Narrative Factuality: A Handbook

Abstract

This handbook is the result of an ambitious, interdisciplinary, and pioneering project, in that it not only opens new horizons for the study of the wide field of factual narratives across disciplines and various media, but it also charts important new trajectories for narrative theory at large. Although narratology has branched out in many interesting and new ways during the past two decades or so, it has traditionally been mainly concerned with literary or narrative fiction rather than with manifestations of narrative in nonfictional domains such as historiography, law, medicine, politics, or sociology. While various domains, forms, and functions of factual or reality-focused narratives have recently received some attention, most notably in a volume entitled Wirklichkeitserzählungen (edited by the German narrative theorists Christian Klein and Matías Martinez in 2009), the wide range of uses of narratives to convey facts and true information have still not been studied as comprehensively and systematically as literary narratives, and as they no doubt deserve to be.Although the present volume was originally conceived of as a “reference work for the PhD students of the graduate school” entitled “Factual and Fictional Narration” (which is situated at the University of Freiburg, from which this project originates), the aims and scope of this handbook are so broad that it can indeed “claim a wider audience among narratologists and literary scholars thanks to its topical and innovative focus on factuality” (2), as the two editors observe in their excellent introduction. This impressive tome of a handbook contains no fewer than fifty-one articles or chapters written by a team of fifty-seven researchers from a wide range of disciplines.Since any attempt to provide an overview of such a large number of articles within the constraints of a review is doomed to failure, a reviewer can only be grateful to the editors for the excellent job they have done in their splendid introduction. Their introduction is, arguably, a model to be emulated by editors of other handbooks and collections of essays for at least three reasons. First, the editors manage to discuss and clarify the key concepts around which the articles that follow revolve, providing lucid definitions of such terms as facts and factuality, narrative and narrativity. Second, they explore the reasons for the relative neglect of factual or nonfictional narrative, while also delineating the main developments and interdisciplinary influences that have contributed to the recent emergence of factuality as an innovative focus in narrative studies. Third, they provide a concise overview of both the structure of the volume and the key issues and topics covered in its five main sections. Therefore, readers who lack the time to closely read the 733 densely packed pages are advised to begin by carefully scrutinizing the extremely informative and rich introduction, coauthored by editors Monika Fludernik and Marie-Laure Ryan, before following their own individual interests and selecting those articles that appeal to their respective research areas.The structure of this handbook is both crystal clear and very helpful for readers who should like to choose those topics and articles that interest them most. The collection is divided into five main parts, which consist of seven, ten, or as many as fifteen chapters. Given the impressive quality of most of the articles, many of which would deserve a much more extensive review, it may be unfair to single out only a few for special praise. However, since limitations on space preclude the possibility of giving proper attention to all of them, it may, in this instance, be legitimate to mention only some of the most outstanding chapters and focus on some of the new directions in research that they open.Tellingly titled “Basic Issues: Factuality and Fictionality,” section 1 comprises ten articles that provide nuanced discussions of terminological issues involved in coming to terms with factuality and its complex relation to fictional narrative. Although all the chapters in the first section are of very high quality, articles that deserve to be singled out for special praise include Irina Rajewsky's informed discussion titled “Theories of Fictionality and Their Real Other”; Monika Fludernik's magisterial overview of how factual narratives have been, and can be, systematically described and explored with narratological categories; Marie-Laure Ryan's terminologically precise discussion of the distinction between fact and fiction, and her thesis that this distinction “is not equally applicable to all media” (75); Marco Caracciolo's cognitive-narratological exploration of the question of whether factuality can be regarded as the norm; and Dorothee Birke's examination of the role of the reader in determining whether a narrative is factual.The title of section 2, “Truth and Reference: Philosophical and Linguistic Approaches,” aptly indicates what it is concernd with. The first two chapters deal with the association of facts with truth in philosophy, which, as the editors observe in their introduction, “quickly leads into a morass of complex logical, epistemological and ontological issues” (3), while the third essay explores the problems of knowledge, insight, and the notion of truth in literature. The next three articles in this section provide sophisticated analyses of the concept and problem of reference in philosophy, literature and literary studies, and linguistics, respectively. Written from the perspective of an approach to literature informed by analytical philosophy, Tilmann Köppe's terminologically precise exploration of the “proliferation of reference” (263) in literature will be of particular interest to readers working in literary studies.Containing fifteen rich and eminently readable articles, section 3 explores various forms and functions of factuality and factual narratives (and in some pieces also authenticity) across an impressively wide range of disciplines and media, including, for example, anthropology, psychoanalysis and