Nested unreality is not always fiction-within-fiction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The illusionist effect

Yesterday I went to a magic show, and I found there were some interesting aspects of unreality to observe from that art form. An illusionist would perform numbers such as walking through a mirror or letting a person levitate on stage. What makes these performances so thrilling?

Let's begin by noting that many of the tasks are seemingly impossible and yet they are done right before our eyes. People don't hover some feet above ground (or a table) elsewhere, they don't do so naturally, and even if you try, you won't manage to do it in the real world. What we see is an illusion. Now I'm not interested in exactly how the illusion is produced, but I take it that some combination of clever distraction and technical devices is at work here. But that's not how we perceive it. We perceive a person levitating.

1) That seemingly impossible things happen cannot be in itself the characteristic thing about illusions that we're looking for — we can find that elsewhere as well, namely in fiction.

The world of the illusionist show is not obviously a fictional world, in the way in which novels or movies create fictional worlds that are apart in time and space. Even though the magicians might sport fancy costumes and exotic names, they're not (at least not always) telling a story about someone else, somewhere else, who does magical things. They often pretend to do it in our world, in the real world. (They don't claim to really perform magic, they're open about the fact that they just pretend to do it for their show; but where they pretend to do it is the actual world.)

Compare this with similar situations in movies. If the fictional world of a movie includes the possibility of people levitating (think Harry Potter), we will probably witness some scenes in which they do. Again, the people who produced that movie have used some technical tricks to create that effect. But in the case of a movie, the thrill of such a scene is weaker (of course it depends on how the levitation is introduced and dramatized). We're used to all sorts of strange things that might go on in sufficiently phantastic film worlds. In an illusionist show, it's not quite the same. After all, everything that goes on does go on before our eyes. There are real people on that stage, and real, physical scenes and props. Moreover, time flows exactly as we know it: when people suddenly change their appearance (their costume, say) in a movie, we take it that they have been photographed at some time, then changed, and at a later time photographed in their different outlook. We don't know much about the timing of production, only about the time of the resulting film. On the other hand, when a shapeshifting magician changes into a completely different look in a mere second or two on stage, there is no such intervening time. Whatever it is exactly that happens, it really happens in those one or two seconds.

2) So it seems it's not just that we are presented with a display of something that's impossible or highly improbable — it isn't just pretended that it happens, but also that it happens under circumstances that pretend to certify that it's real (as compared to trickery). An illusionist will go some lengths about reassuring the audience that they're watching the real thing. For example, I saw a number where a woman was shot out of a cannon into a water bowl, and the magician took care to have someone from the audience write her name on the assistant's arm, so that it was very clear that the woman who was presented in the water bowl was the same one, with those unique marks on her arm, as the one who had crawled into the cannon. We might call this 'non-fiction markers', in contrast to those fiction markers (such as the introductory formula 'Once upon a time...') which signal we're entering a fictional world. A non-fiction marker is intended to signal the exact opposite: it admonishes us to situate what we're about to see in the actual world; instead of being asked to suspend disbelief, we're asked to fire up disbelief and actually equip it with all our attention and perceptive capacities. We're encouraged to believe nothing unless we've satisfied us with our own eyes that it's all real. (Even though we know it's not.)

3) If someone asks you to imagine something, you have some leeway to not do it. For example, suppose you're asked to imagine there was no blogging, that the internet hadn't even been invited. You can now wonder what the world would look like if that was the case, but then again, you don't have to. You can simply refuse to imagine such a thing. Likewise, when you're watching a movie or reading a novel, especially if it's a bad one, you may refuse to get immersed in it. You can tell yourself that this is all 'just made up', you can focus your attention on the attempted (though not quite achieved) effect which it is supposed to make but actually doesn't.

With magic, that's more difficult, because illusionist magic projects the imaginary things that go on into the actual world. Magical illusions thus stimulate imagination more thoroughly; they almost force it out. Unless you really see through an illusion (which is something a clever magician will work hard to prevent), you'll have severe difficulties to refuse imagining that things such as levitation are going on here. At the very least, you'll constantly be asking yourself how it is done. But in addition, you'll constantly be encouraged to quickly consider what you're seeing as an option. You will, that is, for a moment ask yourself whether there is really a woman hovering around on stage, or whether you're deceived; but even if you are quick to reject the first option, it has presented itself to your perception for a moment, and so it has at least as a possibility briefly existed in your mind. The space of options that exist in the world widens, even if only for a moment, to include it. And if I'm right, that contributes considerably to the illusionist effect: it widens the space of options, stimulates imagination; and it does so in a manner that's very difficult to escape while you're sitting in the audience.

Magically illustrated forms of unreality

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

Disconnect, unreality, and unhappiness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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