The Distinction of Fiction.

Bell, Michael

The Distinction of Fiction. By Dorrit Cohn. Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1999. ix + 197 pp. 35 [pounds sterling].

Dorrit Cohn demolishes, with remorseless and elegant clarity, the view, fashionable among some literary theorists, that there is ultimately no distinction between historical and fictional narrative. She emphasizes the distinction of fiction from history with respect to their referential claims, authorial access to other consciousnesses, and the distinguishability of the real author from the narrative voice. After noting that borderline or ambiguous cases, far from destroying this distinction, actually throw it into relief, she examines the generic ambiguity in, principally, Freud's case histories, Proust's autobiographical fiction, Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Marbot, and Mann's Death in Venice.

Some readers will feel that the emperor had no clothes, and that the distinction of history and fiction is inevitably contextual as well as textual. Such readers may regret that her analytic argument for differentiating fiction does not allow her to pursue another sense of its distinction, over and above its `uniqueness' and `differentiation', namely its qualitative power in its own terms. None the less, having dismissed the claim that Freud's case histories are indistinguishable from fictions, she raises some critically significant questions about, for example, Proust, J. M. Coetzee, and Thomas Mann. If one questions the enterprise, therefore, it is not to fault it in its own terms, but to ask whether, if her opponents have evacuated an historical gravitas arising precisely from the unfathomable interrelations of history and fiction, she stays too much on their ground.

Her final reading, of War and Peace, is in keeping. Having so deftly argued the distinction between historical author and narrative voice in Mann, she now speaks unproblematically of Tolstoy mixing fictional characters such as Pierre with historical characters such as Napoleon. But surely Tolstoy's Napoleon is also, in the first instance, fictional albeit his function is to throw an interpretative light on an historical original. She implicitly acknowledges this since her main drift is precisely to assert the historical value of fiction as fiction. What she most effectively demonstrates, perhaps, is that raising the abstract categories of fiction and history is invaluable for bringing these questions into sharp and urgent focus, as long as one does not suppose they can readily be answered.

MICHAEL BELL
UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK