows.
(The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, Episode April 13th. Selma Lagerlöf)
35 [a] [Nils Holgersson] versuchte, sich loszureißen; aber ehe ihm dies gelang, eilte noch eine
Krähe herbei, biss sich in einem von seinen Strümpfen fest und riss ihn zu Boden. [b] Wenn
der Junge sogleich um Hilfe geschrien hätte, wäre es dem Gänserich wohl gelungen, ihn zu
befreien. Aber der Junge dachte wahrscheinlich, mit ein paar Krähen müsse er es allein
aufnehmen können.
First, I render the restrictions on context which are conveyed by [a], a passage
which does not contain speaker oriented expressions, and [b], a passage with two
epistemic modals (English).
34.a {c | S P (c) lives at T IME (c), which is later than the events at hand;
in W ORLD ( c), N.H. tries to break loose;
in W ORLD (c), this is interrupted by a crow – different from any

aforementioned crow – who grips N.H. by the stocking
and knocks N.H. over}
34.b {c | S P (c) lives at T IME (c), which is later than the events at hand;
S P (c) in W ORL D ( c) is certain that ‘if N.H. had called for help, G.G.
would have rescued him’;32
S P (c) in W ORL D (c) holds it possible that N.H. thought in W ORLD (c)
that he could fight a crow alone}
The literal content of passage [a] contains only minimal restrictions on possible
speakers who could have told it. As the past tense indicates, the speaker must tell
(and hence, live) after the time when Nils’ adventure takes place.33 The content of
passage [b] places more limits on the choice of possible speakers. In any world w
which fits the story content so far, the range of possible speakers is delimited to
those who maintain certain beliefs about Niels and hypotheses about counter-
factual courses of events.
Let us next see how the content in [a] and [b] integrates with the reader’s or
hearer’s knowledge in different situations of listening or reading the story. First,
imagine that the story is being told by Selma Lagerlöf to her pupil Mats. This is
what Mats knows about possible contexts at the outset.
Storyo(Mats) = { c | S P (c)=Selma.Lagerlöf and A D (c)=Mats/myself and

ORL D (c) is such that Sweden’s history and geography
W ORLD
are like in the actual world;
ORL D (c) ≠ actual world }
but W ORLD
At the point of the story in (34), Mats updates the current story set, a subset of
Storyo(Mats), by [a] and [b]. The set of contexts in [b] will contribute that Selma
Lagerlöf has certain beliefs about the motives of Niels Holgersson and about coun-
terfactual alternative courses of events. Yet, the choice of speaker is not further de-
limited at this point, because it has been clear all along that the speaker is Selma
32 Technically, this conditional requires another quantification over possible worlds: ‘In all
worlds close to the speaker’s world where N.H. calls for help quickly, G.G. rescues N.H. with
success’. See David Lewis, Counterfactuals, Oxford 1973; Kratzer, “Descriptive and Expressive
Meaning”; Portner, Modality, for standard accounts of counterfactuals.
33 This is consistent with Käte Hamburger’s observation that in fiction, the past tense morphol-
ogy has lost its function to refer to the past: past tense is not related to any point in time which has
to do with the production or reception of the text. Past means neither “before the author wrote this”
nor “before you are reading this.” It is reduced to: “in whatever c this text could have been uttered,
c must be after the events which are reported” – if past tense is used, as in our example.
180 Regine Eckardt
Lagerlöf. Interestingly, both Mats and Selma Lagerlöf must be aware of the fact that
they are in fact play-acting. Given that Selma Lagerlöf will be the inventor of the pro-
tagonist Niels, as well as everything that happens to him, she cannot really be un-
certain about his motives. Both Mats and Selma act as if the story were real, and only
under this assumption does it make sense for Selma to express the beliefs at hand.
Let us next consider the case where Mats is reading the story in a book.
(Actually, the story was originally written as a geography textbook for Swedish
school children.) Mats is aware of the fact that the book must have been written
by someone. Yet, he also knows that schoolbook authors do not literally tell you
stories. On the other hand, he may have been told that this was a book about
Sweden’s landscapes and history. Hence, this is his starting point.
Storyo(Mats) = { c | W ORLD
ORL D (c) is such that Sweden’s history and geography
are like in the actual world;
ORL D (c) ≠ actual world }
but W ORLD
At the point of the story presented in (34), Mats will again intersect his current
story content with [a] and [b]. Both sets will further restrict the set of possible
worlds W ORLD (c) about which the story is told. For instance, [a] restricts choices
to those worlds where Niels is caught by crows – leaving aside worlds where he
cries for help fast and is rescued, among others. Passage [b], however, imposes
more restrictions on the speaker. Choices are delimited to those c where the
speaker maintains two beliefs: First, that Niels very likely could have been rescued
under certain circumstances. Second, that Niels perhaps acted wrongly out of
pride. If Mats trusts the speaker, he can delimit the choice of possible contexts c
further to those where Niels indeed could have been rescued, and where Niels
indeed acted wrongly out of pride. But this will be Mats’ inference from what has
been presented as the beliefs of the speaker.
Finally, let us consider an alternative version of passage [b]. Information
about the speaker could also be rendered by making use of the first-person
pronoun. The passage might look like this:
36 If Nils Holgersson had immediately cried for help, I am certain that the white goosey-
gander would have been able to save him; but I guess that the boy thought that he
could protect himself, unaided, against a couple of crows.
The set of utterance contexts which is covered by (36) is more or less identical to
the set (34.b). What is different, though, is the status of the narrator as a “member
of staff.” Dynamic theories of meaning capture members of staff as discourse
referents. Discourse referents reflect which persons and things were explicitly
introduced in the story, and regulate anaphoric cross-referencing in texts. As soon

as the text refers to S P (c) with the pronoun I, a discourse referent for the speaker
will be generated and carried on in the (dynamic) representation of the text. In a
dynamic version of the present account, we could hence track the differences in
status of the speaker in (34) and (36) even though the content conveyed about the
speaker remains the same in both versions.
Careful readers might point out that we have broadened the notion of ‘story
content’. Asked about the content of Niels Holgersson, we would start listing his
adventures and maybe also facts about Sweden’s geography and history – but we
would not call ‘that someone is telling us this who is not sure about Niels’ motives
sometimes’ part of the content, in the traditional sense of the word. In the present
account, the content of fictional stories is taken in a broad sense: A story conveys
its plot – events, actions, adventures, happenings – and, in addition, a more or
less vivid story about the situation in which someone tells it to me. Sometimes it
may be useful to distinguish between broad and narrow story content. I hope that
no confusion arises in the present paper.
VI Speakers and Narrators
Let us return to the question where narrators come from. The present account of
story content is based on the assumption that stories generate the set of possible
contexts (including worlds, speakers, addressee, time, and place) in and about
which they can truthfully be told.
Section II introduced the world-based version of the analysis that goes back
to Stalnaker.34 It assumes that sentence meanings are captured by the sets of
imaginable worlds in which the sentence would be true. The content of a story is
represented by the set of imaginable worlds where all sentences of the story (in
the respective order) are true. The story hence restricts the set of all imaginable
worlds to those which could be the world in which the story took place. The less
specific the story, the more choices of worlds are left open. Section III extended
the account to include context information. According to the new account, story
contents are sets of possible contexts, namely those contexts c which are such
that S P (c) could be the person who told the story, A D (c) could be the person who
listens or reads, T IME (c) could be the time of the telling and P LACE (c) could be the
location where the story is being told. Moreover, c is linked to W ORLD (c), the world
about which the story is told – and hence, a world where the story is true.
34 Stalnaker, “Assertion”; Stalnaker, Context; Stalnaker, “Common Ground”.

182 Regine Eckardt
The simpler account can be mapped onto this richer account, if we make the
additional assumption that in a Stalnaker type theory, speaker A, addressee B,
time T, and place P are known to both interlocutors. If this is the case, then there
is a one-to-one correspondence between possible story worlds w in the simpler
account, and possible story contexts in the richer account: Each world w in the
simpler version of story content will correspond to the one context c where S P (c) =
A, A D (c) = B, T IME (c) = T, P LACE (c) = P (i.e. the local situation looks as both A and
B know it), and W ORLD (c) = w.
The richer account covers information about the speaker, including but not
limited to first-person narrations. In section IV, we surveyed a range of known
linguistic expressions that implicitly refer to the speaker. We restricted attention
to linguistic reference to the speaker. What was systematically excluded from
consideration are restrictions which draw on opinions expressed, positions de-
fended, moral or religious content etc. While these add many more options to
restrict the choice of possible speakers, it requires more than linguistic analysis to
argue that they have this effect.
The account supposes that story content always covers a huge range of
imaginable contexts, which all include a speaker. Doesn’t this predict that stories
always have a narrator? And is not this prediction falsified by the observation that
many stories do not create the fiction of a narrator at all?
In fact, the account does not predict the fiction of a narrator. Many options
always mean little knowledge, which can come close to no knowledge at all. If the
content of a story could have been told by anybody, the illusion of a protagonist
“somebody” simply does not arise.
The difference between little and more information can be illustrated on the
basis of the passages by Selma Lagerlöf in section V. Consider once again the sets
[a] and [b] which reflected speaker-neutral and speaker-referring content, respec-
tively.
[a] = {c | S P (c) lives at T IME (c), which is later than the events at hand;
in W ORLD ( c), the person N.H. tries to break loose;
in W ORLD (c), this is interrupted by a crow – different from any
aforementioned crow – who grips N.H. by the stocking
and knocks N.H. over}
[b] = {c | S P (c) lives at T IME (c), which is later than the events at hand;
S P (c) in W ORL D ( c) is certain that ‘if N.H. had called for help, G.G.
would have rescued him’;
S P (c) in W ORL D (c) holds it possible that N.H. thought in W ORL D (c)
that he could fight a crow alone}
These sets have distinct properties, and [a] is ‘richer’ than [b] in the following
sense:
For any c1 in [a], and any person Z who lives in W ORLD (c1) around T IME ( c1), there is a context
c2 in [a] such that S P (c2) = Z and c2 is like c1 otherwise.
For a context c3 in [b], however, we can find persons Y in W ORL D (c3) who live at the right
time but could not have been the speaker: i.e. there is no c4 in [b] such that S P (c4) = Y and c4
is like c3 otherwise. For instance, if a person Y does not believe in W ORLD (c3) that Niels could
have acted wrongly out of pride, Y is not an option as a speaker. In this sense, the set of
contexts in [b] is more restricted than [a].
What we observe – and this is an empirical point, not a theoretical prediction – is

that too few restrictions may be insufficient to create the fiction of a narrator, in
spite of the fact that the formal speaker parameter is in play. The situation is,
perhaps, comparable to point of view in movies. Each shot defines a position for
the viewer and a direction in which he or she would look. In this sense, a point of
view is always present throughout the movie. However, only very specific choices
of subsequent points of view are suited to create the illusion that we are seeing
the world through the eyes of one specific person, that there is a ‘seer’ in analogy
to the narrator in texts.35 In movies, putting your camera somewhere does not
always create the fiction that someone was watching from this position. In
narrations, linking the story to a speaker does not always create the fiction that
someone is telling me this.
Does a story create the fiction of a narrator? This remains the volitional choice
of the person who words the story: the author.
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Tobias Klauk, Göttingen
Serious Speech Acts in Fictional Works
I am interested in a class of related cases in which the utterance of a sentence in a
fictional work can be understood as a serious speech act. Near the end of his
paper “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse” Searle famously introduces
such cases:
Sometimes the author of a fictional story will insert utterances in the story which are not
fictional and not part of the story. To take a famous example, Tolstoy begins Anna Karenina
with the sentence “Happy families are all happy in the same way, unhappy families
unhappy in their separate, different ways.” That, I take it, is not a fictional but a serious
utterance. It is a genuine assertion. It is part of the novel but not part of the fictional story.
[…] Such examples compel us to make a final distinction, that between a work of fiction and
fictional discourse. A work of fiction need not consist entirely of, and in general will not
consist entirely of, fictional discourse.1
Searle here opposes an argument which he never explicitly states, but which
could be formulated as follows:
1. In fictional discourse, authors only pretend to make serious utterances.
2. Fictional works are defined by containing only fictional discourse.
3. Authors can make serious utterances in fictional works.
4. An utterance cannot be both serious and pretended.
5. Since (1)‒(4) are incompatible, we should give up (1), i.e. the central tenet of
Searle’s theory of fictional discourse.
Searle instead denies premise (2) by allowing that fictional works can contain
nonfictional discourse. And surely, (2) is wrong. Nobody believes that fictional
works cannot contain serious utterances – during the course of this essay, I will
mention several examples of such utterances.
However, giving up (2) cannot save Searle’s theory if we can find examples of
serious utterances in fictional discourse. Such examples can be found, and the
main part of this essay will be devoted to analyzing such cases.2 Before we can do
1 John R. Searle, “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse”, in: New Literary History, 6/1975,
pp. 319–332, pp. 331f.
2 Searle’s own example, the first sentence of Anna Karenina, is not of this type. While it will not
concern us any further, Searle’s own analysis of the example has puzzled generations of his
readers. It is not at all plausible to think that Tolstoy wanted to make a serious assertion in writing
the first sentence of Anna Karenina. Instead, he might have wanted readers to consider the first
188 Tobias Klauk
that, we need to get rid of some technical difficulties and I will explain in a
slightly more detailed way what the aims of the essay are.
I start with the first technical difficulty. Notice that for Searle, fictional
discourse is characterized by the fact that the normal speech act rules are not
fulfilled. He then goes on to claim that in fictional discourse authors pretend to
perform various speech acts without actually performing them. Whatever one
might think about the idea of ‘pretense’ in this context, most of the time Searle
just presupposes that in fictional discourse the normal speech act rules are not
fulfilled. ‘Fictional discourse’ is therefore a terminus technicus which is, among
other things, defined by the non-fulfillment of the usual speech act rules. If Searle
is read this way, no examples of serious utterances can exist in fictional dis-
course – that is just how ‘fictional discourse’ is defined.
In order for the question whether there are cases of serious speech acts in
fictional discourse to become interesting, then, one needs to disallow this stipula-
tive move, which ignores any pretheoretical intuitions concerning the cases. If we
go back to the introductory quote by Searle, we can see that in some places he wants
to take such pretheoretic intuitions into account by thinking of fictional discourse
as being “part of the story.” What is meant here is that some sentences contribute to
the story, while others don’t. Only the first type counts as fictional discourse.
For reasons beyond the scope of this essay I find it helpful to understand
fictionality not as a discourse property: In this essay, fictionality is treated only as
a property of works, not of single utterances. This is a natural consequence of the
view that the fictionality of works cannot be explained by reducing it to the
properties of its parts.3 The view I am thereby rejecting would basically force one
to locate all properties of fictionality on the level of single utterances. It seems to
me that previous attempts to explain the existence of serious utterances in fiction
tend to suffer from this misconception.4
All of this allows me to say more precisely in which discourse properties I am
interested. Instead of seeking to determine the fictionality of some stretch of
discourse, this essay centers on two properties of utterances. Firstly, I want to
know if an utterance makes for a serious speech act. And secondly, I want to
know if the utterance contributes to the fiction (to the world of the fiction, to the
story). The interesting cases are of course those in which both properties are
sentence or he might have wanted to set the mood for the novel. See Peter Lamarque/Stein
Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature, Oxford 1994, p. 66.
3 This view is brought forward and backed by persuasive arguments by Stacie Friend, “Fiction as
a Genre”, in: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 112/2012, pp. 179–209.
4 See, e.g., Searle’s own treatment in Searle, “Logical Status” or Lamarque/Olsen, Truth,
pp. 62–76.
present. Ultimately, then, I am interested in the question of how it is possible to

have cases of serious utterances which contribute to a work’s fiction. In other
words, since, e.g., assertions are normally understood to be about our world
alone – how then can utterances about the world of the story be assertions?5
The great benefit of locating fictionality solely on the level of works is that we
are free to analyze these relatively simple properties of utterances without having
to argue that it is these properties which make the utterance and, in combination
of all utterances in the fictional work, the work itself fictional.
What does it mean that an utterance contributes to the fiction? It seems to me
that contributing to the fiction is best spelled out in terms of prescriptions to
imagine. Readers are asked/justified/authorized to engage in games of make-
believe. In the spirit of Searle’s general speech act theory (but very much against
his specific ideas concerning fiction), we can even understand these prescriptions
to imagine as indirect speech acts that accompany other speech acts. By uttering
p in the context of a fictional work, the author (whatever other speech act she
might or might not perform) often makes the request that readers imagine that
p. Notice that this does not commit us to understanding prescriptions to imagine
or a special type of speech act as sufficient for defining fictionality.6
The second technical difficulty which needs to be addressed concerns
Searle’s initial motivation and his notion of pretense. Consider assertions and
their counterparts in fiction. How can it be that by uttering “The king was
friendly” normally a speaker commits himself to the truth of the sentence, but
that he does not do so if he utters it as part of a work of fiction? Searle’s well-
known solution to this problem is that in fictional works authors only pretend to
5 Edgar Onea has called my attention to a different solution from the one proposed in this paper:
Maybe we can understand speech acts as carrying a hidden variable whose value fixes the world
the speech act is about. Typically speech acts are about our world. But an assertion might also be
about a fictitious world, or even about more than one world. The elegance of this solution is
rivaled only by its radicalness: In stark contrast to most theories of fiction, utterances in fictional
contexts are understood as normal speech acts which just differ in the value of the hidden
variable. Whatever its merits and problems, the alternative solution so far is too permissive: It
does not explain why we often cannot read utterances in fictions as assertions about our world.
6 Nothing in this essay depends on understanding prescriptions to imagine as a type of indirect
speech act. Walton, who made famous the idea of prescriptions to imagine, explicitly does not
understand them as speech acts, mostly because his theory is intended to also cover nonlinguistic
works of art. See Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, Cambridge, Mass., 1990, pp. 81–85.
For a clear formulation of the view that prescriptions to imagine can be understood as (speech)
acts, see e.g. Friend, “Fiction”, p. 182. See Sarah Hoffmann, “Fiction as Action”, in: Philosophia,
31/2004, pp. 513–529, p. 520, for a modern version of Searle’s argument that there is no speech act
distinctive to fiction.
190 Tobias Klauk
assert, ask, request, etc. It is important for our project to understand this notion of
pretense. Searle’s official explanation is innocent enough. Pretending to assert
that p just means to utter a sentence p, which under the conditions of nonfiction
would be understood as an assertion, without thereby asserting that p.
I find it useful to think of these [speech act] rules as rules correlating words (or sentences) to
the world. Think of them as vertical rules that establish connections between language and
reality. Now what makes fiction possible, I suggest, is a set of extralinguistic, nonsemantic
conventions that break the connection between words and the world established by the
rules mentioned earlier. Think of the conventions of fictional discourse as a set of horizontal
conventions that break the connections established by the vertical rules. They suspend the
normal requirements established by these rules.7
Now something like this is certainly true and one can understand, e.g., the
institutional theory of fiction as the attempt to spell out the horizontal conven-
tions mentioned by Searle.8 Again, ‘pretense’ can be understood here as ‘going
through the motions’ without actually doing the act in question. Unfortunately,
Searle’s examples, first-person narrators and drama, allow readers to forget about
this innocent notion of pretense. Quoting a passage from Conan Doyle’s Sherlock
Holmes stories, Searle remarks:
In this passage Sir Arthur is not simply pretending to make assertions, but he is pretending
to be John Watson, M.D., retired officer of the Afghan campaign making assertions about his
friend Sherlock Holmes. That is, in first-person narratives, the author often pretends to be
someone else making assertions.9
It is easy to forget that ‘pretending to be Watson’ means nothing more than that
Conan Doyle intends readers (according to the conventions of fiction) to imagine
that the text is written by Watson. Conan Doyle does not necessarily want readers
to think that he is Watson. Searle should especially not be understood here as
claiming that every fictional work has a fictional narrator, someone who the
author pretends to be, or whose speech acts the author pretends to perform. It
seems to me that Searle himself, when discussing serious speech acts in fictional
works, falls prey to something like this error. That maybe would explain why he
never considers a straightforward solution to cases of serious utterances which
contribute to the story: That the conventions of fiction in general suspend the
normal requirements of the speech act rules is perfectly compatible with the idea
7 Searle, “Logical Status”, p. 326.

8 See, e.g., Lamarque/Olsen, Truth.
that in some cases the conventions of fiction themselves can be overruled by more
local conventions, which reinstitute the original speech act conventions.
In fact, this is exactly the solution brought forward in this essay. I believe that
Searle was right in thinking that in fictional works usually the normal speech act
conventions are suspended. This is one of the conventions of fiction. However,
further conventions exist which can locally trump the general convention. And
there are still more local conventions which in turn trump those conventions.
It seems to me that this is what Kendall Walton had in mind when he envisaged
a “genre of historical novel, in which authors are allowed no liberties with the facts
and in which they are understood to be asserting as fact whatever they write.”10 The
imaginary, local genre conventions suspend the more general conventions of
fiction, and thereby the original speech act rules for assertion are in force.
Walton’s imaginary case suffices as an example to establish that utterances
can contribute to a story while fulfilling the normal speech act conditions. Still
one can ask about the actual conventions which allow for serious speech acts that
contribute to fictions. In this essay I shall analyze some of them. Walton hints at
such an analysis when he claims that “[i]t was by means of making it fictional (in
my terms) that Napoleon invaded Russia that Tolstoy asserted that this event
actually did occur.”11 I shall attempt to answer the question how that is possible
and name the conventions which allow authors to make such assertions.
The last technical difficulty concerns the fact that in seeming contradiction to
his own analysis, Searle himself allows for serious speech acts which contribute to
the story, the idea being that speech acts can be conveyed by fictional text. A whole
text can be used to make an assertion or pose a question. And it is possible to
include these assertions in the text. Searle looks down on such cases as occurring
only in children’s books or “in tiresomely didactic authors,” without explaining
how these cases fit into his general account.12 We shall return to them below.
I Speech Acts
Before analyzing examples, let us shortly review Searle’s basic rules for ordinary
speech acts.13 Over the years Searle has put forward many slightly different
10 Walton, Mimesis, p. 79.

