I’ve been rereading Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe, and I think that figurative language in fiction poses a problem for his view. Maybe he solves this problem in later parts of the book that I’m not back to yet, or there’s a solution in the literature, but I couldn’t tell immediately how to solve it.

Walton’s main idea is that a work makes a proposition fictional by prescribing that you imagine it. But many things other than fiction as traditionally conceived contain prescriptions to imagine. Figurative language, for instance, is also meant to be understood as containing prescriptions to imagine certain things. So what happens when figurative language gets used in fiction?

For instance, in the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode of Ulysses Bloom is variously described in many different ways, with the descriptions being intended to recall many different genres. In the first of these he is described as a knight in a parody of Mallory’s Arthurian tales. It seems clear that (a) the reader is at this point meant to imagine Bloom as an Arthurian knight and (b) it is not fictional in Ulysses that Bloom is an Arthurian knight.

I think Walton’s solution to this puzzle is to say that there are several fictional games going on here, and it is not part of the Ulysses game, or perhaps of the core Ulysses game, that one must imagine Bloom as an Arthurian knight. But neither of those moves looks very good. If we take the first option, that this prescription is not part of the Ulysses game, it is unclear what game it is a part of. If we take the second that this prescription is not part of the Ulysses game, we have to define, somehow, what are core and non-core prescriptions, and I don’t see a way to do that.