ABSTRACT

The last sentence smoothly moves out of narrative, which we are not supposed to take as a report of fact, into a statement of an element in Proust’s theory of love, which we are supposed to take factually seriously. In this example, the fictional and the factual separate neatly into sentences, but this is not always so: a single sentence may contain elements of both. Tiresias was asked by Zeus and Juno to compare the pleasure of men and women in the sexual act. According to one rendering, he replied:

According to the story, this is what Tiresias said; so it’s fiction. But Ovid, one famous recounter of the mythical episode, could well have intended his audience to believe as factual truth the claim the lines make. Somewhat similarly, Eco no doubt intended his audience to believe some of the details of the workings of Foucault’s pendulum, to get them in the mood to swallow some of the nonsense in the book with that title.