1 Introduction

American author George Saunders, when asked in an interview about his use of sci-fi or fantastic elements in otherwise realist fiction, responded: “I use those elements as a way of honing in on the emotional truth of a situation. When I look at what my life has actually been, to just represent what literally happened is to shortchange the emotional range that I’ve experienced” (Begley 2017: 78). Even though Saunders talks about his works of fiction, what he says about the role of unusual story elements in depicting emotions and personal experience seems to me a vital point that holds equally true for everyday storytelling: we enliven our stories with elements that push them close to fiction, and, in doing so, we also give added meaning to the moments in our lives thus depicted. Extreme cases of such imaginative storytelling may amount to what Joseph de Rivera and Theodore R. Sarbin (1998) called “believed-in imaginings,” e.g., when people report that they have seen ghosts or have been abducted by extraterrestrials (see Chapter 2).

However, one need not look as far as such extreme examples to find elements in real-life stories which show a convergence between fictional and nonfictional storytelling. Take, for instance, someone who recounts a conversation he had with someone a while ago and renders this conversation in direct speech. Linguists would argue that much of the presented dialogue is in fact “constructed” and by no means a verbatim rendition (see Chapter 5). Indeed, who could ever hope to remember the exact same words that were actually spoken in a conversation? So, while the narrative refers to a conversation that truly took place and has real-life people as ‘characters’ in it, the way this conversation is presented is partially ‘made up,’ even though it may at least in spirit come close to what was actually said. Another example: how often do we tell someone about what happened to another person even though we may not have been direct witnesses of that event? Hearsay and gossip, as we all know, often rest on what we ourselves were merely told. This does not usually hinder us from embellishing our descriptions of situations and events or even from ascribing thoughts and emotions to the person whose story we tell – despite the fact that we technically cannot have first-hand knowledge of that person’s thoughts and emotions. In conversational contexts, we usually ignore such inconsistencies and accept the ‘factuality’ of such stories. Most existing theories of fictionality leave out such examples where the fictionalized aspect or, as I shall put it, the narrative’s inherent potential for fictionalization or fictional contamination, is not necessarily self-evident. However, it is precisely these examples that should be of interest from the perspective of fictionality studies because they show that ‘fictionality’ can sometimes be neither here nor there. What would one classify as the fictionalized part in these examples? Where would one draw the line to non-fictional elements as some theorists try to do when talking about “local” and “global” fictionality (Nielsen, Phelan and Walsh 2015)?

I shall argue in this book that the very act of storytelling already opens the door to potential fictionalization since the narrative discourse mode may entail features that – if pushed too far in non-fictional storytelling contexts – may diminish the credibility of the story told while also attesting to the creative impulse that storytelling in general accommodates. After all, when we tell stories we strive to ‘draw in’ listeners or readers, to engage and involve them in the actions and situations we present in our stories. We do so by using seemingly literary or even fictional elements, e.g., existing story templates (see also Maier and Stokke 2021a: 1), linguistic phenomena like double deixis and free indirect discourse, discursive modes such as dialogue and thought presentation, narrative-functional elements such as focalization and characterization, as well as subcategories of narratives such as second-person narration and narratives of vicarious experience. On a deeper level of human interaction or what Kenneth J. Gergen (2009) describes when he calls humans “relational beings,” these narrative techniques and elements fulfill various functions, ranging from the creation of bonds between interlocutors to the exploration of personal or others’ experiences, their evaluation and the attendant expression of emotions. I call this convergence between fiction and non-fiction in everyday storytelling fictional contamination in analogy to theories of contamination in linguistics and psychology that capture the processes whereby elements from different realms (lexical or conceptual) come into contact and mutually influence each other, both semantically and structurally.

In two articles I co-authored with Mari Hatavara, we proposed “hybrid fictionality” (Hatavara and Mildorf 2017a) and then “cross-fictionality” (Hatavara and Mildorf 2017b) as terms for our concept of fictionality. We devised these terms in response to Nielsen, Phelan and Walsh’s (2015) proposal of a rhetorical approach to fictionality, which is based on the assumptions that fictionality is marked by the ‘invention’ of characters, settings and facts and is discursively or rhetorically ‘signaled’ to recipients. By contrast, we argued that this account was too simple and did not fit discursive contexts where fictionality cuts across fictional and non-fictional textual genres in complex ways, e.g., oral storytelling or documentary texts in museum contexts. We already looked more closely at features like thought representation and narratives of vicarious experience as markers of fictionality in non-fictional stories but also stressed the importance of the pragmatic context in which such stories operated. In this book, I revisit and build on some of the ideas and examples presented in those articles, but I also move away from the terms “hybrid fictionality” and “cross-fictionality.” In my reconceptualization, fictionality is not some discrete or definable entity that ‘moves’ or ‘travels’1 between different narrative modes and genres but a complex relationship of mutual influence that is made possible because of what one may call “narrative homology,” a likeness between fictional and non-fictional forms of storytelling that is grounded in shared basic narrative parameters. More generally, I therefore also explore what fictional and non-fictional narratives have in common, while acknowledging that they are – especially in their contemporary manifestations – in many regards different from one another (see also Hyvärinen 2019), just as evolved species may no longer be easily recognizable as being related at the core or as having the same biological ancestry.

Furthermore, linking the potential for fictionality to narrative, I argue that fictional contamination can be present on the level of the ‘what’ or the content of stories (narratologists call this the story side2) – for example, when we recreate scenarios that resemble those in films or literary fiction or when we present other people analogously to fictional characters – , and on the level of the ‘how’ or the narrative discourse of stories – as when we use referential expressions and tenses to create specific viewpoints or what narratologists call focalization, or when we position narrators as well as the ‘characters’ we present, including ourselves, through certain pronouns. Needless to say, the distinction between the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ concerning stories is a theoretical construct that is sometimes hard to maintain in actual practice because the discourse of a narrative is to some degree also constitutive of its story or content. As film narratologist Guido Heldt (2013) writes,

the story/discourse distinction does not really posit one as logically independent of the other: a story is a mental construct on the basis of discourse. The distinction between fact and fiction may clarify the point. If in real life someone tells us what happened to him that day, we indeed assume that the facts of the matter are logically independent from the discourse (his report) – at least if we believe him. Discourse does not generate the facts, but gives us (mediated) access to them, and ‘story’ is the name we give to that mediated access. In fiction, discourse does generate the entire story and storyworld, but – at least in most realist fiction – it pretends to give us access to story facts, or rather, gives us access to pretend story facts … (55; emphasis mine)

While I concur with Heldt in saying that “a story is a mental construct on the basis of discourse,” I argue that non-fictional stories resemble fictional ones by equally creating “mental constructs”3 for listeners and that, in doing so, they may come close to crossing the boundaries to generic fiction. Listening to stories also involves imagining. Storytelling can thus be said to be a two-way process: our personal experiences come to life (again) through stories but they equally require the workings of recipients’ imagination for this coming to life to happen. Heldt obviously considers referentiality to the real world as a distinguishing mark between non-fictional and fictional storytelling, as do many other theorists (see Chapter 3). Achim...