Wandering, soul-wandering, and magnetic rapport

After a day-long hiking trip in the Ragged Mountains near Charlottesville, Virginia, Augustus Bedloe has an astonishing tale to tell: was it a dream? a vision? or even a real experience — that he was transported to a different time (almost fifty years earlier) and a different place (the Indian city of Benares), where he got entangled in a riot, lived through the last hours in the life of a hot-blooded young officer and a strange after-death experience, until he then found himself back on his walking trail and returned home?

What are we going to make of "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains"[1] like this? Among those who hear of it is Dr Templeton, a physician who has been treating Mr Bedloe for some time, and who has established a kind of 'magnetic rapport' with him. After Bedloe has finished, we learn that Dr Templeton, at the exact time of that strange experience, had written an account from his own memory of those riots in Benares of the year 1870 in which his good friend, the young officer Oldeb, had died in an ill-judged attack. More coincidences: there is a portrait of Oldeb that remarkably resembles Bedloe, whose name incidentally is almost what you get when you read the officer's name backwards.

1) Two possible ways of explanation suggest themselves: one based on metempsychosis, the other based on hypnosis. Let's begin with the latter. The explanation would go somewhat like this: Dr Templeton is an enthusiastic follower of the theories and practices of Mesmerism, which postulates an 'animalistic magnetism' that accounts for a deep connection between physician and patient. Treating Bedloe, Templeton has achieved a remarkably stong influence on him: "between Doctor Templeton and Bedloe there had grown up, little by little, a very distinct and strongly marked rapport, or magnetic relation. I am not prepared to assert, however, that this rapport extended beyond the limits of the simple sleep-producing power; but this power itself had attained great intensity. [...] the will of the patient succumbed rapidly to that of the physician, so that [...] sleep was brought about almost instantaneously, by the mere volition of the operator, even when the invalid [i.e. Bedloe] was unaware of his presence."[2] (941)

Given this way of influence without observable interaction, perhaps Templeton's recounting and writing down of his earlier experiences have been sufficient to draw Bedloe, in the solitude of his walk (and under the influence of a strong dose of morphine; 942, 943) into a vision that shared its content with Templeton's memories. Templeton, as it were, telepathically transferred the recall of what he eyewitnessed a long time ago into Bedloe's weakened and suggestible mind, by either deliberate or accidental use of his 'magnetic' connection with his patient.

So that would be one possible explanation of what happened to Bedloe; the one based on hypnosis. If it rather seems bizarre to you, then wait until we get to the other one, the one that's based on metempsychosis.[3]

Before we get to that, however, let us check on the merits of the hypnosis explanation. On the one hand, it would account for the inexplicable similarity in content of Templeton's written tale and Bedloe's vision. On the other hand, it would be of no help with some of the other strange facts: no simple mental connection could have caused the resemblance in looks, and the close similarities in the names (spelled forward and backward), of Bedloe and Oldeb. So the 'magnetic rapport' between doctor and patient cannot be the whole story.

2) What about metempsychosis, then? The Greek term means soul-wandering, and the idea would be that in some sense, Bedloe is Oldeb, that the officer's soul was reincarnated in the other man. What Bedloe experiences on his trip is an actual memory from his previous life. We must remember that Bedloe, although a young man, has a certain air of coming from the past: "He certainly seemed young — and he made a point of speaking about his youth — yet there were moments when I should have had little trouble in imagining him a hundred years of age." (940)

Now this accounts for the coincidence in looks and names, and a couple of other details. But if that is what is going on, then how would we account for the apparent connection between Bedloe's experience on the trip and Templeton's writing an account of just those events? Perhaps we have taken it the wrong way round: we have assumed that Templeton is the sender and Bedloe the receiver. (Why does this seem the more natural reading?) But maybe we'll have to correct that. Maybe Bedloe's vision comes from an anamnesis of his soul, a remembrance of things past, and what he experiences is then sent via his 'magnetic' link to Dr Templeton. (Note also that Templeton is clearly shaken when listening to Bedloe's account. From this we can infer that he didn't suspect anything strange was going on when we was writing his account. Only once Bedloe has returned Templeton began to see the coincidences. So, strangely, Bedloe on his trip was aware that something extraordinary was going on; Templeton, writing his account, wasn't.)

