FICTION AND EXISTENCE Joseph MARGOLIS Temple University The analysis of fiction is complicated, currently, by two sorts of excessive philosophical zeal: one is motivated by continued loyalty to the extensional purposes of Russell's pioneer account of denotation and the avoidance of truth-value gapsl; the other, by exaggerated uncertainties regarding the balance between realist and idealist accounts of what there is. 2 Russell conflated denotation and reference (in the speech-act sense),3 and did not explicitly distinguish between cases in which nothing existent instantiated a set of definite des­ criptions (where only existent particulars were intended: "the present king of France," say) and cases in which only a fictional instantiation was intended ("Sherlock Holmes," say).4 Since the fictional has been assimilated, apparently in the spirit of Russell's program, merely to what contingently happens not to exist in the real world, it is thought that truth-value gaps threaten to arise where the would-be referents of discourse are fictional. On the other hand, if fictional entities are permitted to satisfy reference, it is thought that their ontology becomes a serious puzzle, since they must (it is supposed) be construed to be or to exist (treating those terms as synonymous)5; for, if they are so construed, then although they need not generate truth-value gaps because of a failure of reference, they will still do so because the entire range of applicable predications could not be brought into 1. Bertrand Russell, "On Denoting," Mind, 14 (1905). 2. The problem appears in its best-known form, for instance, in Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. 3. See P.F. Strawson, "On Referring," Mind, 59 (1950). 4. See, for example, John Woods, The Logic of Fiction, The Hague: Mouton, 1974. 5. See, for example, Peter van Inwagen, "Creatures of Fiction," American Philosophical Quarterly, 14 (1977). 180 accord with the law of excluded middle (as, for example, when we wonder, quite futilely, whether Holmes had or did not have a mole on his back).6 Regarding the reanst/idealist controversy, if, in Quine's famous phrase, in determining correctly what, ultimately, there is, there is "no fact of the matter,"7 then we are committed to an extremely attenuated form of realism (if we prefer realism) and we are open (if we are not careful) to the view that the world is as much made as encountered8 (or even that, in being made, is made in the same way fictions are made). The latter possibility may strike the mind as extremely farfetched. But there can be little doubt that, in recent American literary theory, it has found a moist home. It is often expressed, there, in terms of the replacement of mimesis by poiesis. For example, Paul de Man asserts that sign and meaning can never coincide is what is precisely taken for granted in the kind of language we caIl literary. Literature, unlike everyday language, begins on the far side of this knowledge; it is the only form of language free from the faIlacy of unmediated expression. AIl of us know this, although we know it in the misleading way of a wishful assertion of the opposite .... The self-reflecting mirror-effect by means of which a work of fiction asserts, by its very existence, its separation from empirical reality, its divergence, as a sign, from a meaning that depends for its existence on the constitutive activity of this sign, characterizes the work of literature in its essence. 9 6. See Alvin Plantinga, The Nature ofNecessity , Oxford: Clarendon, 1974 and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art, Oxford: Claren­ don, 1980. 7. W.V. Quine, Word and Object, Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960. 8. This, for instance, is the apparent point of Nelson Goodman's new book, Ways of Worldmaking, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1978. Goodman now terms his position "irrealism" (p. x) and expressly means to assimilate discourse about worlds (or the world) to "making worlds," as by painting "them" - as the dedicatory line indicates. The thesis provided an occasion for a rather spirited exchange between Quine and Goodman, beginning with Quine's review of Goodman's book, in the New York Review of Books. 9. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, New York: Oxford University Press, 1971, p. 17. The passage is cited in Gerald Graff, Literature against Itself, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979, Ch. 6. Graff assembles quite a number of related remarks from recent discussions, but he tends not to sort out the different claims carefuIly enough. For example, the struc-.