B.FICTION

Fiction is distinguished from Non-fiction by its being non-fact, or, better to say, a fact of Verbal Art. Yet Art is not reality itself, it is an artistic interpretation of reality. That is why what makes up the novelty and genuineness of a literary work is not the reality that it interprets, but its interpretation. Dissertations written on the same topic (as Scientific Style texts) will not pass, because their novelty is their topics. Yet novels written on the same topic will, because their novelty is their interpretation of the topic. There is A.S.Pushkin’s Don Juan in “Stone Guest” and G.G.Byron’s in “Don Juan”. Being “variations on the topic”, they are quite different works of art each with its own philosophy and interpretation of their hero.

There are certain topics that remain eternal. For instance, volumes had been written about love long before “Romeo and Juliet” and are being written after it. But each new work of literature on this topic, if it is really talented as every genuine artwork ought to be, is usually consumed by the reading public with unabated interest and aesthetic satisfaction.

To better understand the nature of Fiction-as-Style in comparison with Non-Fiction, it is worthwhile considering them in the light of truth criteria. For Non-Fiction, the truth criterion is that of Formal Logic according to which the truth is what correlates with the existing state of affairs, while what does not is false. Hence, in terms of Logic, Fiction is a pack of lies. To make a lie look true, the liar should make his opponent believe it, and to make him believe it, he must use certain rhetorical tricks, such as sustaining the lies by some false facts and/or figures, introducing certain details or rhetorical figures of speech, tropes and other stylistic devices to sound convincing and to manipulate, thereby, the minds of the readers (listeners) in his interests. Indeed, this kind of “dirty language games” is daily played by the mass media and advertisement. Any idea of “objectivity” regarding the press and the advertisement is a fake for those suffering from the childish naivety complex.

In other words, a militant Logician will claim that Literature, to make the reader believe in its realistic background, or “verisimilitude”, will use the same language tricks. At first glance, this kind of reasoning might seem valid in the sense that, indeed, the entire stylistic machinery of a Fiction text is centered on making the reader believe the story told. Adding to his argumentation, the Logician will perhaps remind us that Fiction writers themselves, from time to time, admit the falsity of the stories they tell their readers by making statements like “all the facts related in this story and the personages acting in it have nothing to do with the real state of affairs”, and so on. But the Logician will overlook the fact that suchlike statements, which are explicit markers of Fiction, produce the effect contrary to their purpose, which is a very good proof that the logical criterion of truth is not applicable to Verbal Art. In it, this criterion is contrary to Logic. It is based on how well the writer manages to create the effect of verisimilitude. The artistic truth is the truth of generalizations, typifications, selections, overstatements (exaggerations) or understatements (diminutions) so that its effect on the addressee may be stronger than the effect of reality itself and make the reader throw out some of his adrenalin into his blood.

Since any work of Fiction is genuine, unprecedented and creative, since it is strongly marked by its author’s individuality, there can be no standardized, stereotypical scheme of its analysis. It will very much depend on the individuality of the author, on the one hand, and on the individuality of the reader on the other. Nevertheless, there certainly exists some general principle serving as a starting device which puts this scheme into action. This principle is “Foregrounding”. Those wanting to remind themselves of what Foregrounding is, are please referred to [3, 6 –14]. Foregrounding is such an organization of text which makes the reader involuntarily focus his attention on certain fragments making them significant. Structurally, Foregrounding presents a system of stylistic means which are united for their specific function and closely interrelated. As a rule, the types of Foregrounding are said to be Strong Position, Coupling, Defeated Expectancy, Convergence, and Salient Feature, although this list may well be continued.

In addition to what the students may find about Foregrounding in the textbooks, particularly by I.V.Arnold who always uses this notion in her concept of Decoder Stylistics, the following points must be stressed.

a) Foregrounding is aimed at awakening the reader’s reflection, that is at making him ask questions.

b) The Salient Feature (dominant) is, strictly speaking, not simply one of the types of Foregrounding. It is any of its types which has become actualized. In other words, any of the types listed above may be promoted to the Salient Feature if it is actualized, that is given additional significance to.

c) Since different readers have different personal qualities (age, gender, professional distinctions, distinctions of their personal experience and level of education etc.), in analyzing a text, they may proceed from their own Salient Feature(s) which they think most significant in the text. Beginning their scheme of analysis from various Salient Features, they eventually come to some “common denominator” at the end, because different Salient Features are logically connected.