11 Ibid.
13 Apart from some minor comments and corrections, which I will give below, I am going to
assume that Searle’s formulations of the speech act rules more or less correctly capture the actual
language rules. While this is a useful assumption for the purposes of this essay, it has to be said
192 Tobias Klauk
formulations of these rules, but the general idea remains the same: Speech acts
are centrally characterized by their essential rule. Something is an assertion only
if it “[c]ounts as an undertaking to the effect that p represents an actual state of
affairs”14 or “the maker of an assertion commits himself to the truth of the
expressed proposition.”15 Something is a question only if it “[c]ounts as an
attempt to elicit this information from H,”16 a request if it “[c]ounts as an attempt
to get H to do A,”17 a piece of advice if it “[c]ounts as an undertaking to the effect
that A is in H’s best interest,”18 and a warning if it “[c]ounts as an undertaking to
the effect that E is not in H’s best interest.”19
In addition to the essential rule, Searle knows two further types of rules. The
first of these are preparatory rules, which in general are determined by the
essential rule.20 Let us review the preparatory rules for assertion, which say that
“the speaker must be in a position to provide evidence or reasons for the truth of
the expressed proposition” and “[t]he expressed proposition must not be ob-
viously true to both the speaker and the hearer in the context of utterance.”21 Both
of these rules call for explanation. Firstly, it seems to me that not every assertion
must be backed by the asserting person’s ability to give reasons for her belief or
claim. For example, people are often unable to state reasons for simple perceptual
beliefs. It is enough that speakers be entitled to their claims or beliefs, i.e.
warranted without being able to bring forth that warrant. Secondly, it is important
to understand that the second preparatory rule is meant to capture the idea that a
speech act should have a point – in this case, that normally it would be futile to
assert p if both hearer and speaker know perfectly well that the hearer knows p.
Nonetheless there are exceptions to this rule. A speaker giving a talk might e.g.
want to assert the obvious in order to remind his audience, or to introduce lesser
that it is also a dangerous assumption. I am especially doubtful if the speaker’s intentions need to
feature in the speech act rules. SDRT, e.g., tries to “use model-theoretic semantics instead of
intentions as the basis for distinguishing one speech act type from another.” Nicolas Asher/Alex
Lascarides, Logics of Conversation, Cambridge 2003, pp. 304–311. The actual formulation of the
speech act rules does not affect the argument of this essay as long as the rules can be trumped by
other, more local rules.
14 John R. Searle, Speech Acts, Cambridge 1969, p. 66.
16 Searle, Speech Acts, p. 66.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., p. 67.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., p. 69.
21 Searle, “Logical Status”, p. 322. Again, the formulation in Speech Acts, p. 66, is slightly
different.
known facts afterwards (“As you all know, p. However, you might not know that
also q.”). As Searle himself notes, while the essential rule is a constitutive rule,
the preparatory rules “take the form of quasi-imperatives.”22 Like Gricean rules
they can be broken, ignored or bent, and that means that the second of the
preparatory rules might not be fulfilled although the speaker asserts p. Most
speech acts have such an anti-obviousness rule, but the exceptions show that in
most cases it won’t be helpful in analyzing the fictional cases.
The second types of rule are sincerity rules. It is possible to assert, request,
question etc. insincerely. Speakers can lie, ask without wanting to know (or
wanting to find out if the hearer knows), request without trying to get the hearer
to do something, etc. If, on the other hand, a speech act is sincere, the (constitu-
tive) sincerity rule applies. A speaker asserts p sincerely only if he believes that p,
he sincerely requests A only if he wants the hearer to do A, etc.
To summarize, we have the constitutive essential rule which must be fulfilled
for a speech act to count as that particular type of speech act. We have prepara-
tory rules, which are not constitutive and therefore might not be followed
although the speech act still counts as an assertion, question, request, etc. And
we have sincerity rules, which guarantee that the speech act is sincere, i.e. which
cannot be broken while sincerely uttering the speech act.
Let us now turn to the peculiarities of indirect communication, i.e. commu-
nication in which speaker and hearer don’t have direct contact. This is important
since all examples which are discussed below are cases of indirect communica-
tion and we don’t want to confuse the effects of fiction with those of indirect
communication. Searle’s original speech act rules are written with oral commu-
nication in mind. Media like written texts, however, allow for spatiotemporal
distance between speakers and hearers. It seems that this rules out certain kinds
of speech acts, regardless of the fictionality or nonfictionality of the text. Ques-
tions are the most problematic case. For a speech act to count as a question, for
Searle it must count as an attempt to elicit information from the hearer, either
concerning the topic of the question or the information whether the hearer knows
the answer. All types of text to which readers are not conventionally supposed to
answer would therefore rule out questions. Compare rhetorical questions in a
newspaper with questions in a written exam (where real questions are possible
despite the spatiotemporal distance). Actually, I believe that while rhetorical
questions indeed function more like assertions, there exists a further type of
question Searle did not think of, namely hypophoras, questions which the speak-

194 Tobias Klauk
er himself answers and which are posed because the speaker expects the reader
to have those questions. We will soon analyze a fictional example.
Another effect of indirect communication is that the anti-obviousness rule,
which most speech acts have, seems fulfilled by default. If authors don’t know
their readers (and apart from some very sad cases no author knows all his readers)
then it is not obvious to them (as e.g. in the case of assertions) that the readers
don’t know p. The well-known remedy for this complication is the notion of an
intended audience. It seems that the anti-obviousness rule should be understood
to apply to the author and his intended audience.
II Disruptions of the Fictional Work and Paratexts
Let me begin analyzing examples by setting aside cases of serious speech acts in
fictional works which will not concern us any further. I am thinking of cases in
which utterances are spatiotemporally located in a work, but are not, in a narrow
sense, intended as a part of that work.
Imagine a father narrating a fictional bedtime story. Suddenly the telephone
rings. Our father says: “And then the dwarf said … Let me get that. I’ll be back in a
second. … On second thought, forget it, whoever it is can call again. … The dwarf
said: Is she dead?”23
The thoughts about answering the phone are uttered in the middle of a
fictional story. But it should be obvious that they constitute an interruption and
are neither part of the fiction nor part of the work. A policeman coming on stage,
asking the audience to keep calm and quietly leave the theater because there has
been a bomb threat, or a love letter left as a bookmark in a novel can be treated
the same: They utter or contain utterances which are located spatiotemporally in
a fictional work, but are not part of that work. We shall be solely concerned with
cases where the utterance in question is intended by the author to be part of the
work.
Now fictional works more often than not contain paratexts, which are in this
sense part of the work, but don’t constitute the main text. The utterance of such
paratexts typically fulfills the normal speech act conditions. For example, Robert
Hültner comments in an afterword on his Sommer der Gaukler:
So frei diese Erzählung mit historischen Fakten zuweilen umgeht, so beruht sie doch im
Kern auf einer wahren Begebenheit. Ein anonymer Reisender beschreibt in seinem Tagebuch
eine turbulente Schikaneder-Aufführung der ‘Agnes Bernauer’ im Jahr 1780, bei der das
23 The example is basically Lamarque and Olsen’s, Truth, p. 65.

Publikum eine Änderung des Stückes erzwang. Auch die zeitgenössische Berliner ‘Littera-
tur- und Theaterzeitung’ berichtete darüber.24
Such cases are not controversial, since paratexts are not part of a fictional work in
a narrow sense. Even if the distinction between a wide and narrow sense in which
something can be part of a fictional work cannot be drawn precisely, Searle
explicitly allows that fictional works can contain nonfictional utterances, as long
as they don’t contribute to the fictional story. Since real paratexts don’t do that,
we can therefore safely ignore them from here on.25
III Apostrophe
Maybe the most striking candidates for serious speech acts in fictional works are
apostrophes, i.e. passages in which readers are directly addressed. The phenom-
enon is ubiquitous and not at all restricted to fictional texts:
Why did people think this way? Why was sexual discipline presumed to be so fundamental
to the social order? If reader, you happen to be a member of the Iranian or Saudi Arabian
moral police, which even today enforce a similar ethos, you can probably guess the answer.
Otherwise, read on.26
There can be no doubt that the author Dabhoiwala, after posing two rhetorical
questions, addresses his readers. With the third sentence, Dabhoiwala, among
other things, asserts that today’s Iranian and Saudi Arabian moral police enforce
an ethos similar to that in England before 1600. He also jokes around by playfully
considering the possibility that members of those police forces might be among
his readers. In the last sentence of the quote, we may take Dabhoiwala to give
advice to his readers or to request of his readers that they read on. The details
don’t matter here.
24 “Although this narration from time to time treats the historical facts quite freely, at its core it
rests on a true event. An anonymous traveler depicts in his diary a turbulent performance of
‘Agnes Bernauer’, directed by Schikaneder, in 1780, during which the audience enforced an
alteration of the drama. The contemporary Berlin ‘Litteratur und Theaterzeitung’ also gave a
report.” Robert Hültner, Der Sommer der Gaukler, München 2005, p. 221 (all translations in this
article by T.K.).
25 Fake paratexts, fictionally written by fictional editors, do contribute to the fiction. However,
they also belong to the main text body of a fictional work and pose no distinct problems in our
context.
26 Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The Origins of Sex. A History of the First Sexual Revolution, London
2013, p. 27.
196 Tobias Klauk
Notice that this nonfictional example already exemplifies some complica-

tions which will accompany us from now on: The same sentence can be used to
perform several speech acts, it is often not entirely clear which speech act exactly
is performed, and one can use speech acts playfully, without committing oneself
to all the implicatures. With that in mind, let us turn to fictional cases:
Greff war Gemüsehändler. Doch lassen Sie sich nicht täuschen. Weder an Kartoffeln glaubte
er noch an Wirsingkohl, besaß aber dennoch umfassende Kenntnisse im Gemüseanbau, gab
sich gerne als Gärtner, Naturfreund, Vegetarier. Doch gerade weil Greff kein Fleisch aß, war
er kein echter Gemüsehändler. Es war ihm unmöglich, von Feldfrüchten wie von Feldfrüch-
ten zu sprechen.27
We are interested in sentence two, “don’t be deceived.” Someone seems to give

advice to the readers not to be deceived by Greff’s profession. However, it is
reasonably likely that it is not the author Günter Grass, but the fictional narrator
Oskar Matzerath, who has slightly muddled thoughts about vegetarianism and
who therefore sees the need to warn his readers. That is all grist to Searle’s mill:
Grass does not give advice but utters a sentence, which readers, according to the
conventions of fictionality, imagine to be uttered by Matzerath, and imagine
constituting advice given by Matzerath. No serious speech act takes place in the
example.
In a more complex example, Jean Paul delightfully plays with conventions
when he writes:
Ich nehme meinen historischen Faden wieder auf und befrage den Leser: was hält er von
Sebastians Weiber-Liebhaberei? Und wie erklärt er sich sie? – Wahrhaft-philosophisch
versetzt er: „Aus Klothilden: sie hat ihn durch Magnetisieren mit der ganzen Weiberwelt in
Rapport gesetzt; […] Ein Mann kann 26 Jahre kalt und seufzerlos in seinem Bücherstaube
sitzen; hat er aber den Äther der Liebe einmal geatmet: so ist das eirunde Loch des Herzens
auf immer zu, und er muß heraus in die Himmelluft und beständig nach ihr schnappen, wie
ich in den künftigen Hundposttagen sicherlich sehe.“ Einen närrischen philosophischen Stil
hat sich der Leser angewöhnt; aber es ist wahr; […].28
27 “Greff was a greengrocer. But don’t be deceived. He believed neither in potatoes nor in savoy
cabbage, although he had a wide gardening knowledge, liked to present himself as gardener,
friend of nature, vegetarian. But precisely because Greff ate no meat, he was not a real green-
grocer. He wasn’t able to talk of field crops as field crops.” Günter Grass, Die Blechtrommel,
Neuwied 1959, p. 276.
28 “I take up my historic thread and ask the reader: What does he think of Sebastian’s love
affairs? And how does he explain them? – Truly philosophically he replies: ‘Through Klothilde:
By magnetizing him she has built rapport to the world of women; […] A man can sit cold and
without sighing in book dust for 26 years; but once he has breathed the ether of love, the egg-
shaped hole of the heart is closed forever and he needs to go out into the free air and keep panting
The apostrophe comes in the form of two questions, which the readers cannot
answer – at least not in a way that Jean Paul could hear. Knowing this, Jean Paul
invents the reader’s response and then mocks the style of the reader’s alleged
answer; the questions therefore are hypophoras. The character Sebastian, after
falling in love with Klothilde, has nonetheless succumbed to the charms of
another woman. Now the author, fearing the reaction of his readers to this
scandalous event, feels the need to explain it. Jean Paul anticipates the questions
of his intended audience and gives some kind of answer, although it remains an
open question how seriously the answer is meant.
Now one might doubt that it is in fact the author himself who poses questions
to the readers. Doesn’t the fact that the narrator narrates quite a lot of details
about himself which are clearly fictional show that he must be a fictional narrator,
and therefore cannot be the author Jean Paul? We know that Jean Paul does not
live on an island, has never received the pages of a manuscript via a dog, and has
not turned out to be one of the lost princes in the story, all of which is told about
the narrator. However, we can explain these peculiarities without assuming a
fictional narrator in Jean Paul’s Hesperus. For readers are invited by the text to
imagine of Jean Paul that he lives on an island, that the he is a long lost prince,
that the pages of a manuscript are brought to him by a dog, etc.
Here then we have a first example of a serious speech act in a fictional work.
Still, Searle need not be alarmed, for the questions (and the following explana-
tion) perfectly illustrate Searle’s idea: Yes, these are serious speech acts, and yes,
they occur in a fictional work, but they don’t contribute to the story, they rather
comment on the story.
However, it is not difficult to come up with a very similar example in which
the serious assertion also contributes to the fiction. The nature of the comments
must be such that they introduce new intrafictional facts about the story.29
You cannot wonder, then, that these fields are popular places of resort at every holiday time;
and you would not wonder, if you could see, or I properly describe, the charm of one
particular stile, that it should be, on such occasions, a crowded halting place.30
The first part of the sentence does not concern us here, “you cannot wonder that”
is just a manner of speaking for ‘it is no wonder that,’ therefore the first part of the
for it, as I will surely see in the hound post days to come.’ The reader has taken to a foolish
philosophical style but it is true; […].” Jean Paul, Hesperus, in: J.P., Werke, ed. Norbert Miller,
Vol. 1, Darmstadt 1965, pp. 471–1236, p. 650.
29 In contrast to extrafictional facts like “Sherlock Holmes is Conan Doyle’s most beloved
character.”
30 Elisabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton, Oxford 2006, p. 5.
198 Tobias Klauk
sentence is not an apostrophe. This changes with “you would not wonder, if you
could see, or I properly describe.” Gaskell directly addresses her readers and
makes a serious assertion in the form of a conditional. However, the sentence also
transports some new information about the fictional world: Some particular (or
any arbitrary) stile is, on certain occasions, a crowded halting place. This is
achieved by the fact-implying verb ‘wonder that,’ followed by some new informa-
tion about the story-world. It is easy to construct more examples along these
lines, e.g. “Dear reader, I wish I could make you understand that in spite of his
turbulent entrance Peter wasn’t a buffoon.”
A second, related type of serious speech act which contributes to the story
occurs in fictional texts that authorize readers not only to imagine a series of
events, but to imagine of themselves that they take part in the events, are being
addressed, etc. Think of the opening passage of Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a
Traveller:
You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller.
Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close
the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want
to watch TV!” Raise your voice – they won’t hear you otherwise – “I’m reading! I don’t want
to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m
beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope
they’ll leave you alone.31
Here, it might seem, before starting the novel proper, the author gives advice on
how to start reading his newest book without being interrupted – a serious
utterance which does not contribute to the story. Although there is no reason to
suppose that Calvino wants to give the concrete advice stated in the text, it may
stand pars pro toto for more general advice: Retreat from the world in order to
read properly and comfortably. Let us therefore assume for the moment that
Calvino actually gives advice to his readers in the opening passage of If on a
Winter’s Night a Traveller. If the relationship between readers, texts and authors
were not one of the major themes of the novel, we would probably classify the
opening passage of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller as a nonfictional paratext.
But Calvino’s novel is special since it authorizes readers to imagine that they
themselves read the book, that they themselves undergo various adventures and
finally “in a flash, you decide you want to marry Ludmilla,” one of the protago-
nists of the book.32 These kinds of imaginings which are essential to the story by
31 Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, London 1998, p. 3.

32 Calvino, Winter’s Night, p. 259.
readers about themselves are also prompted by the opening passage, and that
means that via prescribing these imaginings the opening passage contributes to
the story.
With this in mind, we can ask again if Calvino really gives advice to his
readers in the opening passage of the novel. For one could argue that the passage
only comes with a prescription to imagine that the author gives advice to his
readers. And that is not advice but just what Searle would call pretending to
advice. However, in the end this argument does not succeed. Firstly we have to
differentiate between the concrete advice in the text, which is too specific for
Calvino to intend giving it to all his readers, and the more general advice, for
which the specific advice stands. Calvino intends to give the general advice. And
secondly, if one wants to find out if readers are only authorized to imagine
something or if serious advice is given, one just needs to check if the essential rule
for advice is fulfilled, that the utterance of a sentence “[c]ounts as an undertaking
to the effect that A is in H’s best interest,”33 where A is a future act of the hearer
H. For all we know, Calvino’s utterances in the opening passage fulfill this
condition, which makes them serious advice.
That being said, it is evident that the opening passage of Calvino’s novel is
the rare exception of a serious speech act being made part of the fiction. As we
will see, most cases of serious utterances in fictional works that contribute to the
story look quite different. And bracketing examples of (1) apostrophes by the
author with fact-stating verb, followed by some information about the fiction, or
(2) apostrophes by the author which through some special level of prescriptions
to imagine contribute to the fiction, apostrophes seem to pose no challenge to
Searle’s original ideas. It is not enough that some fictitious narrator talks to his
readers. The serious utterance must be (truthfully) ascribable to the author. As
soon as we can correctly ascribe the apostrophe to the author, though, it typically
does not contribute to the story.
But aren’t there cases in which an author expresses his opinion by letting a
fictional narrator (fictionally) assert it? There are, but let me postpone the discus-
sion of such complicated examples until after I have covered the more basic
cases.
One of these more basic cases, namely explicit prescriptions to imagine, often
comes in the form of an apostrophe. As I mentioned in the introduction, I assume
that one central part of what makes a sentence contribute to a fictional story is the
implicit prescription to imagine (presume, consider, pretend to be true) what the

200 Tobias Klauk
sentence describes.34 But at the same time, what are explicit prescriptions to
imagine but a type of request, i.e. an ordinary, serious speech act?
There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by
coral reefs – commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you
waterward. Its extreme downtown is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves,
and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the
crowds of water-gazers there.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties
Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see? – Posted like silent
sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in
ocean reveries.35
Melville does not ask his readers to actually take a walk around Manhattan; he
invites them to imagine taking that walk and to imagine the water-gazers there. Is
this, then, a good example for a serious utterance in a fictional context? Yes and
no. Let us for the moment put aside the fact that Moby-Dick has a first-person
narrator whose presence makes it at least more difficult to ascribe the prescrip-
tions to the author. The main issue is more fundamental: If we understand
prescriptions to imagine as implicit requests by the author, then, since every
sentence contributing to the fiction (and many sentences in nonfictional works)
comes with the implicit prescription to imagine, the utterance of all those
sentences is an implicit request to imagine their content. Maybe one can under-
stand prescriptions to imagine as a kind of indirect speech act which can accom-
pany other speech acts.36 However, this is not the phenomenon we are looking
for. I am interested in special cases of utterances contributing to the fiction in
which the normal speech act rules apply, i.e. in which, e.g., a seeming assertion
really is an assertion, etc. What we have found instead is a serious indirect speech
act, which makes utterances in general contribute to a story. I will ignore such
cases from here on.
To sum up, apostrophes in general do not involve serious speech acts which
contribute to the story of a fictional work. In one large group of cases the
34 Remember, prescriptions to imagine are not a sufficient criterion for fictionality: “Anyone who
reads Ernest Shackleton’s South (1920), an account of his failed expedition to Antarctica, without
imagining the terrible odyssey that unfolded after his ship was crushed by ice has simply not
engaged properly with the story. Vividly told non-fiction narratives invite us to imagine what it
was like for people to live in different times and places, to undergo wonderful or horrible
experiences, and so on.” Friend, “Fiction”, p. 183.
35 Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, New York 1851, pp. 1f.
36 See, however, Fn. 6.
apostrophe can only be ascribed to a fictional narrator, not to the author herself.
In a second large group of cases the apostrophe can be attributed to the author,
but does not contribute to the fiction. We found a special case of apostrophes that
are attributable to the author and contain fact-stating verbs followed by informa-
tion about the story-world. We found a second special case of apostrophes that
contribute to the story via authorizing readers to imagine certain facts about
themselves. And we bracketed more complicated cases of (fictional) speech by
fictional characters which might also be a speech act of the author. In order to
assess those cases we should first consider simple cases of assertion in fiction.
IV Assertion
The last section dealt with apostrophes, which come in the form of all kinds of
utterances. Let us now drop the condition that readers be explicitly addressed as
‘you,’ ‘dear reader’ and the like, and let me concentrate on only one type of
speech act, assertion.
The most promising examples for serious assertions in fiction are utterances
of true sentences about real objects or actual situations in fictional texts without
fictional narrators. Of course, truth is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condi-
tion for assertion. However, true sentences rule out errors on part of the author,
which frees us from an important complication. And I bracket again the more
complicated cases of fictional texts with fictional narrators, to which we will
return in the next section.
Sentences might be accidentally true, but the interesting cases are those
where authors intend true sentences to be true, which means that authors commit
themselves to the truth of the sentence: The essential rule for assertion is then
fulfilled. Let us look at some examples. “There are some fields near Manchester,
well known to the inhabitants as ‘Green Heys Fields,’ through which runs a public
footpath to a little village about two miles distant.”37
Competent readers can easily understand that this first sentence in Gaskell’s
Mary Barton is intended to be true and that therefore the essential rule for
assertion is fulfilled. But how can readers do that? What distinguishes sentences
like this from others like the following one?
37 Gaskell, Mary Barton, p. 5. The example is Stacie Friend’s, who analyzes it thus: “This
statement is not only true, it was intended to be true and any informed reader of Gaskell will
believe it. It meets all standard requirements on sincere assertion.” Friend, “Fiction”, p. 184.
202 Tobias Klauk
Mary sprang forward to take her father’s charge, with a girl’s fondness for infants, and with
some little foresight of the event soon to happen at home; while young Wilson seemed to
lose his rough, cubbish nature as he crowed and cooed to his little brother.38
The point is not that this sentence contains a fictional name, “Mary,” which does
not refer (or, if you are a realist about fictional names, refers to an abstract object,
the fictional character). Fictional names can be used in sentences which are
intended to be true, like “Mary Barton does not exist.” (Think of an [imaginary]
preface, in which Gaskell talks about the fictional characters of her novel.) In fact,
there is no general mark or sign distinguishing sentences in fiction which are not
intended as true. On the contrary, the rules of fictionality are such that as a default
position readers are not allowed to take seeming assertions as expressing the
author’s beliefs and authors can’t just assert, i.e. utter p in such a way that this
utterance counts as an undertaking to the effect that p represents an actual state
of affairs. Readers are, as far as the default position goes, typically authorized to
imagine that p, but are not advised to entertain belief p or take the author to belief
p. With fiction, readers should not assume that what looks like an assertion
fulfills the essential rule for assertions. In Searle’s terms, the default position in
fiction is that authors don’t assert.
The question then is how some sentences, for example the very first sentence
of Mary Barton, can be used to assert. And the answer is that certain rules can
override the default assumption that no speech act contributing to the fiction is
ever serious. The opening of Mary Barton, for example, follows a convention
which roughly can be spelled out like this:
(ST) If the plot of a fictional text is spatiotemporally located in our world, general informa-
tion about the scenery and the background of the plot is, ceteris paribus, historically
correct. The closer information is to the concrete plot of the fictional text, the more
liberties with the historical setting are allowed.39
Gaskell and any competent readers know at least implicitly about this convention.
That is why readers know that when Gaskell writes about some footpath through
fields near Manchester without having introduced any concrete plot, she most
probably intends that statement to be true. Gaskell, on the other hand, knows that
without explicit warning signs, such a sentence will be understood by readers as
true and intended as true.
38 Ibid., p. 12.
39 I discuss this convention (ST), including restrictions, exceptions, and rule-breakings in Tobias
Klauk, “Fiktion, Behauptung, Zeugnis”, in: Christoph Demmerling/Íngrid Vendrell Ferran (eds.),
Wahrheit, Wissen und Erkenntnis in der Literatur. Philosophische Beiträge, Berlin 2014, pp. 197‒217.
Notice that convention (ST) (for spatiotemporal) does not make reference to
speech acts. It is a convention concerned with the reliability of certain informa-
tion in fiction. But knowing about the convention and understanding its implica-
tions allows authors to make serious assertions in fiction and readers to under-
stand authors as making serious assertions – in the cases covered by the
convention. It is, to take Searle’s metaphor, a horizontal convention which
suspends the more general (also horizontal) convention of fiction, which in turn
suspends the vertical speech act rules.
Notice also that serious questions, advice, requests and the like cannot be
explained by authors’ and readers’ knowledge about (ST), although the informa-
tion transported in (fictional) questions, requests, etc. can be reliable according to
(ST), just as the information transported by presuppositions of fictional sentences
can be reliable according to (ST).
Convention (ST) allows sentences which simultaneously talk about how
things are with us and in the story for the simple reason that in these cases the
author believes that the relevant facts hold in the story as well as in our world. As
soon as the author believes that story-world and reality differ, convention (ST) is
not applicable. One more example of this type, which has been used to claim that
fictional works can contain serious speech acts: “At the turn of the nineteenth
century, the West Coast of Africa – from Dakar to the Bight of Benin – had a
reputation for pestilence and rot unequaled anywhere in the world.”40
The story of Water Music is spatiotemporally located in our world (England
and Africa) at the turn of the nineteenth century. The sentence gives general
background information about the West Coast of Africa, and the author, Boyle,
makes a serious assertion about what people thought about that particular corner
of the world back then. At the same time the sentence is intended to describe how
things are in the story, namely just as they were in reality. This then is the third
type of speech acts which contribute to the story.
Notice that this way of analyzing the examples fits nicely with the observation
made above that serious utterances in nonfictional works can come with the
prescription to imagine whatever is described in those sentences. They can have
the very same property in fictional works!
Convention (ST) is not the only convention that allows authors to simulta-
neously make a serious assertion and authorize readers to imagine the very
40 T. Corraghessan Boyle, Water Music, New York 2006, p. 297. The example is Maria E. Reich-
er’s, “Knowledge from Fiction”, in: Jürgen Daiber/Eva-Maria Konrad/Thomas Petraschka/
Hans Rott (eds.), Understanding Fiction. Knowledge and Meaning in Literature, Münster 2012,
pp. 114–132, p. 117.
204 Tobias Klauk
content of the assertion, thereby contributing to the story. I name two more such
principles:
(P) As long as no evidence to the contrary is given, the psychological constitution of

