often been cited by those who want to blur the boundaries between the two
genres. Dorrit Cohn, on the other hand, has identified what she regards as dis-
tinctive textual features, or “signposts,” that differentiate fiction from nonfic-
tion. Marie-Laure Ryan uses classical narratology and possible-worlds theory
to argue for the viability of the distinction. And recent work on fictionality
by Richard Walsh, Henrik Skov Nielsen, Simona Zetterberg Gjerlevsen, and
others relies on the distinction even as it looks to separate fictionality (defined
as a nondeceptive departure from the actual) from generic fictions such as
the novel, short story, and fiction film. I have contributed to that work on the
pervasiveness of fictionality, but my focus here is on how readerly assump-
tions about the fiction-nonfiction distinction interact with both textual and
readerly dynamics in generic fictions and generic nonfictions.
RHETORICAL THEORY’S ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT FICTION
AND NONFICTION
The most significant tacit assumption underlying the writing and reading of
generic fiction is that its audience maintains a double perspective on the char-
acters and the action. (For the purposes of this chapter, I will bracket meta-
fiction, which sometimes plays with this tacit assumption—except to say that
such play highlights its importance.) Readers of fiction simultaneously par-
ticipate in the illusion that the characters are independent agents pursuing
their own ends and remain aware that the characters and their trajectories
toward their fates are part of an authorial design and purpose. Ralph Rad-
er’s definition of the novel (as it emerged in the work of Samuel Richardson
and Henry Fielding) captures this tacit assumption very well: the novel, says
Rader, is “a work which offers the reader a focal illusion of characters acting
autonomously as if in the world of real experience within a subsidiary aware-
ness of an underlying constructive authorial purpose which gives their story
an implicit significance and affective force which real world experience does
not have” (“Emergence of the Novel” 206). I would slightly revise the end
of Rader’s definition to read “an underlying constructive authorial purpose
which gives the story a thematic, ethical, and affective significance and force
which real world experience does not have.”
As noted in the introduction to this book, rhetorical theory connects its
understanding of the readerly experience of fiction to this double conscious-
ness: the narrative audience responds to characters as if they were acting
autonomously, while the authorial audience remains tacitly aware of the fic-
tion’s construction and thus interested in its “underlying . . . authorial pur-
PROBABILITY IN FICTION AND NONFICTION • 69