Kugelmass: symmetry, time-mappings, and foreign translation

Woody Allen's satirical short story "The Kugelmass episode"[1] has an unattractive, middle-aged literature professor jump into Flaubert's novel and make love to Madame Bovary.

Passage into unreality in this case is effected by the messy craft of an obscure magician, and the workings of the device are themselves satiricized:

Persky reappeared, pushing before him a large object on squeaky roller-skate wheels. He removed some old silk handkerchiefs that were lying on its top and blew away a bit of dust. It was a cheap-looking Chinese cabinet, badly lacquered. [...]
"If I throw any novel into this cabinet with you, and tap it three times, you will find yourself projected into that book." (349–350)

There is no pretense of an explanation in quasi-scientific or technological terms (as there would be in science fiction). There is no indication that the world of this story is one in which magic is the norm: it's not a fairy-tale world. The only element of magic is this one device, and in contrast to typical fairy tales, it's also unreliable and messy — rather as technology is in real life. (It is, in other words, a case of what I've called locally restricted fictionality).

1) An interesting element of the use of passage into unreality, in this story, is its symmetry. Passage works here in ejection mode. (The word Persky uses in the story is 'project', but in the terminology I've used in this blog, this is what I've called ejection mode, rather than projection mode.) While Kugelmass is in the novel, he vanishes from the real world:

Persky rapped three times on the cabinet and then flung open the doors. Kugelmass was gone. At the same moment, he appeared in the bedroom of Charles and Emma Bovary's house at Yonville. (350–351)

Conversely, when Emma Bovary is with him in reality-New York, she's absent from the world of the novel. (A Stanford professor notices that "now she's gone from the book.", 355) Moreover, not just does the novel reflect her absence — it also faithfully reports Kugelmass' presence when he is with her:

What he didn't realize was that at this very moment students in various classrooms across the country were saying to their teachers: "Who is this character on page 100? A bald Jew is kissing Madame Bovary?" (352)

The complication that the book itself is, as book, part of the real world, is thus preserved: changes in the real world are just changes in the real world; but changes in the world of the novel are reflected in the real-world book which is about that world.

The magic doesn't just transform a single person's experience (namely, that of Kugelmass). So it is different from, say, Kugelmass only imagining the whole thing. If it were just an elaborate and exceptionally life-like dream, for instance, then the dreamer would have the experience of roaming around in the novel, of talking (and, actually, more than just talking) to Emma Bovary. But the outside world would know nothing about it. As it is, however, the events happen out there, in the world, and the real-world novel's text is transformed.

(We're ignoring the fact that Kugelmass would have to be described in Flaubert's prose, stylistically correct and everything. We just assume that's the case, which means that the magician's task is even larger now — the necessary adjustments in the real world reflect changes to the text, not just Kugelmass' absence from New York and the injection of some experience into his mind.)

2) It seems that the timelines are aligned this way: while Kugelmass is absent from the real world and present in the book, the original text of Flaubert's novel reads differently; it includes Kugelmass as character. The moment he pops out of the book, the text is restored. Thus there is talk of Kugelmass as "the sporadically appearing character in the Flaubert book." (358) I take it that 'sporadically' means here not that the character appears at several different points in the book, but consistently over different readings, but rather that the character appears in some readings (occasions when someone reads the novel) and doesn't appear in others. If you happen to read through Madame Bovary just on an afternoon when Kugelmass is visiting her, then you'll read about him; otherwise not. The text oscillates between a version including him and another one which doesn't.

Conversely, when Emma leaves the novel, she disappears from the novel (which seems a rather grave change to the text, but that's not elaborated).

But what about Emma's timeline? Kugelmass, it seems, is inserted into the book at about the same page every time:

"Make sure and always get me into the book before page 120," Kugelmass said to the magician one day. "I always have to meet her before she hooks up with this Rodolphe character." (353)

This sounds as if the book cycles through its story every time Kugelmass makes a visit (and that implies a pretty repetitive existence for Emma), and he jumps in at a certain point each time. Somewhat inconsistently, though, it's not as if he meets her for the first time each time. On the contrary, the two develop a relationship, which means that Emma can remember his previous visits just as he can.

(If you are fit to allow a little confusion into your life, stop for a moment and think about what "at this very moment", or "at the same moment" can possibly mean in the quotes I have given above.)

3) What about different editions? Emma Bovary speaks "in the same fine English translation as the paperback" (351), which the magician has used to send Kugelmass into the novel. But does that mean that, say, a French reader who peruses a different edition will not notice anything of the whole affair? But if not — then how many instances of Emma Bovary are there? Is a French-language one still sitting around bored while an English-translation one enjoys an affair with Kugelmass?

(We're ignoring more pedantic questions, of course, such as why nobody would have started comparing the changing text of the paperback edition with the French original, or even another English-language edition.)

4) Now, don't get me wrong: I know this is just a dramatic device and the real topic of the story is on a wholly different level. It may be ironic comment on society, adultery, or the relationship between text and reader. In either case, we do understand the plot device well enough to get immersed in the plot, and we don't care about the finer points I've just laid out. And that's fine. But I'm interested in the workings of the device itself.

The magical projection into a novel is an unrealistic plot device. Like all such devices, it wouldn't work in reality, it's just that our imagination is misled into thinking it might. The implausibilities are glossed over or disguised. My purpose, though, is precisely to uncover those implausibilities, and to investigate the ways in which they are covered up. The goal is not to criticize the text as being unrealistic (there would be no point: everyone can see that, and everyone can see that it never aimed at being realistic; one could even make the point that it deliberately displays how unrealistic it is, in order to refer us to a different level, that of ironical comment). The goal is rather to learn something about the workings of the imagination, and the ways of triggering the imagination by using such tricks. As it usually turns out, these tricks work because they play on hidden assumptions we carry around, and making these assumptions explicit is my goal.

This is not to deny that the real interest of the story lies in its ironic comment on adultery (or, depending on your view of things, the relationship between text and reader, or whatever). It is to analyze the craft that went into it, especially in aspects (of that craft) which are not as plainly in view as the satirical character or the social comment is.

[1] Pages 347–360 in my paperback edition of The Complete Prose of Woody Allen, New York: Picador 1998.

Ejection and projection

I have written that fiction that includes passage into an instance of unreality highlights the perspective of the passenger, thus emphasizing an element that makes the travel metaphor seem particularly apt. There are exceptions, such as the shifted passage technique, which has the function of verifying that passage has actually happened in the world of a fiction (in our examples, these fictions were all movies). But on the whole, the perspective of the character who makes the trip is closely attended to.

A further characteristic that is sometimes in line with the travel metaphor and sometimes not is this: the character who does the trip sometimes fully departs from his world, vanishes physically, and at other times remains there, albeit oblivious of, and incapable to interact with his surroundings for the duration of the trip. In order to have some labels, let's say that a character sometimes leaves his world in the mode of ejection, and at other times in the mode of projection.

Thus in the clip from Die Einsteiger we have a clear case of ejection: the two travelers vanish from their own world for the duration of their trip. Shifted passage is used to demonstrate this to the audience; but the fact is also often referred to in the course of the movie, when the trips get more and more extensive and some characters even decide never to return from the fictional worlds they have entered. In contrast, in Dreamscape we have seen a typical example of projection (the word 'project' is actually used in the film itself as a term for the act of entering dreams of other people).

Entering dreams or memories seems to suggest projection mode more than ejection mode, perhaps because it allows closer modeling on the (real) dream state, which is very similar to projection: you're asleep, you physically remain in your room, though oblivious to your environment, and the only sense in which you're 'there' in the dream world is mentally, even though it may not look and feel that way to you while you're immersed. On the other hand of the spectrum, trips into fictional worlds and time travel seem to suggest ejection more strongly. (In particular time travel stories would struggle to use projection mode: it's rather counterintuitive to suggest that a character can be a two different times at once, whatever 'at once' can mean in this context. Remember that all passage stories, time travel not excluded, have to keep up the metaphor of traveling, and that requires a sequential personal time for the traveler, even as she jumps from one spacetime-location to the other.)

There can be hybrids: in the extract from Sherlock Jr. the protagonist doesn't simply enter the world of a movie, he dreams that he enters a movie. So we have a more complicated setup: there is the world of the Buster Keaton movie itself, then nested inside it the world of the dream, which allows passage into movies, and then again nested inside that dream world the world into which he steps when Buster walks into the movie screen. The latter is a clear case of ejection, for the in-dream-Buster vanishes from the world surrounding the movie screen when he walks in. But then there is also the dream itself, which is a case of projection. (The sleeping body of the projectionist remains visible for us, the audience, unresponsive to the surrounding world, but not physically away.) Probably the motivation for this complicated setup was a hesitation to make the movie too phantastic. It's one thing to create a fiction in which people dream (not unusual in the real world, too), but another to create one in which people walk into fictional worlds through a movie screen. (To wrap the more extravagant elements of a fiction into a dream is a time-worn device, just think of the epilogue of A Midsummer Night's Dream.)