fictional characters is like the psychological constitution of humans.
This psychological condition (P) allows readers to assume that the psyche of
hobbits, dragons, aliens, and ancient Romans in fiction is very much like their
own, if no evidence to the contrary can be found. There might be historical limits
to this rule – some of the finer distinctions we make in describing our feelings, for
example, were significantly different in ancient times. The details don’t matter for
our purposes. However (P) needs to be formulated exactly, given the right con-
tent, (P) translates into a rule about the possibility of serious assertions in
fictional works which contribute to the fiction:
“But Endymion Leer was right. Reason is only a drug, and its effects cannot
be permanent. Master Nathaniel was soon suffering from life-sickness as much as
ever.”41 Here, convention (P) allows readers to understand the second sentence,
which is about the mind of the persons in the story, also as a sentence about the
minds of humans outside the story. The right content is such that general
psychological observations are made. This type of case is ubiquitous. I give just
two more examples:
Aber nur Sorgen, nicht Wehmut oder Liebe lassen sich vertrinken.42
Les êtres nous sont d’habitude si indifferénts que quand nous avons mis dans l’un d’eux de
telles possibilités de souffrance et de joie pour nous il nous semble appartenir à un autre
univers, il s’entoure de poésie, il fait de notre vie comme une étendue émouvante où il sera
plus ou moins rapproché de nous.43
Notice the parallel to convention (ST): Both conventions open up the possibility
of speaking about how things are and how things are in the fiction simulta-
neously, because both conventions concern facts which are in the fiction just as
they are in reality. To be more precise: What is at stake here is not how things are
41 Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist, Doylestown 2002, p. 59.

42 “But only troubles, not melancholy or love can be drunk away.” Jean Paul, “Hesperus”,
p. 934.
43 “We usually care so little for others, that, if we put into one of them such possibilities of
suffering and joy, he seems to belong to a different universe, surrounds himself with poetry, and
makes our life an agitating expanse, on which he, as the case may be, is closer or more distant.”
Marcel Proust, A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, Vol. 1: Du Côté de chez Swann, Paris 1987, p. 357.
in reality, but how authors think the world to be in certain respects. Sometimes
authors intend their fiction to be just as they think the world to be in these
respects. To take the sentence from Hesperus, it makes a general psychological
point (possibly being ironic about the possibility of drinking troubles away) and it
simultaneously states that this general point holds in the fiction, thereby explain-
ing why the protagonist still feels bad on the morning after.44
There exists at least one further convention similar to (ST) and (P). It concerns
general remarks on morals, life, the human condition and the like. Call this (GC)
for general comments:
(GC) As long as no evidence to the contrary is available, readers are allowed to understand
general comments on life, morals, the human condition and the like as expressing the
author’s beliefs.
The many pseudo-intellectual remarks in Coelho’s The Alchemist are notorious

examples, e.g. “Not everyone can see his dreams come true in the same way,”45 or
“Sometimes there just is no way to hold back the river.”46 Basically, (GC) allows
the same move as (P) and (ST). Sentences can be simultaneously about how
things are in the fiction and how things are in reality.
Searle notices cases which I explained by invoking convention (GC) by
acknowledging that
serious (i.e. nonfictional) speech acts can be conveyed by fictional texts, even though the
conveyed speech act is not represented in the text. Almost any important work of fiction
conveys a “message” or “messages” which are conveyed by the text but are not in the text.
Only in such children’s stories as contain the concluding “and the moral of the story is …” or
in tiresomely didactic authors such as Tolstoy do we get an explicit representation of the
serious speech acts which it is the point (or the main point) of the fictional text to convey.47
44 Although in this essay I generally just presuppose that there are cases of serious speech acts
which contribute to the story in fictional works, a word on the present examples is in order. While
I consider the examples for convention (ST) to be beyond dispute, one might be tempted to argue
that the examples for convention (P) and the upcoming convention (GC) are not cases of assertion.
One may feel that, in these cases, authors ask their audience to consider the proposition in
question without asserting it. Such an argument is possible since both (P) and (GC) only allow
utterances about very general matters. And we often muse about those without claiming anything.
However, even if (ST) and (CG) would never allow for assertions, there still would be a serious
speech act involved, namely asking readers to consider a proposition.
45 Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist, London 1999, p. 57.
46 Ibid., p. 61.
206 Tobias Klauk
Searle makes two distinct points. Firstly, he acknowledges that a fictional text can
convey a message. I shall discuss this possibility below, since the cases at hand
need not involve assertions an author makes via the whole work. Secondly, and
this for the moment is the relevant part, Searle admits that it is possible to write
an implicit assertion explicitly into the text. One should think that he would be
concerned about these cases, but Searle only criticizes them as a mark of bad
literature. Unfortunately, even if we were to assume that Searle is right on this
point (and it certainly is easy to find examples for convention (GC) in children’s
literature and “tiresomely didactic authors”), this does not explain the existence
of serious speech acts (which contribute to the story) in fictional works. The three
conventions, by contrast, do explain why it is possible in certain, well-defined
cases to make assertions in fictional works which contribute to the story.
I hasten to acknowledge that the three conventions can be disregarded by
authors, can become the object of playing with rules, and most importantly, are
only in force as long as no evidence to the contrary is present in the text. This
evidence can take almost any form. A general comment might be contradicted by
another general comment or by the plot, we might get clues to the effect that the
comment is ironic, and the general comments might be so obviously false or
nonsensical that readers refrain from ascribing them to the author. The most
direct signs that the conventions are overruled, though, are those that imply the
presence of a narrator.
V Narrators and Authors
I postponed the discussion of complications arising from a (fictional) speech act

being uttered by a fictional narrator. Since this postponement only makes sense if
some fictional texts do not involve a fictional narrator, it should be obvious by
now that I believe that indeed many fictional texts don’t feature fictional narra-
tors.48 A fictional text contains a fictional narrator if and only if it authorizes
readers to imagine a fictional character who tells (parts of) the story. Some stories
feature such narrators, some don’t and some have them only for parts of the text.
For our purposes, i.e. for finding cases of serious utterances in fiction which
contribute to the story, it is not necessary to distinguish between examples in
which some character speaks temporarily and examples in which a character tells
the whole story or parts of it. In fact, even examples of fictional texts without
48 The reasons for this are again beyond the scope of this essay. Cf. Tilmann Köppe/Jan Stühring,
“Against Pan-Narrator Theories”, in: Journal of Literary Semantics, 40/2011, pp. 59–80.
narrators but with internal focalization manifest the same problem as passages
with fictional narrators.
The problem is that any indication that a sentence gives us the thoughts,
beliefs, etc. of a fictional character trumps the three conventions of the previous
section: “‘After all,’ said the Duchess vaguely, ‘there are certain things you can’t
get away from. Right and wrong, good conduct and moral rectitude, have certain
well-defined limits.’”49 Although the second sentence puts forward a general
comment, convention (GC) is overruled by the clear indication (in this particular
case provided by the quotation marks) that it only relates the Duchess’s opinion,
and not the author’s opinion. Therefore, we have found a further convention: If
there is an indication that sentences in fictional works express the thoughts,
beliefs, etc. of a fictional character, the rules (ST), (P), and (GC) are overridden.50
Therefore, we now have four levels of conventions. On level one there are the
usual speech act rules. On level two the rules of fiction suspend the level one
rules. On level three, (ST), (P), and (GC) name exceptions to the level two rules.
And on level four we just found the fictional character rule, which trumps the
level four rules.
The specific rules on each level are less important than the general idea:
Rules can have local exceptions, those exceptions can in turn have exceptions
and so on. By naming the different levels of rules we can explain how it is possible
to have serious speech acts in fictional works which contribute to the fiction,
although the rules of fiction disallow this for the general case.
Can we go even further and find exceptions to the last rule? We can at least
try. Authors can play with this convention by deliberately giving contradictory
hints as to whether a fictional character is speaking or not. The epilogue to
William Shakespeare’s The Tempest is such a case: It is clear that the play is
(almost) over, but the viewers see the actor who plays (or has played) Prospero.
He speaks of having given up his magic, but maybe viewers are supposed to
understand that Shakespeare intends to stop writing plays. Conversely, the epilo-
gue suggests that Shakespeare is asking the audience for applause, but in words
which fit Prospero and his situation.
In any case, there seem to be examples in which authors clearly assert p by
letting a fictional character utter that p:
49 Hector Hugh Munro, “Reginald at the Theatre”, in: Hector Hugh Munro, The Best Short Stories,
London 2008, pp. 11–14, p. 11.
50 To be more precise, this constitutes “evidence to the contrary” and the “ceteris paribus”
conditions hinted at in the formulation of the three conventions.
208 Tobias Klauk
Then he [Endymion Leer] leaned forward in his chair, and gazed steadily at Master Natha-
niel. This time, his eyes were kind as well as piercing. “Master Nathaniel, I’d like to reason
with you a little,” he said. “Reason I know, is only a drug, and, as such, its effects are never
permanent. But like the juice of the poppy, it often gives temporary relief.”51
The sentiments expressed by Endymion Leer can be understood by readers to be

Hope Mirrlees’ sentiments exactly. How do we know that this is an assertion by
the author, that the author intends it to be true? In this case the answer is easy,
since the very same idea is expressed a few pages later, this time not by a fictional
character. What is more, the author there explicitly declares Endymion Leer to be
correct: “But Endymion Leer was right. Reason is only a drug, and its effects
cannot be permanent. Master Nathaniel was soon suffering from life-sickness as
much as ever.”52
Therefore this specific example reduces to the cases discussed in the previous
section. Other examples, however, are not backed in this way. When headmaster
Dumbledore from the Harry Potter books makes general comments about life,
J.K. Rowling doesn’t state elsewhere that he is correct:
“There are all kinds of courage,” said Dumbledore, smiling. “It takes a great deal of bravery
to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends. I therefore award ten
points to Mr Neville Longbottom.”53
Nonetheless it is reasonably likely that the author intends the central sentence of
the quote to be true. Readers know this because the headmaster is such a
positively painted character, that almost anything he says has the air of being
remarkable and trustworthy.
Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist, a rich source for serious assertions in fiction,
also contains many cases in which a character fictionally utters what can be
understood as the author’s speech act: “‘Listen to your heart. It knows all things,
because it came from the Soul of the World, and it will one day return there.’”54
But neither is the same idea expressed elsewhere in the novel, nor is the alche-
mist, the character fictionally uttering these sentences, painted quite as thor-
oughly positive as the headmaster Dumbledore. Rather, readers soon find out that
The Alchemist is packed with such bon mots, that the characters’ thoughts as well
as other passages typically end with them, that they are never revoked, and that
51 Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist, p. 55.

52 Ibid., p. 59.
53 Joanne K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, London 2000, p. 329.
54 Coelho, Alchemist, p. 134.
the plot seems just a device for delivering yet another one-liner. In short, readers
need to have a grip on an interpretation of the work as a whole in order to be able
to understand that it contains serious speech acts.
Sometimes, readers can spot that a sentence expresses the author’s opinion
because the anti-obviousness speech act rule is not fulfilled:
I had neither kith nor kin in England, and was therefore as free as air – or as free as an
income of eleven shillings and sixpence a day will permit a man to be. Under such
circumstances I naturally gravitated to London, that great cesspool into which all the
loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained.55
Conan Doyle does not assert with the last sentence that London is a great cesspool
into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. His
intended audience most probably shares this conviction and Conan Doyle knows
as much. But since the anti-obviousness rule is not fulfilled, these utterances do
not count as assertions.
To sum up, although cases exist in which authors perform a speech act by
letting a fictional character fictionally utter that speech act, there don’t seem to be
conventions as well-established and concrete as the three conventions discussed
in the last section which would explain these cases. I am not saying that the cases
cannot be explained, but rather that explaining them is less a matter of general
principles than of the concrete interpretation of fictional works.
The same, unfortunately, goes for speech acts which are performed by utter-
ing a whole work. Pace Searle, who speaks of conveying a serious speech act
through the performance of a pretended speech act, there is general agreement
that it is possible to assert p with a whole work, to ask a question, to warn, etc.
But then it is perfectly possible to write such serious speech acts into the text.
They can feature in the fictional work itself and contribute to the fiction. Actual
examples, though, are hard to come by. The explicit moral at the end of a fairy
tale, for example, does not contribute to the story. And the point of a work of
fiction (if there is any) more often than not is much more complex than can be
expressed in a few utterances in the fiction.
In any case, understanding that an author wanted to make a certain serious
speech act with her fictional work relies on an interpretation of the work that
needs to go far beyond the basic conventions which I discussed in this essay.
Searle’s statement that “there is as yet no general theory of the mechanisms by
55 Arthur Conan Doyle, “A Study in Scarlet”, in: A.C.D., The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Ware
1996, p. 11.
210 Tobias Klauk
which such serious illocutionary intentions are conveyed by pretended illocu-

tions”56 is still true – and it is not to be expected that this ever changes.57
VI Conclusion
I have analyzed various candidates for cases in which serious utterances in works
of fiction contribute to the fictional world. We found several conventions at work
which can trump the default rule that in fictional works authors do not perform
serious speech acts. These conventions again can be overruled by others, they can
be broken or be made thematic; nonetheless they explain how it is possible for a
serious utterance to contribute to the fiction, or for a sentence which contributes
to the fiction to be a serious utterance. All cases have in common that a sentence
is about the fictional world and about our world, or more generally speaking, that
a sentence is fiction-oriented and world-oriented simultaneously. Maybe more
conventions like the ones discussed here can be found which allow for such
cases. But we have seen that often the basic conventions are not sufficient for an
adequate understanding of what is going on. In many cases, the explanation
doesn’t stop short of an interpretation proper of the fictional work in question.
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57 There exist, however, interesting attempts to explain implied authors as the actual author’s
style or narrative device. See Jukka Mikkonen, “Truth-Claiming in Fiction. Towards a Poetics of
Literary Assertion”, in: The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 38/2009, pp. 18–34.
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(eds.), Wahrheit, Wissen und Erkenntnis in der Literatur. Philosophische Beiträge, Berlin
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pp. 319–332.
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Claudia Hillebrandt, Jena
Author and Narrator in Lyric Poetry
Since the 1980s, there has been growing scholarly interest in the narrative
structures of poetry1 – specifically in those kinds of poems that can be categorised
as ‘lyric’,2 as opposed to poetry that has traditionally been associated with a
narrative plot structure (for example, ballads such as Bertolt Brecht’s “Ballade
von den Seeräubern” or epics in verse like Les Murray’s Fredy Neptune).3 Certainly
the most sophisticated approach to date for analysing narrative elements in lyric
poetry is the one provided by Peter Hühn and Jörg Schönert.4
1 Some early considerations on this issue may be found in Jack Stillinger, “The Plots of Romantic
Poetry”, in: College Literature, 12/1985, pp. 95–112; Dore Levy, Chinese Narrative Poetry. The Late
Han through T’ang Dynasties, Durham, NC, 1988; Jan van der Eng, “Narrative Aspects in Puškin’s
Lyrical Poetry”, in: Russian Literature, 26/1989, pp. 441–450; Willem G. Weststeijn, “Plot Struc-
ture in Lyric Poetry: An Analysis of Three Exile Poems by Aleksandr Puškin”, in: Russian
Literature, 26/1989, pp. 509–522; Wolfgang Bernhart, “Überlegungen zur Lyriktheorie aus er-
zähltheoretischer Sicht”, in: Herbert Foltinek/Wolfgang Riehle/Waldemar Zacharasiewicz (eds.),
Tales and ‘their telling difference’: Festschrift für Franz K. Stanzel, Heidelberg 1993, pp. 359–375;
Jürgen Link, Literaturwissenschaftliche Grundbegriffe. Eine programmierte Einführung auf struktu-
ralistischer Basis, 2nd Edition, München 1974, pp. 334f., includes some examples of narrative and
non-narrative lyrical poems.
2 At present, there is no consensus among literary scholars on a proper definition of the term
‘lyric’ (English and German). Some of the most prominent definitions from recent years within the
German debate may be found in Dieter Burdorf, Einführung in die Gedichtanalyse, 2nd Edition,
Stuttgart/Weimar 1997, p. 20; Renate Homann, Theorie der Lyrik. Heautonome Autopoesis als
Paradigma der Moderne, Frankfurt/M. 1999, pp. 459–496; Dieter Lamping, Das lyrische Gedicht.
Definitionen zu Theorie und Geschichte der Gattung, 3rd Edition, Göttingen 2000, p. 63; Eva
Müller-Zettelmann, Lyrik und Metalyrik. Theorie einer Gattung und ihrer Selbstbespiegelung anhand
von Beispielen aus der englisch- und deutschsprachigen Dichtkunst, Heidelberg 2000, pp. 15–19;
Rüdiger Zymner, Lyrik. Umriss und Begriff, Paderborn 2009, pp. 139–141. Within the current
debate, which focuses on a narratological approach to the study of lyric poetry, ‘lyric poetry’ is
usually referred to as a set of texts written in verse, with the exceptions of those genres, like
ballads or verse epics, that are clearly narrative. For my purpose here, I adopt this view although,
like Zymner, Lyrik, p. 9, I am convinced that in principle it should be possible to give a more
sophisticated definition of the term ‘lyric’. See also II.2 in this paper.
3 For these kinds of narrative poems, see Clare Kinney, Strategies of Poetic Narrative: Chaucer,
Spenser, Milton, Eliot, Cambridge 1992; or Brian McHale, “Telling Stories Again: On Replenish-
ment of Narrative in the Postmodernist Longpoem”, in: Yearbook of English Studies, 30/2000,
pp. 252–260.
4 See Peter Hühn, “Transgeneric Narratology: Applications to Lyric Poetry”, in: John Pier (ed.),
The Dynamics of Narrative Form, Berlin 2004, pp. 139–158; Peter Hühn, “Plotting the Lyric: Forms
of Narration in Poetry”, in: Margarete Rubik/Eva Müller-Zettelmann (eds.), Theory into Poetry:
214 Claudia Hillebrandt
This paper will explore the possibilities and limitations of a narratological

