Fictionality and Pleasure. Traces of a Practice of Fictionality in Medieval German Short Verse Narratives?
Authors: Manuwald Henrike 
Published: September 2020

Despite an intense debate over the past decades the question of whether the concept of fictionality can be regarded as universal or whether it needs to be historicised is still unresolved. The same question applies to the practice (or practices?) of fictionality, which come into focus once an institutional theory of fictionality is applied. In addition to the problem that literary practices can only be reconstructed incompletely for past epochs, it is methodically difficult to determine which practices should be identified, given that the practice of fictionality might have changed over time. One possible solution is to search for historical literary practices displaying similarities to what is regarded as the contemporary practice of fictionality. This article adduces a subtype of medieval German short verse narratives (Mären) as a test case for the scope of this approach and arrives at a twofold result:

The controlled anachronism implicit in the approach makes it possible to show that literary practices sketched in someMärendisplay parallels to the contemporary practice of fictionality (in the sense that the truth value of single predications becomes indifferent). This result contributes to our understanding of the history of the practice of fictionality, while placing the parallels in their historical contexts demonstrates that the category of ›fictionality‹ cannot capture the essence of the literary practices relevant toMären.

This approach has the advantage of making it possible to describe in a phenomenon-orientated way literary practices only potentially linked to a practice of fictionality before narrowing down the view to pre-defined features of a practice of fictionality. For the textual examples analysed it can thus be shown that the emotional effect of literature, especially the potential to arouse pleasure, is a feature regarded as decisive for the reception of a literary text. This observation opens up further links to research on the fictionality of post-medieval texts, especially the ›paradox of fiction‹.

The argument builds on the assumption that we can speak of a practice of fictionality if the truth value of the sentences of a text becomes indifferent for its production and reception. Although this is a definition with universal scope, it is timebound in so far as it highlights that truth concepts depend on a propositional level of a text, while for a medieval audience the ›true meaning‹ of a text would probably have been more important. In the article this problem is illustrated by the genre of exemplary narratives. Of these the subtype ofMärenis singled out in order to study literary practices. This selection is also motivated by the fact that in medieval studiesMärenhave received less attention in debates on fictionality than e. g. Arthurian romances or chronicles.

The textual analysis focuses on prologues and other self-reflexive passages from selected late medievalMären, where literary practices are being alluded to in an explicit way. Notwithstanding that these passages do not allow the reconstruction of actual practices, they convey an impression of what was regarded as plausible practices. Truth claims or references to sources in the selectedMärenconfirm that the expectation of truthfulness (whether on the literal or a deeper level) was a kind of default mode for the production and reception of narratives. However, various strategies to undermine this default mode can be observed: in some cases the truth claims are ironically questioned within the texts themselves, in other cases the aesthetic quality and/or the emotional effect of the narratives is foregrounded so that the question of authenticity becomes irrelevant. This strategy suggests a mode of reception that parallels the contemporary practice of fiction as outlined above.

Since the capacity of theMärento arouse pleasure is highlighted in the sources, the pre-modern debate ofdelectatioandutilitasis established here as the historical context for the self-reflexive passages of the analysedMären. These categories were discussed in the medieval period in relation to the aspect of ›truthfulness‹, at least in normative theological discourse, and can thus be linked to questions of fictionality. This makes it possible to define a place for a practice of fictionality within a medieval Christian framework, the possibility of which had been doubted in research on medieval concepts of fictionality.

On a systematic level, the foregrounding of the emotional effects of literature in someMärenopens up the opportunity to draw parallels to institutional theories of fictionality stressing the need of imaginative engagement with the text on the part of the recipient. The examples suggest that questions such as the ›paradox of fiction‹ should receive attention within a diachronic framework, too, in order to obtain a fuller picture of the history of the practice of fiction.