Moreover, what Bedloe experiences is not a direct replay of Templeton's memories, for Bedloe experiences the whole thing from the point of view of Oldeb, not Templeton. This supports the interpretation that bases the vision onto metempsychosis, not thought transfer: if it were Templeton's memories that were transferred, then we would have expected the whole thing to play from Templeton's point of view.

But then why is the story set up so that Templeton doesn't merely receive the vision, but had himself been a witness of the original events fifty years ago? Why, for instance, couldn't Templeton just listen patiently to Bedloe's tale, then go off to a library and come up with the facts about India, Benares, the insurrection fifty years ago, and so on? What is the significance, for the story, that Templeton knew Oldeb himself?

3) Let's also note that much care is taken in the story to invoke the topos of independent verification, in a somewhat original manner: Templeton produces a notebook in which he has written an account of the very same events, at just the time when Bedloe, on his hike, had a vision of them.

The story doesn't state this, but we are obviously supposed to assume that what we would find in those pages would closely resemble what Bedloe had just narrated. (Templeton says so, but the actual text of the notes is not part of the story, nor does the narrator tell us anything else about them than what Templeton says.) So let's assume that Templeton's notes indeed contain a tale very like the one we've just heard from Bedloe. We are told by the narrator that the pages appear to have been freshly written.

4) So where does Bedloe's vision come from? Is it a case of soul-wandering, i.e. has the dead soldier's soul possessed the wanderer for a while, making him experience the events from around the time of his own (bodily) death? Or is it a case of thought transfer, i.e. has the connection between Templeton and Bedloe caused the latter to experience the events just as the former was writing them?

(Nothing precludes of course that Bedloe might have heard from Templeton about them. In fact, we could easily imagine the whole episode of Bedloe telling his story a pre-arranged confidence trick supposed to demonstrate super-natural powers. But even without assuming the intent to deceive, a simple explanation would be that Templeton may have talked about these events before and Bedloe just remembered the tale and visualized it under the influence of the lonesome setting out there in the mountains, the drugs, and possibly illness or exhaustion.)

The text supports both interpretations to some extent. That the 'magnetic' connection between Templeton and Bedloe has mitigated a transfer of Templeton's memories into Bedloe's vision seems mostly supported by the demonstration setup, that Bedloe is in fact a reincarnation of Oldeb, the officer and friend of Templeton's who died in Benares, seems to be supported by the similarity in appearance, and also by the subtle indication that Bedloe sometimes has an air of being a hundred years old.[4]

Maybe the idea was to have it both at once. So then there would have been soul-wandering between Oldeb and Bedloe and a magnetic communication of Templeton's memories to the latter. However, if the guiding question is what accounts for the extraordinary thing that happens to the wanderer, then the answer seems to be overdetermined here. Bedloe, on this combined interpretation, lives through the experiences of his former incarnation and the recall of his physician which coincide with his trip; it's so vivid and coherent because it's his actual former live and the doctor's memories; and finally, it's triggered by his physical exhaustion and mental relaxation and via the magnetic rapport with Templeton. This seems to be too much of a good thing.

So here we are with two interpretations that are too weak individually and too strong if combined. That's a pity, because I'm now going to analyze an element in the story that seems to me particularly well done, namely: the way Bedloe's immersion in the world of his vision is narrated. I would have liked to have the question of the main story line out of the way; but as it is, it's going to hover unresolved over what I think can be extracted from that element.

[1] Edgar Allan Poe, "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains", in: The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Volume 3: Tales & Sketches II, edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, Cambridge: Belknap 1978, 935–953.

[2] The theory of Mesmerism with its 'magnetic rapport' that Poe builds into his story was widely discussed at his time. The view has been discarded long since, but there was some core of real phenomena behind it which is today known as hypnosis.