analysis of lyric poetry (referring principally to Hühn and Schönert) as far as the
distinction between author and narrator – as it is developed in classical narratol-
ogy – is concerned. More specifically, its main question is: under which condi-
tions should one conceive of a lyric poem as featuring a narrator, i.e. a speaker
that is (1.) distinct from its author and (2.) tells a story?
1. Broadly speaking, the narratological distinction between author and narrator
has been drawn with regard to the peculiarities of fictional utterances, posit-
ing that these should not be ascribed to its author but rather to an entity
within the fictional world of the text (be it figurative or not).5 In other words,
the distinction has been put forward as part of a certain theory of fiction,
New Approaches to the Lyric, Amsterdam/New York 2005, pp. 147–172; Peter Hühn, “Geschichten
in Gedichten. Ansätze zur narratologischen Analyse von Lyrik, mit einem Ausblick auf die Lyrik
Shakespeares und den Petrarkismus”, in: Hartmut Bleumer/Caroline Emmelius (eds.), Lyrische
Narration – narrative Lyrik. Gattungsinterferenzen in der mittelalterlichen Literatur, Berlin/New
York 2011, pp. 79–102; Peter Hühn, “Lyrik und Narration”, in: Dieter Lamping (ed.), Handbuch
Lyrik. Theorie, Analyse, Geschichte, Stuttgart/Weimar 2011, pp. 58–62; Peter Hühn/Jens Kiefer, The
Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poetry: Studies in English Poetry from the 16th to the 20th Century,
Berlin 2005; Peter Hühn/Jörg Schönert, “Zur narratologischen Analyse von Lyrik”, in: Poetica, 34/
2002, pp. 287–305; Peter Hühn/Jörg Schönert/Malte Stein, Lyrik und Narration: Text-Analysen zu
deutschsprachigen Gedichten vom 16. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, Berlin 2007; Peter Hühn/Roy
Sommer, “Narration in Poetry and Drama”, in: P.H./Wolf Schmid/Jörg Schönert/John Pier (eds.),
Handbook of Narratology, Berlin 2009, pp. 228–241. Cf. also Brian McHale, “Narrative in Poetry”,
in: David Herman/Manfred Jahn/Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative
Theory, London 2005, pp. 356–358; Brian McHale, “Beginning to Think about Narrative in Poet-
ry”, in: Narrative, 17/2009, pp. 11–30; and Eva Müller-Zettelmann, “Lyrik und Narratologie”, in:
Ansgar Nünning/Vera Nünning (eds.), Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär,
Trier 2002, pp. 129–153; Eva Müller-Zettelmann, “Poetry, Narratology, Meta-Cognition”, in: Greta
Olson (ed.), Current Trends in Narratology, Berlin/New York 2011, pp. 232–253.
5 For an overview of the concept of ‘narrator’, see the entry in the Handbook of Narratology
written by Uri Margolin. At the beginning, Margolin provides a standard definition of ‘narrator’
that is prevalent in narratology: “In the literal sense, the term ‘narrator’ designates the inner-
textual (textually encoded) speech position from which the current narrative discourse originates
and from which references to the entities, actions and events that this discourse is about are being
made. Through a dual process of metonymic transfer and anthropomorphization, the term
narrator is then employed to designate a presumed textually projected occupant of this position,
the hypothesized producer of the current discourse, the individual agent who serves as the answer
to Genette’s question qui parle? The narrator, which is a strictly textual category, should be clearly
distinguished from the author who is of course an actual person.” Uri Margolin, “Narrator”, in:
Peter Hühn/Wolf Schmid/Jörg Schönert/John Pier (eds.), Handbook of Narratology, Berlin 2009,
pp. 351–369, p. 351 (italics in the original text). A critical investigation of the author-narrator
distinction may be found in Fotis Jannidis, “Zwischen Autor und Erzähler”, in: Heinrich Detering
(ed.), Autorschaft. Positionen und Revisionen, Stuttgart/Weimar 2002, pp. 540–556.
claiming that every fictional narrative text manifests a narrator that must not
be identified with its author. In turn, this theory has given way to a multitude
of models of literary communication stemming from, but not limited to, the
field of narratology. Given that poems (at least in some cases) can be regarded
as fictional, one may propose to adopt that theory developed in the narratolo-
gical realm and, likewise, one of its related communication models for the
study of lyric poetry.6
2. Apart from matters of fictionality and communication levels, it must also be
shown that something is narrated in lyric poetry and, additionally, that it
does make sense to speak of a narrator as someone telling a story. This also
raises questions of genre, as it is sometimes claimed that ‘lyric poetry’ can be
regarded as a special form of narration.7
Thus, my main question poses problems surrounding (I) communication pro-

cesses by way of fictional works, namely the status of poems as being fictional or
non-fictional utterances (section I.1) and the different instances of speech, i.e. the
issue of an appropriate communication model for poetry in analogy to narrative
prose (section I.2); and (II) narrative elements in lyric poetry, i.e. the question of
whether it is possible to speak of a piece of lyric poetry in the narratological terms
of author and narrator (section II.1) and whether the genre of ‘lyric poetry’ may
even be defined as a certain kind of narrative form (section II.2).
I will argue that
I. based on an institutional theory of fiction as developed by Lamarque and
Olsen, poems can be held to be either fictional or non-fictional (section I.1)
and that as a consequence of this theory of fiction as well as the differentia-
tion between the producer of a text, the source of the utterance, and the
context of its reception, a more precise context-dependent classification of
possible relations between author and speaker should be substituted for the
fixed hierarchy of communication levels common in classical as well as post-
6 For an example of such an adoption, see Hühn, “Plotting the Lyric”, p. 152; Hühn, “Geschichten
in Gedichten”, p. 86; Hühn/Kiefer, Narratological Analysis, pp. 8f.; Hühn/Schönert, “Zur narrato-
logischen Analyse”, p. 296; Hühn/Schönert/Stein, Lyrik und Narration, p. 11; Jörg Schönert,
“Empirischer Autor, Impliziter Autor und Lyrisches Ich (mit einem Nachtrag)”, 2012, http://www.
icn.uni-hamburg.de/webfm_send/40 (accessed February 4, 2012).
7 This is, at least at some points, indicated by Hühn and Schönert. See Hühn/Kiefer, Narratologi-
cal Analysis, p. 234. Also Hühn, “Transgeneric Narratology”, p. 151; Hühn, “Lyrik und Narration”,
p. 59; Hühn/Schönert/Stein, Lyrik und Narration, p. 312. As most of the problems of a proper
definition of the ‘lyric’ are beyond the scope of this paper, I will only discuss this matter briefly.
See II.2.
classical narratology. Moreover, the category of the ‘implied’ or ‘abstract

author’ should be rejected (section I.2).
II. there is a large quantity of lyric poems that are fictional and tell a story.
Additionally, many of these feature a narrator, i.e. a figurative instance or an
agent within the text. These can be classified as being told by a narrator
(section II.1). Nevertheless, these observations do not necessitate a genre
definition of ‘lyric poetry’ as a special variant of narration (section II.2).
I Poetry and Literary Communication
I.1 Poetry and Fiction
In the long scholarly debate about poetry, the question of whether poems should
be regarded as fictional or not has produced many different answers, ranging
from one extreme position (all poems are fictional)8 to another (all poems are
non-fictional)9. Whereas the second position is rarely taken nowadays, in con-
sideration of clear-cut examples of fictional lyric poetry like T. S. Eliot’s “The
Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, the first one has recently been renewed by
Werner Wolf.10 Unfortunately, he does not provide an argument for his position.
He simply states: “There are only two basic features that are unproblematic […],
namely that a poem is a literary text and that it is fictional.”11 Presumably,
though, his insistence on this point can be interpreted as a reaction towards
earlier definitions of poetry: these depend upon the norm of the so-called
Erlebnislyrik as the standard case of poetry, which has produced the well-known
and often misleading practice of treating author and speaker as identical in the
8 See for instance Monroe C. Beardsley, “Fiction as Representation”, in: Synthese, 46/1981,
pp. 291–313, pp. 301–305.
9 See for instance Käte Hamburger, Die Logik der Dichtung, 3rd Edition, Stuttgart 1977, p. 12. For
Hamburger, the speaker of a poem cannot be differentiated from its author. For an overview of the
debate, see Frank Zipfel, “Lyrik und Fiktion”, in: Dieter Lamping (ed.), Handbuch Lyrik. Theorie,
Analyse, Geschichte, Stuttgart/Weimar 2011, pp. 162–166; also Frank Zipfel, Fiktion, Fiktivität,
Fiktionalität. Analysen zur Fiktion in der Literatur und zum Fiktionsbegriff in der Literaturwis-
senschaft, Berlin 2001, pp. 299–303, and Zymner, Lyrik, pp. 10–20.
10 Werner Wolf, “The Lyric: Problems of Definition and a Proposal for Reconceptualisation”, in:
Müller-Zettelmann/ Rubik (eds.), Theory into Poetry, pp. 21–56, p. 23. See also Müller-Zettelmann,
“Lyrik und Narratologie”, p. 131, p. 142.
11 Wolf, “The Lyric”, p. 23 (bold print in the original text).
course of interpretation.12 Thus, Wolf’s critical impulse may be the same as in

classical narratology: to forestall a naїve identification of speaker and producer of
a literary text.
Nevertheless, when considering examples of occasional poems like Johann
Wolfgang von Goethe’s “An Werther”,13 it is difficult to see why one should not
assume that some poems can be regarded as directly expressing the beliefs of
their author and, accordingly, as non-fictional: in this poem, Goethe describes the
successful yet problematic reception of his epistolary novel and his feelings
towards his main character from a time distance of fifty years; moreover, he seeks
to warn his readers not to emulate Werther. The poem was written as a foreword
to the anniversary issue of the novel of 1824 and serves as a non-fictional paratext.
In other words: “An Werther” can only be understood adequately if one supposes
that the author confesses his own feelings here – be they authentic or not – and
wants his audience to understand the poem as a historically correct description of
the reception of Die Leiden des jungen Werther as well as a piece of advice for their
own course of life.
Apart from the extreme positions mentioned above, there is a growing con-
sensus among scholars that poems – as well as narrative texts – can either be
fictional or non-fictional.14 This view points to the need for a sophisticated theory
of fiction that allows for a differentiated approach to the complex interrelations
between producer, speaker, and recipient of a literary text. These can be best
elucidated with reference to an institutional theory of fiction. According to this
theory, fiction is a rule-governed practice that is neither dependent on referential
aspects nor on a theory of speech acts but rather on conventions that are guided
12 As is well known, this identification has been associated with the standard yet problematic
term of the so-called ‘lyrical I’ (‘lyrisches Ich’) developed in German Literary Studies by Margarete
Susman and Oskar Walzel. For an overview and a critique of the underlying concept, see Jan
Borkowski/Simone Winko, “Wer spricht im Gedicht? Noch einmal zum Begriff des lyrischen Ich
und zu seinen Ersetzungsvorschlägen”, in: Hartmut Bleumer/Caroline Emmelius (eds.), Lyrische
Narration – narrative Lyrik, Berlin/New York 2011, pp. 43–78; Burdorf, Einführung, pp. 185–193;
Schönert, “Empirischer Autor”.
13 Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Gedichte 1800–1832”, in: J.W.G., Sämtliche Werke. Briefe, Tagebü-
cher und Gespräche, Vol. 2, Karl Eibl (ed.), Frankfurt/M. 1988, p. 457.
14 See Johannes Anderegg, Sprache und Verwandlung. Zur literarischen Ästhetik, Göttingen 1985,
pp. 122–124; Lamping, Das lyrische Gedicht, pp. 102–110; Simone Schiedermair, ‘Lyrisches Ich’ und
sprachliches ‘ich’. Literarische Funktionen der Deixis, München 2004, p. 124; Zipfel, Fiktion,
pp. 303f.; Zipfel, “Lyrik und Fiktion”; Zymner, Lyrik, pp. 10–20.
by an institution of fiction.15 The two main rules the practice rests upon can be
explicated as follows:
Rule 1 (R1): Readers of fictions [sic!] are invited to engage in an imaginative activity based on
the sentences of the text.
[…]
Rule 2 (R2): Readers of fiction are neither justified, solely on the basis of the fiction, in
regarding as true what they are authorized to imagine, nor are they justified, solely on the
basis of the fiction, in ascribing any such beliefs to the author of the work.16
R2 operates as an inference blocker similar to the author-narrator distinction in

narratology. Nevertheless, within the framework of such an institutional theory,
the term ‘fiction’ does not rest upon the distinction between producer and speaker
of a fictional text.17 Rather, it explains the distinction as a possible consequence of
the conventions of the institution of fiction. Moreover, according to R2, inferences
are also blocked even if there is no narrator present within the fictional text.18 In
accordance with the institutional theory, sometimes poems are fictional, some-
times they are not, depending on the practice common within a historical and
cultural context, not on an ahistorical distinction between author and speaker/
narrator. Besides, sometimes it might be rather difficult to decide whether a poem
is fictional or not.19
Consequently, only a fictional poem may be uttered by a text-internal speaker
who is by definition distinct from its author. For non-fictional poems this has to be
decided on a case-by-case basis.20 And especially for lyric poetry, it might some-
times be rather difficult to determine whether a text should be held to be fictional
15 This theory is formulated e.g. by Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen. Cf. Peter La-
marque/Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction and Literature. A Philosophical Perspective, Oxford
1994, and Jan Gertken/Tilmann Köppe, “Fiktionalität”, in: Fotis Jannidis/Gerhard Lauer/Simone
Winko (eds.), Grenzen der Literatur. Zu Begriff und Phänomen des Literarischen, Berlin/New York
2009, pp. 228–266.
16 Tilmann Köppe/Jan Stühring, “Against Pan-Narrator Theories”, in: Journal of Literary Seman-
tics, 40/2011, pp. 59–80, pp. 60f.
17 See Gertken/Köppe, “Fiktionalität”, p. 237, Fn. 24.
18 See also II.1 of this paper.
19 Zipfel claims that this is even more the case with poetry than with narrative prose: poems more
often lack easily discernible indicators of fiction than prose texts. See Zipfel, “Lyrik und Fiktion”,
p. 166.
20 Probably, author and narrator in non-fictional poetry will be identical in most cases. It is
conceivable, though, that an author (in the minimal sense of the word as the producer of a text)
could cite statements or even narrations of others without even altering the lines. Take pieces of
documentary literature like Peter Handke’s “Die Aufstellung des 1. FC Nürnberg vom 27.1.1968”,
which, of course, does not show a narrative structure. Although I cannot give a proper example of
or not. Accordingly, the question of whether the speaker of a poem is the author
or an entity within the text may sometimes remain controversial.21
I.2 Who Utters the Poem?
Connected to the problem of fictionality, there is the matter of communication

models – or: who utters the poem? There is a variety of possible answers to that
question, some of which have been discussed in narratology, some within the
context of the study of poetry: the author, a fictive or historical character, the
narrator, the implied author, the textual or lyrical subject, the ‘I’, and so on.
In the following, I will not deal with all of these terms and concepts sepa-
rately and extensively,22 but will simply briefly discuss the narratological ap-
proach developed by Hühn and Schönert. They have proposed the adoption of the
following communication model:
When dealing with mediating entities, four levels (of communication) embedded in one
another can be distinguished. They are the levels of (1) the empirical author/producer of a
text, (2) the abstract author/composing subject, (3) the speaker/narrator, and (4) a protago-
nist/character.23
Note that Hühn and Schönert take these four levels to be a fixed structure of
uttering instances that are “embedded in one another”. Moreover, according to
them, every poem features all of these mediating entities with only level (4) as an
optional speech position. There are two problems that arise from this kind of
approach: one concerning the speech instances, the other related to the assump-
tion of “levels (of communication)” or ‘embeddedness’.
such a piece of narrative ready-made poetry, in principle it should be possible to write lyric poems
like this. But admittedly these are exceptional cases.
21 See for instance Jorge Luis Borges’ “Poema de los dones”: it is either Borges who speaks here,
or Groussac, or an autofictional persona that is simply named like Borges or Groussac or both of
them. Jorge Luis Borges, Obras completas, Vol. 2, Carlos V. Frías (ed.), Barcelona 1989, pp. 187f.
22 For further reading, see Borkowski/Winko, “Wer spricht”.
23 Hühn/Kiefer, Narratological Analysis, pp. 8f. Note that Hühn and Schönert, in accordance
with classical narratological models of literary communication, include the category of the
narrator, on level (3). See also Fn. 6.
Speech Instances
Contrary to Hühn and Schönert’s model, I claim that only level (1) is not optional
insofar as every text in principle can be attributed to a producer – at least in the
minimal sense of the word. This claim has to be substantiated, of course.
Levels (1), (3),24 and (4) are straightforward categories: every text is written by
an author who can cite or create a speaker or narrator within her text, who in turn
may invent a protagonist or character. Or the author may create a character or
protagonist who speaks and so on. The only much-discussed and -questioned
category here is the ‘abstract author/composing subject’. For Hühn and Schönert,
[t]he abstract author/composing subject is responsible for the system of values, norms, and
meaning implied by the formal, stylistic, rhetorical, and tropical structure of the text. This
structure is an attitude or stance that should be treated as a construct, not as belonging to an
individualized person. This is the level where we can see what is (necessarily) excluded from
the words of the speaker/narrator by his or her particular personal perspective, the level where
we may find out about underlying motivations or problems, for example. This level can
therefore be described more precisely as one of second-order observation, a source of perspec-
tive superordinate to speaker and focalizer and established, so to speak, behind their backs.25
Obviously, this concept of ‘abstract author/composing subject’ corresponds to the

well-known concept of the implied author first employed by Wayne C. Booth:
according to Booth, “the values, norms, and meaning implied by the formal,
stylistic, rhetorical, and tropical structure of the text” are reconstructed by inter-
preting these structures with reference to the underlying values, norms, and
meaning that lie beyond the scope of the speaker and focaliser. Instead, these are
attributed to another entity within the text.26 This concept has undergone severe
criticism for many reasons. As regards Hühn and Schönert’s approach, I seek to
demonstrate that they conceive of the abstract/implied author as an interpretive
category and that it is this assumption that renders the concept superfluous.
As Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller have shown, there are several ways of
conceiving of the implied or abstract author: as a phenomenon of reception,27 as
24 The matter of (3) being an optional category will be discussed more extensively in II.1.
25 Hühn/Kiefer, Narratological Analysis, p. 9. Cf. Hühn, “Geschichten in Gedichten”, p. 86;
Hühn/Schönert/Stein, Lyrik und Narration, p. 316, p. 326, p. 328.
26 See Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago 1961, p. 20. Cf. Tom Kindt/Hans-Harald
Müller, The Implied Author. Concept and Controversy, Berlin/New York 2006, pp. 42–61.
27 The implied author is seen here as “an aid to the description of empirical reception processes”.
Tom Kindt/Hans-Harald Müller, “Six Ways Not to Save the Implied Author”, in: Style, 45/2011,
pp. 67–79, p. 68 (italics in the original text). See also Kindt/Müller, Implied Author, pp. 151–181.
a participant in communication,28 or as a postulated subject behind the text, i.e.

as part of an intentionalist or non-intentionalist approach to textual interpreta-
tion.29 Hühn and Schönert clearly take the third way to be the appropriate one:
they conceive of the abstract author as “responsible for the system of values,
norms, and meaning implied by the formal, stylistic, rhetorical, and tropical
structure of the text”. This concept, in turn, can be explicated in a pragmatist30 or
a conventionalist31 vein or as a hypothetical or actual variant of an intentionalist
conception of interpretation. According to Kindt and Müller, only an intentional-
ist approach is capable of guiding the process of interpretation that the concept of
the implied author comprises; namely – in Hühn and Schönert’s terms – the idea
of “second-order observation” that gives way to a historically adequate and
unambiguous understanding of a text. The pragmatist approach, in turn, neglects
the historical foundation of the ‘implied/abstract author’, the conventionalist one
does not sufficiently restrict the possible attributions of historically adequate
meaning.32
Construed as an intentional conception of interpretation, however, the term
of ‘implied’ or ‘abstract author’ becomes superfluous. In the case of actual
intentionalism, “the meaning of a text is to be attributed directly to the empirical
producer of the work in question”.33 As far as hypothetical intentionalist positions
(HI) are concerned, Kindt and Müller propose the term of the hypothetical author:
[W]hile advocates of the implied author are in need of a theory like HI that allows them to
guide and justify their interpretive ascriptions, supporters of HI are obviously not in need of
a term like “implied author” to use when referring to the results of their interpretations –
actually, introducing such a term may easily detract from and obscure the operations
necessary to interpret a text in the manner of HI. […] If we treat Booth’s concept as a subject
with the intentions about which we make inferences with the sense of HI, we should rather
speak either of the “hypothetical author” or of the “postulated author”.34
28 I.e. “a sender in the process of literary communication”. Kindt/Müller, “Six Ways”, p. 68 (italics
in the original text).
29 See ibid., pp. 69–74.
30 In this vein, the concept of ‘implied author’ allows for an interpretation that is “free of internal
contradiction” and “generally appropriate to the text”. Ibid., “Six Ways”, p. 70.
31 “[D]etermining the implied author of a text requires that the text be read with the help of the
lexicon of the time in which it originated and against the background of the culture of the time.”
Ibid., p. 70.
32 See ibid., pp. 69–71. I presuppose that Hühn and Schönert are indebted to such a conception
of interpretation, as this is what becomes apparent in their own interpretive practice.
33 Ibid., “Six Ways”, p. 74.
34 Ibid., pp. 72f.
However, this category is not meant to replace the ‘abstract author’. In fact, it
describes one way of reflecting on the intentions of the empirical author and the
contexts that are necessary in the course of interpretation, not on the intentions
of a subject within or ‘behind’ the text. Consequently, like Kindt and Müller, I
propose to exclude the category of the ‘abstract author’ when modelling pro-
cesses of literary communication.35 Rather, for the purpose of interpretation an
explication of the chosen conception of interpretation should be provided – be it
intentionalist in a weak or a strong sense or non-intentionalist.
Levels of Communication
With respect to the question of communication levels, the metaphor of ‘em-

beddedness’ of different positions of speech is misleading: it suggests a hierarchy
of different speakers that only partly covers the complex relations between the
author and the possible speaker(s) of literary texts. Instead, I propose to replace
the hierarchy developed in narratology with a more precise classification of
possible relations between author and speaker within a given context of recep-
tion. Such a classification is provided by Jan Borkowski and Simone Winko: based
on three different types of speakers (internal,36 external,37 no speaker) and three
different types of context (linguistic,38 individual and situational,39 institu-
tional40), they identify eight possible relations between author and speaker
significant for poetry. These can be distinguished as follows:
1. a certain institutional and/or linguistic context means a speech instance can
be identified within the poem:
1.1 an internal speaker (e.g. a fictional character or a non-fictional person)
who is distinct from the author,
35 See also Borkowski/Winko, “Wer spricht”, p. 57.