Note that there is no difference in the experience of the passenger between ejection mode and projection mode. The passenger is immersed in what happens at the destination location. The only difference is what an additional observer would see at the origin location during the time of passage.

Yet shifted passage neither implies ejection nor projection. We have seen ejection in the clips that included shifted passage, but as I have noted, there could easily have been shifted passage in Dreamscape, where we're clearly in projection mode. Likewise, in The Dutch Master, there's no shifted passage, which I argued is by design; yet both ejection and projection might be in play here — the movie leaves it open, thus allowing both interpretations, but this very fact shows that there might be both cases in which we have no shifted passage and projection and cases in which we have no shifted passage and ejection. So the distinction between use of shifted passage or not on the one hand and projection mode vs. ejection mode on the other are completely orthogonal.

Passage illustrated III - the Flemish painting

Who says that passage into the unreal is restricted to movies as destinations? Whatever generates its own fictional world is a candidate. It could be a painting, for instance:

This is from The Dutch Master, a 1993 film that was intended as the flagship production of a collection of erotic shorts. Whatever its credentials in that genre may be, it uses an old dramatic device, namely: the interpenetration of the real world and the world of some sensually stimulating piece of art.[1] But in contrast to, say, Flaubert's 1834 novella Omphale, in this film it is not a fictional character who steps out of an unreal world into reality — it's the other way round. The protagonist, Teresa (Mira Sorvino), walks into the painting.

Passage in this case is established in a gradual buildup: when she first encounters the painting, Teresa is just fascinated and pleased by it; later on, the picture seems to come to life for short moment, and one of the characters smiles at her; then further into the film there is a scene in which she is practically invited into the picture and then walks in; after that she begins to make the passage deliberately and from her own initiative.

1) From the three excerpts in the video above, it remains unclear whether Teresa actually walks into the painting or whether she remains physically in her everyday world. In other words, the story leaves it open whether she's not simply imagining or daydreaming to be inside the painting, while physically still sitting on the museum bench.

Whenever there are other people with her in the room at the museum, the painting remains just a painting. It comes alive (and invites her in, so to speak) only when she is watching it alone. So there is no way to decide, from what the film shows, whether we are supposed to think Teresa is 'just imagining' all this, or whether, in this film, things such as stepping into the world of a painting can happen. Needless to say, in the real world, such things don't happen anyway. It's only because we're already in a story, the story of the movie, that we can even ponder the possibility. What the question comes down to, then, is whether the world of The Dutch Master is just like the real world but contains a protagonist who is prone to daydreaming, or whether that movie world is a fantasy world in which people can travel between reality and paintings.[2]

The movie artfully leaves that question open until the end. While Teresa becomes more and more involved with the painting, her real-life friends and family become more and more irritated. (Though there is a notable lack of concern; they're just irritated, nobody's really worrying.) The climax of this conflicting development is reached when Teresa disappears at the day of her wedding, leaving her fiancé, her family, and the wedding guests waiting for her in front of the church. The final sequence of the movie then suggests that she has withdrawn into the painting for good. If Teresa remains missing, that is, if she in fact has vanished from the world outside the painting, then what we've got here is a fantasy world in which passage into the unreal is possible.

2) There is no interaction between Teresa and the characters in the painting; they simply ignore her. When she is inside the painting, it's like a holographic film. She stands in the middle of what's going on, but nothing she does seems to impact the scene in any way. She's watching from inside the room, but she's still only watching. On the other hand, the physical elements of the picture do seem to impact her: when one of the characters blows some smoke from his pipe towards her, she coughs.

It's different when Teresa is outside the painting. One of the characters smiles at her and invites her into the painting with a nod; and there is also a brief scene when Teresa steals into the museum by night and it's dark, and she points the flashlight to the painting. The people in the painting act bedazzled. So the rules of interaction are frustratingly limited: The fictional characters can communicate only with her, and only when she's outside; the real-world characters can't interact with the characters in the painting at all.

There seems to be a parallel here between the indifference of the people in the painting towards Teresa and the lack of concern for her increasingly becoming distant in her everyday world. As I've observed above, none of her colleagues or her family seem really to worry, they're just puzzled. And while the narrative sometimes mentions something Teresa said or claimed, in all of the plot she doesn't utter a single word. (It's a romanticist cliché: the artist, or in this case simply the imaginatively gifted person, is estranged from her world, withdraws into a world beyond it which is associated with art and eros, but where real fulfillment isn't possible either as long as there are ties to reality etc. etc. But I don't really want to go into an interpretation of the story here. I'm only interested in the phenomenology of passage into an instance of unreality.)

3) We have now discussed two general questions: does the story involve passage into the unreal? and: what are the rules of interaction between the real and the unreal in this particular fictional world (i.e., the world of The Dutch Master)? Let's also take look at the elements of passage I have extracted in my previous postings about Die Einsteiger and Sherlock Jr.. I have identified three such elements: first, a setup-and-recognition structure; second, a departure sequence and an arrival sequence; and third, what I've called shifted transfer: the characters transfer into the instance of unreality at a different time than the audience does — while the characters have already arrived at the destination location, the audience's perspective is still at the departure location. Can we identify the same elements here, where the destination isn't a movie, but a painting?

Well, there is clearly some setup going on: the painting is explained in some detail by a museum guide, who fills the audience in on historical background and sharpens the eye for some detail that might easily go overlooked without a bit of experience. (Would you have noticed the statue of Mercury on the cupboard in the bedroom?) We also get some detail views of the painting before it comes to life, and when it does, the scene with the drunken woman rolls up once or twice as a kind of movie in a picture frame before Teresa actually witnesses it from inside the painted room. Many of these things are repeated in the passage sequences and clearly contribute to our understanding that we (together with Teresa) are now 'in the picture', thus they constitute the recognition end.

Moreover, since this is a painting we're talking about, there is a clear sense of a static frame present all the time, even when we're inside the artificial world. The number of rooms is limited to three, and most of them are already in sight at least partially from the viewer's perspective at the museum. The wooden, rectangular frames of the room and the windows, cupboards, and the like add to this sense of a mostly static, changeless room. All the animation comes from the people moving around in them. And even that seems to happen mostly in a scripted sequence that unrolls every time Teresa steps in. Thus even though she has now entered that fictional world, it is still somewhat different from the real world: it's in 3D, and it's animated — and yet it feels static and rigid to some degree.

It is more tricky to locate the departure sequence than to find the arrival sequence. That is mostly due to the gradual buildup I've mentioned. The departure sequence, I think, is distributed over several scenes in the movie. It begins when Teresa's fascination with the painting sets in and ends when she is drawn into the picture for the first time and sets her foot into the room inside the painting. The film marks the actual transfer with a simple fading of the museum setting into black, which then re-occurs on the trip back. Let's compare this with the corresponding departure sequence in Die Einsteiger, as I have analyzed it in my earlier post: it begins when the 'video integrator' device is switched on, then there is some blinking and beeping, a suggestion of the characters being drawn into the device, and finally they vanish. The corresponding marks in The Dutch Master are the first viewing of the painting, the smile and the nod of the man in the painting at Teresa, and finally her stepping in.

Compared with that, the arrival sequence is relatively short. It consists mainly of another iteration of the movements of the drunken woman (as they had happened before, when Teresa watched them from the outside). After this, Teresa makes another step forward and approaches the man with the pipe who remains seated in the room, and from that moment, we're immersed in a story that wasn't already visible on the painting when it was still frozen. The arrival sequence is over.

What about shifted transfer? This element is missing here. The perspective of the audience moves immediately into the destination location when Teresa gets up from the museum bench and the camera turns its direction into the painting. There is no discernible lingering of the audience's point of view outside. (There is no shot of the painting after Teresa has moved in, with her standing in front of the fictional characters, or some such thing.) So it seems that shifted transfer is not a necessary element in tales of passage. It might be featured, but it doesn't have to.

I think there is a good reason that this particular film doesn't use shifted transfer. I have remarked above that the movie leaves it open whether Teresa actually walks into the painting or whether she just imagines that she does. These two options are meant to remain open until the ending of the film, and shifted passage would have been a too strong indicator for one of them, shutting out the other. More precisely, if the director had used shifted passage, and the camera (and with it we, the audience) would have remained in the museum setting after Teresa had stepped in, then we would have seen either an empty museum room or Teresa inside the painting, both of which would have clearly indicated that she actually did step into the painting (as opposed to merely having daydreamed it). And that would have defeated much of the expositional strategy used in the plot of the movie. Compare this again with Die Einsteiger. There, the intention is exactly not to leave it open whether passage is possible in its fictional world. Passage into movies is the main plot device. So it's important to make it clear that it really happens.

