Let's begin to clarify some notions. I have introduced the idea of traveling into an instance of unreality, such as the fictional world of a movie, or a dream. The use of 'traveling' is highly metaphorical, of course: if you travel, that means a change in location, usually going from some origin location to a fairly distant destination location; and the act of traveling itself typically takes time. Obviously, in the normal use of 'traveling', both the origin and the destination locations are places in the real world, to be reached by some means of transport. Another element of the meaning of 'traveling' has to do with what one experiences: broadly speaking, you're widening your horizon, see new and unfamiliar places, strange customs (strange, that is, to you, not to the people in the places you visit).
The trips I have illustrated in my recent series of posts can be metaphorically described as 'traveling' into an unreal world, because some of these meaning elements still apply: there is an origin location and a destination location, which is removed and distant. The process of passage itself doesn't take much time, but the trip as a whole occupies a span of time during which the passenger cannot interact with the origin location any more. There are strange and unusual things going on at the destination location, making for a new and stimulating experience. (That's the point, after all, of using passage as a dramatic device in fiction. The movies from which I have extracted some excerpts for demonstration all rely on passage to get some central plot lines going.)
There's an important difference, too. The distance between the origin and the destination is not a spatial difference, as the distance between two places in the real world is. Rather, it's the gap between the real world and an unreal world — the difference (however it is conceived) between reality and fiction, or reality and dreams, reality and memories, and so on. I have used the term 'metaphysical apartness' before: just as the metaphorical use of 'passage' and 'trip', that term also suggests some kind of gap or distance — and the gap or distance is taken to be metaphysical, that is, to be described in terms of reality and unreality (metaphysics being the study of what, in general, makes up reality).
Describing something as a journey adds another important element: it suggests a continuous, linear structure. There is a departure (possibly some preparation before), then there are the events of the trip itself, including the actual travel, the arrival at the destination location, the events there, and then in reverse the trip back with its final arrival at the origin. All these events typically form a continuous process with an ordered structure. Even more important, this structure is tied to the experience of a traveler: it only makes sense to bring events in that order with reference to someone who undergoes the process. Without a traveler from whose point of view there is a time-ordered series of events, there is no such thing as a journey.
In all the illustrations I've given, the perspective of the passenger (one or more characters in the movie) is crucial. That is why the plot usually follows the perspective of the character who undertakes the journey very closely. The only deviation from this principle is the technique I have called 'shifted transfer'.
The Phenomenology of the Unreal
Showing posts with label metaphysical apartness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label metaphysical apartness. Show all posts
May 15, 2012
January 30, 2012
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:
You can download the pdf version here.
The table of contents looks like this:
Preface
Activities
Living your life · Reflection · Imagination · PhilosophyGoals
Beauty · Excellence of character · EudaimoniaTheory
Unreality · Interplay · Apartness · PresentReferences
July 16, 2011
Metaphysical apartness and aesthetic ascent
This continues directly my previous post on metaphysical apartness and the stage. I quoted Bernard Williams' observation that there are two different levels of what we see when we're in a theatre audience. We see both Othello strangling Desdemona and we see the actors in those two roles, acting out the events of the drama. Likewise, we're looking both at the palace in Venice and at a scenery which represents that palace. For many purposes, we can just take that scenery to be the palace. But in some respects, we can't. As Williams says, "when in a play someone sets fire to the palace, they do not, hopefully, set fire to the scenery."[1] They're not identical; they're, strictly speaking, different things.
Note that, however immersed we may be in the action when we're watching the dramatic events unfold, we are always aware of that difference. You wouldn't calmly remain in your seat if you thought that the facade of that building in front of you, just a few steps away, were catching fire for real. Likewise, if someone started strangling another person just before your eyes, you wouldn't just sit there and watch, would you?
(There is an extensive discussion in recent philosophy about how exactly unreal events like these can still trigger something resembling authentic emotions, how you could be, as in the title of one influential paper, "fearing fictions".[2] The central question here is why an emotion such as empathy for Desdemona or anger at Othello is felt in the audience but doesn't, as it would in real life, trigger any action at all. Why do emotions in the real world motivate us to do something whereas they simply leave us transfixed and immersed when we're at the theatre or in the cinema?)