36 I.e. a speaker who is part of the world of the text, be she figurative or not. See ibid., p. 64.
37 I.e. a speaker who is not part of the world of the text but a real person who performs a poem (a
singer, a reciter, etc.). See ibid., p. 65.
38 I.e. the “co-text” or the other parts of a text. See ibid., p. 66.
39 I.e. all aspects of the situation like time, place, circumstances, co-present objects, reactions of
others, etc., as well as the actual context of communication shared by producer and recipient. See
ibid., p. 66. Typically, lyric poetry lacks information about most or all of the features of this
individual and situational context.
40 I.e. the communicative competence (lexical, grammatical, illocutionary) as well as shared
knowledge about the complex set of institutional and group-specific pre-conditions of commu-
nication. See ibid., p. 67.
1.2 an internal speaker who is identified with the author (due to the con-
vention of Erlebnislyrik, for example),
2. a certain individual and situational context means there is an external speaker:
2.1 an external speaker (e.g. a reciter, singer, etc.) who is distinct from the
author,
2.2 an external speaker and an internal one who are distinct from the
author,
2.3 the author, who speaks only to submit the utterances of the poem,
2.4 the author, who speaks to submit the utterances of an internal speaker,
2.5 the author, who speaks about herself within the poem,
3. a lack of evidence from the linguistic, individual, situational, and institu-
tional context means there is no internal or external speaker, and the author
appears only insofar as she is the producer of the text.41
Based on different speech instances and different types of context, this classifica-
tion allows for a more precise description of the source(s) of utterance of a poem:
it covers all the speech instances that can be found within Hühn and Schönert’s
scheme (apart from the ‘abstract author’), adds another type of speaker (‘external
speaker’) that is highly relevant to the study of lyric poetry, and specifies the
relation between speaker and author in terms of identity or non-identity. The
author-speaker/narrator distinction as proposed by Hühn and Schönert coincides
with classes (1.1), (2.2), and (2.4).
To sum up, contrary to some implications of the author-narrator-distinction
as adopted by Hühn and Schönert, poetry can be either fictional or not, and the
poetic discourse may originate from several possible sources of speech that can
either be identified with the author or not, dependent on the context of reception.
Note that what narratology still lacks, however, is a typology of possible relations
between the author and different speakers within the world of the text (e.g. causal,
fictionally causal, etc.).
Yet the question remains: is there something that is narrated in lyric poetry,
i.e. ‘narrated’ at least in a minimal sense as involving two or more events that are
concatenated temporally as well as in another meaningful way – be it causally,
aesthetically, etc.?42 And, additionally, is there a narrator?
41 See ibid. pp. 75f. Note that this classification presupposes that there are literary texts which
lack an internal speech instance. See also II.1.
42 See Tilmann Köppe/Tom Kindt, Erzähltheorie. Eine Einführung, Stuttgart 2014, p. 43.
II Lyric Poetry and Narrative
II.1 Lyric Poetry and Plot Structure
As Hühn and Schönert have convincingly shown, there are poems that one may
describe as ‘lyric’ and that tell a story. They take Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely
as a cloud” as an example.43 Here, a speaker who might either be identified with
Wordsworth himself due to the conventions of Romantic Erlebnislyrik or with a
fictive persona describes his feelings towards nature and the daffodils in particular,
as well as their appeal to his poetic imagination. Hühn convincingly analyses this
poem from a narratological perspective in terms of three different dimensions:
1 Sequentiality:
The plot of Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud” is constituted by the speaker’s

specific experience of nature as the source of joy and inspiration and the later imaginative
re-production of this experience through which its vitalizing and integrating power is re-
activated and thus preserved in the mind as well as (ultimately) in the very text of this
poem.44
2 Mediacy:
[…] the particular composition of the text permits the reader to see not only the speaker’s
personal anxieties and desires but also the specifically self-induced process of creation
which […] must be hidden from self-observation, i.e. be preserved as a ‘blind spot’.45
3 Eventfulness:
What is unusual, however, and typical of poetry, is that the eventful result of the imagina-
tion is recounted in a kind of permanent (because iterative) present. It is here that the
function of narrating becomes apparent: the speaker effectively utilizes the plot he narrates
43 See e.g. William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, with Introduction and Notes by Thomas Hutch-
inson (ed.), rev. by Ernest de Selincourt, Oxford 1990, p. 149.
44 Hühn, “Plotting the Lyric”, p. 151.
45 Ibid., p. 152. In other words, Hühn postulates three different speakers or agents of mediacy
here: the author (1) as the producer of the text, the abstract author (2), who allows for the
attribution of the self-delusion of the autodiegetic narrator (3). This solution seems rather baroque
to me. One might as well either argue that Wordsworth himself is telling his story here (concur-
rently interpreting the poem as non-fictional) or that the idiosyncrasies of the narrator may be
explained in terms of hypothetical or actual intentionalism.
to define his identity, namely as someone capable of imagination and – by implication – of

poetic creation.46
Complying with Hühn, it can be claimed that Wordsworth or the speaker is telling
a story here.
Additionally, there are lyric poems that are unequivocally fictional and that
authorise imaginings of a narrator telling a story. For these poems, it can be
claimed that they feature a narrator distinct from their author. Take Les Murray’s
“The Cows on Killing Day” as an example. Here, a collective is the narrating
agency which tells the story of the death of one of its members:
All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining.
All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still

from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths
that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out.
[…]
One me is still in the yard, the place skinned of feed.

Me, old and sore-boned, little milk in that me now,
licks at the wood. The oldest bull human is coming.
Me in the peed yard. A stick goes out from the human

and cracks, like the whip. Me shivers and falls down
with the terrible, the blood of me, coming out behind an ear.
Me, that other me, down and dreaming in the bare yard.
[…]
Looking back, the glistening leaf is still moving.

All of dry old me is crumpled, like the hills of feed,
and slick me like a huge calf is coming out of me.
The carrion-stinking dog, who is calf of human and wolf,

is chasing and eating little blood things the humans scatter
and all me run away, over smells, toward the sky.47
46 Ibid., p. 155.
47 Les Murray, Selected Poems, Melbourne 2007, pp. 141f.
However, there are also poems that are fictional and narrative, but can still be
described as lacking a narrator. Take Federico García Lorca’s “El Concierto Inter-
rumpido” as an example:
Ha roto la armonía
de la noche profunda,
el calderón helado y soñoliento
de la media luna.
Las acequias protestan sordamente

arropadas con juncias,
y las ranas, muecines de la sombra,
se han quedado mudas.
[…]48
Obviously, it is possible to characterize the poem as narrating a story: it connects

several events – the disturbance of the night’s harmony due to the rise of the
moon, the protest of the ditches, the hushing frogs, the end of the music, and the
poplar slapping the moon in the face – temporally, causally, and by associating
them with a mental state of excitement, weirdness, and sadness, as well as with a
diffuse symbolic meaning (“El Concierto Interrumpido”). The words “armonía”,
“helado”, “soñoliento”, “muecines”, “triste”, “aristón”, “oscura”, “Pitágoras”,
“casta”, “quiere dar, con su mano centenaria”, and “cachete” point to a mental
state and to an evaluative comment. Consequently, one might suggest postulating
a speaker/narrator who is a part of the textual world.49 But it is not necessary to
do so:50 all these words can just as well be explained as invitations to the reader
to visually and acoustically imagine the moon’s disturbance of the night, to
evaluate the events displayed with reference to several metaphors (musical,
religious, geometrical), and to ascribe emotional qualities like sadness to the
music, excitement to the ditches and frogs, or aggression to the poplar. In order to
comprehend García Lorca’s poem, then, it is not essential to construe a speaker/
48 Federico García Lorca, Libro de Poemas [1918–1920], with Introduction and Notes by Mario
Hernández (ed.), Madrid 1989, pp. 172f. “The Interrupted Concert // The frozen sleepy pause / of
the half moon / has broken the harmony / of the deep night. // The ditches, shrouded in sedge, /
protest in silence, / and the frogs, muezzins of shadow, / have fallen silent. // […].” F.G.L., The
Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca, trans. by Jaime de Angulo et al, New York 1955/2005,
p. 13 (translation of this poem by W.S. Merwin).
49 See, for instance, Borkowski/Winko, “Wer spricht”, p. 70.
50 See Köppe/Stühring, “Against”.
narrator who is emotionally moved by the moon’s appearance or conceives of the

scenery as harmonious, excited, or uncanny.
Generally speaking, there is no need to postulate a fictional narrator for every
fictional narrative text.51 According to the theory of fiction outlined above (espe-
cially R2), a fictional text may simply authorise imaginings about a certain state
of affairs or course of action without authorising imaginings about an entity
within the text that the discourse originates from. In both Wordsworth’s and
Murray’s poems the “I” and “me” invite the reader to imagine a narrator within
the text.52 “El Concierto Interrumpido” lacks any such clear-cut clues. Conse-
quently, it is only in cases like the first two examples that a lyric poem may be
said to be told by a narrator.
II.2 Lyric Poetry as a Narrative Genre?
The question remains whether lyric poetry per se displays a certain form of
narrative structure. In some of their papers, Hühn and Schönert claim that it can
be regarded as a special sort of short narrative: “Accordingly, it was suggested,
lyric poetry in the narrow sense (i.e. not just narrative poetry) can be defined as a
special variant of narration in which the possible levels of mediation and mediat-
ing entities are employed to various degrees.”53 If this were true, the vast majority
of non-fictional lyric poems would be narrated by their authors and every fictional
51 This amounts to a certain form of optional-narrator theory that has recently been convincingly
defended by Köppe and Stühring. See ibid., as well as their contribution to this volume.
52 Even an autodiegetic one. For Wordsworth’s poem this attribution depends on the presup-
posed fictionality of the text.
53 Hühn/Kiefer, Narratological Analysis, p. 234. See also Hühn, “Lyrik und Narration”, p. 59. As
regards the problem of genre definition, Hühn’s and Schönert’s approach is far from clear,
though. Sometimes, they just speak of “Specific Forms of Narrativity in Lyric Poetry” (“The
transgeneric application of narratological concepts to poetry is apt to highlight the specifity of
poetry”. Hühn, “Transgeneric Narratology”, p. 151). See also Hühn/Schönert/Stein, Lyrik und
Narration, p. 312. Elsewhere, Hühn, like Wolf or Müller-Zettelmann, argues for a cluster concept of
‘lyric’ that is characterised by family resemblances such as “the tendency to brevity, heightened
artificiality, self-referentiality, subjectivity, and deviation as well as the production of unstable
illusion.” Hühn, “Transgeneric Narratology”, p. 142. Or Hühn and Schönert conceive of ‘lyric
poetry’ as displaying the fundamental feature of a doubled reference, i.e. external as well as self-
reference. Cf. Hühn/Schönert, “Zur narratologischen Analyse”, p. 289. Finally, they also declare
that they seek to “determine the limits of a narratological approach to lyric poetry, i.e. describe
the type of poem which does not lend itself to such an analysis” (Hühn, “Transgeneric Narratol-
ogy”, p. 140, Fn. 13). For them, this holds true for all sorts of ‘language poetry’ like sound poems,
concrete, or visual poetry. Cf. Hühn/Schönert/Stein, Lyrik und Narration, p. 330.
lyric poem would be narrative, or even narrated by a narrator. This also amounts
to naming all figurative speakers of a fictional lyric poem ‘narrators’. Although in
this paper I am not aiming at a proper genre definition of ‘lyric poetry’, I would
like to consider several objections against such a pan-narrativic approach.
First, there are poems that do not tell a story, but by tradition are ascribed to
the genre of ‘lyric poetry’. Hühn and Schönert name all sorts of ‘language poetry’
here.54 Take Gerhard Rühm’s “Ein Lautgedicht” [“A Sound Poem”, C.H.]:
b g
b d
bbg bbgd
bbk
bbkt bbkt
bbkt bbkt bbkt bbkt
[…]55
For these kinds of poems, it is not easy to see how one could speak of sequenti-
ality or even of a diegesis or of diegetic events.
One might want to add sub-genres like ‘thing poems’ or ‘reflective poetry’ to
this list of borderline cases. Compare, for instance, Philip Larkin’s poem “Love”,
which can easily be categorised as reflective:
The difficult part of love

Is being selfish enough,
Is having the blind persistence
To upset an existence
[…]
And then the unselfish side –

How can you be satisfied,
Putting someone else first
So that you come off worst?
[…]
[…]
Only the bleeder found
Selfish this wrong way round
54 See Fn. 54.
55 Gerhard Rühm, Ein Lautgedicht, 2000, http://www.lyrikline.org/de/gedichte/ein-lautgedicht-
824#.Une_QxBEOSo (accessed October 9, 2012).
Is ever wholly rebuffed,

And he can get stuffed.56
Prima facie, a sequence of events can be identified here only in a weak and
iterative sense: being selfish enough (event 1a) leads to upsetting the loved
person (event 1b), being unselfish (event 2a) to dissatisfaction (event 2b), the
bleeder is rebuffed (event 3a) and gets stuffed (3b). Whether there is a temporal
sequence of events 1, 2, and 3 is far from clear. It seems that we are not invited to
imagine these as events within a certain temporal and situational frame but rather
as paradigmatic descriptions of different mental states present when you are in
love. What is interesting about the poem, one might then claim, is not that it tells
us a sequence of events (at least not in a sophisticated sense) but rather that it
names the difficulties of balancing selfish and unselfish behaviour in the state of
love – with a bitter metaphorical punch line at the end that might be interpreted
as an evaluative comment on that state. Thus, one might claim that “Love” cannot
be analysed in a satisfying way with reference only to categories like sequenti-
ality, mediacy, and eventfulness. Moreover, even if a sequential and mediated
structure of events is taken for granted here, it may still be questioned whether
Larkin’s poem displays an eventful narrative in the emphatic sense of the word.
Indeed, the poem itself claims that the events displayed are very ordinary.
Hühn and Schönert take it, though, that what is typical (or special) of lyric
poetry are not the events presented within the text but rather the discourse
events:
One particularly complex type of poetic plotting consists in shifting the eventfulness from
inside the narrative sequence or story level to the transgression of this level, from a story
event to what may be termed a ‘discourse event’, as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 107, where the
frame of the sequence is abruptly re-defined – from aiming at the friend’s praise for his
continued friendship and patronage to the speaker’s insistence on his own superiority, on
account of his immortalizing poetic gift, over the friend’s mortality; […].57
Note that a “discourse event” is mainly characterised by a change of frame. In

Larkin’s poem, the last four lines of stanza three can be qualified as such a kind of
event: the metaphor of the “bleeder” comes as a surprise and requires careful
interpretation. What does it mean to conceive of love as some kind of hydraulic
system? What do words like “rebuffed” and “get stuffed” imply in this context?
Surely these last four lines are meant to concatenate event 1 and 2 metaphorically
56 Philip Larkin, Collected Poems, Anthony Thwaite (ed.), London 2003, p. 180.
57 Hühn, “Transgeneric Narratology”, p. 151.
and to evaluate the state of love described in the first two stanzas. Thus, these last
four lines can even qualify as a “discourse event” in the sophisticated sense of a
surprising incident.
This presupposed, it might be the case that even most thing poems or reflec-
tive poems have a narrative structure, in the special sense of displaying discourse
events. The term needs further clarification, though, as it remains rather vague:58
in the worst case, it could allow for classifying nearly every linguistic feature of a
poem as a discourse event. This becomes even more apparent when one considers
other types of events that Hühn and Schönert regard as characteristically dis-
played by lyric poems. Apart from diegetic and discourse events, they also name
mediating and reception events. “Mediating event” denotes a shift of attention
from the level of the diegetic world to the abstract author’s construction of that
world, whereas a “reception event” is characterised by a change of attitude or
perception on the side of the reader.59 If we take the category of the abstract author
for granted here and also admit that changes of attitude or perception occur
during many reading processes, this typology of events would permit us to claim
that nearly every literary text features a narrative structure – especially by dis-
playing discourse, mediating, or reception events. In other words, the term ‘event’
becomes all-encompassing and thus useless. Even language poetry might then be
interpreted as eventful, which seems counterintuitive – not only to me, but also to
Hühn and Schönert.60
In summary, as not all forms of ‘lyric poetry’ are covered by a narratological
frame such as that provided by Hühn and Schönert, a genre theorist may still
insist that this does not amount to a comprehensive definition of ‘lyric poetry’.61
Moreover, even if it can be shown that most lyric poems tell a story,62 it does not
follow that this has to be the basis of a definition of the genre of ‘poetry’ or even
‘lyric poetry’. For it may be that there are other features of this group of literary
texts apart from the criterion of narrative concatenation that might serve just as
well (or even better) as a starting point for a fruitful definition.63
58 Thus, it shows a close similarity to the concept of the so-called “Abweichungsästhetik”

[“aesthetics of deviance”, C.H.] originating from Russian formalism. See Hühn/Schönert/Stein,
Lyrik und Narration, p. 319.
59 Ibid., pp. 321f.
60 See Fn. 54.
61 See Zymner, Lyrik, p. 52.
62 Be it in a minimal (sequentiality, concatenation) or a sophisticated sense (eventfulness,
closure, tellability). See Köppe/Kindt, Erzähltheorie, ch. 2.2. Cf. Fn. 42.
63 Cf. Lamping, Das lyrische Gedicht; Zymner, Lyrik.
Apart from that, though, as it is highly likely that most lyric poems can be
classified as narrative at least in a minimal sense, a narratological approach to
the study of ‘lyric poetry’ proves to be fruitful when perceived as providing
another analytic tool box for the study of lyric poetry besides the ones provided
by rhetorical and metrical analysis.64
III Conclusion
Despite these advantages of the narratological approach, the author-narrator

distinction adopted from classical narratology is only of limited help in the study
of lyric poetry: it neither fulfils all requirements for a proper theory of fiction nor
depicts all possible sources of utterance of poetry and the complex interrelations
between them. Furthermore, it seems implausible to assume that all lyric poems
feature a narrative structure, and it is by no means true that all narrative lyric
poems feature a narrator.
Consequently, one should conceive of a lyric poem as being told by a narrator
as distinct from its author only if (1) it is a fictional poem with a narrative structure
that authorises imaginings about a (figurative) narrator telling a story (in the
minimal as well as in the sophisticated sense) or if (2) it is a non-fictional poem
uttered by its author, who simply cites another speaker telling a story.65
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Markus Kuhn and Andreas Veits, Hamburg
Narrative Mediation in Comics: Narrative
Instances and Narrative Levels in Paul
Hornschemeier’s The Three Paradoxes
I Introduction
For some time now, narratological research has no longer focused exclusively on
the analysis of narrative structures in purely linguistic forms of expression. With
the development of post-classical narrative theory, the field of narratology has
expanded to include new methodological approaches as well as new objects of
inquiry. The field has become increasingly transmedial, taking into account
media as diverse as computer games, films, and comics. In fact, the narratological
analysis of audiovisual media is by now well-established in narratological dis-
course.1 However, this statement does not hold to the same degree for narration
by means of still images. Certainly, narrative structures in comics have been
investigated across diverse disciplines as to their narrative potential.2 It is the
verbal aspects of the narrative that are primarily considered, though. Narratologi-
cal studies such as those by Martin Schüwer or Jan Noël Thon show that concepts
of narrative mediation can be applied to the written aspects of a comic.3 Thon’s
well-supported explanations, in particular, demonstrate that contemporary gra-
phic novels create complex narrative situations, and that the distinction between
author and narrator can be fruitful for the analysis of graphic novels that make
use of fictional narrators.
1 See amongst others Seymour Chatman, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction
and Film, Ithaca 1990; Markus Kuhn, Filmnarratologie: Ein erzähltheoretisches Analysemodell,
Berlin/New York 2011; Sabine Schlickers, Verfilmtes Erzählen: Narratologisch-komparative Unter-
suchung zu ‘El beso de la mujer araña’ (Manuel Puig/Héctor Babenco) und ‘Crónica de una muerte
anunciada’ (Gabriel García Márquez/Francesco Rosi), Frankfurt/M. 1997.
2 In this essay, we use the concepts of ‘comic’, ‘graphic literature’ and ‘graphic novel’ as
synonymous. For a discussion of the differences between the various formats of narrative image
sequences, see Jacob Dittmar, Comic-Analyse, Konstanz 2008, pp. 20–25.
3 See Martin Schüwer, Wie Comics erzählen. Grundriss einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie, Trier
2008; Jan-Noël Thon, “Who’s Telling the Tale? Authors and Narrators in Graphic Narrative”, in:
Daniel Stein/Jan-Noël Thon (eds.), From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels. Contributions to the Theory
and History of Graphic Narrative, Berlin 2013, pp. 67–99.
236 Markus Kuhn and Andreas Veits
As of yet, comparable investigations focusing on the narrative potential of the

images and image sequences of comics are not available.4 This article contributes
to closing this gap by discussing the basic conditions of narration through images
in comics as well as the question of how narrative mediation in comics can be
modeled and analyzed.
Taking into account comics’ media-specific means of expression, sections II
and III will discuss why and according to what definition of narrativity the visual
portion of comics can be defined as narrative. We will also discuss the extent to
which visual representations can be analyzed in terms of narrative mediation and
explain which categories of classical and film narratology we consider helpful for
the analysis of comics. Obviously, due to the differences between the source and
target medium, a transfer of analytical concepts is not possible without modifica-
tions. If the concept of ‘narrator’ or ‘narrative instance’ is to be applied in analyses
of comics, it is necessary to complement the model put forward by classical
narratology with further distinctions.
In section IV, using the example of Paul Hornschemeier’s graphic novel The
Three Paradoxes, we will then apply our proposed categories for the narratologi-
cal analysis of visual narratives. The work’s complex, self-reflexive, multiple-
layered structure makes it a perfect case study for demonstrating how new
interpretations can be inspired by explorations into the narrative structure of the
work. These insights lead us to characterize the work as a discourse about the
unreliability of human memory.
II Narrativity in Comics
In comics, narratives unfold through sequences of still images that are usually
arranged in a causal and logical manner. Even though comics often include
4 Exceptions are the contributions by Phillipe Marion (Traces en cases: Travail graphique, figura-
tion narrative et participation du lecteur, Louvain 1993), Thierry Groensteen (The System of Comics,
Jackson 2007), or Kai Mikkonen (“Presenting Minds in Graphic Narratives”, in: Partial Answers, 2/
2008, pp. 301–321). Marion’s analysis is of particular importance to a narratological perspective
on comics. Referencing the concept of a ‘cinematic narrator,’ Marion is the first to apply the
concept of a mediating narrative instance (“monstrateur graphique” or “graphiateur”). To this
instance, he attributes the function of visual narration in graphic literature. However, Marion
conflates questions of authorship and narrative mediation, severely hampering the analytical
value of his model. “Incidentally, it should be noted that Marion […] seems to understand the
‘graphiator’ (as well as the ‘monstrator’) of a graphic narrative as being closer to some kind of
hypothetical author (or ‘implied author’ or ‘author function’) than to a narrator-as-narrating-
character” (Thon, “Who’s Telling the Tale?”, p. 71).
Narrative Mediation in Comics 237
verbal information, the constitutive element of the medium remains visual narra-
tion by means of still images. In fact, many comics communicate the plot exclu-
sively through sequences of images, and do not use written language at all.5
The necessity of the visual mode and the facultative role of verbal information
are a feature shared by comic and film (whereas auditory elements are only
possible in film). In order to discuss the narrative potential of comics, it thus
makes sense to differentiate, as in film narratology, between the levels of image
and language. These are two different sign systems or modes of mediation that
must each satisfy different requirements in order to be counted as narrative. The
medium of comics can narrate without linguistic elements. It therefore seems
sensible to regard the narrative qualities of the visual representations as elemen-
tary to comics as a storytelling medium.
Since some of the specific narrative qualities of comics are similar to those of
films, Markus Kuhn’s book Filmnarratologie about narration in film can be taken
as a point of depature. Kuhn’s broad definition of narrativity refers to the level of
‘the represented,’ i.e. the histoire. Meanwhile, his narrow definition brings narra-
tive mediation to the fore, which is also the stance we are taking in this article:
As narrative works in a narrower sense, I see representations in which a story (that is, at least
a change of state) is mediated or communicated by one or more, non-anthropomorphic
narrative instance(s), through a specific sign system.6
This means that narrativity in the narrow sense is constituted by the presence of a
mediating system of communication as well as a change of state. Film has (at
least) two basic means of representing such a change of state: A change of state
can be expressed by movement within a camera shot or through the montage of
diverse shots.7 Comics, by contrast, can only represent succession from panel to
panel – the still images of a comic cannot represent movement the way the
moving images of a film can. This is a crucial difference between the media.
However, comics may indicate movement by means of comic-specific codes (such
5 In addition to the pictorial representation of affairs, language is communicated on a second