[1] A painting that is a version of Pieter de Hooch's 'Young woman drinking', with the interior of the room very similar, but the people in the picture somewhat changed. (The painting is actually not in New York, but at the Louvre in Paris.)

[2] When the question is posed this way, some might reply that it is neither: it's a symbolic world, in which the museum, the painting, and the act of passage stand for an artistic or erotic inclination in the protagonist that is awakened. (And that may well be a sound interpretation of the director's intentions.) But even so: in order to understand a symbol, one needs first a grasp of its literal meaning, and this is what we're concerned with here. This is an investigation in the mode of phenomenology, where we're interested in the way things are presented, not in their symbolic meaning (if there is one). When we just look at what's manifestly happening (the analogue to looking at the literal meaning of a symbol), we're faced with the two options I've listed.

Passage illustrated II - the dreaming projectionist

An early forerunner of the geeks who traveled into movies in my previous post, in Die Einsteiger, is Buster Keaton, who does a similar trip in his 1924 film Sherlock Jr.

While the 1980s were a period in which the dramatic device of choice was a blinking and beeping machine, this earlier film from the 1920s uses a more traditional approach: the protagonist is just dreaming that he enters the movie world. Here's how it looks (watch until approx. 22:30):



Keaton plays the operator of a movie projector at a film theatre; he falls asleep while a picture runs and dreams that the characters in the film transform into people from his own life. He then walks up (still dreaming) to the screen and steps right into the scene that is being shown. In other words, he enters the world of the movie and starts interacting with its characters.

This is a very early example of how such a situation is staged. It's a comparatively prolonged and elaborate sequence, as the film tries to get the idea across that the main character is now entering a movie. But it includes all the elements I have discussed in my previous analysis.

Let's begin with setup and recognition. Before the actual passage happens, we are introduced to the world of the movie into which Buster is about to step. It is set in a villa and there's its owner, his daughter, and a young man (presumably her suitor). Each of the characters is briefly shown and then turns around and transforms into a person from the projectionist's world, noticed by the dreaming Buster. This is what I've called setup: elements of the destination world are introduced to us (the audience), as part of the departure sequence. Later on, in the arrival sequence, these elements are then used to show us that the traveler really has arrived there. In the case of Sherlock Jr., the plot of the movie into which the protagonist steps resumes in earnest (after a bit of slapstick comedy) with the daughter of the house and her suitor on the stage. This is supported by one or two cinematic tricks: one of them is a circle-open effect (as if we're opening our eyes to the scene); another is that the camera now zooms in so that the stage of the nested movie fills the entire frame. So far, we have watched the movie-within-the-movie on a cinema screen, with bits of the orchestra and audience visible. Now it has become exclusive: there is no intruding outside world any more, we're fully immersed in the nested picture's world. We have now moved into the recognition part: the elements that were introduced earlier, during the setup, are repeated so that we know we have arrived. (In this case, it's only we, the audience, who have arrived. Buster will follow, though he is already mentioned in absentia as "the world's greatest detective".) We witness a bit of interaction between the daughter of the house and the suitor, and then the villa's owner discovering the theft of the pearls. With the telephone call for Sherlock Jr. and Buster's subsequent appearance (not in this extract), the arrival scene ends.

Where exactly would we pinpoint the departure and arrival sequences? I'd say that the departure sequence spans the time from Buster falling asleep to the end of the slapstick intermezzo (where he is thrown into one location after the next). When he finally fades out of the picture, in the setting with the empty park bench (quite conceivably the front garden of the villa), he has entirely vanished from the surrounding setting in the movie theatre, has lost his presence in the outer movie's world, so to speak. He really has departed. The arrival sequence, on the other hand, somewhat interleaves with the departure sequence. In a sense, the arrival begins when he first steps into the frame of the inner movie. He is promptly knocked out of it again, and then needs another attempt to step in until it holds. When the departure sequence has ended, and the inner movie resumes its plot, this is made clear by the cinematic tricks I've mentioned above. A little later on (not in this extract any more), Buster appears in the role of Sherlock Jr. — at this point at the latest I think the arrival sequence is completed.

Finally, note that again there is a shifted transfer: when Buster has already entered the world of the inner movie, we (the audience) are still located with a perspective that includes both the outer and the inner world, the origin and destination locations. Only after Buster has completed the passage and is firmly located at the destination, the audience's perspective also changes to focus exclusively on the inner movie's world.

Passage illustrated I - the 'Video Integrator'

Let's start with a film I have mentioned before: Die Einsteiger. This one is in German, but I have added English captions in a couple of relevant places.

In a nutshell, this has all the elements of what I call a trip into an instance of unreality. In the film's world, there are movies (such as the Western that happens to be in the video tape recorder in this clip). Movies are instances of unreality — imaginary worlds which belong to a fiction. And one of the characters in the film is an inventor who has built a device that lets you travel into such imaginary worlds. (Just as in dozens of other movies people have invented machines to travel into the past or the future, or into dream worlds, as in Inception.) Of course we don't have a clue how the thing works. (Just as we don't have a clue how time machines or 'shared dreaming' technology work.) But whatever the technical detail, we are supposed to imagine that, in the world of this film, there is a device that lets you travel into films-within-the-film, fictions within the fiction.

How does the movie convey that such a passage into unreality has just happened? There is a lot of blinking and beeping going on, of course. More importantly, we can observe that the device is somehow acting on the two people in the scene: the funny rotating radar screen seems to be scanning them; then for a moment it looks as if some wind or airstream is ruffling their hair, as if something is drawing them towards the device; finally they vanish from the picture. Let us call this the departure sequence. Note that it is a real, physical departure. It's not just that the two travelers close their eyes and imagine (or dream) themselves into the world of the Western. We take it that they are actually, physically moved elsewhere, and that they are now 'there' (wherever 'there' is, in terms of the spatiotemporal universe we inhabit), and no longer 'here'. They have no physical presence any more in the room out of which they have just vanished. If anyone would walk into that room, he wouldn't see them. For the time of their trip, they have been 'beamed' elsewhere.

In the world of the Western, there is a counterpart arrival sequence. Beforehand, we get some idea of the basic inventory in the Western's world from the images we see on the video tape: the houses are there, some Western stereotypes are rolling off (riding, shouting, and shooting), and one of the characters who is to appear later is shortly visible: the tough guy who will insist on their hanging lights a match by scratching it on a wall (something he will repeat just a moment on, when the travelers have arrived). All this we can watch on the television screen before the departure of the travelers. Then, directly after they have vanished from the room, we can see their faces on the video screen. It is as if we, the audience, linger for a moment longer in the departure lounge while the travelers have already done their trip, verifying, as it were, that they have safely arrived, by checking up the video tape, on which we can now see them. Only then the camera moves us (the audience) into the arrival scene as well. Beginning from that point, we're all in the world of the Western, and the events there unfold now. And now, of course, the elements that were set up earlier are repeated, so that we recognize that we're now in the other world. The tough guy lights his match again, we see the houses, there are people shouting.

Thus there are several elements needed to make this kind of scene work. First, there is both a departure and an arrival sequence; second, we have a setup-recognition structure; and third, there's a shifted transfer.

(To be continued.)

Improbable fiction, continuity, and personal identity

I have written about continuity of personality in fictional characters involved in passage into the unreal. Here's a little sidetrack investigation, namely: does this discussion carry us into the philosophical topic that is typically headlined 'personal identity'? Can we learn anything interesting about the idea of personal identity from fictional settings that involve passage into an instance of unreality? I don't think so — there isn't much of special interest here as far as I can see. Here's why.

Much of what is discussed by philosophers of personal identity focuses on cases where it isn't clear (at least not on the face of it) whether someone is still the same person under some hypothetical change of circumstances. So for instance, if Fred wakes up one morning and has lost all his memories of the past, we might ask whether he's still the same person or whether his personality has been somewhat reduced by such a loss of recall. We might then go further and ask what we would think if it turns out that instead of his own memories, Fred now has the memories of someone else — is he still, in this changed scenario, the same person as yesterday, or should we say that he's now someone else, transferred into Fred's body? At which point would we have to conclude that we're no longer talking about one and the same person? Does it depend on how we lay out the scenario, that is, do our intuitions here depend on the kind and order of changes we gradually introduced? There is a stream of literature on these and related questions about personal identity. But it's mostly, as I said, about constructing borderline cases, scenarios in which we can test our intuitions and assumptions.

In our discussion here it's the other way round. It's not a scenario in which we are uncertain about the identity of a character at all. When I wrote that Arnold is the same person in act I as he is in act II (when he is thrown into a fictional world), that claim is a simple assumption, or stipulation.[1] He's the same person because we take him to be the same person. The playwright supports that assumption by arranging the first switch to a fictional world so that it almost suggests itself. At the end of act I, Arnold stands in the middle of the room, when there are suddenly a thunderstroke and a few seconds of darkness — after that, the scene has changed (the telephone, as the primary passage marker, has disappeared), the other actors have suddenly appeared in different costumes. Arnold is standing at exactly the same place, in the same clothes, and gives a surprise interjection. Thus it's a very natural assumption that, while much around him has changed, he's still the same. But when we make that assumption, it's exactly that: an assumption. Arnold is still Arnold because we take him to be still Arnold.

