Kendall Walton

My great-grandfather died before I was born. He never saw me. But I see him occasionally—when I look at photographs of him. They are not great photographs, by any means, but like most photographs they are transparent. We see things through them.Edwin Martin objects. His response consists largely of citing examples of things which, he thinks, are obviously not transparent, and declaring that he finds no relevant difference between them and photographs: once we slide down the slippery slope as far as photographs there will be not stopping short of absurdity. The examples fail in their purpose, but they will help to clarify the reasons for the transparency of photographs. Several of them can be disposed of by noting that they jeopardize the transparency of photographs only if they jeopardize the very possibility of perception. The others appear to reflect a misconception of the issue before us and the nature of my claim.To perceive something is, in part, to have perceptual experiences caused by the object in question. This is scarcely controversial. It is also uncontroversial that additional restrictions are needed—not all causes of one’s visual experiences are objects of sight—although exactly what the required restrictions are is a notoriously tricky question. One important restriction is that the causation must be appropriately independent of human action , in a sense which I explained . This, I argued, is what distinguishes photographs from “handmade” pictures, which are not transparent. Seismographs and footprints are caused just as “mechanically” as ordinary photographs are. So are photographs that are so badly exposed or focused that they fail to present images of the objects before the camera. So, also, are the visual experiences of those who look at seismograms, footprints, and such badly focused or exposed photographs. Yet we obviously do not see the causes of these things through them, Martin claims. How is it, then, that we see through ordinary photographs? Kendall L. Walton is professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan and author of a book on representation in the arts . His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism,” appeared in the December 1984 issue

The representational arts seem friendly territory for “symbol” theories of aesthetics. Much of the initial resistance one may feel to the idea that a Mondrian composition or a Scarlatti sonata is a symbol evaporates when we switch to a portrait of Mozart, Michelangelo’s Pietá, or Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities. These representational works have reference to things outside themselves. The portrait is a picture of Mozart; the Pietá is a sculpture of Christ and his Mother; A Tale of Two Cities is about London, Paris, and the French Revolution. It is natural enough to consider the relation between these works and what they are of or about a semantic one. And if the representational is to be understood in terms of this semantic relation it is reasonable to hold that to be representational is to be a symbol of a certain kind.

Sports and competitive games of many kinds—from tag to chess to baseball—are often occasions for make-believe. To participate either as a competitor or as a spectator is frequently to engage in pretense. The activities of playing and watching games have this in common with appreciating works of fiction and participating in children’s make-believe activities, although the make-believe in sports, masked by real interests and concerns, is less obvious than it is in the other cases. What is most interesting about tag and chess and baseball, however, are the ways in which the make-believe they involve differs from other varieties.

It is tempting to assume that understatement and overstatement, meiosis and hyperbole, are analogous figures of speech, differing only in whether the speaker represents a quantity as larger, or as smaller, than she means to claim that it is. But these tropes have hugely different roles in conversation. Understatement is akin to irony, perhaps a species of it. Overstatement is an entirely different kettle of fish. Things get interestingly messy when we notice that to overstate how large or expensive or distant something is, is to understate how small or inexpensive or close it is, and vice versa. So it may seem, anyway. I propose an account of the two tropes that counts some utterances, in their conversational contexts, as overstatements of a quantity but not understatements of the opposite quantity, and other utterances as understatements only. This account shows why understatement is closely related to irony and overstatement is not. Although overstatement and understatement (or irony) are very different, they are sometimes combined. An understatement of one quantity may be an overstatement of a different one.

That photography is a supremely realistic medium may be the commonsense view, but—as Edward Steichen reminds us—it is by no means universal. Dissenters note how unlike reality a photograph is and how unlikely we are to confuse the one with the other. They point to “distortions” engendered by the photographic process and to the control which the photographer exercises over the finished product, the opportunities he enjoys for interpretation and falsification. Many emphasize the expressive nature of the medium, observing that photographs are inevitably colored by the photographer’s personal interests, attitudes, and prejudices.1 Whether any of these various considerations really does collide with photography’s claim of extraordinary realism depends, of course, on how that claim is to be understood.Those who find photographs especially realistic sometimes think of photography as a further advance in a direction which many picture makers have taken during the last several centuries, as a continuation or culmination of the post-Renaissance quest for realism.2 There is some truth in this. Such earlier advances toward realism include the development of perspective and modeling techniques, the portrayal of ordinary and incidental details, attention to the effects of light, and so on. From its very beginning, photography mastered perspective . Subtleties of shading, gradations of brightness nearly impossible to achieve with the brush, became commonplace. Photographs include as a matter of course the most mundane details of the scenes they portray—stray chickens, facial warts, clutters of dirty dishes. Photographic images easily can seem to be what painters striving for realism have always been after. 2. See André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What is Cinema?, trans. Hugh Gray, vol. 1 , p. 12; all further references to this work, abbreviated “OPI,” will be included in the text. See also Rudolf Arnheim, “Melancholy Unshaped,” Toward a Psychology of Art: Collected Essays , p. 186. Kendall L. Walton is professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. He is currently completing a book on representation in the arts.