visual level, in graphemes. Theoretically, both communication systems can be so close that a
sharp differentiation between the two is no longer possible. As a rule, though, they can be
schematically differentiated from each other. For reasons of simplification, we are referring to
visual-graphemic information as ‘(written) language,’ and visual-pictoral information as the
‘visual’ or the ‘image’ element of a comic.
6 Kuhn, Filmnarratologie, p. 47 (our translation). In the following, all translations of German
originals are our own, unless indicated otherwise.
7 See ibid., p. 60.
as motion lines and poses).8 Most of these occur within one individual still
image.9
In order for a change of state to count as narrative, it must, according to Wolf
Schmid, fulfil three conditions:
(1) A temporal structure with at least two states, the initial situation and the final situation
[…].
(2) The equivalence of the initial and the final solutions, that is, the presence of a similarity
and a contrast between the states, or more precisely, the identity and difference of the
properties of those states […].
(3) Both states, and the change that takes place between them, must concern one and the
same acting or suffering subject […].10
A change of state is generally represented through the juxtaposition of contrast-

ing situations involving a certain object. In comics, though, the transformation
itself is usually not shown. For example, the first picture (A) of a comic’s page
could show an illustration of a house, followed (B) by the image of a collapsed
house. The change of state in this example could be paraphrased with the words
‘a house collapses.’11 Of course, (A) the initial state and (B) the final outcome of a
change of state do not have to be shown in directly adjacent panels. The presenta-
tion of A is often followed by other panels before B is shown. The temporal
interval between situations A and B can be represented explicitly (e.g. through
supplementary information) or implicitly (e.g. through the simple contrast of the
initial and final state).
This example nicely illustrates the tendency towards elliptical narration
which is so typical of comics. Generally, comics do not prominently feature
representations of change as step-by-step processes. Instead, the empty spaces
have to be filled by the imagination of the readers.12 Ellipses within representa-
tions of state changes are typically implicit and of low importance to the
8 Schüwer extensively details the possibilities of representation of movement and divides them
into the categories of “movement in a single image” (Schüwer, Wie Comics erzählen, pp. 42–51),
“sequences of movement” (ibid., pp. 51–66) and “trajectories” (ibid., pp. 66–75).
9 This is also possible in film. However, due to the possibility of depicting movement directly,
this is seldom used. A rare example of a film narrative consisting only of film stills is La Jetée
(Chris Marker, France 1962).
10 Wolf Schmid, Narratology: An Introduction, Berlin/New York 2010, p. 3; see also Kuhn,
Filmnarratologie, p. 57.
11 See also the discussion of this basic example in reference to film: ibid., pp. 56f. The depiction
of a collapsing house that can be read as a state of change can be found in the comic book Corto
Maltese (Hugo Pratt, Corto Maltese: The Ballad of the Salt Sea, New York 2012, p. 112).
12 See Schüwer, Wie Comics erzählen, p. 45.
narrative sequence because the omitted information can be inferred from the
context.
Exaggerated poses, motion lines, and further forms of representation do not
represent changes of state according to the definition given above. Rather, they
only imply changes of state by way of style. Thus, we prefer to call them indicators
of narrative [narrationsindizierend].13 Indicators of narrative lead to the activation
of a cognitive schema in the recipient to infer a change of state even if the pictures
do not explicitly represent a change of state. For example, a panel might only
show the initial, final, or a transitory stage of the transformation, leaving it to the
reader to infer the change of state as a whole. Marie-Laure Ryan describes the
same phenomenon when discussing the narrative potential of paintings which
depict only a moment of an event:
A work that defines only one point on the narrative trajectory presents the spectator not with
a specific story but with an array of narrative possibilities. Every spectator will plot a
different story line through the fixed coordinates of the pregnant moment, and this story
tends to fray towards the edges, since the network of possibilities increases in complexity
the farther one moves away from the climactic moment.14
Comics depend to a particularly large extent on this ability to fill in the gaps
because the narrative economy of the medium frequently relies on such indica-
tors of narrativity. Comic-specific codes like motion lines can be ‘naturalized’
by experienced comic readers. By such means, the comic’s presentation ensures
that, from the sum of depictions, most recipients are able to construct a
comparable story, i.e. one whose central events can be understood by all its
recipients.
13 See also Werner Wolf, “Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik,
Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie”, in: Ansgar Nünning/Vera Nünning (eds.),
Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär, Trier 2002, pp. 23–104. Wolf defines the
narrative as a schema in the sense of frame theory and departs from the premise that various works
and media, through explicit and implicit signals, trigger a narrative mode of comprehension. That
is to say, Wolf does not understand narrative as a primarily textual phenomenon. Instead, he
understands it as a schema of understanding applied and actualized during the process of
reception.
14 Marie-Laure Ryan, “Will New Media Produce New Narratives?”, in: M.-L.R. (ed.), Narrative
across Media. The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln/London 2004, pp. 337–359.
III Narrative Instances and Narrative Levels in Comics
III.1 The Visual Narrative Instance in Comics
Just as in narrative literature and film, recipients of a comic are not directly
confronted with that which is being represented. Rather, they receive it as
mediated through an “instance which selects, accentuates, situates and offers
perspective.”15 As established above in the discussion of minimal requirements of
narrativity, two aspects of visual mediation are central in comics: the showing of
individual images and their connection through montage. In the case of comics,
though, ‘showing’ is not the same thing as, for example, in film’s cinemato-
graphic narration. The characters ‘shown’ or the world ‘presented’ in a comic are
no recordings of staged situations on a technical-mechanical device, but pro-
duced by the artist in an act of drawing.
In this context, the term ‘visual narrative instance’ (hereafter ‘visual NI’)
neither refers to an anthromorphized narrator concept nor an (audio)visual narra-
tive instance realized through camera and post-production technology. Rather, it
refers to an abstract concept which serves to describe the diverse narrative
functions of visual acts of representation in comics.
Similar to camera shots, many comic illustrations convey a specific perspec-
tive (e.g. a singular, double or triple vanishing point perspective).16 In many
realist paintings since the Renaissance, the recipient is thus put into relation with
the illustration. To a certain extent, this feature of representation can be com-
pared with the positioning of a film camera and the resulting visual frame.17 Every
panel depicts a specific moment, selected and given a perspective through the
visual NI.
A picture […], due to its framing, provides only an excerpt of a larger or more extensive
environment. […] In this way the picture determines the selection of that which is presented,
and its point of view controls the view of the reader. The reader has to follow the perspective
that is offered and is influenced by long shots, medium shots or close-ups […].18
15 Manfred Pfister, Das Drama: Theorie und Analyse, Stuttgart 1997, p. 48.
16 See Schüwer, Wie Comics erzählen, pp. 140–154, pp. 523–528.
17 Dittmar, Comic-Analyse, pp. 82–84. The terms used here draw on the description of camera
parameters (range, angle) in film analysis. However, we have to stress that there is a crucial
difference of ‘depiction’ in comics and the positioning of a camera in film (and the resulting
perpectives and distances).
18 Dittmar, Comic-Analyse, p. 77.
Just like filmic narrative, graphic literature can present shifts in the chronology of
the narrative as well as variations of narrative speed.19 The graphic realization of
the representation must be assessed as a further fundamental narrative function of
the visual NI.20 According to Jacob F. Dittmar, further important aspects of visual
staging in comics are “balance,” “shape” and “form” of the “visual elements,” the
“presented setting,” the “lighting” and the “presentation of characters.”21
Furthermore, like in film, the function of the visual NI in comics is not
restricted to the selection, perspectivization and staging of images. Montage also
has to be considered. For example, consider the sequential ordering of individual
images (panels). Here, a distinction has to be made between the micro-level, i.e.
the individual image, and the macro-level, namely the tabular structure of the
entire page.22 It is the sequencing of individual panels on a page which makes the
causal connection of that which is presented possible in the first place:
The montage or combination of images can be understood as a process in which a […] new
meaning is created from the […] sequences or segments following each other as they are now
working together. The context of individual sequences within a narrative or a scene sorts
them into the narrative arc and creates a coherent meaning.23
The order in which individual graphic elements are arranged on a page influences
the flow and pace of reading. In most cases, however, the causal correlation of
what the images depict can be inferred from the schematic ordering as well as the
conventional reading direction. The reading direction (in the Western cultural
tradition) is usually oriented from left to right and from top to bottom. Even in
comics which adhere to this sequence, individual graphic elements (speech
bubbles, panels, commentary blocks) can alternatively be emphasized through
variations of size or colored markings and thus interrupt the conventional reading
direction. In this way, the recipient’s attention may be drawn to particular objects.
The ordering of images on a page, the distance between the individual panels
selected, or the background color – all these are features of montage and layout
that may contribute to a larger meaning. Furthermore, the sequencing of the
pages has to be taken into account. Many comics play with the set-up of pages,
for example by telling a story from the perspective of a particular character until
19 See Schüwer, Wie Comics erzählen, pp. 382–388; and Dittmar, Comic-Analyse, pp.129f.
20 Regarding this dimension, however, it cannot always be clearly distinguished if a particular
manner of presentation (e.g. the specific presentation of lighting) fulfils a primarily narrative or
dramaturgical function.
21 See Dittmar, Comic-Analyse, p.78.
22 See Dittmar, Comic-Analyse, pp.125–136; and Schüwer, Wie Comics erzählen, pp. 271–301.
23 Dittmar, Comic-Analyse, p. 120.
the end of a page, changing the narrative perspective with the turning of the
page.24
As a rule, the status of the visual NI can be described as extra-heterodiegetic.
The visual NI communicates information without being part of the diegetic
reality. There are only few cases of intradiegetic visual NIs, for example when the
events of an intradiegetic comic are communicated within the diegetic world. In
this case, the events are mediated by two visual NIs located at different narrative
levels. The extradiegetic visual NI shows the diegetic world of the base narrative.
Meanwhile, the intradiegetic visual NI communicates the events of an ‘internal
comic,’ which is, for example, read by a character in the diegesis.
III.2 Facultative Verbal Narrative Instances in Comics
In addition to sequences of images, comics also have the option of communicat-

ing verbal information. Put simply, the written language of comics has three
different functions: 1.) Commentaries or remarks of a verbal narrative instance.
These are frequently marked graphically through a square frame and isolated
from the world presented. They can be differentiated from 2.) text in speech and
thought bubbles, marked as characters’ direct speech, and 3.) the presentation of
noises in ‘sound words.’25
Verbal utterances that are realized in speech and thought bubbles will in the
following be referred to as character speech. If verbal utterances are represented
outside of characters’ speech/thought bubbles, they will be referred to as narrator
speech, ascribed to a verbal narrative instance (hereafter: verbal NI).26 The forma-
tion of the speech/thought bubbles can be compared to the so-called inquit
formula used in verbal narration, such as ‘he/she/it says,’ or to the stage direc-
tions found in dramatic texts.27 Character utterances marked by speech bubbles
represent spoken speech in the world of the narrative. As a rule, such utterances
24 Such changes in perspective are frequently found in superhero comics, e.g. in Batman: The
Killing Joke (Alan Moore/Brian Bolland, Batman: The Killing Joke, New York 1988).
25 Schüwer, Wie Comics erzählen, pp. 331–335.
26 In some comics the distinction of characters’ and narrators’ speech can be more complicated.
For further investigation, see Thon, “Who’s Telling the Tale?”, pp. 79–82.
27 As a rule, in drama the character speaking is identified by his or her name prefixed to their
speech. Furthermore, information can be offered as to the manner in which the speech is to be
performed: Stage directions fulfil the need “[…] to regulate the circulation of speech and clarify its
origin, context and destination” (Irene J. F. De Jong, Narrative in the Drama: The Art of the
Euripidean Messenger-Speech, New York/Kopenhagen 1991, p. 185). In comics, the shape of the
speech bubbles and the lettering can offer clues as to the volume or emotive qualities of the
can be perceived by other characters. Meanwhile, speech represented in thought

bubbles corresponds to inner monologue/internal speech and is not accessible to
the surrounding characters.
Characters who communicate through direct speech can become, just as in
film, intradiegetic verbal narrative instances. In order to qualify as an intradie-
getic narrator, the character has to offer an internal narration, for example by
narrating prior events.28 In practice, purely linguistic intradiegetic narratives – or
metadiegeses, as Genette would call them29 – only rarely occur in comics. More
frequently, longer metadiegetic passages are introduced in thought or text bub-
bles, but are then taken up by the visual NI and translated into a visual metadieg-
esis, using dramatic character speech (see section IV).
If narrator speech occurs in a comic, it often takes on functions comparable
to a narrative voice-over in film. In images, narrator speech can be implemented
for various purposes. It can serve as a commentary which delivers information
that supplements the contents mediated in the visual-pictoral portion – as, for
instance, when new characters are introduced by way of a short verbal character-
ization.30 However, linguistic information can easily exceed such rudimentary
additions and commentaries, for example when the verbal NI gives a narrative
account which stands in contrast to the information presented in the images,31 or
represents another narrative strand in parallel to that graphically represented.
The attitude assumed towards the diegetic world by the verbal NI can be just as
variable as in purely written narratives.32
As a result, the verbal NI can appear as an autodiegetic first-person narrator, as
a spectator commenting on the events, or as an omniscient authorial narrator.33 As
speech. Cf. Dittmar, Comic-Analyse, pp. 105f.; and Scott McCloud, Comics richtig lesen: Die
unsichtbare Kunst, Hamburg 1994, p. 142.
28 In these cases, characters themselves become verbal narrative instances ‒ if they tell a
narrative of at least minimal nature. Regarding the concept of ‘minimal story’ in language-based
media, see Schmid, Narratology, p. 3; or Gerald Prince, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of
Narrative, Berlin 1982, p. 4.
29 See Gérard Genette, Die Erzählung, trans. by Andreas Knop, München 2010 [Original: G.G.,
Discours du récit, Paris 1972], p 148.
30 See Dittmar, Comic-Analyse, p. 109.
31 See also the comic strip I Guess by Chris Ware (Chris Ware, I Guess, England 1991 [= RAW, High
Cultures for Low Brows 2.3]).
32 See Schüwer, Wie Comics erzählen, p. 332.
33 Thon, “Who’s Telling the Tale?”, presents models of further narrative situations for the
written-linguistic portion of contemporary graphic novels.
with dramatic texts,34 comics can also narrate completely without the use of a
verbal NI. The action is then rendered by graphically represented actions, and the
verbal acts between characters.
Narration through images is a constitutive hallmark of comics. This does not
mean that a verbal NI is automatically dominated by a visual NI. The relations
between visual and verbal NI are highly variable and can be very complex.
III.3 Narrative Levels in Comics
Tying into the concepts of classical narrative theory, we assume that comics may
feature nested narrative layers:
The diegesis is a ‘narrated […] world’ presented, narrated and/or told by one (or multiple)
extradiegetic instance(s) […]. The metadiegesis is a ‘diegesis within the diegesis’ opened up
by one or more (intra)diegetic instance(s) […] etc.35
In comics, such embedded narratives are distinguished from the diegetic reality
either by marked changes in graphic style or by introductory and/or concluding
sequences. Most commonly, such metadiegetic sequences are framed by visual
indicators in the surrounding panels. Often, they proceed according to the follow-
ing schema: Within a panel or a sequence of panels, the visual NI first shows the
reflecting character presented from the ‘outside.’ By devices such as the emphasis
on facial features, it is suggested that the character’s attention is focussed not
outwards, on the diegetic reality, but inwards, e.g. on a dream, imagination, or
memory. After this anticipatory framing, the actual (mental) metadiegesis occurs.
Over multiple panels, the fantasy, memory or dream is depicted. Following the
mental metadiegesis, which may be further marked by a particular drawing style or
a change in coloring, the representation returns to the diegetic reality. Often, this
transition is signalled through another representation of the perceiving character.
34 Holger Korthals, Zwischen Drama und Erzählung, Ein Beitrag zur Theorie geschehensdarstellen-
der Literatur, Berlin 2003, pp. 104f.
35 Kuhn, Filmnarratologie, p. 103.
IV The Self-Reflexive Narrative Structure in Paul

Hornschemeier’s The Three Paradoxes
The representation and the staging of stories are both a central theme and a
structurally determining element of the graphic novel The Three Paradoxes. The
comic narrates the visit of artist Paul Hornschemeier to his parents in a small town
in Ohio, a setting which is not further described. The protagonist’s life appears to be
dominated by personal insecurities: Over the course of the story, Paul36 begins to
doubt his qualities as an artist, his developing relationship with his pen-pal Juliane
and finally, even his own senses. During his stay, he attempts to finish a comic book
titled “Paul and the Magic Pencil.” The narrative of this embedded comic interrupts
the framing narrative at various points. In addition, Paul is distracted from his work
by memories of his past. These metadiegetic sequences are highly intertextual and
in their form playfully reference other comic formats and genres.
The topic of ‘telling stories’ is explicitly foregrounded, and complemented by
reflections on the relation of factual and fictional narratives. Over the course of
the comic, Paul begins to doubt the reliability of his own memory and thus his
whole personal biography. This intratextual play with fact and reality is rein-
forced by the paratextual labelling of the graphic novel The Three Paradoxes as
the (pseudo)-autobiography of the (real) authorial artist Paul Hornschemeier.
References to the extratextual reality such as character names or their appearance
create the impression that the book in question is an autobiographical work. The
extent to which this actually applies is not made explicit. A short paratext in the
form of a description, in upper case, of the “READING OF THIS VOLUME” which
prefaces the narrative also contributes to the bewilderment of the reader:
DESPITE STATEMENTS ELSEWHERE IN THIS VOLUME, THERE ARE THOSE WHO WILL
QUESTION THIS VOLUME’S TRUTH […]. TO THIS END, THE AUTHOR SUBMITS THE FOL-
LOWING EXPERT STATEMENT: ‘IF YOU CAN’T BELIEVE WHAT YOU READ IN THE COMIC
BOOKS, WHAT CAN YOU BELIEVE?’37
The last sentence, in particular, remains ambivalent in its intended meaning.38

While various authors, such as Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, or Joe Matt, have
36 In the following, we refer to the diegetic character of Paul Hornschemeier as Paul and the real
author as Paul Hornschemeier.
37 Paul Hornschemeier, The Three Paradoxes, Seattle 2006, Foreword. The graphic novel is
without page numbers. For the reason, we have supplied our own numeration. Our numeration
takes as its first page the beginning of the metadiegesis “Paul and the Magic Pencil.”
38 Here, the author Paul Hornschemeier is quoting the American animated series The Adventures
of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends (USA, 1959–1961).
experimented with (auto)biographical and documentary forms of the comic,

comics usually convey fictional rather than factual contents. Thus, the “EXPERT
STATEMENT” with which the author apparently seeks to support the factual
nature of his narrative can only appear ironic. Before the beginning of the
narrative proper, the reader is confronted with the idea that the following narra-
tive may possibly be autobiographical. The narrative’s veracity must, however,
also be called into question. Many of Hornschemeier’s comics deliberately leave
questions open. At certain moments, signals for autobiographical narrative are
woven in. However, such an interpretation is at the same time deliberately under-
mined by incoherences and contradicting elements.39
IV.1 The Diegetic Framing Narrative
Paul’s visit to his parents forms the framing narrative of four metadiegetic internal
narratives. These frequently interrupt the framing narrative. Within the framing
narrative, events are primarily communicated by the visual NI. Linguistic infor-
mation is given by the characters in the action; there is no extra-heterodiegetic
verbal NI. The drawing of the framing narrative is sober; an even line dominates,
which renders all objects with a unified outline. The same applies to the colour-
ing, which is held in dark, earthy tones (see fig. 2).
IV.2 The Metadiegesis “Paul and the Magic Pencil”
The comic The Three Paradoxes begins not with the diegetic framing narrative but
with a metadiegesis that is only retrospectively framed and in which the visual
viewpoint of the intradiegetic character Paul is represented. The metadiegetic
structure of this first embedded narrative comes about through the incorporation
of an ‘inner comic’ into the basic narrative. In a novel, in general, an intradiegetic
character can bring about a verbal metadiegesis by ‘reading’ a book as part of the
diegetic action. In the same way, the visual NI establishes Paul’s perusal of an
intradiegetic comic, and in doing so establishes a metadiegesis.
The drawing style is clearly differentiated from that of the framing narrative
and thus serves as a marker of the internal narrative. The coloring is reduced to
white and blue; the drawing style appears extremely sketchy and starkly
reduced. Faces are suggested with just a few strokes and hardly any clear
39 See also Paul Hornschemeier, Mother Come Home, Seattle 2003.

outlines are drawn. The visual style of the metadiegesis is motivated in the
framing narrative by the fact that the diegetic comic artist Paul works on this
comic and that the visual NI is representing his viewpoint. As is the case in
many graphic novels which are made up of individual chapters and issues, the
visual NI shows a title page at the beginning of the metadiegesis. On this page,
stylized lettering declares to the reader the title of the volume, “Paul and the
Magic Pencil” (see fig. 1).
In the following panels, the visual NI shows how Paul stumbles through the
wood with his magic pencil. On the next page, he is shown being attacked by a
‘magic creature.’ Before, however, he is confronted by the “WISE GUY IN THE
SKY,” a character with a long white beard, reminiscent of traditional depictions of
God. From a cloud in the sky, this character addresses the young boy with a
warning: “OH COME ON, YOU DUMB ASS! YOU’RE MISSING THE POINT, DON’T
YOU THINK?” Paul and his opponent react to this as if frozen. In the last panel on
this page, the visual NI shows the boy turning to the Almighty, articulating the
following question in a speech bubble: “WELL THEN WHAT’S THE ANSWER AND
QUICKLY PLEASE!”
This last panel also represents the element that establishes the connection
with the intradiegetic framing narrative. In its drawing style, page 3 renders the
diegesis through a close-up of the intradiegetic artist Paul sitting at his desk and
staring at his drawing board, deep in thought (see fig. 2). The change of style and
the fact that we are, in the following, presented with the image of an artist at his
drawing board can be interpreted by the reader as suggesting that “Paul and the
Magic Pencil” is a metadiegetic narrative attributable to the comic artist Paul. This
impression is finally confirmed by the written part of the panel. A thought bubble
above Paul’s head (“THE ANSWER IS…”) makes reference to the last panel of the
metadiegesis and reveals the comic artist Paul as the observer and producer of
what has been presented before.
It is through this concluding framing that the recipient is first made aware
that the previous page is a metadiegesis. Further alternations between diegesis
and metadiegesis follow the same strategy and are both prospectively and retro-
spectively framed: The identification of the shift in the narrative level is executed
by an introductory panel which shows the character Paul in the diegetic world,
working at his drawing board. This is followed by a panel representing the comic
seen through the eyes of its intradiegetic author as well as a concluding panel
showing the intradiegetic artist once again at his work station.40 Overall, the
meaning of the metadiegesis “Paul and the Magic Pencil” remains nebulous.
40 See Hornschemeier, The Three Paradoxes, pp. 63f., pp. 64f. and pp. 65f.