In that earlier post I looked at spatial relations and the notion of a point of view. There is, however, also a connection to what I've called aesthetic ascent.
That we can see things thus in two different ways (the world of the play: Othello, the palace, the strangling vs. the real world: actors, a scenery, and acting) is a condition for making the step from immersion in the world of the play to the levels of comparison and appreciation. We can only begin to compare Shakespeare's play to other plays with similar plots, or the particular stage design to that of other productions, or these particular actors to others doing the same part, if there is some discernible difference between, say, watching Othello strangle Desdemona and watching Sir Laurence Olivier and Dame Maggie Smith acting — performing that strangling scene in act V. (It seems that Williams was able to do so; nowadays, our only chance would be on video.)
Even though the world of a fiction can have our full and undivided attention at the level of immersion in the aesthetic ascent; even if we might, for a period, use our capacities of perception and imagination exclusively following the plot of a novel, play, or movie (and, in a more general sense, even a dream, a scenario, a memory or a future plan); even if nothing about the real world occurs to us for quite some time (such as our sitting in a theatre seat or reading chair, the fact that there are other performances of that same play, different tellings of that same story, varying interpretations of what's going on or how it might sediment itself in reality) — even so we are never part of that fictional world; we're in the real world, and thus can never be in the world of an instance of unreality.
At the same time, this apartness is the basis for aesthetic ascent: leaving the level of immersion and comparing that which is going on with other, similar instances. Making this step means to switch between the two ways of looking at things Williams distinguishes: switching between seeing the palace (when immersed) and the scenery (when comparing).
(There is an extensive discussion in recent philosophy about how exactly unreal events like these can still trigger something resembling authentic emotions, how you could be, as in the title of one influential paper, "fearing fictions".[2] The central question here is why an emotion such as empathy for Desdemona or anger at Othello is felt in the audience but doesn't, as it would in real life, trigger any action at all. Why do emotions in the real world motivate us to do something whereas they simply leave us transfixed and immersed when we're at the theatre or in the cinema?)
In that earlier post I looked at spatial relations and the notion of a point of view. There is, however, also a connection to what I've called aesthetic ascent.
That we can see things thus in two different ways (the world of the play: Othello, the palace, the strangling vs. the real world: actors, a scenery, and acting) is a condition for making the step from immersion in the world of the play to the levels of comparison and appreciation. We can only begin to compare Shakespeare's play to other plays with similar plots, or the particular stage design to that of other productions, or these particular actors to others doing the same part, if there is some discernible difference between, say, watching Othello strangle Desdemona and watching Sir Laurence Olivier and Dame Maggie Smith acting — performing that strangling scene in act V. (It seems that Williams was able to do so; nowadays, our only chance would be on video.)
Even though the world of a fiction can have our full and undivided attention at the level of immersion in the aesthetic ascent; even if we might, for a period, use our capacities of perception and imagination exclusively following the plot of a novel, play, or movie (and, in a more general sense, even a dream, a scenario, a memory or a future plan); even if nothing about the real world occurs to us for quite some time (such as our sitting in a theatre seat or reading chair, the fact that there are other performances of that same play, different tellings of that same story, varying interpretations of what's going on or how it might sediment itself in reality) — even so we are never part of that fictional world; we're in the real world, and thus can never be in the world of an instance of unreality.
At the same time, this apartness is the basis for aesthetic ascent: leaving the level of immersion and comparing that which is going on with other, similar instances. Making this step means to switch between the two ways of looking at things Williams distinguishes: switching between seeing the palace (when immersed) and the scenery (when comparing).
[1] Bernard Williams, "Imagination and the self", in: Problems of the self. Philosophical Papers 1956–1972, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1973, 26–45, 35.
[2] Kendall Walton, "Fearing fictions", in: Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978), 6–27.
July 11, 2011
Metaphysical apartness, perspective, and the stage
At one point Bernard Williams raises the example of stage plays, and he points out that
For instance, Othello does strangle Desdemona in Shakespeare's play, and there is a sense in which we (the audience) witness that murderous act: we watch Othello strangle Desdemona when act V has arrived. And yet we don't watch the actor who plays Othello strangle the actress playing Desdemona, for he doesn't: he's just acting. We can say that we watch that actor pretending to perform a jealous murder, and we can say that we watch Othello murdering; and for many purposes, there's not really a difference. But still we're talking about different things.