Contrast this with the cases that are interesting to the philosophy of personal identity. There, we have some reason to ask ourselves whether someone's identity has changed, and from that we can start a philosophical reflection on the notion of (and our intuitions about) that sort of identity. In our case, however, most of the interpretation of the rest of the play is based on taking the character of Arnold as continuous. So our imagination is clearly directed to taking him as the same person throughout. It is stipulated that Arnold is still Arnold (even as he has been transferred into the world of a fiction).

So personal identity, instead of being questioned and explored in a borderline setting, is taken for granted here, and there is some effort to construct the scenario precisely in a way so that there is no question about it. In the case of Improbable Fiction, this is competently done, and it simply works. Obviously, there might be a limit to such a construction. If, let's say, the play wasn't a play, but a novel, and instead of simply being transferred to somewhere else, Arnold would also find himself in a completely different body, perhaps even the body of an animal, say, a crocodile, plus fully unable to remember anything from earlier times, and incapable of speaking and thinking at all ... well, you get the picture — at some point the stipulation that this is still the same character, Arnold, would become unintelligible. And now we might ask ourselves where exactly that point is. Is it when Arnold has become an animal? (But then, Kafka's Metamorphosis seems intelligible.) Is it when he cannot remember anything anymore? (But would we say that someone ceases to be a person just because they suffer amnesia?) And so on. We might explore our intuitions about such cases. We might do some 'experimental philosophy' to find out empirically how widely exactly which intuitions are shared. And so we might learn something interesting about our concept of personal identity.

But none of this really plays a role in our understanding the plot of Improbable Fiction (and similar plays, movies, or novels), and the continuity of a character in it. And that's because that continuity is essential to the device of passage into an instance of unreality. So an author has to simply stipulate such continuity, to make us naturally assume it. He'd only ask for trouble if he would stage it as problematic. These plots are not designed to discuss the question of personal identity (as the scenarios in the philosophical literature are). Rather, they're designed to avoid or preempt that question. Thus it doesn't seem to me that we can learn anything interesting about the philosophy of personal identity from them.

[1] The notion of stipulating identity, rather than discovering it, is the same here as that on which Saul Kripke insists when he criticizes the idea, vented by some, of 'trans-world identification' in the first lecture of his Naming and Necessity. (I'm as much an antirealist about possible worlds and fictional worlds as Kripke, just in case there was any doubt.)

Improbable fiction and passage markers

I remember that a few years ago, on a trip to Oxford, I watched a play called Improbable Fiction by Alan Ayckbourne. The cast of characters consists of people who meet for a session of their creative writing circle; the first act introduces both the individuals, their relationships, and their writings (a colorful assortment of genres: crime fiction, science fiction, children's books, and more). In the second act, then, during a thunderstorm, all these fictions are brought to life, and the characters find themselves in a world that has been created out of their writings.

Much of the fun in this comedy comes from the writer characters being in turn characters in their own fictions, sometimes in unlikely positions. For instance, there is Brevis, a retired schoolteacher who angrily corrects Clem (the author of complicated science fiction), whenever he misuses a foreign or technical term. Later on, when the science fiction setting has become real, Brevis is the character from Clem's fiction who utters one of these the wrong terms after the other, totally convinced and with a straight face. There was one laugh after the other from the audience. Part of what this shows, of course, is how cleverly all the fun in act II was prepared in act I.

When I just wrote that the characters find themselves in a world created out of their writings, that's not fully correct — in two ways. First, strictly speaking only one of the characters actually 'finds himself' in the strange setting. That character, Arnold, suddenly notices that his surroundings have somewhat changed, and gradually comes to understand that he is now exactly within those fictions he has heard about earlier in the evening (that is, in act I). The others haven't any noticable consciousness of the change. They just act as the characters of those fictions-within-fiction. Jess, for instance, who was in act I an aspiring writer of historical romances, is now the narrator of a Victorian fortune-hunting mystery tale, and she shows no sign of having ever been anything else than an inhabitant of that story. Arnold, on the other hand, first calls her 'Jess' and only gradually comes to understand that she now has transformed into someone else, namely a person from a fiction. So, the only character who maintains a continuity of consciousness from act I through act II is Arnold (he is, in this respect, rather in the same position as we, the audience).

The second way in which it's not quite correct to say that the characters find themselves in a world created out of their fictions is this: there are actually three alternating fictional worlds in which Arnold (and the audience) is thrown. So not all the fictions from act I are combined into only one world. However, some of them are merged: at the peak of the turbulent action in act II, in the science fiction setting, there is also suddenly an appearance of the Hoblin the Goblin (from an illustrated children's book by one of the writers), and all this happens to music which was composed by a member of the circle for a musical. So the worlds of their fictions are partially merged, partially they are held separate. There is an old Victorian setting, an early twentieth-century setting (a classical murder mystery), and finally a modern setting which has the science fiction and fantasy elements in it.

Since these alternate frequently and rapidly, how do we know in which one of them we are, at any given moment in act II? There is a strike of thunder that often signals a switch between fictional worlds, and normally there is also changed lighting and different costumes. These indicators all subtly hint at a change of setting. In part they belong to the conventions of the theatre stage — so if there is a change in lighting, we normally recognize that as a signal (for instance, it could mean that time has passed by and it's now evening where it was just mid-day, or in a more abstract setting it might mean a change to a different room, or again it might signal a temporary stepping out of the stage plot altogether, into a soliloquy designed to express some character's feelings or plans). But then on the other hand, these signals are only understood by us, the audience. What about Arnold, the character who is also drawn into those fictional worlds? I haven't checked the text of the play yet, but as far as I remember, he doesn't reflect on the change of lighting, or the difference in costume. So we can presume that these signals are meant for the audience, not for him. How does he, as a character who just traveled into a fiction, recognize that this is what happened?

In other words, what we are looking for here are passage markers: details in the world of a fiction-within-fiction which signal to a character that he has just traveled from a fiction (the world of Ayckbourn's play, in our example) to the world of a fiction within that fiction (one of the worlds of those writers circle members' fictions). In the terminology of this blog, I call such a trip a passage into some instance of unreality. Fictions, that is, stories or novels, are instances of unreality; thus, if a character travels into a world of fiction, that's called a passage into an instance of unreality. So we're looking for signals that let such a character recognize he is now within the world of a fiction. (Just to give a few more examples: other ways to travel to an instance of unreality are timetravel, where you travel into the past or the future, or entering the world of someone else's dream, as in movies like Inception. In the first case, how do you know that now you are 'in the past', or 'in the future'? If you think about it for a moment, it's not quite trivial. The same applies to dreams — what are signs that show you you're now 'within someone else's dream'? I'm not going into these other examples here, but stick with fiction. But I wanted to mention the parallel.)

If an author wants to make it clear to his character that he's been traveling into a different world (such as the world of a fiction), he builds passage markers into that world which demonstrate the fact to that character. And so did Ayckbourn. The passage marker in this case is a telephone, which sits on a sideboard throughout act I. At the beginning of act II, when we are suddenly in a Victorian setting, the phone has vanished, and promptly Arnold is perplexed when he wants to use it and notice it's gone. Then we switch to the early twentieth century and its murder mystery, and there's an old-fashioned phone sitting in the right place — but Arnold confusedly notes that this isn't his phone. In the modern science fiction setting, the phone's back where it belongs. By now everyone, including Arnold, has realized that the phone being there or not, and being a modern one or not, indicates in which world we currently are. I remember when watching the play, the first thing I looked at whenever something strange happened was the phone: a quick check to make sure I was oriented about where (in which of the fictional worlds) I was. And of course, so did Arnold on stage.

So the telephone in Improbable Fiction serves as a passage marker: it shows us that a character has been transported from his world (the world of the play) into another world (the world of one of the fictions within that fictional world). In this case, not only does the marker indicate that passage has transpired, but it also shows us in which of the different destination worlds we have arrived now. For passage into the unreal, then, that is for travels of a fictional character into some other world than his or her own world (like worlds of stories, dreams, or the past or the future), passage markers are a central device that helps both the audience and the characters themselves to realize they have successfully reached their destination.

Creating fictional worlds

Every time we encounter a new fictional story we create a new world. The default assumption is that this world contains everything the real world contains. We then modify this representation based on several constraints [...].[1]

This talk of representation (and world creation) can easily mislead, and the formulations in Skolnick and Bloom's paper are a good example for this, so let's have a closer look.