Although the various extracts repeat elements such as the magical nature and the
all-knowing person in heaven, the story remains ‘incomplete.’ Time and again,
the visual NI shifts into the framing narrative and shows how the artist picks up
his eraser and removes scenes from the ‘comic-within-a-comic’ that have just
been shown.41 A vague causal relation seems to exist between the individual
metadiegetic fragments.
IV.3 The Metalepsis in “Paul and the Magic Pencil”
In contrast to the clearly framed and marked metadiegetic narratives there is

another scene in which diegesis and metadiegesis appear to blend into a metalep-
tical presentation. Page 67 includes eight panels presented in the metadiegetic
style of “Paul and the Magic Pencil” (see fig. 3).
In the metadiegesis Paul is holding a telephone receiver in his hand. A speech
bubble contains a monologue to an acquaintance about their mutual exchange of
letters, in which Paul expresses his excitement about an imminent reunion. The
details suggest that he is talking to his pen-pal Juliane, who was first mentioned
at the beginning of the framing narrative.42 The shape of the speech bubbles and
the text contained in them is distinguished from the previous metadiegetic
fragments. Throughout the graphic novel, the outlines and the text of the speech
bubbles belonging to the diegetic world are black, while those that are part of the
“Paul and the Magic Pencil” metadiegesis are blue. But in this case, the speech
bubbles and text of the metadiegetic character are outlined in black, just like the
utterances of the intradiegetic characters. Speech bubble text that should be
attributable to the diegetic level due to its content and formal shaping is here
placed in the mouth of the metadiegetic character Paul. The last panel on the
page once again separates the levels. It shows the diegetic comic artist Paul on
the telephone, sitting at his drawing board. It is not clear, however, if panels 1–8
are once again a point-of-view sequence retrospectively framed by the last panel,
or a metadiegesis in which the intradiegetic author pictures himself as his own
comic-book character.
41 See ibid., pp. 65f.

42 See ibid., p. 27.
IV.4 The Metadiegesis “Summer School”
The second metadiegesis attributed to the intradiegetic character Paul shows a

sequence of memories which occur to Paul during a walk through his home town
with his father. They are presented on page 16 with the title “Summer School.”
Paul remembers difficult episodes of his time at school, characterized by his
striving for recognition from his peers and a childish need for closeness to his
parents. The memories are represented as fragments, evoked by particular loca-
tions which Paul and his father pass in the diegetic world. Just like the metadieg-
esis “Paul and the Magic Pencil,” the diegetic action is repeatedly interrupted by
the metadiegetic fragments of “Summer School.” Furthermore, “Summer School”
is not narrated in chronological fashion. The following parts of the metadiegesis
can be distinguished: prologue (p. 11), introduction (pp. 16–19), conclusion
(pp. 24f.), first main section (pp. 28–31) and second main section (pp. 58–60).
The mental metadiegesis43 “Summer School” is stylistically distinguished
from the framing narrative. Furthermore, it is characterized by intertextual refer-
ences to the American comic series Dennis the Menace.44 Due to the abstract
drawing style and the shape of his facial features, Paul resembles the celebrated
comic character Dennis the Menace to a remarkable degree. This character enjoys
great popularity in the United States and is referenced there across the most
diverse publishing formats such as comic albums, newspaper strips, animated
films or computer games.
The drawings have a strongly stylized appearance. Shadows or other details
are missing – the characters of the metadiegesis, for example, are represented
only in minimalistic lines. The metadiegesis is also visually distinguished from
the framing narrative through the colorful design in red and gold tones as well as
the Ben-Day dots ‘laid’ over the characters. The framing device selected to mark
the transition between diegetic reality and metadiegesis repeats a pattern initially
established on page 11: In the second panel, the visual NI shows a half-subjective
view over Paul’s shoulder as he passes an old canal during a walk. In the next
picture, a close-up from slightly below shows Paul holding a camera up to his
face. The following panel then shows the moment in which the photograph is
taken. Although the image structure of the third panel is almost completely
retained, the drawing style creates an effect as if the recipient was looking directly
43 For the concept of ‘mental metadiegesis,’ see Kuhn, Filmnarratologie, pp. 301–304,

pp. 167–170.
44 Dennis the Menace has been published as a newspaper strip, comic collection and animated
series. See the official Homepage of Hank Ketcham’s Dennis the Menace [since 1951], 2008, http://
www.dennisthemenace.com/cast.html (accessed May 10, 2014).
at the triggered camera flash. The visual NI presents the character’s contour only
in rudimentary fashion and the frame is held in a yellow and ochre tone (see
fig. 4).
After this, the presentation of the metadiegesis begins. It is marked by
another ‘stylistic disruption.’ Once again, the visual NI shows the old canal, this
time without any obstacles in the line of view. In front of the canal, there is a boy
running into a pipe. In a speech bubble, the boy is saying: “COME ON! IT’S
COOL!” In the next panel, the visual NI is looking over the shoulder of another
boy, who seems nervous as he peers into the depths of the drain passage. At the
end of the pipe, the boy from the previous panel is illustrated in a schematic
fashion. He is asking the second boy to follow him into the canal (in later
sequences of “Summer School,” the second boy can be recognized as Paul at
childhood age). The narrative then switches back to the level of the diegesis. Paul
is once again shown in a close-up from below, holding the camera to his body,
lost in thought as he gazes at the object just photographed. In summary, the
memory sequence is anticipated by the camera flash and retrospectively framed
when Paul is again shown standing with a camera.
The style of the panels’ frames also changes in the metadiegesis. They are
lightly blurred and thus, together with the altered drawing style, serve as addi-
tional markings for the metadiegesis. The transition described is repeated for the
first fragment of the main section of “Summer School” in nearly identical fashion.
Meanwhile, the conclusion and the second part are framed with only slight
variations of this principle.
Like “Paul and the Magic Pencil,” “Summer School” offers a metaleptic
element. In the last panel on page 20, we return to the diegetic level as the older
Paul and his father continue their nocturnal walk through the small town. In the
background, young Paul and his friends from the metadiegesis “Summer School”
can be seen, drawn in the distinct style of this metadiegetic level. This moment is
not, however, framed as a memory sequence. The comic offers no explanation of
as to why it here blurs two narrative levels that were clearly distinguished
previously (see fig. 5).
IV.5 The Metadiegesis “The Scar”
The metadiegesis “The Scar” is also represented by the visual NI, showing Paul’s
thoughts. Paul remembers the tragic story of Matt, who was run over by a car
while playing and suffered severe damage to his vocal chords. The narrative
explores the accident’s effects on Matt’s life, for example, how he was mocked in
school due to his disability.
The metadiegesis is clearly distinguished from the framing narrative by its yet
again different style, reminiscent of 1970s comics. It is characterized by a particu-
lar emphasis on emotions, achieved by exaggerated representations of the char-
acters’ faces and a particular use of color. The setting, too, is presented in a
reduced fashion, for example through the use of monotone surfaces as back-
ground instead of detailed presentations of the environment. This visual style
directs the recipient’s attention to the interior states of the depicted characters.45
On page 38, for example, there is a close-up of the face of the driver who causes
the accident, twisted into a mask-like shape; the details of the background space
are replaced by a colorful surface which surrounds the man’s facial features and
shades into a black hachure. This intertextual allusion to comic history relies not
only on the use of drawing techniques and the color formation of the panel but
also on the color of the pages themselves: In contrast to the white pages of the rest
of the comic book, the pages representing the metadiegesis are brown and thus
strongly reminiscent of the cheap paper used for action comics from the 1950s to
the 1980s.
The last two panels on page 33 function as a prospective framing of the
following metadiegetic sequence: Paul is in a grocery store when he is struck by
the scar of the store clerk. The visual NI shows two increasingly close point-of-
view panels which represent Paul’s perception. In the penultimate panel, the
clerk’s upper body is shown in close-up. In the last panel, only the lower half of
his face, his throat with a large scar, and his name badge (“Matt W.”) are visible.
This close-up serves to represent the focus of Paul’s attention on the scar. This
effect is reinforced through the employment of montage. The panel borders are
placed in such a way that within the visible picture it is communicated that the
sales clerk is addressing Paul, but the text within the speech bubble is outside the
panel frame and thus out of view. This reflects Paul’s subjective perception. He
has concentrated on the scar and the salesman’s name badge until he has
completely sunk into the world of his thoughts and is no longer aware of the
external world. On the next page, the mental metadiegesis begins. It closes with
an almost identically constructed retrospective framing panel showing the scar
and the upper half of the clerk’s torso.
45 Schüwer, Wie Comics erzählen, pp. 144–146.

IV.6 The Metadiegesis “Zenon and his Friends”
The internal narrative “Zenon and his Friends” references a theme from Greek
philosophy. The Greek philosopher Zenon of Elea supports a theory by his lover
Parmenides, arguing by means of three of his famous paradoxes. He does this by
trying to make visible the problems of particular assumptions about change and
movement. The paradoxes Zenon relays to the Athenians ‒ the best-known of
which is probably the paradox of Achilles, the quick runner, unable to catch up
with his opponent ‒ are presented in a curt and overdrawn fashion. As a result,
they appear fragmentary and open to interpretation. What seems clear is that they
are concerned with the relationship between stasis and movement as well as with
the relationship between subjective perception and objective reality ‒ issues that
loom large in the entire comic. This metadiegesis is introduced by a conversation
between Paul and his father in front of the supermarket. Paul describes his feeling
of being unable to move at the check-out. He begins to call reality and perception
into question.46 To this end, he makes reference to the theories of Zenon. In this
case, however, the status the embedded narrative assumes in the diegetic world
remains open. Due to the absence of frames, it is unclear if what is being
presented here is a visually implemented verbal narrative, the representation of
one of the characters’ ‘mental metadiegesis’ or an old comic book which Paul
remembers reading.
Once again, the drawing style is starkly reduced. The characters’ dimensions
are greatly simplified, meaning that facial features, in particular, are emphasized
with large button eyes on excessively-sized heads. The action has comical ele-
ments. For example, the metadiegesis ends with a panel showing Parmenides,
who gives Zenon a friendly slap on the backside and offers a judgement on
Zenon’s presentation: “SO I THINK THAT WENT WELL!”47 To the reader, Parme-
nides’ encouragement can only appear sarcastic, as Zenon’s presentation has
really been disappointing. Socrates has refuted his ideas. Apart from the thematic
relationship between the metadiegesis and Paul’s conversation with his father
about the theories of Zenon, there are no specific framing devices – a fact that
distinguishes this metadiegetic fragment from the others.
46 See Hornschemeier, The Three Paradoxes, p. 49.

47 Ibid., The Three Paradoxes, p. 56.
V Conclusion
We have offered a sketch of how the embedded narrative levels of The Three
Paradoxes are constructed and integrated and how the respective metadiegeses
can be attributed to an intradiegetic character who is drawing, narrating, or
remembering. The question remains who is actually narrating the metadiegeses.
One possibility is to define the diegetic status of the narrative levels by attributing
them to the characters of the diegetic world. Or one could argue that they are
shown by a visual narrative instance which does not appear to be connected to an
inner narrative level.
The metadiegeses remain ‒ no matter whether we understand them as pre-
senting an oral narrative, a drawn or read text or a character’s thoughts ‒ ‘only’
subordinate or complementary visual sequences within a comic. Certainly, the
metadiegeses are connected to scenes in which characters tell stories or read, and
they are also partially introduced by character speech. However, their greater
parts are presented by the visual NI and are therefore primarily narrated through
the visual showing of situations and dialogues.
According to the model of narrative levels as developed for literature, this
visual NI would have to be classified as intradiegetic if it presents a metadiegesis.
In the case of this graphic novel, though, the visual NI is not an element of the
framing diegetic world and thus not a ‘shown showing instance,’ as literature’s
‘narrated narrating instances’ are. Here, an inherent contradiction becomes
obvious, one already highlighted in relation to the medium of film.48 On the one
hand, narrative levels in visual media can be clearly differentiated with regard to
their diegetic and fictional status. On the other, they are shown by a visual NI
which does not seem to be connected to a particular inner diegetic level. This is
connected to the fact that an internal visual narrative within an external visual
narrative generally means a change of media: the visual metadiegesis in a comic
usually represents an oral narrative or the mental processes of a character. It is
only rarely that it represents what it actually is: a subordinated sequence within a
comic. The unusual case of a clear shift in visual narrative, for example a real
‘comic within a comic,’ occurs in The Three Paradoxes only at the beginning, with
the visual NI showing the artist’s view of his own comic, itself present in the
diegesis.
This phenomenon, described by Kuhn as the “visual short circuit of levels”
for the case of film, as a rule also applies to comics:
48 See Kuhn, Filmnarratologie, p. 60, pp. 310–314.

This short-circuit arises from the fact that a visual NI – which is not an element of the
diegetic world and must therefore be located on the extradiegetic level – narrates stories
through showing which, with the help of specific markings, are attributed to intra- and
metadiegetic characters (although they are not told by them, or, if so, only in part).49
According to Kuhn, a differentiation can be made between (A) “latent” and (B)
“active” circuits between levels.50 (A) describes a visually supported change in
narrative levels, primarily communicated by an extradiegetic visual NI. (B) refers
to cases where the layering of levels that was initially established is called into
question by the visual NI over the course of the narrative, for example if the visual
NI contradicts or exceeds the previously established and demarcated logical
stacking of levels.
In the case of a latent short circuit of layers, a clear diegetic structure of levels
can be analyzed. In an active short circuit of layers we should rather speak of a
‘pseudo-metadiegesis.’ Latent level short circuiting occurs in many comics and
films and has become a convention of visual narrative. In most cases, spectators
and readers hardly pay attention to it. In The Three Paradoxes, these ‘logical
ambiguities’ of visual narration are only presented in order to draw the recipient’s
attention to cracks in the narrative structure. In conjunction with the comic’s
contents, this foregrounds the inconsistency of human perception and memory.
In the metadiegeses “Paul and the Magic Pencil” and “Summer School,” the
latent short circuit of levels is emphasized through the fact that within the two
metaleptic sequences described above, the narrative levels appear to overlap.
And, as a matter of fact, the interpolated narrative “Zenon and his Friends” has to
be seen as a pseudo-metadiegesis. This is because the frames and markings are
not clear enough to attribute the sequence to a talking or thinking character.
In The Three Paradoxes, the focus of attention is deliberately placed on the
short circuits of narrative levels. The means of representation specific to comics
are thus used to draw attention to the unreliability of human memory.51 In this
respect, the contents of Hornschemeier’s graphic novel belong to a long tradition,
49 Markus Kuhn: “Film Narratology. Who Tells? Who Shows? Who Focalizes? Narrative Media-
tion in Self-Reflexive Fiction Films”, in: Peter Hühn/Wolf Schmid/Jörg Schönert (eds.), Point of
View, Perspective and Focalization. Modeling Mediation in Narrative, New York/Berlin 2009,
pp. 259–278, p. 271.
50 Kuhn, Filmnarratologie, pp. 299–213.
51 In addition to these formal breaks between (diegetic) reality and (metadiegetic) memory, the
graphic novel at various points also thematizes the importance of reality and subjectivity, as Paul
Hornschemeier calls the credibility of his own memories into question (see Hornschemeier, The
Three Paradoxes, p. 20).
particularly of the novel. In a manner comparable to the ‘novel of memory,’ the

comic reflects on the fact that memories are not only representations of past
experiences and thus the basis of a person’s understanding of their own identity.
Memories also have a direct influence on everyday actions as well as one’s
perception of the world. This idea is also supported by the title “The Three
Paradoxes” and its allusion to the philosophical theories of Zenon of Elea. His
paradoxes are considered to be expressions of pre-Socratic scepticism concerning
the ‘objectivity’ of human perception.52
In other words: In order to interpret the fragmentary base story of The Three
Paradoxes, in which little happens and which ends in an open fashion, the reader
can draw on its internal narratives. Furthermore, s/he can draw on the specific
narrative structure of the work as a whole. The conspicuous play with different
visual styles is an important formal factor that must be considered in any inter-
pretation. The goal of this article was to tease out the complexities of this
structure, which presents a challenge even for a recipient familiar with narrative
strategies across a range of media. As we have shown, questions of narrative
mediation as well as further categories of classical narratology are highly perti-
nent to the analysis of comics but must be adapted to this visual mode of
presentation. This includes features such as the differentiation between narrative
levels, aspects of mind representation and mental projections, as well as the
positioning of the narrative instance in relation to the events represented.
Works Cited
Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends, The, TV series, ABC, USA 1959–1961.
Chatman, Seymour, Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film, Ithaca 1990.
Dittmar, Jacob, Comic-Analyse, Konstanz 2008.
Genette, Gérard, Die Erzählung, trans. by Andreas Knop, München 2010. [Original: G.G., Discours
du récit, Paris 1972.]
Groensteen, Thierry, The System of Comics, Jackson 2007.
Hank Ketcham’s Dennis the Menace [since 1951], official Homepage, 2008, http://www.den-
nisthemenace.com/cast.html (accessed December 1, 2011).
Hornschemeier, Paul, Mother Come Home, Seattle 2003.
Hornschemeier, Paul, The Three Paradoxes, Seattle 2006.
Jong, Irene J. F. de, Narrative in the Drama: The Art of the Euripidean Messenger-Speech, New
York/Copenhagen 1991.
Korthals, Holger, Zwischen Drama und Erzählung, Ein Beitrag zur Theorie geschehensdarstellen-
der Literatur, Berlin 2003.
52 See Christof Rapp, Vorsokratiker, München 2007, pp. 153f.

Kuhn, Markus, “Film Narratology. Who Tells? Who Shows? Who Focalizes? Narrative Mediation in
Self-Reflexive Fiction Films”, in: Peter Hühn/Wolf Schmid/Jörg Schönert (eds.), Point of
View, Perspective and Focalization. Modeling Mediation in Narrative. New York/Berlin 2009,
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Kuhn, Markus, Filmnarratologie: Ein erzähltheoretisches Analysemodell, Berlin/New York 2011.
Marion, Philippe, Traces en cases: Travail graphique, figuration narrative et participation du
lecteur, Louvain 1993.
McCloud, Scott, Comics richtig lesen: Die unsichtbare Kunst, Hamburg 1994.
Mikkonen, Kai, “Presenting Minds in Graphic Narratives”, in: Partial Answers, 2/2008,
pp. 301–321.
Moore, Alan/Brian Bolland, Batman: The Killing Joke, New York 1988.
Pfister, Manfred, Das Drama: Theorie und Analyse, Stuttgart 1997.
Pratt, Hugo, Corto Maltese: The Ballad of the Salt Sea, New York 2012.
Prince, Gerald, Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative, Berlin 1982.
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Ryan, Marie-Laure, “Will New Media Produce New Narratives?”, in: M.-L.R. (ed.), Narrative across
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Schlickers, Sabine, Verfilmtes Erzählen: Narratologisch-komparative Untersuchung zu ‘El beso
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(Gabriel García Márquez/Francesco Rosi), Frankfurt/M. 1997.
Schmid, Wolf, Narratology: An Introduction, Berlin/New York 2010.
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Ware, Chris, I Guess, England 1991 [= RAW, High Cultures for Low Brows 2.3].
Wolf, Werner, “Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik: Ein Beitrag
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Fig. 1: Paul Hornschemeier, The Three Paradoxes, Seattle 2006, p. 1.

© Paul Hornschemeier. (All reprints by kind permission of Paul Hornschemeier.)
Fig. 2: Paul Hornschemeier, The Three Paradoxes, Seattle 2006, p.3.

© Paul Hornschemeier.



Julian Schröter, Würzburg
Narrator and Author: A Selected
Bibliography
I Preliminary Remarks: Selection and Structure
The following selected bibliography represents investigations in literary scholar-