Williams makes this point in terms of formal identity:
2) One consequence is that there are, strictly speaking, no spatial relations between the audience and the characters, although there are spatial relations between the audience and the actors (or the scenery). Again, "the audience at such a play are spectators of a world they are not in. They see what they may well describe as, say, Othello in front of a certain palace in Venice; [...] But they are not themselves at any specifiable distance from that palace; unlike Othello, who may be (thus he may be just about to enter it)." (35)
However (and this is where it gets interesting), there is still something like a 'point of view', a perspective from which the whole thing is observed. ('The whole thing' meaning here the world of the play, including the scenery, props, and actors moving around and doing whatever they need to do to constitute the actions of their characters.) When the audience sees the palace, "they are presented with [...] a certain view of that palace, e.g. a view of its front." (35)
Note first, then, that this perspective is not simply constituted by spatial relations. A point of view is not simply equivalent to 'looking from a given spatial direction'. For who's looking here? It's not the characters. There could easily be a scene in which none of the characters looks at the palace, and it would still be there, as seen from a certain point of view. So it must be the point of view of the audience. But once more, "we are, as spectators, at a certain distance from the scenery and the actors, but not from the palace or from Othello" (36). It's not the spatial relationship from which the perspective results.
This becomes even clearer when we switch from stage examples to film, where the perspective can be from any point in space, and typically will even move around: the point of view is now that of the camera, and thus no longer fixed by the spatial location of the audience in their theatre seats. While in a stage play there is only so much possibility of having the fictional world presented from various locations in space, there is an infinity of such possibilities in a movie. (Even though there is still the same basic setup of an audience sitting on seats in rows facing a fixed screen of certain dimensions. That very setup has now lost even the small power it had over point of view with theatre audiences. Of course, with this additional freedom comes also loss: namely, there is no longer the direct physical presence of the actors, which marks one of the primary differences between film and theatre.)
Thus for the worlds of movies holds what holds for the worlds of plays: we're not in those worlds. We're not looking at them in the way an inhabitant of that world would look at them. The point of view from which we watch isn't one from within that world.
Perspective doesn't imply an act of perceiving within the world unto which it is a perspective. (That's the idea that Williams uses for his attack on Berkeley.) Another way to put this is that there can be perspectives on instances of unreality and metaphysical apartness can still hold.
"we as spectators are not in the world of the play itself; we — in a sense — see what is happening in that world, but not in the same sense as that in which we see the actors" (36)[1].1) So Williams distinguishes two senses of seeing what's happening, two senses, that is, of observing the events on stage. We (the audience) who are outside the fictional world witness those events in a different way than the characters, who are inside.
For instance, Othello does strangle Desdemona in Shakespeare's play, and there is a sense in which we (the audience) witness that murderous act: we watch Othello strangle Desdemona when act V has arrived. And yet we don't watch the actor who plays Othello strangle the actress playing Desdemona, for he doesn't: he's just acting. We can say that we watch that actor pretending to perform a jealous murder, and we can say that we watch Othello murdering; and for many purposes, there's not really a difference. But still we're talking about different things.
Williams makes this point in terms of formal identity:
"[the audience] would not be seeing Othello unless they were seeing Sir Laurence [Olivier] or another real man moving around [...]. But we must not say that the reason why, in seeing Sir Laurence, they see Othello, is that Sir Laurence is Othello, at least if that 'is' is the 'is' of identity. For if Sir Laurence is Othello, then Miss Maggie Smith, or whoever, is Desdemona, and since Othello strangles Desdemona, it would follow that Sir Laurence strangles Miss Smith, which is false. [...] I see Othello strangle Desdemona; but that will not entail that I, as part of my biography, have ever seen anyone strangle anyone." (34, 35)In other words, although what these actors do constitute the events in the world of the play, there are still two different things to be observed: the playing, and what's played. And what goes for the events also goes for the physical items, such as props and scenery: "when in a play someone sets fire to the palace, they do not, hopefully, set fire to the scenery." (35)
2) One consequence is that there are, strictly speaking, no spatial relations between the audience and the characters, although there are spatial relations between the audience and the actors (or the scenery). Again, "the audience at such a play are spectators of a world they are not in. They see what they may well describe as, say, Othello in front of a certain palace in Venice; [...] But they are not themselves at any specifiable distance from that palace; unlike Othello, who may be (thus he may be just about to enter it)." (35)
However (and this is where it gets interesting), there is still something like a 'point of view', a perspective from which the whole thing is observed. ('The whole thing' meaning here the world of the play, including the scenery, props, and actors moving around and doing whatever they need to do to constitute the actions of their characters.) When the audience sees the palace, "they are presented with [...] a certain view of that palace, e.g. a view of its front." (35)
Note first, then, that this perspective is not simply constituted by spatial relations. A point of view is not simply equivalent to 'looking from a given spatial direction'. For who's looking here? It's not the characters. There could easily be a scene in which none of the characters looks at the palace, and it would still be there, as seen from a certain point of view. So it must be the point of view of the audience. But once more, "we are, as spectators, at a certain distance from the scenery and the actors, but not from the palace or from Othello" (36). It's not the spatial relationship from which the perspective results.
