Nested unreality is not always fiction-within-fiction

Fiction, deception, and illusion are different forms of unreality; carefully distinguishing between them helps in not being led astray in interpreting fiction that includes nested forms of unreality. In Shakespeare's philosophy[1], Colin McGinn writes about The Tempest that here "the impression of allegory is strong: the characters 'stand' for something." (143) He then goes on to interpret Prospero as standing "for the idea of the artist", intended to be "Shakespeare's representative" (ibd.).

Prospero, according to McGinn, arranges for the tempest, the romance between Miranda and Ferdinand, and generally everything that happens to all the other characters as a piece of dramatic art, as a fiction. (To use the terminology of this blog, these episodes are instance of unreality; among the various forms of unreality, they would be classified as fictional.) The storm that wrecks the ship in the beginning of the play, then, "was just a performance, giving only the impression of catastrophe, from which all the actors emerged unscathed. [...] The actors didn't know the storm was essentially fictitious, and so performed their roles with authenticity, but all along it was just a piece of make-believe." (Ibd.)

I think this interpretation confuses the way the different forms of unreality work. It's true that fiction is a game of make-believe, but it's a game that is played with asymmetric roles: there are the author, director, and actors in one kind of role (pretending to do something, performing), and the audience in another one (pretending to believe — suspending disbelief). If you and I, for example, perform a scene with a car crash on stage which we both survive, and an audience watches that performance, it's our job (yours and mine) to pretend being shaken and thrown around and the job of the audience to pretend to witness a car crash.

But note a couple of things: first, it makes sense to ask whether the characters survive the car crash in the fictional world of that scene, but it doesn't make sense to ask whether the audience gets hurt. The audience is not in that fictional world. They're only pretending to watch it. The audience, to put it somewhat differently, is apart from that fictional world. Second, in order to suspend disbelief, the audience must be aware that it's a performance that is going on, that they are presented with fiction. Fiction as a game of make-belief works only if you know that it is a game and yet play along. If you're not aware that this is what happens, it's no longer fiction, but deception (or perhaps, in some cases, illusion).

Now ask yourself who Prospero's audience is when he stages his fake storm. Is it Shakespeare's audience (the people who sit in the theatre and watch the play), or is it the group of travelers on the ship? I think it should be clear that the other characters in the play, though subject to deception and manipulation, are not the audience of a fiction. They are confronted with what is, in their world, an instance of unreality, but they're not suspending disbelief with respect to it, they actually believe in it. The travelers on the ship believe that they are caught in a storm, they're not pretending to witness a storm as if they were an audience watching it on television. In other words, the travelers on the ship are in the same situation as the characters are that you and I play in our car crash scene. In their world, what happens is a storm (or a car crash), and they have good reason to think of themselves as being in that situation. Their world is more complicated than the world of the car crash scene, of course: the storm isn't real, but a deception. (Thus it's a case of nested unreality: a deception within a fiction.) But that doesn't put them in the position of a fiction's audience. It puts them in the position of a deception's target.

It seems, then, that the audience in Prospero's drama cannot be the other characters, but it must be the audience of Shakespeare's play. But then it isn't correct that, as McGinn writes, "Shakespeare is introducing theatricality into the lives of his characters" (144). Prospero's words may be reflections of the playwright put into the mouth of one of his characters (and McGinn quotes some lines which make this plausible), but it doesn't follow that Prospero's machinations make the world of the other characters into a stage. Miranda and Ferdinand don't experience their own romance as if it was a fiction (compare with Theseus and Hippolyta watching the romance of Pyramus and Thisbe); the travelers on the ship don't experience the storm as if it was a show (compare the staged murder Claudius and his court watch). They're subject to deception, not audience to a performance.

(As a side-note: if the audience of the spectacle of the tempest is not the cast of characters, but the theatre audience, then it's also a little imprecise to speak of the tempest as "just a performance, giving only the impression of catastrophe, from which all the actors emerged unscathed." If you're sitting in a theatre audience, it's of course just a performance, and you don't expect the actors to be hurt. On the other hand, you can still ask whether the characters in the world of the play were hurt or not: did Alonzo and friends survive the storm, did your character and mine survive the car crash? And that it is just a play doesn't determine the answer to this question. It simply depends on the plot. The plot might be so that they survive; the plot might be so that they get killed. Both outcomes are consistent with the whole thing being a drama.)

