Any claim for how literature matters and what it ‘does’, even how it can be ‘formative’ (to use Joshua Landy’s terms), is linked with a conception of how it works. And vice versa: any idea of literature’s operation compels a particular understanding of what literature is and how it relates to human living. Many contemporary arguments about literature’s cognitive nullity hinge on ideas of its ontological status, which themselves derive from notions of how it works. Arguments stressing literature’s non-relationship to reality given its status as fiction, for instance, take the fiction-reality antithesis as starting-point. The approach assumes a separation that demands a lot of philosophical manoeuvring to be bypassed, with real meaning simplistically not fictional, and literature, being of the generic classification of fiction, automatically assumed to be fictive in a way that takes for granted the dubiousness of its connection with reality. For Frederick Aldama, literature’s ‘most salient feature is that it is fictional. Fiction is the defining, indispensable component of literature’. But not all literature is fiction, not all fiction is literature (TV, video games), and not all fiction is fictive. Much literature straddles fiction and non-fiction; there’s creative non-fiction, autofiction, semi-fiction, autobiografiction. I’d go so far as to say the division verges on the arbitrary; both genres derive from the mingling of experience and imagination. In awarding the Nobel Prize for literature to Bob Dylan in 2016 the committee made a clear statement: genres are useful categories, but they’re also inescapably general; what counts as literature is not for genre per se to determine. The notion of the status of fiction can be disruptive if it prevents attention to the way a reality created in language touches one’s own reality, just as it is disruptive if it obscures the way literature functions—particularly novels, the most frequent victims of the fiction ‘paradox’.