ABSTRACT
Can poetry pretend to be prose or vice versa? If so, how much vice in the sense of ‘bad faith’ and how much versa in the sense of ‘opposition’ may be said to characterise such putative processes of generic makeover? This chapter draws on classic thoughts on pretence in the philosophy of language by Wittgenstein, who asks why pretending is ‘always taking place’ throughout our lives, its presence embodied in ‘imponderables’ such as winks, nods and gestures; and by Austin and Anscombe, who maintain in ‘“Pretending” in The Aristotelian Society’ (1958) that ‘there is necessarily involved in pretence or shamming the notion of a limit’ that might be identified by specifically considering contexts of ‘disguise’. These insights are extended here to textual cases where prose and poetry apparently disguise themselves as each other. What intentions, conventions, emotions and goals mark this process? Interdisciplinary strands from pragmatic, cognitive, evolutionary and postcolonial theories are brought together in the chapter to further an argument that the major literary genres of prose and poetry offer crucial safe spaces for experiments in cultural survival. Emblematic of all verbal modes, they both serve the Austinian purpose of ‘insulating us from reality via linguistic means’ as well as underwrite the Wittgensteinian intuition (Philosophical Investigations, 1953) that the ‘very special weave’ of pretence enables human communities to more closely engage with reality via ‘imponderables’ such as those involved in literary representation and interpretation.
