Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [41]
Moreover, the attempts to pass fictions for such "urgent news" would be decried. Consider, for example, the indignation of the early readers of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), who had been promised by the title page of the first edition "a just history of fact" but had then been given what they perceived as a "feign'd" story. Responding to the heated charges of "lying like the truth," Defoe felt compelled to tell his "ill-disposed" critics that his "story is not "feign'd" and "though Allegorical, [it] is also Historical, [because it contains] Matter of real History."6 And, indeed, Defoe's novels contain plenty of information that could be stored either with no scope-limiting source-tagging at all or with a relatively weak tagging (note the importance of introducing the concept of gradation to our discussion of source-tagging; I shall come back to it later). For example, Robinson Crusoe contains information fully compatible with our basic ontological assumptions about causation, naive physics, mental states, and so on, as well as the information compatible with culture-specific semantic knowledge, for example, that eighteenth-century Englishmen engaged in overseas trading, that they used slave labor, that they followed their primogeniture laws. This is not to mention that Robinson Crusoe is also a good source of potentially useful inferences of the kind indicated by Cosmides and Tooby in their "Odysseus" example above, such as that one can survive even in the direst circumstances by exercising resourcefulness and self-reliance, or that wanderlust may come at a serious cost. Strictly speaking, the presence of all this ontologically, semantically, and emotionally true information allowed Defoe to claim that his novels were "true histories" because they contained "matters of fact," and yet his critics felt justified in accusing him of lying and violently discarded his "matters of fact" claim. Their outrage7 seems to indicate a strong conviction that certain representations should be publicly acknowledged as fictions as a whole even if many of their constituent parts satisfy a broad range of truth-value requirements.8
Other epochs and cultural settings offer examples of a similar drive to differentiate the "true stories" from "feign'd," even if the criteria and indeed the very vocabulary of "truth" are different in each case. The famous fourth-century B.C. entry in Chinese Zuozhuan (the commentary on Spring and Autumn Annals, which covered the reigns of the twelve Dukes of the state of Lu from 722 to 491 B.C.) tells of the three historians who chose to be killed, one after another, rather than agree to falsify the account in the same Zuozhuan that recorded the murder of Duke Zhuang of Qi by his chief minister. Although Zuozhuan undoubtedly contains some "falsification of records, precisely to suit those in position of power," its testimony about the heroic historians clearly intends to impress upon the readers that
5: "Fiction" and "History"
the commentary would not sponsor the promulgation of political myths, even if the word myth itself did not exist in ancient China.9
Similarly, a sixth-century B.C. Greek historian, Hecataeus, ridiculed other people's tales as "absurd" and presented "his own accounts .. . as true" (alethes), and in the following generation Thucydides distanced "himself from those whose accounts are 'more suited to entertain the listener than to the truth.'" As being beyond scrutiny (anexelegktos), such stories, wrote Thucydides, "won their way to the mythical" {muthod.es), a term, that, as G. E. R. Lloyd observes, "clearly acquires pejorative undertones" when used "in a collocation associated with unverifiability."10
Finally, as a more familiar example, think of our own bookstores' commitment to carefully demarcating