The Quixotic Fallacy

Abstract

When a four-year-old asks his mother upon her return from a trip to Paris if she saw Madeline and the old house covered with vines there, he is expressing an ancient, enduring conception about fiction: the conviction of fiction's continuity if not identity with life. Reading, both the activity of reading and the content read, continually describes and explores various relations between fiction and reality. There is a range of possible relations. The matter of fiction may or may not coexist with actual objects; it may improve upon or depreciate, invert or exaggerate, underscore or obscure, invent or ignore reality. As even this partial list indicates, fiction may just as often complement and elaborate reality as contradict it. We are accustomed to the matches as well as mismatches between fiction and actuality. If Madeline were not to be seen in Paris, my son would readily understand that she exists only in the stories. Some things do exist solely in the imagination and its literary instantiations. But he was also much gratified to learn that I had seen the Eiffel Tower, which also appears in the Madeline books.1 The fact that sometimes a story is just a story heightens the reader's satisfaction in the instances when reality actually accords with fiction, which is to say, when fiction has so successfully reproduced reality that reality appears to verify fiction. One's sight of the Eiffel Tower confirms one's sense of it from literary or pictorial reproductions; in this case, another person's sight of the monument performs the same confirmation. An identity between reader's and viewer's experiences affirms that the objects encountered by the reader exist and that they can be made present in many forms: as story, picture, Parisian landmark, or souvenir statue. Bringing the sight of unseen objects or events into view, fiction routinely performs a testimonial function which can be amplified by the presence (or testimony to the presence) of appropriate objective correlatives.2 Thus readers with mimetic expectations signify not so much a naivete about fiction as the perspicacity with which readers habitually understand the representational and representative properties of fiction. The figure of the reader with mimetic expectations, who expects life to conform to literature, has long been a subject of fascination and entertainment. Most memorably typified by Cervantes' Don Quixote, the quixotic reader would believe Madeline lives or lived in Paris just as the book says (and might go looking for her there). Or, in an even stronger mimetic experience, the quixotic reader might become the heroine as in the American poet John Trumbull's 1773 descrip-

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