[3] But note that we're working here, of course, with the materials of the story. I don't mean to suggest that telepathy and the like take place in the real world. However, Poe himself might have assumed that at the time of writing his story — he might have taken it as valid science, that is, he might have been in the business of creating science fiction; or he might have assumed that his audience would take it as valid science. That's all that is required to base an interpretation of the story on it.

[4] It also seems to be a convention of the genre, at least for Poe, to kill off the host character after a successful soul transfer. That commonality might also count for categorizing it with metempsychosis plots. Compare "Morella", and "Ligeia".

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.

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.

Can unreality be more real than reality?

Some people claim that the worlds of fiction (in novels, or movies) are more real than the world around us, the everyday world. It's a paradoxical idea, but it seems a common one. Oscar Wilde, who had a taste for paradox, didn't let this opportunity pass and had his bad boy hero Lord Henry Wotton say of theatre performances: "I love acting. It's so more real than life."[1]

A little less playfully, Robert Nozick has remarked that

Some literary characters are more real than others. Think of Hamlet, Sherlock Holmes, Lear, Antigone, Don Quixote, Raskolnikov. Even though none of them exist, they seem more real even than some people we know who do exist. It is not that these literary characters are real because they are 'true to life', people we could meet believably. The reality of these characters consists in their vividness, their sharpness of detail, the integrated way in which they function toward or are tortured over a goal. [...] These characters are 'realer than life', more sharply etched, with few extraneous details that do not fit. [...] They are intensely concentrated portions of reality.[2][3]

(When I recently wrote my article about Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, I noticed the same impression of the main character, Aschenbach; I remarked there that

Mann’s whole carefully crafted framework of symbols and allusions, parallels and consequences, seems to have the singular purpose of producing a strongly coherent, compulsively unwinding plot which at closer examination leaves not the minutest detail to chance — everything’s in the scheme, so to speak. (And that’s what primarily constitutes the high literary quality and artistic value of the novella, after all.)

Philosophy often looks to literature (and, we might add, also to other highly sophisticated art forms such as drama or film), in order to find material to analyze or examples to use in demonstrations.

In seeking a reflective understanding of ethical life, for instance, [philosophy] quite often takes examples from literature. Why not take examples from life? It is a perfectly good question, and it has a short answer: what philosophers will lay before themselves and their readers as an alternative to literature will not be life, but bad literature.[4]

In other words, there is a reason why philosophers rely on literature for their examples instead of making up their own ones. Literature, as it were, is in the business of making good examples, whereas making up your own examples would risk making them too simple, or unrealistic — 'cartoonlike', as Bas van Frassen calls it:

An example could be a real happening or a story. But a cartoonlike sketch of a story is neither. Both in real life and in real literature, the observer finds himself in a context so rich that — despite the clear limitations on what he can observe — he has a basis for conclusions about thought and emotions. Cartoonlike sketches, however, do not generally give him such a base [...].[5]

So, carefully crafted literature (or, more generally: carefully crafted fiction) can bring us insights that are at least as good as those we can gain from life, that is, from our own experience. Combine this with the fact that we often have no way to experience certain situations ourselves (how could you know what it is to be a renowned writer such as Aschenbach unless you've had a similar career yourself?); thus in some way, fiction provides us with a repository of insights about the world which are just as authentic, but richer than what we could experience ourselves.

To connect back to the main theme of this blog: this function of fiction is a special case of the more general practice that I've called imagination — the process of generating unreality. Among other things, the function of imagination in our lives is to provide rich materials to fill us with a sense of purpose, and a sense of possibilities. (Which always must be counterbalanced by a closeness to reality, which results from the process I call 'reflection'.) Life just by itself couldn't give us all that. And that's why we have fiction (and unreality, more generally speaking).