d) Salient Features may be of two types: perceptive and cognitive. Perceptive ones are those that have been listed by I.V.Arnold (see the reference above). Cognitive ones are rather not “Foregrounding”, but “Backgrounding”. They are those fragments of the text which seem to the reader to be not well understandable. For each individual reader that fragment is most important which s/he does not very well understand and which provokes most of the questions. This fragment should be the beginning and the end of the scheme of analysis (see [4]).

e) In a Fiction text, Perceptive and Cognitive Salient Features (SF) are linked up by two different types of information. According to I.R.Galperin1, one type of information answers the question what is told in the story and is called “content-factual information”. The other one answers the question why it is told, and is called “content-conceptual information”. The first type of information is the surface layer of the story and is explicit, while the second type is deep and should be revealed by the reader’s mental effort. Respectively, the Perceptive SF is associated with the content-factual information, and the Cognitive SF is associated with content-conceptual information. To illustrate the situation, let us consider a couple of anecdotes. First, because any anecdote is a comical “micro-story”, and therefore may be quite faithfully referred to a fictional genre. Secondly, the brevity of the genre makes them easily retold avoiding references to the literature of “big genres” that might not be known to the student and illustrating things without lengthy explanations.

One was picked up from a former Soviet newspaper many years ago. Rendered in English, it reads like this: “Two tractor drivers, returning late at night from a concert hall, started to discuss Musorgsky, and eventually found themselves in the gutter”.

First of all, it is essential to note that this joke would not be understandable to a foreigner who does not know what most of “Sovok” tractor drivers were (and many of them, by tradition, still are) like. The information about the fact is associated with the so-called “background knowledge” (nationally and culturally specific phenomena) and shows that nearly every work of Fiction as an event of nationally specific culture is based on this kind of knowledge, which adds to the difficulty of understanding.

Secondly, the effect of this joke is based on the type of Foregrounding called “Defeated Expectancy”. Our background knowledge about Soviet and many Post-Soviet tractor drivers makes us be taken by surprise that one occasionally may find, among the tractor drivers, highly intelligent people interested in classical music.

Thirdly, it is evident that such an interpretation is primitive. The so-called “Defeated Expectancy” is only an external form to emphasize the norm in an ironic key: “concert hall” is a pub, “discussing Musorgsky” is a drunken scuffle, and falling into the gutte r is the evident result. The general conclusion is that “Defeated Expectancy” is the content-factual information, while the ironic tone is the content-conceptual information.

The second one is a Russian anecdote more popular in our days, and has many different versions, though it originates from the former Soviet background as well. It pokes fun at xenophobia, which shows to greater or smaller extent in almost every nation of the world, and satirizes black racism, so that Moscow skin-heads might appreciate it best of all because in The States it is now a thing of the past. Its idea is that all Afro-Americans are savages who live in the trees: “A hot summer afternoon in a village … A black fellow who looks very sick as if he had just been vomiting is leaning against a tree. An old collective-farmer is passing by and asks the man, ‘You okay?’ ‘Oh no’, the poor guy answers. ‘Take you home?’ the old man suggests sympathetically. ‘Oh yeah, do please’. ‘Okay, lemme help you up’”.

A question arises, then, how we pass from one type of information to the other. In trying to answer it, we observe that the above story of the tractor drivers, for instance, when considered at the level of content-factual information, does not motivate its ending. We cannot see quite clearly why “discussing composers” should end up in the gutter, which urges us to settling the problem by rising to the next level of conceptual information. The story of the Sick Black testifies to the same effect: the absurdity of the farmer’s way of offering help to the man provokes the question answering which is readily suggested by the level of conceptual information. In other words, the motivation clash between the two types of information signalizes, with a high degree of certainty, the need of passing on to a higher level of interpretation.

Concluding this section, we must stress that a reduction of content-conceptual information in a literary work to its content-factual information is a frequent mistake of the ordinary reader that reveals a very low level or reading culture. One of the important didactic tasks of the Philologist is to teach Uncle Vasya not to make such deplorable mistakes, because this kind of a reduction makes the masterpieces of Literature look commonplace and silly, it testifies to the fact that they have been misunderstood.