This becomes even clearer when we switch from stage examples to film, where the perspective can be from any point in space, and typically will even move around: the point of view is now that of the camera, and thus no longer fixed by the spatial location of the audience in their theatre seats. While in a stage play there is only so much possibility of having the fictional world presented from various locations in space, there is an infinity of such possibilities in a movie. (Even though there is still the same basic setup of an audience sitting on seats in rows facing a fixed screen of certain dimensions. That very setup has now lost even the small power it had over point of view with theatre audiences. Of course, with this additional freedom comes also loss: namely, there is no longer the direct physical presence of the actors, which marks one of the primary differences between film and theatre.)
Thus for the worlds of movies holds what holds for the worlds of plays: we're not in those worlds. We're not looking at them in the way an inhabitant of that world would look at them. The point of view from which we watch isn't one from within that world.
"We cannot say [...] that it is our point of view: for we are not, in the usual case, invited to have the feeling that we are near to this castle, floating towards its top, or stealing around those lovers, peering minutely at them. [...] One thing, in the general run, is certain: we are not there. Nor, again, can we say in any simple way that this point of view is the director's [...], since we are no more invited to think of Griffith or Antonioni floating up towers or creeping around lovers. [...] In the standard case, it is not anybody's point of view. Yet we see the characters and action from that point of view". (36–37)3) I have extracted this line of thought from Williams' article partly because it is such a nice illustration for what I mean by the metaphysical apartness of fictional worlds. But there's at least one more interesting aspect to it. Williams' guiding question is whether we can visualize unseen things; the line of example is intended to show that in a stage play or movie, things can happen 'unseen', in the non-trivial sense "in which the playwright can provide the direction 'Enter First Murderer unobserved', and yet still consistently hope that his piece will have an audience, an audience who will indeed see this unobserved murderer" (36). The fact that we visualize things from some point of view, as if we did perceive them from that point of view, doesn't mean that there must be someone within the visualized world perceiving things from that point of view (37).
Perspective doesn't imply an act of perceiving within the world unto which it is a perspective. (That's the idea that Williams uses for his attack on Berkeley.) Another way to put this is that there can be perspectives on instances of unreality and metaphysical apartness can still hold.
[1] Bernard Williams, "Imagination and the self", in: Problems of the self. Philosophical Papers 1956–1972, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1973, 26–45, quoted by page in the text.
January 6, 2011
De-Lineating unreality
Here's a fun exercise in spotting the borders of unreality. (Thanks to Frank for suggesting it to me :-)
La Linea (or "The Line") is a minimalistic cartoon set in a world which mostly consists of a line. It comes to life by being shaped as a person who moves along the one dimension of its world. Most of the events that make up the plot of the episodes come from obstacles added to that world; the obstacles are built into the very line which also is the material of the main character, but they are deliberately played with by a hand (presumably that of the artist). Sometimes the hand removes the ground on which the character can move; sometimes it provides the character with helpful devices, or simply fills in holes in the floor. At one point, the hand helpfully pushes an elevator a few inches in order to close up with the floor and allow the character to move on (at around 1:15 in the video).
Now I've suggested that worlds of fiction are characterized by metaphysical apartness, and this one is no exception. This means that we could no be part of that world, that we'd be no actor within it; we're limited to observing it.