ship that intend to offer a discussion of the relationship between author and
narrator. Since investigations that refer to the concepts of author as well as of
narrator are numerous, strict selection criteria were necessary. In the following, I
will elucidate these restrictions and explain the structure of the bibliography.
Firstly, there is a large class of theoretical contributions dealing with issues
such as mediacy, voice, fictionality, or narrative communication, wherein both the
concept of ‘narrator’ and ‘author’ traditionally play a constitutive systematic role.
Most of the works cited either give an account of authorial and narratorial voice
or authorial and narratorial communication, or they offer a systematic discussion
of the relevance of each concept to more general theories of fictionality or
narrativity. The latter encompasses the defense and rejection of regarding the
narrator as a basic concept of narrative theory and as an omnipresent entity
within any fictional narrative. However, there is a systematic asymmetry between
the two concepts. Whereas theories of authorship are conceptually independent
from narrator theories, the narrator as a genuine concept of narrative theory and
for analyzing narrative phenomena has been defined by its demarcation from the
author right from the start in the early 1900s. Therefore it is unproblematic to
discard the numerous contributions to authorship which have nothing to do with
the narrator and narrative theory. At the same time, it has been harder to decide
whether in some specific cases a discussion of the concept of the narrator should
also be regarded as a central contribution with regard to the concept of the
author.
Secondly, I have included a section labeled ‘Classics of the Debate’. These
contributions do not necessarily provide an explicit theory of author and narrator.
Instead, they are distinguished by the fact that they became central points of
reference for the ongoing and above-mentioned discussions.
Thirdly, there are several contributions which aim at an investigation of the
narrator and the author in the context of one specific writer or work. Though
rarely cited in narratology, these case studies are included in this bibliography
since they are the only investigations that explicitly address the issue of the
relationship between author and narrator.
II Theoretical Contributions
Aczel, Richard, “Hearing Voices in Narrative Texts”, in: New Literary History, 29/1998,
pp. 476–500.
Alber, Jan/Monika Fludernik, “Mediacy and Narrative Mediation”, in: Peter Hühn et al. (eds.), The
Living Handbook of Narratology, Hamburg, http://www.lhn.uni-hamburg.de/article/medi-
acy-and-narrative-mediation (accessed July 10, 2013).
Alward, Peter, “For the Ubiquity of Nonactual Fact-Telling Narrators”, in: Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, 65/2007, pp. 401–404.
Aumüller, Matthias, “Die Stimme des Formalismus. Die Entwicklung des Stimmenbegriffs im
russischen Formalismus”, in: Andreas Blödorn (ed.), Stimme(n) im Text, Berlin/New York
2006, pp. 31–52.
Banfield, Ann, “No-Narrator Theory”, in: David Herman/Manfred Jahn/Marie-Laure Ryan (eds.),
Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London/New York 2005, pp. 396f.
Bareis, Alexander J., “Mimesis der Stimme: Fiktionstheoretische Aspekte einer narratologischen
Kategorie”, in: Andreas Blödorn (ed.), Stimme(n) im Text, Berlin/New York 2006,
pp. 101–122.
Blödorn, Andreas (ed.), Stimme(n) im Text, Berlin, New York 2006.
Borkowski, Jan/Simone Winko, “Wer spricht im Gedicht? Noch einmal zum Begriff des lyrischen
Ich und zu seinen Ersetzungsvorschlägen”, in: Hartmut Bleumer/Caroline Emmelius (eds.),
Lyrische Narration – narrative Lyrik. Gattungsinterferenzen in der mittelalterlichen Literatur,
Bortolussi, Marisa/Peter Dixon, Psychonarratology, Cambridge 2003.
Cohn, Dorrit, “Signposts of Fictionality. A Narratological Perspective”, in: Poetics Today, 11/
1990, pp. 775–804.
Cohn, Dorrit, The Distinction of Fiction, Baltimore 1999.
Coste, Didier, Narrative as Communication, Minneapolis 1989.
Coste, Didier/John Pier, “Narrative Levels”, in: Peter Hühn (ed.), Handbook of Narratology,
Currie, Gregory, The Nature of Fiction, Cambridge 1990.
Currie, Gregory, Narratives and Narrators, Oxford 2010.
Fieguth, Rolf/Kazimierz Bartoszyński (eds.), Literarische Kommunikation. Sechs Aufsätze zum
sozialen und kommunikativen Charakter des literarischen Werks und des literarischen
Prozesses, Kronberg 1975.
Fludernik, Monika, The Fictions of Language and the Languages of Fiction, London 1993.
Hansen, Per Krogh (ed.), Strange Voices in Narrative Fiction, Berlin/New York 2011.
Heinen, Sandra, “Das Bild des Autors”, in: Sprachkunst, 33/2002, pp. 327–343.
Hogan, Patrick Colm, Narrative Discourse: Authors and Narrators in Literature, Film, and Art,
Columbus 2013.
Hühn, Peter/Jörg Schönert, “Zur narratologischen Analyse von Lyrik”, in: Poetica, 34/2002,
pp. 287–305.
Janik, Dieter, Die Kommunikationsstruktur des Erzählwerks, Bebenhausen 1973.
Jannidis, Fotis/Gerhard Lauer/Matías Martínez/Simone Winko (eds.), Rückkehr des Autors, Tü-
bingen 1999.
Kablitz, Andreas, “Literatur, Fiktion und Erzählung – nebst einem Nachruf auf den Erzähler”, in:
Irina O. Rajewsky (ed.), Im Zeichen der Fiktion, Stuttgart 2008, pp. 13–44.
Criticism, 63/2005, pp. 47–54.
40/2011, pp. 59–80.
Lanser, Susan S., Fictions of Authority. Women Writers and Narrative Voice, Ithaca 1992.
Margolin, Uri, “Narrator”, in: Peter Hühn (ed.), Handbook of Narratology, Berlin/New York 2009,
pp. 351–369.
Margolin, Uri, “Necessarily a Narrator or a Narrator if Necessary, a Short Note on a Long Subject”,
in: Journal of Literary Semantics, 40/2011, pp. 43–57.
Nünning, Ansgar, Grundzüge eines kommunikationstheoretischen Modells der erzählerischen
Vermittlung: die Funktion der Erzählinstanz in den Romanen George Eliots, Köln 1989.
Patron, Sylvie, Le narrateur, Paris 2009.
Patron, Sylvie, “The Death of the Narrator and the Interpretation of the Novel. The Example of
‘Pedro Páramo’ by Juan Rulfo”, in: Journal of Literary Theory, 4/2010, pp. 253–272.
Prince, Gerald J., Narratology, Berlin/New York 1982.
Rabinowitz, Peter, “Truth in Fiction. A Reexamination of Audiences”, in: Critical Inquiry, 4/1977,
pp. 121–141.
Rivara, René, “A Plea for a Narrator-Centered Narratology”, in: John Pier (ed.), The Dynamics of
Narrative Form, Berlin/New York 2004, pp. 83–113.
Ryan, Marie-Laure, “The Narratorial Functions: Breaking Down a Theoretical Primitive”, in:
Narrative, 9/2001, pp. 146–152.
Scheffel, Michael, “‘Stimme’ in fiktionalen und faktualen Erzählungen”, in: Andreas Blödorn
(ed.), Stimme(n) im Text, Berlin/New York 2006, pp. 83–99.
Schmid, Wolf, Der Textaufbau in den Erzählungen Dostoevskijs, München 1973.
Schmid, Wolf, Elemente der Narratologie, Berlin/New York 2005.
Thomson-Jones, Katherine, “The Literary Origins of the Cinematic Narrator”, in: British Journal of
Aesthetics, 47/2007, pp. 76–94.
Walsh, Richard, “Who is the Narrator?”, in: Poetics Today, 18/1997, pp. 495–513.
Walsh, Richard, The Rhetoric of Fictionality. Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction, Columbus
2007.
Walsh, Richard, “Person, Level, Voice. A Rhetorical Reconsideration”, in: Jan Alber/Monika
Fludernik (eds.), Postclassical Narratology, Columbus 2010, pp. 35–57.
Cambridge, MA, 1990.
Weimar, Klaus, “Wo und was ist der Erzähler?”, in: MLN, 109/1994, pp. 495–506.
Wilson, George M., “Elusive Narrators in Literature and Film”, in: Philosophical Studies, 135/
2007, pp. 73–88.
Zipfel, Frank, “Autofiktion”, in: Fotis Jannidis/Gerhard Lauer/Simone Winko (eds.), Grenzen der
Literatur. Zu Begriff und Phänomen des Literarischen, Berlin/New York 2009, pp. 285–314.
Zymner, Rüdiger, “Stimme(n) als Text und Stimme(n) als Ereignis”, in: Andreas Blödorn (ed.),
Stimme(n) im Text, Berlin/New York 2006, pp. 321–348.
III Classics of the Debate
Banfield, Ann, Unspeakable Sentences. Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction,
Boston 1982.
Chatman, Seymour B., Story and Discourse, Ithaca 1978.
Chatman, Seymour B., Coming to Terms, Ithaca 1990.
Chatman, Seymour B., Reading Narrative Fiction, New York 1993.
Friedemann, Käte, Die Rolle des Erzählers in der Epik, Leipzig 1910.
Genette, Gérard, “Discours du récit”, in: G.G., Figures III, Paris 1972, pp. 67–286. [Engl.: G.G.,
Narrative Discourse, Oxford 1980; Ger.: G.G., “Diskurs der Erzählung. Ein methodologischer
Versuch”, in: Die Erzählung, 3rd Edition, Paderborn 2010, pp. 9–175.]
Genette, Gérard, Nouveau discours du récit, Paris 1983. [Engl.: G.G., Narrative Discourse Revis-
ited, Ithaca/New York 1988; Ger.: G.G., “Neuer Diskurs der Erzählung”, in: Die Erzählung,
3rd Edition, Paderborn 2010, pp. 176–272.]
Genette, Gérard, Fiction et diction, Paris 1991. [Engl.: G.G., Fiction and Diction, New York 1993;
Ger.: G.G., Fiktion und Diktion, München 1992.]
Hamburger, Käte, Die Logik der Dichtung, Stuttgart 1957.
Kayser, Wolfgang, “Wer erzählt den Roman?”, in: W.K., Die Vortragsreise. Studien zur Literatur,
Bern 1958, pp. 82–101.
Kuroda, Shigeyuki, “Reflections on the Foundations of Narrative Theory. From a Linguistic Point
of View”, in: Teun A. Van Djik (ed.), Pragmatics of Language and Literature, Amsterdam
1976, pp. 107–140.
Stanzel, Franz K., Die typischen Erzählsituationen im Roman, dargestellt an ‘Tom Jones’, ‘Moby-
Dick’, ‘The Ambassadors’, ‘Ulysses’ u.a., Wien 1955. [Engl.: F.K.S., Narrative Situations in the
Novel: ‘Tom Jones’, ‘Moby-Dick’, ‘The Ambassadors’, ‘Ulysses’, Bloomington 1971.]
Stanzel, Franz K., Typische Formen des Romans, Göttingen 1964.
Stanzel, Franz K., Theorie des Erzählens, Göttingen 1979. [Engl.: F.K.S., A Theory of Narrative,
Cambridge 1984.]
IV Case Studies
Bein, Thomas, “Autor, Erzähler, Rhapsode, Figur. Zum ‘Ich’ in Wolframs ‘Parzival’ 108, 17”, in:
Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie, 115/1996, pp. 433–436.
Blessin, Stefan, Erzählstruktur und Leserhandlung. Zur Theorie der literarischen Kommunikation
am Beispiel von Goethes ‘Wahlverwandtschaften’, Heidelberg 1974.
Busch, Ulrich, “Gogol’s ‘Mantel’ – eine verkehrte Erzählung: Schriftsteller, Autor, Erzähler in
intra- und intertextueller Beziehung”, in: Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, Wien 1983,
pp. 189–203.
Echard, Siân, “Map’s Metafiction: Author, Narrator and Reader in ‘De Nugis Curialum’”, in:
Exemplaria. A Journal of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 8/1996,
pp. 287–314.
Huggins, Cynthia, “Adam Bede: Author, Narrator and Narrative”, in: The George Eliot Review:
Journal of the George Eliot Fellowship, 23/1992, pp. 35–39.
Manteiga, Roberto, “From Empathy to Detachment. The Author-Narrator Relationship in Several

Novels by Women”, in: Monographic Review/Revista Monographica, 8/1992, pp. 19–35.
Meyer, Matthias, “‘Sô dunke ich mich ein werltgot’: Überlegungen zum Verhältnis Autor–Erzäh-
ler–Fiktion im späten Artusroman”, in: Volker Mertens (ed.), Fiktionalität im Artusroman,
Tübingen 1993, pp. 185–202.
Schuchalter, Jerry, “Autor, Erzähler und Opfer bei Wolfgang Koeppens ‘Jakob Littners Aufzeich-
nungen aus einem Erdloch’ und Jerzy Kosinskis ‘The Painted Bird’”, in Jahrbuch der inter-
nationalen Wolfgang Koeppen-Gesellschaft, 1/2001, pp. 117–137.
Thurston, Norman, “Author, Narrator, and Hero in Shelley’s Alastor”, in: Studies in Romanticism,
14/1975, pp. 119–131.
Notes on Contributors
Dorothee Birke, junior fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies
(FRIAS). Research interests: narrative theory, history of the novel, reception
studies, contemporary British literature and film. She has recently finished a
study on representations of reader figures in the English novel. Recent publica-
tions: Realisms in Contemporary Culture (ed., together with Stella Butter, 2013);
“Paratext in Digitized Narrative: Mapping the Field” (together with Birte Christ),
in: Narrative (2013).
Adrian Bruhns, Ph.D. candidate at Göttingen University. Research interests:

analytical metaphysics (ontology), theory of fiction, contemporary American
literature and TV series. He is currently working on his dissertation thesis about
the relevance of philosophical theories of fiction for narratological analyses of
literary texts. Recent publications: “Zur narrativen Funktion intradiegetischer
Fiktionen in NBCs Community”, in: Komik und Gewalt (2013).
Regine Eckardt, professor of Linguistics at the English Department, Göttingen

University. Research interests: formal semantics and pragmatics of natural
language, specifically the semantics of indexicals and perspective taking. Re-
lated publications include “Particles as Speaker Indexicals in Free Indirect
Discourse”, in: Sprache und Datenverarbeitung (2012) and the monograph The
Semantics of Free Indirect Discourse. How Texts Allow Us to Read Minds and
Eavesdrop (2014).
Claudia Hillebrandt, research associate at Jena University. Research interests:

narrative theory, theory and history of lyric poetry, sound studies, contemporary
German literature. She has recently finished a study on emotional functions of
narrative texts by Kafka, Perutz, and Werfel. Recent publications: “Entgrenzung,
Marginalisierung, Kompensation. Verhandlungen der sozialen Geltung von Kunst
in der gegenwärtigen Literatur der Arbeit”, in: KulturPoetik. Journal for Cultural
Poetics (2014); Sympathie und Literatur (ed., together with Elisabeth Kampmann,
2014).
Tobias Klauk, research associate at the Courant Research Centre “Textstruktu-

ren” at Göttingen University. Research interests: theory of fiction, philosophical
aesthetics, narrative theory, philosophy of language. Recent publications: Fiktio-
nalität (ed., together with Tilmann Köppe, 2014); “Fiktion, Behauptung, Zeugnis”,
in: Íngrid Vendrell/Christoph Demmerling (ed.): Wahrheit, Wissen und Erkenntnis
in der Literatur. Philosophische Beiträge (2014).
270 Notes on Contributors
Tilmann Köppe, professor at the Courant Research Centre “Textstrukturen” at

Göttingen University. Research interests: narrative theory, theory of fiction, philo-
sophical aesthetics, history of the novel. He has recently finished a study on
existentialist thought in 20th-century fiction. Recent publications: Fiktionalität
(ed., together with Tobias Klauk, 2014); Erzähltheorie (together with Tom Kindt,
2014).
Markus Kuhn, professor of media studies at the University of Hamburg. Research

interests: film and transmedial narratology, web series, genre theory, biographical
pictures, transmedia storytelling, narration on the Internet, comic and animation
studies, factuality/fictionality. His dissertation Filmnarratologie: Ein erzähltheor-
etisches Analysemodell was awarded the graduate prize by the “Studienstiftung
Hamburg” in 2009 and was published in 2011 with De Gruyter, available as
Studienbuch (paperback) since 2013. Recent publications: Filmwissenschaftliche
Genreanalyse. Eine Einführung (ed., together with Irina Scheidgen and Nicola
V. Weber, 2013).
Vincenz Pieper, Ph.D. candidate and member of the Courant Research Centre
“Textstrukturen” at Göttingen University. Research interests: philosophy of litera-
ture, history of literary criticism, narrative theory, German literature of the eigh-
teenth century. Recent publication: “Narratologie und Interpretation. Ein Beitrag
zum besseren Verständnis von Kleists Erzählungen”, in: Kleist-Jahrbuch (2014).
Julian Schröter, research associate at the University of Würzburg. Research

interests: theories of text interpretation, contemporary German literature, philo-
sophical aesthetics, history of narrative genres. He is currently working on his
doctoral thesis on the hermeneutics of literary self-fashioning. Recent publica-
tions: Figur – Personalität – Verhaltenstheorien (2013).
Jan Stühring, student research assistant at the Courant Research Centre “Text-
strukturen” at Göttingen University. Research interests: philosophy of literature.
Recent publications: “Against Pan-Narrator Theories” (with Tilmann Köppe), in:
Journal of Literary Semantics (2011); “Unreliability, Deception, and Fictional
Facts”, in: Journal of Literary Theory (2011).
Andreas Veits, Ph.D. candidate in media studies and associate of the “Arbeits-
stelle für graphische Literatur” at the University of Hamburg. Research interests:
transmedial narratology, pictorial storytelling, comic studies, visual studies and
film analysis. Veits’ master thesis on focalization and representations of subjec-
tivity in comics and graphic novels was awarded the Roland Faelske-Preis in 2012.
Notes on Contributors 271
Veits’ Ph.D. project Narratologie des Bildes – Ein methodologischer Entwurf zur
Analyse narrativer Strukturen unbewegter Bilder deals with questions of narrativity
and narrative functions in fine arts as well as in comics and graphic novels.
Frank Zipfel, senior lecturer (Akademischer Oberrat) at the Institute for Com-
parative Literature at Mainz University. Research interests: theory of fiction,
(transmedial) narratology, genre theory, intercultural studies. Recent publica-
tions: “Fiktionssignale”, in: Tobias Klauk/Tilmann Köppe (eds.): Fiktionalität
(2014); “Fictionality across Media: Transmedial Concepts of Fictionality”, in:
Marie-Laure Ryan/Jan-Noël Thon (eds.): Storyworlds across Media: Toward a
Media-Conscious Narratology (2014); Tragicomedies: Combinations of the Tragic
and the Comic in the European Drama of the 19th and 20th Century (forthcoming).
Index
Alward, Peter 57–59 Hornschemeier, Paul 10, 236, 245f., 254
Atkins, Stuart 91, 95 Hühn, Peter 213f., 219–221, 223–225,
227–230
Bareis, J. Alexander 62f. Hume, David 89
Barnes, H.G. 82f., 86, 95 Hutcheon, Linda 108f.
Beardsley, Monroe 87f.
Benjamin, Walter 86 Jahn, Manfred 100f.
Birgfeld, Johannes 115f. Jannidis, Fotis 67
Birke, Dorothee 7f.
Blackall, Eric 83f., 86 Kania, Andrew 76
Booth, Wayne C. 1, 105, 114, 131, 220f. Kaplan, David 154, 160f., 177
Borchmeyer, Dieter 91 Kayser, Wolfgang 82, 86–88
Borkowski, Jan 10, 222 Kindt, Tom 131, 220–222
Brenzo, Richard 18, 21, 23-25, 28 Klauk, Tobias 8, 10
Brinkmann, Rolf Dieter 122 Klein, Gabriele 121, 123
Bruhns, Adrian 8f. Köppe, Tilmann 6f., 46f., 52f., 59–67, 134
Kracht, Christian 8, 113–116, 120–130,
Chatman, Seymour 49, 51f., 76, 89 132–135
Conter, Claude D. 115f. Krupat, Arnold 39
Currie, Gregory 55, 68f., 71, 73 Kuhn, Markus 10f., 237, 253f.
Davidson, Donald 154 Lamarque, Peter 4, 215

Dittmar, Jacob 241 Lanser, Susan 99–104, 110
Larkin, Philip 228f.
Eckardt, Regine 9 Levine, Robert S. 39
Levinson, Jerrold 56, 61
Feuerlich, Ignace 86 Lewis, David 154, 165
Fielding, Henry 8, 100, 104f., 107f., 110 Livingston, Paisley 49
Fitzgerald, F. Scott 4f. Lorca, Federico García 226
Fludernik, Monika 101, 110 Margolin, Uri 55, 58
Friedemann, Käte 82, 86f. Martínez, Matías 84–86
Müller, Hans-Harald 220–222
Galbraith, Mary 67 Murray, Les 213, 225, 227
Gaut, Berys 73
Genette, Gérard 1, 100, 133, 214, 243 Niefanger, Dirk 122f., 125f., 129
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 7, 81–86, Nisbet, Hugh Barr 90
89–95, 217 Nünning, Ansgar 103, 105f., 134
Grice, Herbert Paul 4, 73, 121, 128, 193
Olsen, Stein Haugom 4, 215
Hamburger, Käte 69f., 179
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 7, 14, 17–22, 25, Pascal, Roy 83, 86
27–30, 32–41 Pieper, Vincenz 7
Henkel, Arthur 91 Prince, Gerald 55
Hillebrandt, Claudia 10
274 Index
Rajewsky, Irina O. 51 Thomasson, Amie 9, 141–151

Reiss, Hans 90
Rühm, Gerhard 228 Vaget, Hans Rudolf 91
Ryan, Marie-Laure 239 Veits, Andreas 10f.
Schings, Hans-Jürgen 91 Walsh, Richard 102

Schmid, Wolf 117, 238 Walton, Kendall L. 32, 62, 115, 189, 191
Schönert, Jörg 213f., 219–221, 223f., Weber, Dietrich 65
227–230 Wilson, George 61, 77
Schröter, Julian 7f., 11 Wimsatt, William 87
Searle, John R. 9, 53, 65, 147–151, 187–193, Winko, Simone 10, 222
195–197, 199, 202f., 205f., 209 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 88
Spielhagen, Friedrich 86 Wolf, Werner 216f.
Stalnaker, Robert 154, 156–159, 181f. Woodard, David 113, 116, 124f., 127f., 135
Stanzel, Franz K. 1f., 86f., 99f. Wordsworth, William 224f., 227
Stöcklein, Paul 82f., 86
Stühring, Jan 6f., 46f., 52f., 59–67, 134 Zipfel, Frank 7

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Author and

Transdisciplinary Contributions to a Narratological

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

© 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Munich/Boston

Tilmann Köppe and Jan Stühring

Markus Kuhn and Andreas Veits

Notes on Contributors 269

approaches from different disciplinary backgrounds – literary studies, philoso-

I The Narratological Distinction of ‘Author’ and ‘Narrator’

1. A Gricean intention that an audience make-believe (or imagine or pretend) that it is

10 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, New York 1986, p. 1.

II The Contributions to the Volume

provide a detailed interpretation of the short story “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by

authorial self-fashioning and responsibility. They both present case studies of

furnishing in-depth considerations of central problems. As their articles demon-

Biriotti, Maurice/Nicola Miller (eds.), What is an Author?, Manchester 1993.

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) (section III). Our interpre-

II Two Pragmatic Arguments for PN

of narrative communication in narratology. If PN is false, so are standard models

How do any of these options make PN easier to handle?

interpretation of the narrative.) So whether PN allows us to interpret all fictional

III Intertextuality, Gender, and Some Meanings of

“Rappaccini’s Daughter” relates to the problem of gender in the story of the

“Rappaccini’s Daughter,” we have to look at how the different characters are

7 Brenzo, “Beatrice Rappaccini”, p. 164.

These sentences establish three of Rappaccini’s core characteristics. First, as he is

This utterance is elegantly explained by the assumption that Rappaccini is

13 Brenzo, “Beatrice Rappaccini”, p. 160.

our view of Baglioni, this question is of central importance. After all, if he

woman is worthy of worship might be an expression of love as well as sexual

17 Brenzo, “Beatrice Rappaccini”, p. 157.

to be understood as a comment on this theme in the story of the Garden of Eden.

IV Why Our Interpretation Doesn’t Feature a Fictional Narrator

22 See Kendall L. Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe. On the Foundations of the Representational

25 For a more detailed discussion of evaluations in fictional discourse see Köppe/Stühring,

particular, these features could be said to emphatically invite an evaluation or to invite an

Appendix: On the Preface of “Rappaccini’s Daughter”

Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” first appeared in the 1844 issue of the

theories and proponents of Optional-Narrator theories. To some of these issues we

We do not remember to have seen any translated specimen of the productions of M. de

Speaking tongue-in-cheek, or ironically, is not the same as speaking fiction-

of Authorial Presence: Hawthorne’s Provincial Tales, Durham/London 1993, pp. 124f. Michael

no reason to assume that this narrative features a fictional narrator. Factual

Gertken, Jan/Tilmann Köppe, “Fiktionalität”, in: Fotis Jannidis/Gerhard Lauer/Simone Winko

Valenti, Patricia Dunlavy, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne. A Life, Columbia 2004.

I Pan-Narrator Theories, Optional-Narrator Theories, No-

II Theoretical Framework: A Question about Truth?

showing that the truth of ON cannot be established either. Moreover, I want to

III What Does Narration Entail?

level of abstraction has to be considerably raised in order to bring films, theatre

13 Cf. Rajewsky, “Von Erzählern”.

IV Is the Author the Narrator of His Fictional Narration?

16 Chatman, Coming, pp. 115f.

(P1) Narratives are speech acts.

18 Köppe/Stühring, “Against”, p. 63.

order to perform a speech act, such as an assertion, a promise or a question, its

22 Cf. Jannidis, “Narratology”, p. 40, Fn. 18.

32 Cf. e.g. Prince, “Narrativehood”; Ryan, “Foundations”.

40 Cf. e.g. Thomson-Jones, “Origins”, p. 89; Gaut, “Philosophy”, p. 247.

51 Zipfel, Fiktion, pp. 190f.

for an author performing a fictional narration. Moreover, Köppe and Stühring’s

54 Köppe/Stühring, “Against”, p. 64.