Fiction and Laws (Commentaries on the Pikalo Case)
Keywords:
art, aesthetic autonomy, fiction, freedom of expression, ethical responsibility, copyright, Pikalo, MatjažAbstract
Suits for slander brought against fiction (e.g. the case of Matjaž Pikalo’s novel Modri e, 1998) are a symptom of the fading ideology of aesthetic autonomy and of the special role of writers in postmodern society. The roots of these legal disputes go back to the 19th century, when the legal repression of fiction, once used to secure the ideological monopoly of religious and secular authorities, begins to be legitimized by public moral and reputation of private persons or communities, and when literature, organized within an autonomous social field, paradoxically aims at the “effect of the real” (the trial of Flaubert for his novel Madame Bovary). Today’s literature cannot find its legitimacy exclusively within its own field, the sense as to its characteristics is weakening, and so is the sense of what constitutes fiction. In public discourse, the same ethics holds for journalists as well as writers. In a court of law there is a confrontation of two equally legitimate interests of two subjects: of the writer’s freedom of artistic expression on the one hand, and of the individual’s right to privacy and good name on the other. An acceptable legal reasoning is presented by R. Posner, who states that the criminal liability of writers for slander should be minimized. The justification of lawsuits brought for slander in fiction is also made relative by the deconstruction of their theoretical basis, of the opposition fiction/reality. There is always something fictional in reality, and vice versa; the boundaries between the two fields are pragmatic and subject to cultural and historical change. Fiction is one of the possible worlds and is textually and ontologically homogenous. Besides fictitious characters, it contains versions of persons from extra-literary reality and intertextuality. Through the reference of names and descriptions they make or break transworId identity. This play with reality represents one of the charms, as well as the dangers, of literary discourse.References
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