Fictional worlds are a product of the imagination; for example, when we read a story, we imagine a fictional world in which the characters of that story live, and in which the events that make up the plot of the story happen. There are, however, different senses of 'imagining' a fictional world. When you read a Sherlock Holmes story, you imagine an early-20th-century London with a certain famous detective and his sidekick investigating complicated cases there. Of course, in some sense you are creating that world in your imagination — perhaps you visualize some of the settings or characters when you read passages in which they are described; perhaps you even imagine the coldness of a certain evening or the dusty smell of a train compartment; perhaps you feel sympathy or disgust for some of the people in the story. But then there is a second, different sense of imagining the Sherlock Holmes world: the sense in which its creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, has fixed the recipe for your imaginative processes by writing those descriptions, playing to those emotions. The world of the story is the product of the author's imagination in a different sense from that in which it is the product of a reader's imagination. The imaginative processes of writing a story and so constituting that world are different from those of reading it and constituting the world — although they probably overlap in some significant portion.

Let's first note, then, that the sense in which Skolnick and Bloom talk of creating a fictional world must be the first sense, the sense in which a reader imagines the world of the story she reads. Clarifying this, and keeping these senses apart would do away with a confused statement they make about the use of the term 'story':

Our theory states that we create a new world every time we encounter a new story. But this is a little misleading, since it hinges on how we define 'story'. Surely it is not the case that every novel or movie is its own story, since that would involve creating new worlds for sequels. [...] A story must thus be broader than a single work of fiction."[2]

If this were correct, then we would be wrong to say that there are 56 short stories and four novels featuring the famous detective, which each have a plot and tell a story. What we would have to say instead is that there is a single story that is spread over these 60 literary works, and presumably over many others which include guest appearances of Sherlock Holmes, plus films and television series', all of which belong to the same single story. The story wouldn't even be complete: if someone writes another novel as a sequel of Conan Doyle's works, that would be part of it, and there might potentially infinitely many such sequels. But we don't really think that 'the Sherlock Holmes story' is incomplete and open-ended in principle, do we?

The reason for this bizarre new way of talking would be that whenever we read one of the different texts, we create a new world, one distinct from all other worlds created so far. Not making the distinction introduced above, between different senses in which we create a fictional world when we imagine one while reading fiction vs. writing ficton, this makes it seem as if we'd 'create' a new world in the sense in which Conan Doyle thinks up the Sherlock Holmes world whenever we merely read one of the novels or short stories. And since that obviously can't be right, we seem to need a revised use of 'story', a use in which all the texts belonged only to a single story (one that was produced by the author).

But there is nothing wrong with multiple stories being set in the same fictional world, and still be different stories. The fictional world of the Sherlock Holmes literature is not created afresh every time some reader encounters one of the stories. It has been created once, by the author, when writing those pieces, and it's been one and the same since then. Of course, whenever some reader encounters the stories, she would have to imagine that world afresh, and so in a different sense 'create' it. But in that sense, this causes no problem whatsoever, and therefore no need to revise the usage of the term 'story'. (What Skolnick and Bloom must have had in mind when they say that new worlds aren't created by sequels is the first sense: of course the author doesn't think up a new world when he writes a sequel.)

Compare: every time someone draws the rabbit-duck picture on a sheet of paper, he 'creates' the drawing; but that doesn't mean that there are infinitely many inventors of that particular image. There is only one inventor, the person who created it in the first place. And the sense of 'create' in which that person did create it is a different sense from the one we use when we say that you create it by drawing it on a piece of paper.

[1] Deena Skolnick and Paul Bloom, "The Intuitive Cosmology of Fictional Worlds", in The Architecture of the Imagination, edited by Shaun Nichols, Oxford: Clarendon 2009, 73–86, 77.

I think I will refer some more often to this paper; although I start here with some criticism of its terminology, it contains some interesting results and ideas. But that's for a later post.

[2] Ibd., 81.

Introductory book about the ideas behind this blog

During the fall months of the past year, it's been a little quieter than usual on this blog. The reason was that last summer I found that I needed something more of a coherent presentation of the ideas behind it — a kind of backgrounder and introductory text. So I sat down to write that. The result has taken the shape of a small book, which is now available in a draft version. (There is still some formatting work I want to do to optimize readability, and possibly smallish corrections in wording and grammar.)

You can download the pdf version here.

The table of contents looks like this:

Preface

Activities

  Living your life · Reflection · Imagination · Philosophy

Goals

  Beauty · Excellence of character · Eudaimonia

Theory

  Unreality · Interplay · Apartness · Present

References

Hinting at the difference

In Jasper Fforde's series of 'Thursday Next' novels that begins with The Eyre Affair, the borders between reality and fiction are permeable: they can be crossed from either side. What's more, there are multiple ways to do the trick. One way is open to young children with strong powers of imagination. The main character recalls:

my mind was young and the barrier between reality and make-belief had not yet hardened into the shell that cocoons us in adult life. The barrier was soft, pliable and for a moment, thanks to the kindness of a stranger and the power of a good storytelling voice, I made the short journey — and returned.[1]

Let's put romanticism about childhood experience aside (Fforde exploits this cleverly in this passage, but it's not this rhetorical aspect I'm interested in here). What is the function of such explanations about the "barrier between reality and make-belief"? (Which are explanations, really, about the theory or metaphysics underlying the world of the book.) What do they help to achieve in the process of our consuming (or appreciating) fiction?

It is sometimes said that their function is to motivate what is going on in this instance of fiction (i.e. in this book or movie), that they are included in order to make the goings-on (the events, the reaction of the characters) plausible. Their function then, on this view, is to help us believe what we observe; they move us from incredulity to acceptance; they enable suspension of disbelief.

Now this is certainly not entirely wrong: such formulations probably do all these things. But suggestive though it may be, this way of putting it also obscures an important distinction. We don't perceive worlds of fiction. We imagine them. (No doubt we perceive, visually and auditorily, what goes on on a movie screen. But that's not the same as perceiving the imaginary world. In order for the latter to become accessible, there must be a process of imagination, just as there must be such a process when we read a novel. The imagination may be greatly supported by the movie images and sounds, both of which aren't there when we read prose. But what constitutes the fictional world, in both cases, is a process of imagination.) In contrast to perception, then, what we do isn't in the first instance belief-forming, but something more like stipulation.[2]

What phrases such as this one do is not to make the fictional world believable, I'm going to contend. Rather, these are hints to the imagination, design hints. They guide the imagination in fundamental aspects of the fictional world it constructs. They control the frame of what we imagine.

For instance, in the quote above from the Fforde novel: what we are told here is not that, contrary to our everyday belief, the borders between reality and fiction might be more porous than we thought, after all. (How would that be a plausible claim, even if it were made with the intention to appear as one? Countless experiences and the whole body of common knowledge weigh in favor of the contrary.) Instead, it is an indicator, given by the author, of the kind of fictional world we're in. It gently nudges our imagination in a certain direction. We're to imagine a fictional world (that is the world of the novel The Eyre Affair) in which, much in contrast to the real world, the borders between this world itself and any nested fiction (nested unreality, such as that of the book Jane Eyre as referred to in the novel The Eyre Affair) are permeable. It's more subtle than the traditional "Imagine, dear reader, a world in which the borders between reality and fiction can be bent, so that one might travel between the those two..." — but the function is exactly the same. It isn't intended to make such a thought more plausible or believable; it's intended to point out ways for us to imagine such a world.

Such pointers, such hints at differences between the fictional world we're dealing with and the real world, have something in common with the bits of fictional export I mentioned in the previous post. The author provides us with them so that we are better able to imagine the fictional world in question. The materials for fictional export hold also in the real world, and they are included by the author in his fictional world because they are required for the narrative. (Think explanations of forensic methods in crime fiction.) The differential hints I'm discussing here are of course explanations of differences between reality and fiction (this particular fiction). But they serve the same function: helping us to better understand what sort of world we are to imagine in order to make sense of the narrative.

[1] Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair. London: Hodder and Stoughton 2001, 63.

[2] Both perception and imagination are incredibly complicated processes, which haven't been researched in all detail by cognitive science and other disciplines yet. A good starting point for reading up about the differences in phenomenology is Colin McGinn's Mindsight. Image, Dream, Meaning, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2004, especially chapter 1.

History, time travel, and informedness of unreality

'Join us for an amazing journey through time!' — Exhibitions at history museums sometimes advertise that they will 'take you back in time', typically to some earlier period the exhibition is about. And in fact, if the period in question is interesting and colorful enough in itself, and the exhibition supports it by a suitable manner of presentation, focusing not so much on written descriptions and explanations, but rather on rich tableaux, original costumes and items from the time, and appropriate lighting and background sound, you may easily find yourself suddenly 'in' that past world, looking at a lavish banquet, say, feeling almost as if in fact you were there.