Realist theories about fictional entities must explain the fact that, in ordinary contexts people deny, apparently in all seriousness, that there are such things as the Big Bad Wolf and Santa Claus. The usual explanation treats these denials as involving restricted quantification: The speaker is said to be denying only that the Big Bad Wolf and Santa Claus are to be found among real or actual things, not that there are no such things at all. This is unconvincing. The denials may just as naturally be phrased as “The Big Bad Wolf and Santa Claus don't exist”, and claims of nonexistence seem not to admit of interpretations corresponding to statements of restricted quantification. Ordinary denials of the existence of fictional entities constitute a severe difficulty for realist theories

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kendall L. Walton FICTION, FICTION-MAKING, AND STYLES OF FICTIONALITY Both objectsandactions are said to have styles. Styles eire attributed to works of art, bathing suits, neckties, and automobiles. But we also think of styles as ways of doing things. There are styles of teaching, styles of chess playing, styles of travel. The primary notion of style is the one which attaches to actions. When we speak of die style of a poem or a portrait or em automobile we do so with reference to an action or actions associated with the object, usually the action or actions which appear to have been performed in die making of it. I will not argue now for this claim about style except to note that style attributions eure peculietrly alien to objects which are not products of human action. What is the style of a tulip, or an alpine meadow, or a pristine lake in the high Sierras? Are the Grand Canyon and Yosemite Valley in the same style or different ones? Sunsets in the tropics are very different from sunsets in the arctic, but is die difference a stylistic one? We might allow that in unusual cases natured objects can have styles. A chorus ofchirping birds might, just conceivably, chirp in the style of Haydn. But die notion of style here is obviously parasitic on diat which is applied to man-made eirtifacts. To think of an object as having a style is to mink of it as a product of human action.1 If actions are the primary possessors of style, to understand styles of fictionality we must look at die action of fiction-meddng emd its relation to works of fiction. I will concentrate on the very basic question ofwhat fiction is, what it is for something to be a work of fiction, and on attempts to answer this question in terms of die action offiction-making. It has been especially fashionable to utilize die notion ofspeech acts introduced by John Austin in tackling this problem. The fictional status of a work is, supposedly, to be accounted for by what illocutionary actions were or were not performed by the artist producing it, or by connections between what the artist did and certain illocutionary actions. My assessment of mis program will be mostly negative. Speech-act theory is remarkably unhelpful in explaining what fiction is. We have here something ofa "Have dieory, will travel" syndrome. There is a tendency for theorists, when 78 Kendall L. Walton79 faced with a new problem, to dust off an old theory which they know emd love, one devised with other questions in mind, shove it into die breach, and pray mat it will fit. In this case it does not fit, and the result is confusion radier dian illumination. Lest I step on toes other man the ones I am aiming at, let me empheisize that my present concern is not with the viability of speech-act theory as a dieory of language. Nor do I mean to deny that speech-act theory can be used fruitfully to illuminate important features of literary fictions. I am now addressing only die basic question of what fiction is, how works of fiction are to be differentiated from odier things. Whatever the other merits of speech-act theory, its applications to this question have been distinctly infelicitous. From our discussion of such applications em even stronger conclusion will emerge, the conclusion that the nature of fiction is not to be explicated in terms of acts of fiction-making at all. The notion of fiction is in diis respect contrary to that of style, and certain consequences about styles of fictionality follow. I Speech-act theory has been brought to bear on the problem of the nature of fiction in a number of rather different ways. I will look at four of them. The first is the idea that works of fiction are simply texts (or other representations ) which are not vehicles of illocutionary acts. It is true mat in writing fiction an author typically does not perform the illocutionary acts that a person who uses the setme words in a nonfictional setting is likely to be performing...

Poetry is a literary art, and is often examined alongside the novel, stories, and theater. But poetry, much of it, has more in common with music, in important respects, than with other forms of literature. The emphasis on sound and rhythm in both poetry and music is obvious, but I will explore a very different similarity between them. All or almost all works of literary fiction have narrators—so it is said anyway—characters who, in the world of the fiction, utter or write the words of the text thereby reporting the events of the story. But there is a very different way of understanding literary works, one applicable especially to poetry. Much music can be understood in a similar manner, and doing so nicely explains several important characteristics of listen-ers’ experiences