[1] Colin McGinn, Shakespeare's Philosophy. Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays. New York: Harper 2006.

Magically illustrated forms of unreality

Here's a very beautiful illustration of some of the forms of unreality by techno magician Marco Tempest. (He uses the term 'deception' as general cover term, where I've used 'unreality' on this blog.) Enjoy.

Unreality, sedimentation, and comedy titles

Those who study the forms of unreality closely develop a keen sense of reality (as I have written in an earlier posting here).

There's probably no better example for this than Shakespeare. He put deceptions, illusions, confusions and the like at the center of many of his plays, and then explored how things would develop. (He once alludes to this technique by inserting a play-within-a-play into Hamlet, where his protagonist has much the same intention with it as his author.) And he was bold enough to openly declare this even in his titles from time to time. There's an entire vacation company having some good parties, making a few practical jokes, getting into a quarrel after a devious mind does some real mischief by creating a deceptive instance of unreality — and it's all Much ado about nothing.

Disconnect, unreality, and unhappiness

In "Leaning from the steep slope", one of the beautifully composed novel fragments in Italo Calvino's Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore, the protagonist acts continuously under misinterpretations of the events around him, as we can easily recognize while the story unfolds. He is spending some time in a sea town, recovering from an illness, and the people he meets, a pedantic meteorologist and a young woman with some artistic preoccupation, both pursue shady underground activities. The meteorologist seems to have a political agenda; he submerges for a few days, asking the protagonist to look after his weather instruments meanwhile, then there are some dark-looking men searching for him, and finally he meets the protagonist again in a conspirative setting. The young woman who makes drawings of sea animals is seen to visit an inmate of the local prison, and she asks the protagonist under a weak pretext to get tools (an anchor and a rope) that look suspiciously useful for an escape attempt. But none of this even enters the mind of the protagonist. (Only at the end of the fragment, when he is confronted by an actually escaped prisoner, there is 'a sudden crack' in his universe, but it's not clear which of his illusions has been shattered; or, for that matter, whether that phrase really shows that he's finally recognized what's going on. For all we know, he might shortly come up with another misinterpretation of what he sees.)

While the atmosphere of his surroundings is somewhat grey and clammy, his view of things is exceedingly pathetic. The very beginning reads "I'm coming to believe that the world wants to tell me something, through messages, signs, warnings." [1] Yet the meaning of most observations he makes would be plain with just a little common sense, and still they escape him. A little further down the text: "On some days everything I look at seems laden with meaning: full of messages which I'd have difficulty to define, to put into words, to communicate to others, but which for that very reason seem significant to me." And so an inability to perceive accurately and realistically corresponds with a refusal to come to terms with his own views, an indulgence in lofty self-talk, with the grander scheme of things serving as an excuse not to look at the details of his own life. (At some point, he states: "I'm only reporting my first impressions; for only those count.") Perhaps that sort of attitude is required for such a continuous self-deception.

It quickly becomes clear, however, that his naiveté is used and abused by both his acquaintances. Ingenious though his interpretations of the strange goings-on may be, they are far off a much more simpler reality. He is the tool both of a political underground group and a (very probably) romantically motivated escape attempt from prison. Whatever justification these may have in the broader constellation of the world of the novel, the protagonist himself isn't really acting in that world, not from his own motives, at least. He isn't, in a word, in the driving seat, he's himself just moved around by others.

(A side-note for those familiar with Calvino's book and receptive to the delights of the postmodern novel: this tale of a person driven by other people's interests is in the novel's surrounding plot read to the main protagonist, the 'reader'; and the sentence immediately following the fragment is the ironical: "Listening to someone else reading is entirely different from reading yourself. When you're reading yourself, you can take your time or quickly skim the sentences — it's you who controls the pace." It's as if Calvino wanted to drive the point home from the outside, from the guiding metaphor of the framework plot.)