Now this is 'time travel' only in a metaphorical sense: you're not actually going back in time — you're just imagining yourself at another time. Or perhaps you don't even imagine yourself as being there, you simply imagine what it must have been like, how it must have looked (and sounded, and smelled) at that time. This is different from time travel as it is presented in novels and films: there, a character is transferred from his own time into a different time and then is actually there. Put differently, a time traveler in a movie would perceive a different world, the world of the past, while a museum visitor imagines it. Both may have some visual impression (and again, also impressions on the other senses, too) of that world. But where the time traveler perceives an independent reality, not subject to his will, the museum visitor shapes such a world in his imagination, and is therefore free to include whatever he fancies (he might for instance imagine his romantic partner sitting at that banquet table in an exquisite old-fashioned dress). By virtue of this difference, the museum visit isn't time travel in a proper sense, only in a metaphorical sense, based on some similarities in the experiences one would have.

In order to make this distinction as clear as possible, I have so far not mentioned a complication, which we now have to look at. The complication is this: even though we imagine (not perceive) the world of the past into which the museum invites us, we couldn't just dream it up ourselves. After all, the very purpose of the exhibition is to make us familiar with details about the past which we didn't know about so far. We learn something from it, something we didn't know before, and what we learn is obviously not coming from our imagination, but comes from the outside, channeled through its presentation at the exhibition. Where does it come from?

The exhibition will be informed, often by historical or scientific fact which we know about. Thus, if the exhibition is about dinosaurs, much of the information will come from science (what did a dinosaur look like, what were its dimensions, its color and shape, its typical movements, how would a typical environment have looked, which plants were there, and so on). It's science which reconstructs these things and can tell us how we would have to imagine them in order to keep within established facts. If the exhibition is rather about historical or cultural matters (such as the history of an island or the life and work of a composer, say), then that information comes from history. (History has methods that are somewhat different from those of science.)

So, from a historical exhibition, we can learn something about the real world, even though we look at the world of an instance of unreality. I call this the informedness[1] of unreality by bits and pieces from the real world. This does not run counter to the general character of the unreal as imagined, as being a product of the imagination; it just shows that the workings of the imagination always take up some materials from reality and include, shape and develop them in the process of generating an instance of unreality. You can learn from an exhibition about the past just as you can learn from a movie or a novel, or a dream: for instance, if you are a reader of crime fiction, you might learn a bit from it about police procedure, or forensic science. Of course, it's only in there because the author has researched it and built it into the world of her story, and it goes without saying that there is no guarantee that it's not fictional — the author might just have invented some bit of science which was necessary for the narrative, but which isn't actual science. Even dreams include memories, thoughts and emotions from waking life as building blocks, however much they may rearrange and distort them; from these you may pick up things about yourself and your recent experience you haven't noticed (yet) while awake.

(Such informedness is in some respects a counterpart to sedimentation; just like the latter, the former results from the interplay of reality and unreality, resulting in a mix of both along the path. Instances of the unreal sediment into reality when they influence our views and actions; bits and pieces of the real make up the materials from which the worlds of unreality are created.)

[1] It's also sometimes called fictional export. See for instance Christy Mag Uidhir and Allen Hazlett, "Unrealistic Fictions", in: American Philosophical Quarterly 48 (2011), 33–46. This seems to be a very helpful notion, but I have to read up more about it.

Passage and nested unreality

In my earlier posts about entering the worlds of movies and the pull this exerts on the imagination I looked closer at the fascination we might feel with this idea.

So, as I wrote, the worlds of some movies exert a pull on the imagination; but there is no way to satisfy the desire, no way to go in and follow up. So what does the movie do? It 'knows' about that desire and 'satisfies' it, by giving it expression, playing it out. In the movies, everything is possible, including entering a movie plot. So in the world of a movie (such as Die Einsteiger), a device is conjured up that fulfills the desire. It's not different from many other wish-fulfilling machines (or from wish-fulfilling magic). The worlds of fiction are in part intended to act out fantasies in which desires are fulfilled. Thus the idea of a passage into the unreal is born.

Note that this is in some sense a reflective process: fiction, as it were, self-consciously exploits a desire which it itself has helped to generate in the first place. But we must be careful not to make too much out of this reflexive constellation. People in movies don't just travel into the worlds of fictions, but also into dreams, or the past and the future. It's not the reflexivity that makes this work; that's not even a necessary attribute. It is merely a spicy extra feature in the particular constellation in which the world from which departure is taken and the destination world are both instances of the same form of unreality (i.e., worlds of movies).

There seems to be one thing that is required, though. In the real world, it's not possible to travel into the world of a movie, a dream, or the past or the future. In the real world, there is no magic, and neither are there any technical devices (at least up to now) which can do the trick. And therefore we (real people) cannot make any such journey. The only people who can are fictional characters, people who are already part of the world of a movie (or other fiction, such as a novel). The starting point of any passage into the unreal must lie within an instance of unreality already. The laws that govern the real world don't allow for it (as far as we know), but the laws that govern any world of fiction can be adjusted by the creator of that world, the person who imagines it, and so an instance of unreality might allow traveling into those worlds of fictions, dreams, or the past and the future. Note that this means that passage is always a matter of going into the world of a nested fiction. There is no way into fiction; just into fiction-within-fiction.

(It's an interesting question exactly how far this can be generalized: there seems to be a passage from fiction into dreams, and the past or the future; maybe there's a path from dreams into fiction, or again the past or the future; there might be dreams-within-dreams into which we can travel from dreams. There seems to be no passage from either the past or the future to anywhere — what does this tell us about the differences between these forms of unreality?)

So when there is what I have called 'passage into the unreal', we're always talking about nested unreality— there is an outer instance of fiction (the world of the film Die Einsteiger) and a bunch of inner instances (e.g. the world of Dance of the vampires). That they are nested means that the second is, as viewed from within the film itself, a film with its fictional world. The characters in Die Einsteiger are like people in the real world in that they watch movies, put them on video cassettes (which weren't yet replaced by DVDs or Blu-rays as the prevalent medium at that time), and watch them for entertainment. They have the same idea of a movie as fiction, and of the world of that movie as a fictional world (just as I described it in my previous post). But of course, what's fiction for them is fiction-within-fiction for us, the audience in the real world, for these people are fictional characters already. And of course only because their world is a fictional world is it that people can jump into movie worlds (worlds of movies-within-the-movie); that's not possible in the real world (for all we know).

Such fiction-within-fiction is not exactly a rare phenomenon. There is nothing unusual for people in novels to read books or watch movies, or for film characters to do the same. After all, the characters in those novels or films are often intended to appear much like people in the real world, and consuming fiction is something that people in the real world do. Sometimes, fiction-within-fiction has a more substantial role to play than just making characters seem like real people. In Shakespeare's Hamlet, the Danish prince uses a play to confront another character with a story very similar to what he thinks might have been enacted by his uncle. In other words, Hamlet uses the play-within-a-play as a means of indirect communication, and something that is intended to awaken emotions and provoke a reaction.

In any case, however, this nesting of fiction-within-fiction is necessary for passage into the unreal: there is no traveling into fiction unless you are already within a fiction.

More on pull on the imagination

In my previous post on entering the worlds of movies, I noted a certain fascination we might feel with this idea. Let me expand on this a little.

Psychologically, there is certainly some trace of a wish-fulfillment dream in here, but for now, that's not the aspect I want to look into. There is also what I have called a 'pull' that is exerted on our imagination: we feel ourselves drawn into a fictional world, and this feeling of being drawn is not that of a physical dragging, nor necessarily that of a psychological grip (the movie doesn't have to be totally absorbing in order for us to feel the pull). This pull is on the imagination — we feel invited, encouraged, sometimes even compelled to begin imagining ourselves in that world, to think of things we might do in addition to those we watch the characters do, and so on. (I have said that our imagination maps out spaces of options in the world of the movie; that is one of its primary operation modes, and so it's no wonder that it eagerly follows the invitation to take any opportunity for doing so.)

Sometimes this is achieved directly, for instance when a character does something we know he shouldn't do, and we want to shout, sometimes even do shout, something like: "Don't go up there!" — because we know what's going to happen. Sometimes characters do something very unexpected, and there is a residue of things we'd like to check or review, etc. Sometimes there is teasing that isn't followed up in any way. In all those cases, our imagination gets engaged, and by that operation we have the feeling of being pulled in.

At least for someone like me (who likes to muse about the workings of fictional worlds), there is a two-fold pull of that sort in movies like the one I mentioned as an example, Die Einsteiger. One is the pull which the movie exploits: we all know the films that are the targets, those into which the characters of Die Einsteiger enter with the help of their machine; and they are popular samples which certainly have nudged our imagination themselves. (Not each of them, perhaps, but an assortment is used that will probably have something for everyone in a broad group: it includes adventure, horror, romance, and history films.) The other pull is the one the movie itself exhibits: the film is an instance of fiction itself, and in the fictional world of this instance, there is something like this machine — and obviously the imagination of the audience is encouraged to work on that idea. (What would you do if you had such a machine, which movies would you enter?)

