First three examples of oddities in fiction, and then a purported explanation of them all. Much of this post arose in conversation with Andy Egan. Most of the rest, including the first example, comes from section 4.5 of Kendall Walton’s Mimesis as Make-Believe.

Othello (Walton)

In Act 2, scene 2, Othello utters the following lines.

Had it pleased heaven
To try me with affliction, had they raised
All kinds of sores and shames on my bare head,
Steeped me in poverty to the very lips,
Given to captivity me and my utmost hopes;
I should have founds in some place of my soul
A drop of patience. But alas…

In the real world anyone who could compose these lines would be a first-rate poet. The standards for being a first-rate poet are no different in Othello’s world to ours. Othello does compose those lines. Yet it is not fictional that Othello is a first-rate poet.

555 (Egan)

In every movie nowadays, every phone number we hear starts 555. Yet it is not (it seems) fictional that every phone number starts 555, nor that we are seeing a non-random sample of phone numbers.

Censorship (Weatherson)

In airplane versions of movies, profanity is censored. But the censorship normally takes place only on the soundtrack, not the screen. So when the passenger hears the Mob boss say “Kill the lowlife scum”, the Mob boss’s lips are mouthing a much more obscene phrase. Anyone who could produce that sound while moving their lips that way would be a skilled ventriloquist, both really and fictionally. Yet it is not fictional that the Mob boss is a skilled ventriloquist.

Walton suggests that often (not always, but often) the response to ‘silly’ worries like these is to say that the odd claims are true in a story, but are ‘de-emphasised’. Very roughly, that means that they are the kind of fictional truths that it a skilled participant in the fictional game will not attend to. I want to argue that in some cases, including these, actually less is true in the fiction than first appears. (My disagreement with Walton here is a matter of degree – I’m basically saying his solution to the problem posed by blue jeans in Greek plays should be generalised.)

The first point to note is that it is not fictional in __Othello__ that Othello utters the words “Had it pleased heaven…” It is not fictional that Othello speaks English, and it is true in the fiction that he does not speak English in everyday conversation. So Shakespeare is presenting us with (at best) a translation into English of what Othello fictionally said.

Given that we are seeing a translation, is there any reason to think we are seeing a literal translation? Not much, as far as I can tell. For one thing, any speech of which this was a literal translation would be very odd. Literally translate a poem into another language and what you get is neither good poetry nor good prose. It must be true that Shakespeare has at some level ‘cleaned up’ what Othello fictionally said. So why not believe that Othello fictionally spoke in ordinary vernacular, and what we see is a poetic rendering of the sentiments he expressed? As far as I can tell, there is no good reason at all.

Once we see that Shakespeare had to translate, and thereby clean up, his characters fictional language, the door is open to accepting that he did the same thing for characters that fictionally spoke English. It probably is fictional that Henry V uttered just the speech attributed to him, because it is fictional that Henry V is a great orator. But it need not be fictional that Lear uttered all the lines attributed to him. There is a gap between what is represented and how it is represented, even when the represented and the representation are of the same form.

The same thing is true in the 555 case. It isn’t fictional that all phone numbers start 555. It isn’t even fictional that characters say that they start 555. It’s just a convention that however a phone number starts, we represent a character saying what it is by saying “Five-five-five”. This means that in most cases there is no fact of the matter about how the phone number actually starts.

And the same is (pretty clearly I think) true in the airplane censorship case. It isn’t fictional that the Mob boss utters, “Kill the lowlife scum” while mouthing something else, because it isn’t even fictional that he utters “Kill the lowlife scum”. Rather, there’s just a convention that whatever he fictionally said, we’ll represent it (at least on the audio track) by having him utter something more mild. This might mean there is no fact of the matter about what he fictionally says, or (more likely) it might mean that what he fictionally says is determined by the cinema version.