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'It […] cannot do any harm to anyone whatsoever’: fictionality, invention and knowledge creation in global notifications, Joseph Conrad’s prefaces and Chance

Faculty Advisor

Date

2024

Keywords

fictionality, invention, knowledge creation, truth, credibility, signaling, nonfictional conversational storytelling

Abstract (summary)

Chance explores the intersection of two of novelist Joseph Conrad’s life- long fascinations: fictional representations of nonfictional conversational storytelling and the relationship between truth, credibility and invention. The latter is also apparent throughout Conrad’s prefaces, in which he works through long- held anxieties about the truthfulness and credibility of his representations and about critics’ concerns on these fronts. To reconcile the relationship between invention and truth or credibility, he describes a process of constructing, via invention, fundamentally truthful and credible stories about real- world events and figures. In Chance, Conrad depicts a character narrator, Marlow, doing the same thing. There are, however, two salient differences between Marlow’s and Conrad’s undertakings: one is their distance from the events and figures they are telling about and telling to (Conrad very distant from them vs. Marlow literally living amidst them), and the other is the genre claims they make for their narratives (Conrad’s literary fictions vs. Marlow’s conversational nonfictions). Conrad depicts Marlow using invention (through fictionality and otherwise) to supplement the limitations of his knowledge about other people, their motivations and their relationships, so that he can narrate a credible and compelling nonfictional conversational tale for his narratee. But because Marlow lives amidst and communicates with the subjects of his tale and presents his communications as nonfictional, the knowledge he creates through invention is consequential for his own and others’ involvement in the unfolding action. Failure to signal must have beens and hypotheticals as invention contributes to significant outcomes for the people with whom Marlow communicates in the told. Conrad thus qualifies his portrait of the affordances of invention for knowledge creation in global nonfictions with a cautionary note related to narrating situations like Marlow’s: telling nonfictional conversational stories about and to our acquaintances.

Publication Information

Copland, S. (2024). 'It […] cannot do any harm to anyone whatsoever’: Fictionality, invention and knowledge creation in global notifications, Joseph Conrad’s prefaces and Chance. In S. Björninen, P. Meyer, M. Mäkelä, & H. Zetterberg-Nielsen (Eds.), Dangers of narrative and fictionality: A rhetorical approach to storytelling in contemporary western culture, (pp. 143-162 ). Peter Lang.

DOI

Notes

Item Type

Book Chapter

Language

Rights

Attribution (CC BY)