psychology, sociology, religion, and the law, as well as such media as film, journalism, and advertisements. Among the articles that arguably stand out as far as the detailed treatment of their respective subjects, originality, and the level of insight are concerned are Stephan Jaeger's comprehensive overview of factuality in historiography and historical studies and Bernhard Kleeberg's systematic survey of factual narratives in economics. The latter could, however, have benefitted from including Robert J. Shiller's seminal works, although the Nobel laureate's most recent monograph Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Change (2019) may have appeared too late to have caught the author's attention. My personal favorite in this section is Andreas Musloff's insightful and sophisticated exploration of the roles of factual narrative and truth in political discourse. Rightly emphasizing that “ ‘factuality’ and ‘truth’ are not neutral concepts in politics” (352), Musloff does an excellent job elaborating on the notion of “fact-based truth presumption,” which “reflects the common-sense assumption that addressees and audiences who consider a speaker's utterances to be incorrect or insincere by default will soon lose interest in paying attention to them or in checking their veracity” (353). He also manages to shed new light on such complex issues as how political events are framed and how politicians turn an event sequence into a master narrative.Section 5 then zooms in on the field of literary studies, exploring several key issues that are important to the roles that facts, truth, and the notion of the real play in both literature and literary studies. The section begins with a particularly impressive piece of scholarly work: Michael McKeon's seminal overview of the role of factuality and the real in the history of narrative theory and practice. Other excellent chapters include, for instance, Johannes Franzen's essay “Factuality and Convention,” James Phelan's rhetorical analysis “The Ethics of Factual Narrative,” Stefan Iversen's exploration of the recent debates surrounding autofiction and his distinction between different forms of autofictive practices, and Liesbeth Korthals Altes's enlightening hypotheses on the interpretative and evaluative impact that interconnected framing acts, arguably, have on whether narratives are classified as factual or fictional.Given the ambitious aim implied in the title of section 5, “Factuality and Fictionality in Various Cultures and Historical Periods,” it does not come as a big surprise that the final part of this handbook appears to be relatively eclectic and slightly contingent, especially regarding the cultures and regions that are included, or rather left out. The first three chapters are arranged in chronological order, examining the factual in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Early Modern Period, respectively. The following chapters then deal with factual narratives in premodern China and Japan, classical Indian and Persian narratives, medieval Arabic literature, and factual and fictional narratives in East African literatures. As I am not an expert in any of these fields, I prefer not to venture any evaluative comments; instead I gratefully acknowledge that the nine articles in the last section are all a pleasure to read.The clear structure of this handbook; the felicitous choice of the contributors, all of whom are experts in their respective fields; and the pains the editors and contributors have taken to provide a plethora of cross-references between the sections and chapters, all serve to provide a high degree of coherence and unity to this well-conceived and elegant handbook that one rarely finds in similar collections of essays. The editors have evidently taken a lot of care to provide structure and coherence to the volume. Their insertion of cross-references between the chapters, in particular, makes it relatively easy for readers to compare different approaches to the same phenomenon and to tease out subtle commonalities and differences. Moreover, the contributors explore the theoretical and terminological issues that the editors raise in the introduction from a wide range of different disciplines, approaches, and conceptual points of view. The coherence of the book is further enhanced by the fact that a number of key concepts are applied from different perspectives in various chapters, for example, such fundamental notions as the role of conventions for the classification of texts as factual or fictional, reference and truth, frames and framing, and signposts of factuality and the concomitant signposts of fictionality, to name but a few. The detailed and very useful subject index that Hanna-Myriam Häger and Jacob Langeloh (764–80) have thankfully compiled, which is love's labor that is most certainly not lost, also testifies to the fact that this is not just another collection of essays revolving around a more or less clearly defined theme or topic but an exceptionally useful handbook that offers a comprehensive and systematic exploration of a wide range of fundamental issues.Navigating one's way through this handbook and choosing those articles one is particularly interested in is made easy not only by the great guidance provided by the introduction (which serves as a map to the treasures found in this volume) and the thematic foci of the five sections, but also by the clear structure of most of the essays: They generally begin with an introduction stating the main concerns, before going on to explore the theoretical and terminological issues involved in their respective topics, and in several cases demonstrating the fruitfulness of the concepts and hypotheses delineated by applying them to a case study or two. Although the spectrum of factual (and also fictional) works covered in this book is impressively wide, as anyone can glean by taking a look at the name index (755–63), some readers (or at least the reviewer) might have welcomed a greater number of sustained analyses like the two that Musloff provides. He considers the bleak inauguration speech that a former US president