But if that is so, then what about the hand? Isn't this a case where the fictional world (the world of the line and its inhabitant) and the real world (our world, where we, among other things, can use our hands to move things around) connect and interact, where they aren't separated any more? Is not, in other words, this real/fictional-world couple a counterexample to what I've claimed? What we seem to see here is a connection, a direct interaction (going both ways) between the real world and the fictional line world.
I don't think so, and the reason has to do with where exactly the borders between the imagined world and reality run.[1] The interaction between the hand and the line character is not a case of reality-fiction interaction because both of its elements are part of the fictional world. The hand is just as much a character in that world as the line person is. You can make the test: your hand couldn't do the things this hand can do. Not even the artist's hand could do that: what you can see is not a physical interaction between the hand and the line, it's just an impression to that effect created by a technical trick. (Which is of course a common thing in film and television; the point here is just to show that all of it firmly belongs into the fictional world.)
So the fictional world comprises a little more than it looked like at the beginning; but once we've sorted this out, there is really no more question about metaphysical apartness holding between the real world and this particular sort of fictional world. Again: those two are separated, in such a way that we, as inhabitants of the real world, couldn't be part of the fictional world, we couldn't be inside it. And that is not just a separation in practice (such as when you are watching what happens on the other side of the street, but can't do anything about whatever you observe). It's a separation in principle: you, as a part of the real world, couldn't possibly be inside that fictional world (in the case of looking over the street, you might have been over there, you could have crossed the street a couple of minutes ago, and then you would have been part of what's going on over there right now — but there's no such thing that you could have done in order to become part of the line/hand world). (Sidenote: that you can't be part of it doesn't mean that such a world doesn't share some structure with the real world. In fact, every fictional world has a lot in common with the real world. In the case of La Linea, there is still time structure, some sort of gravity, energetic Italian exclamations, and the like, which is all at least similar to the real world. However, for all that, you can't be in that world.)
In summary: this nice little example gives us not only another, slightly different sort of imaginary world (an imaginative one, to be sure) to test the criterion of metaphysical apartness as a marker of unreality; it also helps to show the importance of looking closely where the borders between fiction and reality run, and distinguishing carefully what's part of reality and what is still unreal.
La Linea (or "The Line") is a minimalistic cartoon set in a world which mostly consists of a line. It comes to life by being shaped as a person who moves along the one dimension of its world. Most of the events that make up the plot of the episodes come from obstacles added to that world; the obstacles are built into the very line which also is the material of the main character, but they are deliberately played with by a hand (presumably that of the artist). Sometimes the hand removes the ground on which the character can move; sometimes it provides the character with helpful devices, or simply fills in holes in the floor. At one point, the hand helpfully pushes an elevator a few inches in order to close up with the floor and allow the character to move on (at around 1:15 in the video).
Now I've suggested that worlds of fiction are characterized by metaphysical apartness, and this one is no exception. This means that we could no be part of that world, that we'd be no actor within it; we're limited to observing it.
But if that is so, then what about the hand? Isn't this a case where the fictional world (the world of the line and its inhabitant) and the real world (our world, where we, among other things, can use our hands to move things around) connect and interact, where they aren't separated any more? Is not, in other words, this real/fictional-world couple a counterexample to what I've claimed? What we seem to see here is a connection, a direct interaction (going both ways) between the real world and the fictional line world.
I don't think so, and the reason has to do with where exactly the borders between the imagined world and reality run.[1] The interaction between the hand and the line character is not a case of reality-fiction interaction because both of its elements are part of the fictional world. The hand is just as much a character in that world as the line person is. You can make the test: your hand couldn't do the things this hand can do. Not even the artist's hand could do that: what you can see is not a physical interaction between the hand and the line, it's just an impression to that effect created by a technical trick. (Which is of course a common thing in film and television; the point here is just to show that all of it firmly belongs into the fictional world.)