It's almost a platitude to state that living under illusions isn't good; it is something like a basic premise of a good life that it must be connected to reality. Losing that connection, whether we realize it or not, is a form of unhappiness. We may not necessarily feel unhappy — it isn't unhappiness in a psychological sense; it's not a question only of a state of mind; when we talk about unhappiness here, it's about a condition of our life as such.

Among the reasons for this is that it makes us vulnerable to attempts by others to manipulate us. And being used that way is in turn bad because it means that our actions aren't for the sake of our own goals, including the top-level goal of leading a good life, but for the sake of others' goals. So in the terms I've used throughout this blog, there is a severe weakness of reflection involved here: an inability on the part of the protagonist to make sure the way his life unfolds remains in sync with reality, and in connection with his own goals. At the same time, there's failure of imagination, too. Throughout the story, the hero fails to see other's points of view. However mystical and poetical his interpretations of the world around him may sound, they're unimaginative to the extreme: failing to get a grasp on any concrete idea what might go on, producing no 'candidate realities' whatsoever, and crassly inadequate for seeing things from any of the other characters' point of view. It's others' imagination that controls him, and his own reflection that fails him.

This is a slightly revised version of an earlier posting over at my online journal.

[1] All quotes are my translations from what is already a translation into German; so I might be a little removed from the actual (or, if you will: the 'real') text.

The irreversible sedimentation of unreality

In Hitchcock's North by Northwest the main character (played by Cary Grant) is an advertising man who gets thrown out of his dull life by first being kidnapped and almost killed and then wrongly accused of a murder, all this putting him on the run from both his kidnappers and the police. Each of his attempts to bring some light into what's going on only gets him entangled more deeply in the strange affair that he stumbled into by accident.

Well, what is going on is that Grant's character is mistaken for an intelligence agent; an agent, however, who doesn't exist, but whose identity was set up as a decoy to divert the attention of a spy ring from a second agent (this time a real one). We're told exactly that in a scene right after the first act (the first act containing pretty much what I've summarized in the paragraph above). A group of US Intelligence people around their mastermind, the 'Professor', discusses the situation, and we get the feeling that the whole scene's only function is to brief us, the audience, about every single bit of the background (with the exception of the identity of the other agent; to establish that is the main theme of act two).

What is the purpose of this comparatively undramatic revelation? Why tell us these things, instead of keeping them secret for as long as possible? The script could have been silent about them for much longer: they might have been revealed only at the time when the main character learns about them, preserving much more of the mystery.

Yet that's not Hitchcock's strategy. North by Northwest has this in common with Vertigo, another film where the main character gets drawn into an elaborate game of deception. And once more, there is a dedicated scene that simply reveals the plot of the mastermind behind that deception, in detail, and without inner necessity that would enforce the disclosure at the moment at which Hitchcock puts it in the movie. This time, it's the female lead (Kim Novak) who explains the background of what has happened so far by writing a letter to the main character and target of the deception (James Stewart), revealing the motive and method of the crime as well as the manipulative means she and the mastermind have employed. The letter never reaches the intended receiver, of course: it's just a plot device that provides a pretext for explaining something outright to the audience, without using any dramatic or cinematic means.

What this suggests, of course, is that unraveling the elaborate deception is not the main game the director had in mind for us as the audience. These movies are not about gradually getting behind the devious plotting of some mastermind; they're about something else, and therefore the mystery is quickly and thoroughly disposed of before it can get into the way too much. On the other hand, however, there is an elaborate deception going on in these films, so there must be some function to it. Otherwise, Hitchcock could just have left it out. But he does take some care to build it up. We're thus faced with the double question: what, if not the unraveling of the mystery, is the main way in which the director wants to engage us? And what, if it is not the riddle he wants us to solve, is the function of the complicated deception the main character undergoes and gets only gradually behind? (In contrast to the audience, the main character doesn't learn about the background all at once, and early on; the main character has to get behind everything painfully and slowly, and in the case of Vertigo he's in a tragic predicament which doesn't have any possible happy solution, so that he doesn't even get behind it completely.)

