Enemy of Fiction : A Philosopher's View

I just realized how polemical Searle's treatment of fictional discourse is.

"Why bother?" (332)

The attitude: imagination has its own territory, reality has its own territory, and never shall the twain meet. 

He seems to fall on tolerating ( hence excluding) fiction because

 a) it can at times ally with 'reality' by working for its health
 b) let loose its own energies in a more or less productively 

Polemical in the sense used by Carl Schmitt I should add.


Here's a relevant section:

Searle: "In the case of realistic or naturalistic fiction, the author will refer to real places and events intermingling these references with the fictional references, thus making it possible to treat the fictional story as an extension of our existing knowledge."(331)

The 'intermingling' of references implies that the realm of 'real' people, places, events is distinct from the realm of fiction. I suggest the precisely because such an intermingling is possible, demonstrably so, and has presumably been so for at least a long while, the distinction between 'real' and 'fiction' is perhaps the real fiction, ad infinitum. There is no meaningful break between the vertical connections and the horizontal conventions.

I have to get back to revising my final essay, so this is all I'll write for now but I'd love to return to this fore a more-comprehensive review of Searle's polemics and what it suggests about the relationship between philosophy and fiction.

Edit:


Does this mean:

Philosophy can no longer ( could it really ever?) ask the questions which refuse to die. Where have these questions gone now that philosophy no longer is a home for them? Literature  (poetry) - where they gather and -  live.