[1] Oscar Wilde, The picture of Dorian Gray. In: Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, London: Collins 2003, 67.
[2] Robert Nozick, The examined life. Philosophical meditations. New York: Simon & Schuster 1989, 129–130.
[3] Note that Nozick, when he uses terms like 'real' and 'reality', employs them in a slightly different sense than the one I've used throughout this blog when I refer to forms of unreality. The literary characters Nozick talks about belong to instances of unreality (in my sense of the word), which Nozick expresses by saying that they "don't exist". Yet they have a profound effect on our world, in part by the process I've called sedimentation, and more generally by the fundamental role of our use of imagination in our lives. These aspects are what Nozick is about when he speaks of their (in his sense) being more real.
[4] Bernard Williams, Shame and necessity. Berkely: UC California Press 1993, 13.
[5] Bas C. van Fraassen, "The peculiar effects of love and desire", in: Perspectives on self-deception, ed. Brian P. McLaughlin and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, Berkeley: UC California Press, 1988, 123–156 128.

Appreciation of the craft

In order to get clearer about my concept of beauty, I'm looking first at artistic creation: beauty in literature, music and the arts.[1] I'm focusing on examples from literature for now, but the ideas I'm sketching here should apply more or less the same to all forms of artistic creation. I begin by introducing the notions of appreciation, aesthetic ascent, and performance.

1) Appreciation.[2] Let's start with an obvious and rather truistic point: when we try to understand a work of literature, there is at least one special dimension compared to trying to understand any narrative in everyday life. A work of literature doesn't just tell a story; it does that, but it does it in a special way. For our understanding of something as literature, the way how the story is told is at least as important as its content.

When we read an article in a newspaper (telling us about a political summit, for instance), or a report at work, what we are mostly interested in is what the narrative tells us, not how it is told. Not that the latter aspect doesn't matter: there is a typical style to newspaper articles or work reports, and if a text of that sort fails to comply to our expectations, we're irritated. Imagine a work report using obscure or flowery language, or a newspaper article written in verse. We would be surprised, and because of the unusual format, we would have difficulty reading it as a work report or newspaper article. So the way such a text is written is not immaterial—it must be written in a particular way. But if it is, then we are precisely not interested in the question in what way it is written. The craft aspect, so to speak, is transparent to us. Ideally, we want to be informed, and the best style for a text with that objective is a style that isn't perceived as style, that keeps in the background.

Consider yet another sort of narrative that also is part of daily life. When your friend tells you the amusing (or depressing, depending on where you stand) story how many forms she had to fill in to get her laptop connected to the company network, you're not mostly interested in what exactly happened. If she told you the story to amuse you, then a lot depends on how well she succeeds in making it fun to listen to it. In this case again, the way the story is told is far from unimportant; but again, it should be transparent—it's not necessary for you to notice exactly what makes the story funny, which stylistic elements (choice of words, body language, exploitation of shared opinions) are used, and how well they are employed. On the contrary: the story will probably fail to be amusing if you are made aware of these elements too often and too directly.

In all these examples it is of course possible to reflect on narrative style, and appreciate it. You can come to like a certain newspaper precisely because of its sober and informative style, you can appreciate a colleague's work reports for their matter-of-factness, and of course we can value a friend's talent for amusing storytelling. Such additional reflection and appreciation is not strictly necessary for the functioning of something as a newspaper article, a work report, or an amusing conversation. But it refines your perceptive and social interaction skills if you are capable of doing so (and if you actually do it a lot). It is also a step into the direction of appreciation of art, and literature in particular.

With literature, reflection on and appreciation of the way how things are said in a text are built right into the practice, both on the side of the producers and on the side of the recipients. In other words, authors are aware that it's not just the stories they tell, but also how they are telling them (their particular style, use of language and idioms, the way they construct the story and plot etc.) which is subject to interest and appreciation; and readers know that they must look at these aspects in order to fully 'get' what's going on in the text.

Auguste Toulmouche,
The reading lesson

 Understanding literature, then, must include perceiving and appreciating the 'how' it is made, in addition to the 'what' that it says. This is a skill that requires some development, and naturally it benefits from learning to apply the terms and concepts of technical language. If you are able to distinguish between plot and story, or between the narrator's and the character's perspectives, and if you can use these terms to refer to such differences in discourse with yourself and others, then you have reached a higher level of skill in understanding literature. Note that having a conceptual skill does not necessarily mean that you also have to use some given terminology; many readers have an understanding of the difference between the narrator's perspective and a character's perspective, although they may never have learned the technical use of 'narrator', 'character' and 'perspective' employed here. It's not the particular use of words that matters — what matters is the conceptual capacity.