One possible interpretation is that Hitchcock's goal is to demonstrate the sort of struggle a character goes through in the face of elaborate unreality. That is what both films roll out before our eyes, in different constellations. Subjected to a complicated deceptive plot, they have to find ways to cope with events that don't fit their world. Getting behind the deception is part of their adventure; but it's not just an uninvolved interest they have: in both cases, their own lives and persons are threatened at a deep level. (And in both cases it's not a choice they've made on their own to embark on the sort of adventure they get in.)

In the process, the unreality (the fake world produced by the deception) gains a certain weight, so the hero's goal is not reversal simple and pure, but something that includes both getting back to reality and keeping something from the unreality. The main character in North by Northwest won't be going back to his "dull life", as he puts it; and above all he has met his future (third) wife in the course of the adventure (Eva Marie Saint). The main character in Vertigo is fully broken by the loss of the fake person he has met and the powerlessness he experienced when he failed to save her (a failure that was of course meticulously arranged for by the deceiving party), and he is unable to get into any meaningful relationship again because he compulsively tries to force the moment of crisis back from the past into the present again. Something has been created that cannot be reversed; even though it was unreality, it has caused real people to take real action, and has produced a new state of affairs (with both good and bad aspects). Unreality, one might, is no less of a 'real' force in the world than reality.

Plato, Poe, and Perception

In Edgar Allan Poe's satirical short story "The Spectacles", a young man falls in love with a woman and hurriedly marries her, without ever having had a good look at her. That's mostly because he is extremely shortsighted yet too vain to wear glasses. And ... what can I tell you? The whole thing turns out to be not quite what he expected.

Myopia

1. Mistaken perception is one of the most common sources of unreality: we see, hear, smell something and take it to be something different than it really is; sometimes we even act on misperceptions, and then we have to correct not only our erroneous views, but also take responsibility for our misguided actions. In our everyday lives, of course, mistake and correction happen in quick sequence (for instance, when you think you see a person whom you know from a distance, and wave a greeting, merely to discover after a few quick steps towards them that it wasn't your acquaintance after all); the consequences are mostly negligible, or corrected without much effort. The basic pattern, however, is still the same as in Poe's story: we take in some sketchy information, interpret the situation wrongly, and then act in line with our false views. (The fault, dear reader, is of course not in our perception, but in ourselves; I've emphasized that point in an earlier post on "The Spectacles" and perception.)

Observations such as these suggest that we generally have a certain practical interest in keeping close to reality, which is why in our everyday lives we usually try to double-check whatever we perceive (or remember, learn by hearsay from others, hypothesize, or otherwise get out of sources which we know may mislead us on occasion). We seek small reality-checks in much of what we do, in order to navigate our surroundings without drifting too far into unreality, because we know from experience that we are likely to be more successful in everyday life if we go with the flow of what's really going on, and adjust our course if necessary. We have a constant habit of eliminating unreality from our views in order to succeed in our activities and reach practical goals, a habit I call reflection. (In some areas of philosophy, there's a much more narrow and technical use of the term 'reflection'. That's not the sense I have in mind here; reflection, in the way I've introduced it, has more to do with the common sense notion of taking a step back and a deep breath, and calmly checking things over before forming a view or taking action.) Reflection has the function of keeping us close to reality in what we think and do.

2. In an interesting passage in the Philebus[1], Plato starts out with a perception example not unlike the one I've used (and the one that is, greatly exaggerated, at the basis of Poe's story as well), and generalizes this to other forms of unreality. Most interestingly, he discusses forms of unreality connected to the past and future, and that's what I'd like to take a closer look at here.[2]

In that passage, Socrates (Plato's lead character) sketches an account of what happens when we perceive something. For example, "it often happens that someone who cannot get a clear view because he is looking from a distance wants to make up his mind about what he sees"; when making up his mind, the perceiver would ask himself: "'What could that be that appears to stand near that rock under a tree?'". This way of describing it emphasizes the process character of what goes on: we take in the scene, and sometimes, when it is not clear and obvious what it is we perceive, we first have to decide what to make of how things seem to us. Only then it becomes a judgment (whether it is spoken out loud or remains implicit in what we feel and how we behave). And of course, judgments can be correct or incorrect; we might misjudge the situation, which happens all the time with perception: it can lead us astray. In the example, the man might correctly judge that it is a person what he sees; "he might also be mistaken and say that what he sees is a statue, the work of some herdsmen".

