I had an idea to write a paper on truth in fiction arguing that unreliable narrators pose an insuperable problem for extant accounts. The schtick was going to be that every proposal currently on the table gets some fact or other about Eveline wrong, because they all start from the idea that what is in the text is true, and in Eveline this seems unlikely. But maybe this isn’t true. This is the account from John Phillips’s paper Truth and Inference in Fiction (Phil Studies 1999)

A sentence of the form, ‘In the fiction F, p’ is true iff it is reasonable for an informed reader to infer from the text that, under ideal conditions, the author of F would agree that p is part of F.

The problem is that the analysis here is in a sense circular. Idealised beliefs about truth in fiction are used in an account of truth in fiction. So there isn’t enough independent purchase here to let Eveline get a grip on what’s happening.

Having said that, the theory is false, and for a fairly simple reason. (Even circular sounding theories can pick up mistakes as they cycle around the track.) Phillips intends to respect the Principle of Poetic Licence: a writer can make whatever she wants true in her fiction. But as regular readers here will know, that isn’t true. (And I’m not the first one to point it out.) An author can’t make it true, even in a fiction, that selfishness is the greatest of the virtues, no matter how much she tries. And even though one may infer from Rand’s novels that the author would agree that it is part of the story that selfishness is the greatest of the virtues, it is not true in her fiction that this is so. But I’m not sure how to work this into Eveline, unless I can implicate some of Joyce’s somewhat pre-feminist thinking (just why are Eveline and Maria the two most easily confused lead characters in Dubliners?) somehow.

I had an idea to write a paper on truth in fiction arguing that unreliable narrators pose an insuperable problem for extant accounts. The schtick was going to be that every proposal currently on the table gets some fact or other about Eveline wrong, because they all start from the idea that what is in the text is true, and in Eveline this seems unlikely. But maybe this isn’t true. This is the account from John Phillips’s paper Truth and Inference in Fiction (Phil Studies 1999)

A sentence of the form, ‘In the fiction F, p’ is true iff it is reasonable for an informed reader to infer from the text that, under ideal conditions, the author of F would agree that p is part of F.

The problem is that the analysis here is in a sense circular. Idealised beliefs about truth in fiction are used in an account of truth in fiction. So there isn’t enough independent purchase here to let Eveline get a grip on what’s happening.

Having said that, the theory is false, and for a fairly simple reason. (Even circular sounding theories can pick up mistakes as they cycle around the track.) Phillips intends to respect the Principle of Poetic Licence: a writer can make whatever she wants true in her fiction. But as regular readers here will know, that isn’t true. (And I’m not the first one to point it out.) An author can’t make it true, even in a fiction, that selfishness is the greatest of the virtues, no matter how much she tries. And even though one may infer from Rand’s novels that the author would agree that it is part of the story that selfishness is the greatest of the virtues, it is not true in her fiction that this is so. But I’m not sure how to work this into Eveline, unless I can implicate some of Joyce’s somewhat pre-feminist thinking (just why are Eveline and Maria the two most easily confused lead characters in Dubliners?) somehow.