Einsteigen

When I was a child (I remember) I watched a movie called Die Einsteiger. It was centered around a couple of geeks who were able to 'jump into a movie' by means of some technical instrument. The film was firmly in the genre of light entertainment, and the technique of entering the worlds of movies was simply used as a device for bringing in jokes and a bit of action. But I was fascinated by this core idea: what if you could simply enter a movie plot, such as that of Raiders of the lost ark or Dance of the vampires, walk around in the world of that movie, participate in the action (or wander off to some parts of it that weren't even shown in the film)?

Where did that fascination come from? Was it just childish identification with the adventurous heroes in those films? A bit of that was certainly in the mix for me, at the time. But then the fascination didn't fade away even long after heroic fantasies had (predictably) lost their appeal. So perhaps there's something more interesting to be found here. Mostly, I think, what was intriguing was this notion of crossing that border, of walking around in a world I knew didn't exist. After all, even though it didn't exist, it could be imagined, described, and even depicted in a movie. So how much of a step could it be to actually go there, to travel into it and walk around inside it? Strictly speaking, it actually can be done in fantasy only, and a movie such as the one I saw is best described as simply acting out a fantasy. But the fact remains that the idea on which this fantasy is based exerts an immense pull on the imagination. So let's have a closer look at that idea.

The world of a movie, just as the world of a novel, the past, or the future, is the world of an instance of unreality — it's not really there, but you can imagine it (including the people and events in it) to be there. Typically, this imaginative activity requires some prompting. Fiction is a paradigmatic example of what induces us to imagine such unreal worlds; but there are others, too: dreams do the same; or you can deliberately trigger it yourself in daydreams.

When we imagine the world of a movie, we fit it with as many details as is needed for the narrative. Thus Dance of the vampires will include a wide landscape in deep snow, a rustic inn, and a sinister castle where the vampires reside. It will also include a bizarre cast of characters (the single-minded professor and his fearful assistant, the selfish innkeeper and his beautiful bathing-addict daughter, and the cruel and powerful vampire chief along with his dandyish son). Once the world is stuffed and staffed with all these items and people, there is a sequence of events (the plot), with some memorable scenes perhaps standing out of the stream of what happens. What we mean when we speak of 'the world' of this movie is something like this rough inventory I've just given. We're only able to speak about it like that after we have seen the movie, of course, and that implies also that, even before that, the movie must have been realized (i.e. produced). All those items must have been created (by use of props and scenery, with the help of a camera and nowadays quite likely also computer-generated imagery); all those characters must have been portrayed (by actors), guided by a script and directed by someone with an overall vision, in order to make it coherent and detailed enough to be recognized as a fictional world on its own.

Now if such a fictional world exerts a certain pull on our imagination — if it is an interesting enough place to capture our curiosity and attention —, it seems that this creates a desire for more: we might want to re-watch the movie (sometimes several times), to re-live the experience of getting immersed in that story and its world. (Perhaps a movie makes this even easier for many people because, in contrast to a novel, the visual representation facilitates the operation of the imagination.) What's more: we might also feel that the world in which the story unfolds is so rich and fascinating in itself (aside from the particular plot) that we can easily imagine other interesting stories unfolding in it, too. In other words, we begin to imagine that more happens within the same landscape, more happens to the same characters, than the story presents. If you fancy yourself in the plot of Dance of the vampires, it's not that you simply want to mechanically play out the same role as, say the young assistant to the professor, Polanski's character, seeing the world of the movie through his eyes, re-experiencing what he must have felt. In a sense, that is what you already get from the movie. You want more. You think that you, in the place of that character, might have done something different. Perhaps you may have simply lingered for half an hour longer in this curious old castle, or spent a couple of hundred years reading through that enormous library, or perhaps you might have done something different entirely which none of the movie's characters would ever have thought of. The point is that the moment you can imagine doing something else in the world of that movie than the characters do, however minor a thing it might be, you are on the track I'm exploring here. (Your imagination has widened the space of options within that world of fiction.)

But of course, there is not much of a chance that this gigantic movie machinery will be put to use again just in order to give you that experience. (Some experience may be outside the powers of even Hollywood, anyway.) So your phantasy will probably remain just that. And this is where the idea of a device that can take you there, a device as in Die Einsteiger, begins to seem mightily attractive. (It's the same way in which a time machine begins to get a very desirable thing when you consider using it to visit some event in your past that you happen to have missed.)

So it seems there are at least two conditions to the desire to travel into the world of a movie: it must be a full-fledged world that is open for some possibly interesting activity (an activity that would be interesting enough so that you want to engage in it), and the surroundings must include options which you can't get anywhere else. (Consider: if a movie is set in the Bahamas, and the only thing that is intriguing for you is the nice, sunny beaches you see, then you wouldn't desire to be in the movie — you would simply desire to be in the Bahamas. Now unless that is so unaffordable for you that it is entirely out of the question, this is a desire that's easily fulfilled: just go there! The desire to have a movie-travel machine won't come up. It will only come into play if there is something attractive about the world of the movie itself, something you can't have by merely booking a holiday.)

Entering dream worlds

Suppose you could enter someone else's dream just as if you were visiting a party. It's not that this is an entirely unpopular idea, there are several movies based on this notion, such as only recently Inception. But let's for the moment leave the elaborate theories presented there aside and examine the basic idea in a more simple setting.

1) Suppose, then, you could enter someone else's dream. Let's call the dreamer 'Joe'. You're now in Joe's dream. What would this be like? Would you just be at the same location, see what Joe sees in his dream? Imagine that Joe is in fact dreaming about a party, and now that you have entered the dream, you're at that party. Just as Joe, when he dreams about being at a party, it's as if he were standing in the room, together with all the other guests, hearing the music and idle chatter, seeing those people, the furniture, some food and drinks on a table, the dimmed light, the stereo in a corner... just as for Joe it feels in his dream as if he were actually there, it now also does for you. You're there with him in that very room, seeing and hearing the same things. But does this mean that you can see everything in the room, including the things that Joe isn't looking at, including the things that Joe hasn't even looked at up to now? Or is what you see restricted to what Joe sees, or at least to what he has seen so far (what his dreaming mind has, so to speak, dreamed up)? For instance, if Joe is just standing near the door, looking into the room — does it mean that all you can see is this room, or can you actually peek out the door and see what happens in the next room, even though Joe has (so far in his dream) never turned round and looked there?

We can only answer that question if we have some account of how dream worlds are built. Who decides what and who is in the room at that party Joe and you have joined? Since Joe is the dreamer, it seems that Joe's dreaming mind must do that job. The moment Joe dreams up a chair standing in the middle of the room, the moment that chair exists in the dream world. As it happens, there are three ways this can look to him. Let's say that Joe hasn't glanced at that spot before; then he either might take it that the chair has been there all the time, or he might think it just appeared out of thin air. On the other hand, if we assume that Joe has been looking there frequently and there's never been any chair, then he might notice that now, suddenly, there is a chair where none was before. (Dreams are like that, such things happen all the time.)

But what does that mean for you, the extra participant? What's going on from your point of view? It seems clear that in the third case you are observing a dream world in which there is an empty spot in the middle of the room and in which suddenly a chair appears in that very spot. But what about the two others? What if Joe has been transfixed by some events in the left part of the room and for quite some while hasn't looked at the middle of the room: what do you see when you do look there? Do you see the chair? Since Joe hasn't imagined (dreamed) it yet, perhaps we should say that you can't see it. Now what if Joe now turns to the middle of the room and calmly imagines a chair there, satisfied that it must have been there all along?

We seem to have run into a dilemma here: on the one hand, if we grant the dreamer authority about the furniture of his dream, its position and its changes of place, then we can only observe what he's already dreamed, so there is literally nothing there at any place until he brings his attention there. And presumably, when he turns his awareness somewhere else, there can't be said to be anything there as well: it's neither that the chair remains there nor that it suddenly disappears, leaving the spot empty again. Somehow, it seems, if we take this point about a dreamer's authority serious, the largest part of the dream world is undefined, for most of the time. If, on the other hand, we relax this strict adherence to the dreamer's attention (and imagination), we might enjoy a much more stable world of the dream, but it would be less clear in what sense this is still the world of that dreamer's dream.

2) At this point we might borrow a trick from the way fiction (another form of unreality) works in order to avoid this kind of trouble. No fiction describes each and every detail of the fictional world it is about — that wouldn't be possible. So what usually happens is that there is a tacit agreement between the author and the audience that the undescribed portions are filled in with appropriate assumptions. Thus if a story starts by telling us that "It was a cold, rainy autumn day in London of the year 19__", we can assume that the big city has many inhabitants who go about their lives, and that there has been a day with some weather before and after that particular day at which the story begins, while none of all this is ever mentioned, and quite probably most of it is also totally irrelevant for the narrated events. We just imagine the relevant parts and assume the rest as suitably fixed.

