Yet, that
fictiveness simultaneously secures the naturalness of the sui generis non-transexual's place in modernity's story of progress.
In fact, "based on a true story" actually becomes a signifier of
fictiveness; it makes story where there was no story, it draws our attention to story-hess, and it echoes every other inspirational, and often just as improbable sports film that marked itself as "based on a true story": Rudy, Hoosiers, Remember the Titans, Miracle, The Rookie.
Tolstoy wants to have the story both "spoken and unspoken" (73), an outcome that mirrors the text's subversion of its own
fictiveness by its author's declaration of his fidelity to the Truth at the story's conclusion.
As she surely knew, such a case could never exist, and to parse it too closely, as the previous paragraph does, violates the story's
fictiveness. Her refusal to specify a legal theory for the case or for the damage award indicates neither ignorance nor sloppiness.
I use "story" here (with its implication of
fictiveness) to insist, with Paul Ricoeur, that the line between (fictive) story and (factual) history is not a clean one, and that the narrative structures that govern one govern the other.
(1) It is worth exploring for just that reason: as a rich ecology to be found nowhere else, a time-warping and world-multiplying
fictiveness peculiar to the constitution of literature.
Quim Monzo uses a "compulsive liar" to comment on both the vagaries of small-town identity and the power of his own text to create a believable world--whose
fictiveness, however, is underscored by translator Peter Bush's British English.
The crucial element clearly is self-reflexivity, by which I mean the readiness of a fictional text to expose its own
fictiveness recursively.
Packer quotes the critic Gordon Harvey: "Accounts of actual happenings cast a particular kind of narrative spell; they give a particular pleasure that fiction doesn't give and that won't stand the suspicion of
fictiveness, depending as the pleasure does on our perception of an effort being made to preserve the integrity of past experience, from both the assaults of subsequent experience and the temptations of art."
Kim's method, in the main, is psychoanalytic, for The fall of Young-ho is surely exacerbated by the historical catastrophes, such as Kwangju, the military dictatorship, and the so-called "I.M.F.-crisis" of 1997, but the culprit is also his perceived sense of the lack that is persistently threatening unless its
fictiveness is unveiled.
If Nebraska is to live for the mind, the description may have to acknowledge its
fictiveness so that Nebraska matters because of how it solicits imagined details.
On the other hand, Krog's acknowledgement of her sources for this episode--her basis for the fantasy--indicates its
fictiveness, that is to say, its infidelity.
While they do not seem to parody themselves in any self-consuming way (Fowles may offer two endings, but he does not parody his existential themes; Byatt seems to want to write a romance, not really to undercut her romance endings), the self-reflexiveness created by the relative novelty of the technique and our awareness of the anachronism of its use and the fictive awareness of its own artifice do create the aura of a consideration of
fictiveness within its own fiction that does verify the critical consensus that these novels are postmodern historiography rather than just historical fiction.