[1] Further steps must surely include human beauty (including eros and desire) and beauty of nature (in both its main forms: the organism and the wilderness).

[2] This is a slightly reworked version of an earlier post about Reflection and interpretation over at my online journal.

Möglichkeitssinn

I have written on occasion that we need, in order to lead successful lives, both imagination (which lets us create unreality) and reflection (which cuts down unreality and keeps us close to reality); they're in a continuous interplay: if one of them would be dominated by the other, the result would be an unhealthful distortion.

Here's an imaginative formulation of the same line of thought from Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Musil entitles one of his chapters: "Wenn es Wirklichkeitssinn gibt, dann muß es auch Möglichkeitssinn geben", and continues:

Wer ihn besitzt, sagt beispielsweise nicht: Hier ist dies oder das geschehen, wird geschehen, muß geschehen; sondern er erfindet: Hier könnte, sollte oder müßte geschehn; und wenn man ihm von irgend etwas erklärt, daß es so sei, wie es sei, dann denkt er: Nun, es könnte wahrscheinlich auch anders sein.[1]

People with that sense for possibilities, the Möglichkeitssinn, aren't necessarily unable to cope with reality; some may be, but there we're talking about a weak variety: a "schwache Spielart [...], welche die Wirklichkeit nicht begreifen kann oder ihr wehleidig ausweicht, wo also das Fehlen des Wirklichkeitssinns wirklich einen Mangel bedeutet."[2] This is one of the extremes (imagination without counterbalancing reflection) I have referred to above when I said there's a danger of an unhealthful distortion.

In contrast, there are those who can see deeper:

"Ein mögliches Erlebnis oder eine mögliche Wahrheit sind nicht gleich einem wirklichen Erlebnis und wirklicher Wahrheit weniger dem Werte des Wirklichseins, sondern sie haben [...] etwas sehr Göttliches in sich, ein Feuer, einen Flug, einen Bauwillen und bewußten Utopismus, der die Wirklichkeit nicht scheut, wohl aber als Aufgabe und Erfindung behandelt. [...] Da seine Ideen [...] nichts als noch nicht geborene Wirklichkeiten bedeuten, hat natürlich auch er Wirklichkeitssinn; aber es ist ein Sinn für die mögliche Wirklichkeit und kommt viel langsamer ans Ziel als der den meisten Menschen eignende Sinn für ihre wirklichen Möglichkeiten.[3]

Even here Musil points (albeit gently) to that danger from too much imagination without counterbalancing reflection: "Ein unpraktischer Mann — und so erscheint er nicht nur, sondern ist er auch — bleibt unzuverlässig und unberechenbar im Verkehr mit Menschen."[4]

(From here on, Musil performs a subtle transition from this reflective passage into a description of his main character, partly by building oblique references to later events into the text. It's an intriguing technique, but I'm not going to follow this development here.)

[1] Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften; p. 16 in my paperback edition, Hamburg: Rowohlt 1987.
Note that Musil's notion of Möglichkeitssinn is a very broad notion (just as my notion of imagination).
[2] Ibd.
[3] Ibd., 16–17
[4] Ibd., 17

Songs and Sonnets

I almost never listen to the radio, except per accident sometimes. When I recently did so, a song was playing that began with these lyrics:

I talked to my baby on the telephone long distance,
I never would have guessed I could miss someone so bad.
I really only met her 'bout a week ago;
it doesn't seem to matter to my heart. I know
I love her. I'm hoping that I'll never recover
[...]

Well, and so on. (As I learned, it's an older song by Andrew Gold, but what I heard was a cover version. The lyrics were the same. I might also add that this particular song somehow moved me, partly because, as fortune plays, at the time I was practically in the exact situation that the song invoked.)

