Idea of fiction
As fictive or fictitious:
Elmo FERNANDO
‘The effort to distinguish fiction is as old as Angustine, who felt
that a fiction referring only to itself is a lie whereas a fiction
referring only to itself is a figure.
My distinction between the fictitious and the fictive differs from
this traditional distinction though it is no less simple of fiction that
is fictive if it necessarily implies as a part of itself, the act of its
making it is fictitious even if signifying a truth or a fictive action
other than itself, if it does not as part of itself implacable the actor
of its making.
The expected response to an ordinary television drama is destroyed if
one begins to think of the way the thing was put together when as the
order as ‘The Idea of Order at Key West becomes itself’ only for him but
the drama is feigned as the poem is actual.
Fiction was no problem for the New Critics. On the basis of a
realistic epistemology they believed the poem to be an organism a
simulacrum of reality, unmarked by the hand of its maker and unaffected
by the nature of its audience.
To make or to receive it, was to escape from self to achieve complete
impersonality, or ‘rapt intransitive attention. Thus during one’s own
New Critical period, when a psychologist pronounced he had been reading
Ernest Hemingway and liked him but felt guilty over time spent on mere
fiction becomes a problem. Wallace Steven’s Extracts from Addresses to
the academy of fine ideas is based on just this realization.
A crinkled paper makes a brilliant sound
The crinkled rose tumble the paper ones
And the ear is glass in which the noises pelt
The false roses compare the silent rose of the sun
And rain the blood rose living in its smell
With this paper this dust
That states the point messieurs
It is an artificial world.
Wallace Steven |
