"People I can trick 'em into thinking anything"

This is part of a series of fragmented, loosely connected thoughts, mostly without answer, mostly amateur, mostly concerning the connection between rhetoric and fiction. (By “rhetoric,” I mean the simple definition of rhetoric: basically, using language to convince people of stuff, which, is something that’s incredibly abstruse almost by virtue of how simple some of it looks. Don’t take my word for it – some Greek guys said some stuff about saying stuff. [I’m also going to make an effort not to talk about Paul de Man here, as that will probably undermine (by definition) anything useful I have to say. This isn’t about an “argument” – although that is to say that what I’m writing is not “rhetorical,” and who could fail to see the rhetoric behind that claim? Certainly not Paul de Man.]).

1. First of all, there’s the question of why the question is necessary. After all, isn’t fiction all about not having to convince anybody of anything? Don’t we simply take for granted that books with “Fiction” printed in the lower left-hand corners of their back covers have an implicitly special relationship to argumentation? Wait, is it even possible for a book of fiction to have an argument?

2. Works of fiction make arguments all the time. That is, they generate arguments through their characters, through their narrators, etc. Robert Coover’s Richard M. Nixon in The Public Burning (which I hope I’ll be able to write more about) is virtually defined by the arguments he makes for his own political decisions, for Cold War politics in general, for certain gustatory predilections, and what have you. This is not news. But this is a character making a set of specific arguments that, I would argue, are also (and more importantly) descriptive statements. (Needless to say, I don’t have the book in front of me right now, and you’ll have to at least skim the Nixon chapters to see what I’m saying in regards to The Public Burning, but I feel like the “first-person statements are also always self-descriptive” thing will probably hold for a lot of other books. Let’s also note, while we’re here, that, if it true that first-person statements [in fiction] are also always self-descriptive, then that act of description is also performative [within the frame of the novel] since the character is [again, within the frame of the novel] a self-construction made of the very language he utters. Which is weird, because that sort of kicks the backslash out of J.L. Austin’s constative / performative distinction, collapsing it).

3. So nobody’s going to disagree that, whatever arguments in works of fiction “do,” characters can make those arguments. Let’s also note that this is categorically a different thing than a book “making an argument.” Which is not to say that the character’s argument cannot play a part in the book’s argument, but the two (most likely) are hardly identical.

4. I have not read Wayne Booth. But then there’s this.