Editor fiction

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The editor's fiction (also: manuscript fiction ) is a literary device that is occasionally used in novels . When an author uses the possibilities of editor fiction, then he pretends that there is a person in the fictional world that he has created who has found the text as a finished text. The fictitious publisher created by the author can report how the decision was made to publish the novel, he can state what additional information he was able to gather about the people who appeared, and he can give judgmental statements.

Examples

The trick of the editor's fiction cannot be assigned to any particular epoch of literary history . The corresponding procedure can be found in Cervantes ' Don Quixote , in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe , in Goethe's Werther , in Cáo Xuěqín's dream of the red chamber , in Manzoni's I promessi sposi , in HG Wells ' Die Insel des Dr. Moreau as well as in Nabokov's Pale Fire , in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose , Walter Moers ' The City of Dreaming Books and Ingo Schulze's 33 Moments of Happiness .

Example 1: Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther is laid out as a letter novel . In letters to his friend Wilhelm, Werther tells of his unhappy love for Lotte. Towards the end of the book, Werther's feelings of unhappiness increase and make him decide to commit suicide. So that the reader can understand the developments in the last phase of Werther's life, Goethe brings an editor into play. In the last chapters he has the function that the narrator has in other novels , that is, he tells of Werther's last encounters with Lotte and also of his death.

Example 2: Fernando Arrabal prefixes the main text with a “Note from the editor” in his novel The Enlightened Stone . The fictitious editor declares that the text is a found one. None of the sentences in the novel had been changed by him. With the editor's fiction, Arrabal creates the possibility of including evaluative comments on his own text in the text. Specifically: the fictional editor classifies the text as very unconventional and is surprised at the daring choice of words that he often finds in the text. This creates ironic effects.

Example 3: In Italo Svevo's Zeno Cosini , a psychoanalyst acts as a fictional editor who, in revenge for an interrupted therapy, wants to expose his patient's diary entries to public scorn.

"The Fictional Editor"

Arata Takeda uses the term “fictional” editor to denote an editor who, despite his non-identity with the author, wants to be real in relation to his reader (e.g. the editor in Goethe's Werther or Lorenzo Alderani in Ugo Foscolos Jacopo Ortis ). Takeda thus distinguishes the fictional editor from both the “alleged” and the “fictitious” editor, as they are often undifferentiated in the research literature. The alleged or fictitious publisher literally represents the author who claims to be such (e.g. the “editor” in Samuel Richardson's Pamela or the “éditeur” in Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse ), while the fictitious publisher does not in reality, but only exists in the text (e.g. Richard Sympson in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels or the “rédacteur” in Choderlos de Laclos ' Liaisons dangereuses ). Takeda sees a gradual development from an authorial editor to a fictional editor character in the ever more refined and reflective development of the strategies of the fictional editor in the 18th century novel of letters.

literature

Remarks

  1. ↑ Arata Takeda: The Invention of the Other. On the genesis of the fictional editor in the 18th century epistolary novel. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008. P. 15 and passim.
  2. ↑ See e.g. B. Hans Rudolf Picard: The Illusion of Reality in the Epistle Novel of the Eighteenth Century. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1971. pp. 15-18.