5 - Fictional events and the intricacies of plot

Summary

Events, stories and plots have been topics of central importance in literary studies. Theories of narrative, from Aristotle to the present times, attest to the focal place that events, actions, their composition and manipulation occupy in the literary discussion. In formulating a model for fictional events that would determine the place of events in a fictional world, the centrality of notions like fabula and sujhet, plot, action structures, and event sequence to narrative theory has to be taken into consideration. Yet unlike the case of fictional entities (characters and objects) examined in the previous chapter, in the context of which both philosophers and literary theorists have paid much attention to the question of the fictionality of entities, in the present context the problem of what distinguishes fictional events and actions from nonfictional ones and the effect of this difference on the nature of narrative structures have been almost totally ignored until recent years. Only recently, after a long period in which narrative concepts, neutral with respect to questions of ontology, immigrated to other domains (to nourish research in such diverse fields as historiography, scientific discourse, legal rhetoric), did literary theorists start to be concerned with the narrativity specific to fiction and to be aware of the misleading results of using narrative notions across disciplinary borders (Cohn, 1990; Genette, 1990; Rigney, 1991). In addressing the topic of fictional events and action one faces therefore a total neglect on the part of philosophers concerning how fictional contexts change the logical structure of action and an almost total overlooking of the distinctive feature of literary or fictional narrativity on the part of literary theorists.