Luule- ja pärislugude eristus teoorias ja praktikas III
The Distinction between Fictional and Factual Narrative in Critical Theory and Practice III

Summary/Abstract: After considering some attempts at dating and interpreting the birth of fiction in traditional Chinese literature, the final part of the three-part essay tries to trace the emergence and establishment of the notion and institution of fiction in Estonian literature. The Enlightenment authors of the first secular narratives were concerned about the possibility that their peasant readers might take their fables for true stories. Other cases of taking fictions for factual narratives are discussed and a gradual spread of the tacit notion of fictionality is assumed on the basis of the emergence of various textual devices (disclaimers, authentifications, free indirect discourse, intradiegetic first-person narration, transportation of historical or contemporary characters into fictional worlds, autofiction, etc). Since the 1970s the demarcation line between fiction and fact has been subverted by both external and internal forces. On the one hand, fiction has always had external adversaries – moralists, bigots, pedants, and simpletons – who have denied the distinction between fiction and lie. On the other hand, authors have persistently been tempted to test the border from inside literature either by confusing the author’s empirical self with the narrator or by using real characters under their own name. Mystifications which purport to be real stories and romans à clef which try to pass off real stories as thinly disguised fictions are among the traditional transgressive conventions. Finally the distinction between literary and audiovisual fictions is briefly discussed, as reality TV, simulations and virtual reality are driving literary fiction off its central place in culture.

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