Picture by Alex Baranda

Now, the interesting thing about this is of course how unreality is constructed here. Sometimes songs do this by telling a story, but here we have only a story in the very widest sense of that word: there is no plot (i.e. no sequence of events, actions and motives, causes and effects), there are no characters (people who do something in the story), and there is no conflict, no personal development or anything of the sort. Instead, what the song does is to invoke a feeling; it brings out a certain attitude and emotion on the part of the 'I', the subject of the text. (Which is neither necessarily the author of the lyrics nor the singer; it's a fictional person who formulates the lyrics from his point of view.) In short, it's what in literature is called a lyrical form, as contrasted with a dramatic or narrative one.

And yet it creates unreality. Even if you simply want to express a feeling, that's what you have to do. You can't evoke a feeling by simply naming it, for instance. (Everyone knows how difficult it is to find the words to express feelings, and there's a reason for that: feelings are not the sort of thing that can be easily and precisely named, to bring out a certain feeling well, you have to do much more.) You can, however, describe a situation, a constellation, something that brings you into a context, into (to put it a little exaggeratedly) a world that makes it easy to feel exactly what is to be expressed here.

Take a look at how that world is built up gradually by the lyrics of that song. The first two lines show us a subject who is in a relationship (talks to his 'baby') and currently separated (so he has to talk to her long-distance over the phone). It's implied that the separation is not simply the normal everybody's-got-their-workday separation but something vaguely long-term and far-distance. Then there's the expression of longing (missing someone 'so bad') which is brought into a superlative (he's not only never experienced missing someone so strongly before, but he wasn't even aware that it would be possible as intensely as it in fact is). So far we have a world in which two loving people are separated and at least one of them feels a strong longing. Now lines 3–5 amplify the situation thus created by making the constellation more rare: now we learn that it's a relationship that's just started some weeks ago. (Not that I want to be cynical, in part this explains the strength of the feeling. Fresh feelings are always the most intense ones.) Even so, the feeling seems absolute (no recovery is desired). And so on...

Without creating a situation, something you could imagine as a world or constellation in which you might find yourself, it would be hard to even come to terms with the feeling that is invoked here, let alone bringing it about in the listener. As it is, the song creates, line by line, an awareness of the situation, and thus prepares the stage for the emotional content it wants to transfer. (The rest of the lyrics continues this situation-building interspersed with expressions of what it feels like. If it was only the latter, the song would feel intolerably sentimental.)

Needless to say that use of this technique is not a prerogative of Californian love songs. Compare this sonnet by Shakespeare (no 61), which evokes jealousy:

Is it thy will, thy image should keep open
My heavy eyelids to the weary night?
Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,
While shadows like to thee do mock my sight?

Is it thy spirit that thou send'st from thee
So far from home into my deeds to pry,
To find out shames and idle hours in me,
The scope and tenor of thy jealousy?

O, no! thy love, though much, is not so great:
It is my love that keeps mine eye awake:
Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat,
To play the watchman ever for thy sake:

    For thee watch I, whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,
    From me far off, with others all too near.

We have the same ingredients here: one person, much in love, from whose viewpoint all this is written (the 'I' in the text); the other person far removed, but strongly felt about. In the 20th century song, long-distance telephone lines were used to generate a sense of spatial separation, and the temporal dimension of the relationship was alluded to by referring to it's comparatively short duration so far ('met her 'bout a week ago'). In the 16th century poem, the scenery is more intimate: the subject can't find sleep, his eyes are kept open, he sees his beloved in some shadows similar in shape (similar to what exactly we aren't told). As befits a jealousy constellation, there is also a pointed mention of those 'others' who are all too near the beloved one — this is a thought that can generate limitless jealousy, and consequently it's put at the most prominent (and most effective) position in the text: at the end. Interspersed are many expressions of how it feels to be in that state, and even though the feeling is made out as quite overwhelming, it is also clearly reflected as self-inflicted ('It is my love that keeps mine eye awake'): jealousy, although it's painful, is also an expression of the depth and intensity of one's own love, and it's as such that it is presented here. We, however (just as the addressed lover, too) would not be able to feel it if it wasn't staged in a scene as it is. Emotional effectiveness is produced by use of unreality.

Although the poetic imagery (and the beauty of language) are much more intense in the classic sonnet, both texts have much in common in their use of unreality for meeting their targets. Keep your eyes open, you will find that technique everywhere...