We mustn't misinterpret this 'filling in', however. When you read such a sentence, you may or may not visualize the streets of London in pouring rain, and to any degree of detail you like. Perhaps you'll take a moment after reading this very first sentence and bring those streets before your mind's eye, one by one, with every house clearly and to the smallest detail specified; but probably not. But then some people read stories without even picturing anything; and still they can take up the general idea of a cold, rainy day in a place like London.) In either case, none of them will have to imagine anything about the weather on the previous day, the day before the story begins, our about all the other people in the city which don't have any bearing on the story. To 'fill in' the necessary detail, then, is not to run through all the small details in your mind and fill them in. It's just to suppose that, as in the real world, there are some facts of the matter about all those things, and to be content that they would be described to us, should they be of any relevance to the story.

How can this stance of 'as close to what you'd expect unless directly specified' help us with the world of the dream party we're attending? Let's go through all the possibilities again. First, let's say Joe has looked several times at the center of the room, never noticing a chair or anything else there, but then suddenly dreams up one standing there; he thinks 'Whoops, there's a chair there!' for a moment, and then turns his attention elsewhere. For you, as an observer, the sequence would be the same: you see an empty spot up to the moment when suddenly a chair pops into existence there; you might have a similar thought about it, and from now the chair just remains standing there. Should Joe at some point turn back to see if the chair is still there and then dream its sudden disappearance, then at that moment the chair will dissolve before your eyes as well. Second, let's say the moment you enter the room you look at that center spot, whereas Joe so far has never as much as even glanced there, transfixed by the events in the left part of the room. If the room is mostly empty, then we wouldn't expect neither a chair nor anything else there, so you don't see a chair. (Of course, if the room is actually like a theatre audience with rows and rows of chairs, then we wouldn't expect a gap at this spot either, and so we would do see a chair there. It all depends on what the reasonable thing to expect is.) When Joe turns his attention to this spot, suddenly imagining a chair there, then the chair will duly appear, and for you as observer it will appear only then, even if Joe thinks that it has been there all the time. (That is, the third option above collapses into the second option — there isn't any difference between them, except in what Joe thinks; that, however, is not part of the dream world's exterior, but only of Joe's awareness of it.)

I think this approach preserves most of the authority of the dreamer while still keeping the dream world somewhat stable. Just as always in dreams, completely surprising things can suddenly happen (such as a totally unmotivated appearance of a chair in the middle of the room), but then that's just what dreams are like. However, only with this extra assumption can there be something like a shared dream world, something that both Joe can dream and you can observe. The minimum is some assumption of stability and filled-in detail. Otherwise, the whole idea of entering someone else's dream wouldn't even be conceivable.

But note that this means that Joe can be wrong about the world of his own dream in some respects: not about its present state, for that is exactly as he imagines it, and there is no way he can be wrong about that. (We still hold on to the idea of the authority of the dreaming mind. You can't be wrong about what you imagine. It is as you imagine it, by stipulation.) What he can be wrong about is what was going on before. The past sequence of dream events must be something stable, for that's not something Joe imagines, but something that he has imagined, and you have perceived. It's not something that can be up to anyone's imagination any more. It can be tracked as if it were an objective fact about the dream world, no longer a subjective element that is in Joe's imagination. (I think there is something wrong about this move, but I won't follow up with this here. I'll reserve that for a later post.)

3) So far, we have only talked about looking around, and what it would be like for you to be an observer in someone else's dream. What about exploring this dream world a little more actively? Think of that door next to which Joe is standing. Since he hasn't yet dreamed about what's behind that door, it could be anything from a yawning abyss to an ordinary floor — or perhaps it's a blind door that is fully blocked by a wall. Assuming what is most likely, we would think that if you looked behind it, you'd probably see another room that appears roughly as one would expect; you'd however step through at your peril, for if Joe focuses on it and imagines a blind door there, then you're suddenly in the middle of nowhere (possibly in an adjacent room, or falling down several stories outside — whatever the most likely scenario would be under the changed circumstance, or alternatively, if Joe dreams anything more about it, then whatever that will be).

The world of someone else's dream is an extremely unstable thing: a dreaming mind will change the surroundings all the time. Remember your own dreams: sudden changes of place, or transformations in your surroundings aren't in the least unusual.

4) This is not yet the end of our difficulties. What happens to the authority of the dreamer when it comes to interaction? Once you're not just an observer, but also take action in the dream world, there is potentially a conflict in everything that happens. Suppose you've spotted a chair in the middle of the room, and that chair is actually dreamed by Joe; now you decide to walk over to that chair and sit down on it. Suppose further that Joe's repeating nightmare is an empty chair that just remains empty however long he stares at it. But this time, you just go there and occupy it. Can we still claim that we're in Joe's dream, when this sequence of events is not something that originated in Joe's mind, when it in fact couldn't even have originated there (assuming that the nightmare pattern is relatively sticky and Joe would go through it all over again if left to his dream).

Now you might perhaps say that there is nothing unusual about this: after all, things happen to us in the real world all the time, we don't have full control over events (not even nearly). So why should a dream be different?

It should be different because dreams are a play of the imagination. You may not be able to control what you dream — in fact, most of the time, our dreaming mind plays wild spectacles for us without us having even the slightest say in matters of the program. But even though it is the arbitrariness of our dreaming mind, it is precisely the arbitrariness of our mind. It's not as if you perceive events going on somewhere. You imagine them. Thus the wildest things may happen indeed, but none of them have originated outside your imagination. There is no such thing as an independent actor, or an independent event. It's all in your head.

Intervening in someone else's dream, then, is probably best taken as indeed breaking up the dream state and fiddling with it from the outside. It belongs in the same category as noises or light effects in the sleeper's room which get through to the sleeping mind and become ad-hoc components of the dream; or talking to someone who is in the process of waking. There's decidedly an outside influence here. Sometimes, this idea is taken to the point of actual therapy: in Dreamscape, for instance, dream researchers enter others' dreams in order to figure out the deep-seated origins of nightmares (typically some repressed idea, a notion from the Freudian tradition of dream theory), and address them from within the dream. It is, as if a helping hand is extended to you from a character in your dream, only that this character is not in fact a character at all (someone imagined by you), but a real person who is projected into your dream. (Is there a way for the dreamer to distinguish between a proper dream character and an impostor, someone who came from the outside world into the dream with an agenda?) In any case, interaction is a further complication that makes the idea of entering someone else's dream a rather difficult setup. (Remember that we still haven't even discussed the question how this might be implemented: we're only talking about the phenomenology, that is, how it appears; or how it would appear, if it were actually possible to implement.)

5) Because of all this, in Inception a wholly different process of dream world creation is used.

The basic idea of the movie is that you can get into another person's dreams and there interact with that person's mind, in particular, steal some information that person wouldn't reveal to you when awake. This notion is probably inspired by the observation that dreams do visualize much of our inner lives, especially our emotional lives, which we wouldn't be willing (or even capable) to expose to others in words. Since you put your deepest secrets into pictures when you dream, you open up to spies there much more than when you're awake.

But your dream world would be much too unstable for anyone to enter it, and thus too dangerous — the plot would be infeasible. Therefore, the spies won't simply put you to sleep and then enter your dreams. Instead, they let you enter the dream of someone from the team; and the world of that dream has been pre-designed. It's not something his dreaming mind creates on the spot, it's something that an 'architect' has carefully drafted and later on explained to the team member who dreams it. Then you are invited into this world, and you start walking around in it. When you encounter a safe place, such as a bank vault, you'll picture your innermost secrets as lying there, safely. (You also 'populate' it, in the film's lingo, with projections of people you know.) The gang of thieves, who don't just know the interior of the world much better than you, but also quite probably have built in some back doors and secret shortcuts, will then 'extract' that information from the safe place, and so in effect steal it from you.

So, in other words, the way Inception solves the problem of the instability of dream worlds is by using worlds which aren't, strictly speaking, dream worlds at all. They resemble much more the worlds of a video game: they're pre-designed, not just in their layout, but also with a specific purpose in mind. You don't enter another person's dream, you enter a virtual-reality playfield. (Revealingly, the dream worlds are called 'dream levels' in Inception jargon, which is probably not a coincidence: the worlds of video games are also structured into 'levels'.) By treating dreams as a kind of shared video game, the creators of Inception have addressed an inherently complicated aspect of a world of unreality to make it plausible that you can 'enter' it, as it were, travel into it. (In this way, the film is also similar to those which play around with the notions of the past and the future, to make it plausible that you can travel there, using a time machine.)

(Side remark: This is basically a more detailed exposition of the line of thought at the end of my earlier posting on Projection, interception, and Inception.)