PRECEPTOS GENERALES

This section describes the tension in imaginative engagement with impossible fiction. I establish the wide philosophical consensus that proper engagement with fiction requires the reader to use her imagination. I also show that there is a popular notion that absolute impossibilities cannot be imagined. Given these two notions, there is a problem for impossible fiction: its impossible content prevents the reader from imagining it, and hence prevents her from properly engaging with it. First, however, I take a moment to explain exactly what I mean by the phrase ‘imaginative engagement’.

Imaginative engagement with fiction is closely related to the idea of narrative engagement. Narrative engagement, Shen-yi Liao helpfully articulates, is ‘the mental project we undertake when we recruit imagination for the sake of gaining aesthetic pleasure from imaginative prompts such as fictional narrative (2016: 465).’ The imagining we do during this project, Liao clarifies, has a normative component which is provided by the fictional narrative itself (2016: 466). He summarises: ‘during narrative engagement, one aims one’s imaginings at fictionality (Liao 2016: 466, Liao's italics).’ Imaginative engagement may be

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thought of in similar terms. I see it the use of one’s imagination to explore the content of a fictional narrative. The normative standards for these imaginings are set by that content.

Generally, philosophers see this kind of imaginative activity as essential to the minimally appropriate reading of fiction (and indeed for a proposition to count as fictional to begin with).48 _{When reading an excerpt from a fiction in the form of a proposition p, the}

appropriate response is usually considered to be imagining p, and doing so is typically regarded as necessary for successful narrative engagement (Stock 2013: 887). How exactly imagining p constitutes narrative engagement is less widely agreed upon. It may be due to a Gricean relation where an author intends for a reader to imagine the propositions contained in the fiction, as is notably the case for Currie (Currie 1990). It may be that imagining as prompted is by itself sufficient for narrative engagement, as Liao argues, provided that this is done in order to derive enjoyment (2016: 462). It may instead be the case that appropriate engagement with fiction takes the form of a game of make-believe, as is Walton’s approach (Walton,1990). Even in the most prominent case of a philosopher challenging the link between fiction and imagination, in Matravers’s Fiction and Narrative, the imagination is still an essential component in engaging with fictional narratives (it is simply not the defining component) (2014: 57). There is a consensus in philosophy of fiction that the imagination is a major or even constitutive factor in how we successfully engage with narratives.

There is also a tradition, if not a consensus, in Western philosophy which states that the conceivable is possible (and, by implication, that one cannot conceive of something absolutely impossible). This has been used to draw conclusions about the separability of, for example, cause and effect, mind and body, and knowledge and true belief (Chalmers 2002). If the impossible is not conceivable, it may also be the case that it is not imaginable. While conceiving of p and imagining p are different activities, it is not a stretch to claim that the two are related. Yablo and Chalmers define the act of conceiving in terms of the imagination, and Yablo suggests a strong link between imaginability and possibility (Chalmers 2002; Yablo 1993). Gendler & Hawthorne distinguish between the two as sensory and/or imagistic (in the case of imagining) and non-imagistic (in the case of conceiving), but they are agnostic about whether this difference means that one can imagine something absolutely impossible (2002: 9). These discussions have a major ramification for impossible fiction: if the absolutely impossible cannot be imagined, then

48 _{See, among many others, Feagin (1988), Currie (1990) and Stock (2013; 2017). Matravers offers}

a helpful overview of the links drawn between fiction and imagination (as well as challenging the explanatory power of this link) in the second chapter of his Fiction and Narrative (2014).

131 readers cannot imagine the content of impossible fiction. If readers cannot imagine the content of impossible fiction, then they cannot engage with impossible fictions in the way readers normally engage with fiction.

Given this issue, it is worth investigating the argument that the impossible is unimaginable more thoroughly. The position is best shown by Yablo, who claims that to imagine p is to entertain the appearance that p could obtain. To conceive of p is to imagine a world where p is verified, and it is by doing so that Yablo thinks the possibility of p is made apparent to us (1993: 30). This means that absolute impossibilities are not imaginable, as there is no world to be imagined where they are verified. Yablo writes that:

Tigers with round-square striping are not imaginable; neither can we imagine tigers that lick all and only tigers that do not lick themselves, or tigers with more salt in their stomachs than sodium chloride, or indeed any tigers that do not strike us as capable of existing (1993: 30).

By claiming these logically impossible objects are not imaginable, Yablo inadvertently lays down a major challenge to impossible fiction. His position creates a tension between the unimaginability of impossible fictional content and the requirement that the reader imagine that content as part of standard narrative engagement. If impossible fictions cannot be imagined, then readers cannot engage with them appropriately.

Even if Yablo is not correct, his claims show that I cannot simply assume that impossible fiction is imaginable. There is a live possibility of tension between the unimaginability of impossible fiction and the fact that imagining the content of fiction is a major aspect of engaging with that fiction. I offer three responses in order to dissolve this tension. These are as follows: first, reject Yablo’s claim and argue that absolute impossibilities can be imagined; second, reject the claim that imagination is an essential aspect of standard narrative engagement; third, give an example of how readers engage with impossible fiction in the same way as they do a standard fiction. Each section remaining in this chapter addresses one of these responses. I address the first in the following section.