gave on January 20, 2017, and Boris Johnson's notoriously vague “vision for a bold, thriving Britain enabled by Brexit” that appeared in the Daily Telegraph on September 15, 2017. The latter of which is based on a curious blend of “alternative facts” and lies that unwittingly provide a paradigm example of what the philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt has labeled bullshit.Although one is rather pressed to find them, there are arguably some minor shortcomings that are conspicuous by their absence or by the marginal role they play in this volume. First and foremost, readers may be as surprised as I was, to find that the current debates about “alternative facts,” “fake news,” and “posttruth” do not receive the degree of attention in this handbook that they arguably merit. While fake news has at least nine entries in the subject index, there are no more than three for posttruth, one for postfactuality, and none for alternative facts. This is indicative of the fact that the chapters are not much concerned with the forms and functions of “postfactual narratives” that play such a prominent role in today's so-called social media as well as in politics and economics. Readers interested in such issues as these will find the fascinating collection of essays entitled Postfaktisches Erzählen? Post-Truth–Fake News–Narration (2021), edited by a team of German narratologists (Antonius Weixler, Matei Chihaia, Matías Martínez, Katharina Rennhak, Michael Scheffel, and Roy Sommer), an interesting companion volume in that the foci of the latter are almost in complementary distribution with the handbook under review. Anyone who is wondering what postfactual narratives actually look like and how they operate, will find Roy Sommer's brilliant article “Dolus Trump: Presidential Lies and the 2016 Masterclass on Truth-Bending” in this volume as eye-opening as Musloff's article in the Narrative Factuality handbook.In addition, whether or not, when, and how “stories go viral” (see Shiller's Narrative Economics) may not be questions of their degree of factuality, but they are certainly issues that one would have expected to see a chapter (or two) on in a twenty-first-century handbook on narrative factuality. It also comes as a bit of a surprise that some of the hotly debated issues in literary and cultural theory—for example, the forms and functions of hybrid genres and processes of hybridization that we have witnessed in many media (e.g., docudramas, scripted reality, reality TV, hybrid forms of representing history, etc.)—receive only relatively short shrift, although they would arguably have deserved somewhat lengthier treatment. The same holds true for the question of whether, and to what degree, the concepts of unreliable narration and (un)trustworthiness can also be profitably applied to factual narratives, a question that is explored in detail in the volume Unreliable Narration and Trustworthiness: Intermedial and Interdisciplinary Perspectives (edited by Vera Nünning, 2015), which does not seem to have crossed the radar of any of the contributors. Last but not least, the question of the historical specificity and cultural variability of what passes for facts, truth, and factual narratives would have deserved a more thorough examination.Notwithstanding these desiderata and slight reservations, this rich and wide-ranging handbook provides an excellent and multifaceted survey of a topic that is relevant not just for narrative theory and literary studies but also for a variety of different disciplines dealing with nonfictional genres and media. The quality of all the contributions to this volume is much better and higher than can reasonably be expected in such a collective venture involving so many contributors. Systematically redrawing the whole architecture of inquiry, the editors and their contributors manage to outline a wide range of new approaches to narrative factuality. Each chapter offers sophisticated analyses of the respective topics, more often than not enriched by perspicacious textual analyses, many of which deserve to be singled out for more elaborate appraisal. The contributors never content themselves with just reviewing well-known issues, offering instead a welter of sophisticated observations and new perspectives. An added virtue of this handbook is that it is not confined to contemporary literary theory but is interdisciplinary in scope, dealing with factual narratives from many different disciplines, cultures, periods, and languages.Meticulously researched and cogently argued, this handbook provides a cutting-edge and highly stimulating intervention into the blossoming and rapidly changing field of interdisciplinary narrative theories. It is a landmark work in narrative studies in that it is arguably the most comprehensive, systematic, and valuable recent contribution to the ongoing debates about factual narratives to date. Rich in insight and scholarship, rigorous in argumentation, and exemplary in terminological precision, the original chapters in this handbook open up productive perspectives and new paradigms for a fruitful engagement with the problems raised by the recent debates on factual (and fictional) narration. This highly recommendable handbook is not just a brilliant exploration of narrative factuality from almost any conceivable angle, it is also a goldmine of critical insights and a great pleasure to read. The fact that there are virtually no errors and typos testifies to the great care with which this groundbreaking handbook, which deserves to enjoy many reprintings, has been conceived and written. Narrative Factuality will be essential reading not only for all researchers and graduate students working in narratology and interdisciplinary narrative research, but also for the growing number of scholars, students, and teachers concerned with factual narratives in many other disciplines and domains. One would hope, however, that the publishers will be wise enough to make this excellent and invaluable but immodestly priced handbook available in a paperback edition so that it can reach the wide readership it no doubt deserves.