Fiction

Use in the book

The theatrical-light fragment gives fictions a false light, the light of torches in the theater, without a completed governing assertion. Condillac’s statue receives a contrary judgment: it might have been ingenious but is called useless. The approved saying about fiction in the frame and truth in the painting allows invention a supporting role. Children’s games supply an embodied means of persuasion, as gestures help them believe their fictions again. A history of unfamiliar lands, however, is said to contain its own poetry and to be spoiled by invented additions. Pleasing fictions are also bounded by the mind’s nature. Finally the collective whole is itself a fiction through which a multitude becomes one, a use wider than any literary genre.

Places to read

1. I, p. 449, entry 3, ¶1Theater supplies the fragment’s false light for fictions.
2. II, p. 475 bis, entry 1, ¶2Condillac’s statue is a fiction judged useless despite possible ingenuity.
3. II, p. 581, entry 6, ¶1Fiction can frame a truthful painting.
4. II, p. 640, entry 8, ¶1Children enact fictions into renewed belief.
5. II, p. 737, entry 6, ¶1Invented additions would spoil the desired historical truth.
6. II, p. 741, entry 7, ¶1The mind’s nature bounds pleasing inventions.
7. II, p. 795, entry 5, ¶1A multitude becomes a whole through fiction.

Translation in this edition

The English translation retains fiction and fictions without turning them uniformly into falsehood or novel. The frame saying’s speaker and journal reference remain unidentified. In the collective passage, the causal force of parce is retained despite the absent French que; no particular political theory is supplied.