Contexto arquitectónico del área de estudio

How precisely does adopting the attitude of make-belief work, and what precisely is it that we are making believe when we do so? Currie distinguishes between three inter-related terms: make-belief, make-believe, and making believe. “Make-believe [is] something we do,” he writes. “’Make-belief’ denotes a propositional attitude: an attitude we take toward the propositions of a story. But we also speak of something being make-believe…. In this sense, make-believe is a propositional operator (M) [as fiction is also treated as a propositional operator (F)]” (72). In adopting the attitude of make-belief that the author intends toward the propositions of a fiction, we are engaged in the act of making believe what is properly regarded as make-believe. All of this is part of what Currie refers to as the “game of make- believe,” which represents the broader context in which fiction is read. What is make-

believe—that is, what is true-in-the-game-of-make-believe (M)—and what is fictive—that is, what is true-in-the-fiction) (F)—“normally overlap a great deal,” Currie notes; for what is fictive is precisely that which we are intended to make-believe. “But there are things that are make-believe in games of fiction that are not true in the corresponding fictions.

It can be make-believe in a game of fiction that I am reading an account of events that have occurred, but that is not part of the fiction itself, since the story says nothing about me.

In this way, each reader’s reading generates a fiction larger than the fiction being read. (72-73)

According to Currie, one such part of the game of make-believe is

not merely that the events described in the text occurred, but that we are being told about those events by someone with knowledge of them. Thus it is part of the make-

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believe that the reader is in contact, through channels of reliable information, with the characters and their actions, that the reader learns about their activities from a reliable source. To make-believe a fictional story is not merely to make-believe that the story is true, but that it is told as known fact. (72-73)

This implies, of course, a teller—a “fictional construct ”similar to Hamburger’s fiction- narrating “statement-subject” that Currie notes can be variously referred to as “an ‘implied,’ ‘apparent,’ ‘postulated,’ or ‘ideal’ author” (76). Currie himself adopts and employs the term “fictional author” to refer to this figure: the “fictional character constructed within our make- believe whom we take to be telling us the story as known fact” (76).

What the actual author of the fiction intends for us to make-believe is what the fictional author “believes”—in the sense, really, of what he knows to be true—concerning what he is telling us. “Our reading is thus an exploration of the fictional author’s belief structure,” Currie declares (76). And “the reader’s task is to work out what the fictional author believes” (Currie 79). And the fictional author’s belief set—what is true-in-the- fiction—is determined through both the text itself, and a complementary background of assumptions. The text alone is insufficient, Currie says: “When we try to build up a picture of someone’s belief set we don’t proceeds mechanically, by listing all the indicative sentences he utters, concluding that his beliefs are exactly the propositions expressed by those

sentences” (77). As a general rule, Currie suggests, following David Lewis, that where no explicit dissimilarity between the world of the fiction and the actual world is asserted or implied, their similarity is and must be assumed. This extends, too, to the fictional author: though distinct from the actual author of the work, where no explicit dissimilarity is indicated in the text, we assume similarity. Specific assumptions about what the fictional author

believes derive first and foremost, and primarily, then, from 1) what is known of the community to which the fictional author belongs and/or in which the work was produced ,

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and 2) what may be reasonably inferred from that. This leads Currie to the “concept of an informed reader, a reader who knows the relevant facts about the community in which the work was written. The informed reader, unlike the fictional author, is not a fictional entity. A real reader can be an informed reader” (79). Ultimately, what is true-in-the-fiction is defined in terms of what it is reasonable for the informed reader of the story to infer that the fictional author believes (80). These beliefs, because they are those of a non-existent figure, are constituted by and through an informed reading of the text. Consequently, “as we read, we learn more about his beliefs, and we may come to change earlier hypotheses about what his beliefs are. Understanding the fictional author is thus like understanding a real person; it’s a matter of making the best overall sense we can of his behavior” (76).

Such a theory is susceptible to accusations of what the American New Critics Monroe C. Beardsley and W.K. Wimsatt termed “the intentional fallacy.” Yet the approach here is, Currie asserts, consistent with their critical approach as grounded in close textual reading. The text itself must not only allow for the kinds of assumptions that function to comprise in part the belief set of the fictional author; it must make them reasonably inferable: “To make a proposition P true in his fiction the author has to compose sentences that against the

background of relevant community belief, make it reasonable for the reader to infer that the fictional author believes P” (109-110). It is not fallacious, Currie argues, to ascribe any particular intention to the author, with respect to what the reader is to make-believe (by ascribing a corresponding belief to the fictional author) if it is prompted by reasonable textual evidence. Consequently, such ascribed or assumed intentions/beliefs can be considered “internal to the text”; for Beardsley and Wimsatt declare, “What is (1) internal… is

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the language, through grammars, dictionaries and all the literature which is the source of dictionaries, in general all that makes a language and culture” (qtd. in Currie 110). “All that makes a language and a culture” would include, Currie argues, the “patterns of belief in a community” that comprise the “background” against or in which the work is read—the “background” from which the reader, in conjunction with more direct textual evidence, makes reasonable inferences/assumptions about what the fictional author believes (110-111).