In both cases, the judgment can be neatly expressed as a sentence, as I just did at the end of the previous paragraph for both the true and the false version. It has, to put it in philosophical jargon, propositional content. However, Socrates makes it clear that this is not all there is to a particular act of perception. There is also all the sensual input itself, which is in this case visual input (but it could also be input from other senses, i.e. auditive, tactile, or olfactory).[3] The content is not exhausted in the mere word-content. There are also the images that you see. If you'd write down the sentence and then text it to someone, you would have transferred only part of the content. (Maybe if you'd take a photo and send it along with the text, you'd have transferred more, or even most of it.) So, in addition to the propositional content (the 'word' content), there's also what we might call pictorial content.

Right from the beginning, Socrates stresses that his account also applies to what happens when we remember something. Again, memory can fail us, and we might remember something incorrectly. And once more, to our false memory, there is not only the propositional content of what we remember ("I remember having seen this street at daylight.") There are also the images, which we can revive in our mind's eye. And as we all know, vivid and even convincing-seeming as such images can be, they're extremely unreliable.

Having covered the present (in perception) and the past (in memory) in their function as "lead[ing] to judgment or the attempt to come to a definite judgment, as the case may be" (38b), Socrates finally extends this to an analogue in the future: in hopes. (It seems to me he should better have used a neutral term, such as 'projections' or 'expectations', since hopes normally are associated with positive expectations only. I presume this choice is because what interests Socrates is the pleasure that we take in them, and we wouldn't find that in negative expectations, thus the restriction. For a general account, however, hopes would be only one side of the medal, the other being fears and the like.) As with memories and perceptions, hopes (which Socrates identifies with "assertions in us", that is, presumably the sentence formulations of what we expect to happen to us in the future) are associated with images: "someone often envisages himself in the possession of an enormous amount of gold and of a lot of pleasures as a consequence. And in addition, he also sees, in this inner picture himself, that he is beside himself with delight."[4]

The structural claim here is that if there is a kind of unreality we have to cope with in the present (in the form of false perception) and in the past (false memories), then there must also be something similar in the future (false hopes). This premise is emphatically confirmed by Socrates' interlocutor, which probably indicates it's an uncontroversial premise; at least Plato wants to take it as one for the purposes of this dialogue. (Compare also La. 198d for a similar structural claim about knowledge of present, past and future.)

When we're looking for unreality, then, be it in small and simple instances as in everyday life or even in elaborate illusions as in Poe's story, we must check for all areas: not just what's directly before our eyes, but also what's before us in time, and what has been before. A phenomenology of the unreal will thus have to cover the future and the past in addition to the present.

[1] 38c–39e. All quotes (unless otherwise indicated) are from that passage, taken from the Hackett edition: Plato, Philebus. Translated, with introduction, by Dorothea Frede. Indianapolis: Hackett 1993.

[2] The context is the notorious discussion of 'false pleasures', where Socrates argues that pleasures can be literally false, just in the same sense in which opinions can be false. He lists four different classes of false pleasures, and our passage here is taken from the exposition of the first of these classes. For my purposes, the connections to the theory of pleasure aren't relevant, and I've systematically left them out.

[3] Plato's argument is sketchy, and it proceeds by analogy; of course, much more would be needed for a full-blown account of perceptual content, and from a modern point of view, several serious questions would have to be raised. I won't discuss the question whether the account Socrates gives is sufficient for the purposes of his own argument; for me, the important aspect is rather the parallel with other forms of unreality, such as false memories and hopes, which we'll get to in a moment.

[4] Socrates goes on to claim that what causes us pleasure is within the pictorial content, and thus if the pictorial content is false, i.e. an instance of unreality, then the pleasures are 'false' in his sense. As noted above, I'm not interested in pleasure here. If you want to look further into this debated notion, a good place to start is Dorothea Frede's introduction (and its bibliography) to the Hackett edition. See note [1] above for the bibliographical reference.