So the fictional world comprises a little more than it looked like at the beginning; but once we've sorted this out, there is really no more question about metaphysical apartness holding between the real world and this particular sort of fictional world. Again: those two are separated, in such a way that we, as inhabitants of the real world, couldn't be part of the fictional world, we couldn't be inside it. And that is not just a separation in practice (such as when you are watching what happens on the other side of the street, but can't do anything about whatever you observe). It's a separation in principle: you, as a part of the real world, couldn't possibly be inside that fictional world (in the case of looking over the street, you might have been over there, you could have crossed the street a couple of minutes ago, and then you would have been part of what's going on over there right now — but there's no such thing that you could have done in order to become part of the line/hand world). (Sidenote: that you can't be part of it doesn't mean that such a world doesn't share some structure with the real world. In fact, every fictional world has a lot in common with the real world. In the case of La Linea, there is still time structure, some sort of gravity, energetic Italian exclamations, and the like, which is all at least similar to the real world. However, for all that, you can't be in that world.)
In summary: this nice little example gives us not only another, slightly different sort of imaginary world (an imaginative one, to be sure) to test the criterion of metaphysical apartness as a marker of unreality; it also helps to show the importance of looking closely where the borders between fiction and reality run, and distinguishing carefully what's part of reality and what is still unreal.
[1] Being able to exactly pin down where the lines run between fiction and reality is very important; if one doesn't, one might very well end up with shrill, though interesting-sounding, theories about self-interpreting texts and multi-level fiction/reality fusions which really have no other basis than someone's not looking carefully. I've criticized that sort of line-blurring in the research literature on Kafka's Über Gleichnisse in my BA's thesis.
January 3, 2011
Less apart than fiction
I recently watched Stranger than fiction, a movie which uses a dramatic technique I call 'suspension of metaphysical apartness'.[1]
Metaphysical apartness means that the world of the movie (just as any fictional world, including those of novels, video games, or the like) is separated from the real world, it's 'apart' from it. Intuitively, the criterion for this is that we, the audience, are not in that fictional world, cannot be part of it — we're always outside it, merely observing. (Unless of course we are the author ourselves, in which case we're certainly not just observing, but creating the fictional world in question.) You can't walk or travel into a fictional world, have conversations with the characters in it, influence their actions and so on.
However, there are no limits to poetic license, and what you can't do in the real world, someone might just be able to do in a made-up world: imagine you are watching a movie in which an author writes a novel, and then steps directly into the novel she has written, perhaps with the help of some mysterious machine. Note that now we have three different worlds: the real world (in which you are watching the movie), the world of the movie, in which the author is writing and then entering her novel, and the world of that novel. Metaphysical apartness still holds between the real world and the world of the movie (it always holds between the real world and any fictional world). But there is no metaphysical apartness between the world of the movie and the fiction-within-fiction which is the world of the novel. Or, to put it differently, the law about metaphysical apartness is not in force in the world of the movie.
There is nothing overly surprising about that, of course. Just as you can think up a story which takes place in a universe in which the laws of physics are no longer in place (commonplace in science fiction of a certain sort), you can think up a story where the laws that govern fictionality are suspended. Remember, though, that this only works for fictional worlds and their fictions-in-fiction. It can't work for the relationship between reality and fiction, because the possibility to suspend laws that hold in reality itself can only arise in unreality.
In "Stranger than fiction", a writer (brillantly played by Emma Thompson) creates a fictional world in which the main character (also excellent: Will Ferrell) lives his life. In the beginning of the movie, we observe him going through a morning routine, while the author's voice describes it for us at the same time, thereby introducing the character. Thus far it's an unremarkable situation; it is common to have a voiceover narration in movies to get us into the story. It gets more interesting, however, when it turns out that the character himself can hear the narrator's voice. (A little later in the movie he describes it like this: "It's just a voice in my head. [...] It's telling me what I've already done... accurately, and with a better vocabulary.") This is where we realize that we're in a two-worlds situation (the world of the movie and the world of a novel that's written by one of the movie characters), and one in which the two worlds are not apart enough to prevent interaction between their inhabitants.
Strangely enough, all the impulses that cross the line between the two worlds come from within the inner-fiction world, i.e. from the world of the novel, the fiction-within-fiction. Since it is the world of the novel, however, we'd expect the author of that world to be omniscient (and controlling) of that world, and thus of all the thoughts and actions of its characters, too. In particular, shouldn't the author have known about the attempts of the main character to find her and prevent her from continuing and finishing the book? But she doesn't. (And of course, the movie would have been pretty boring if she had.)
The point here is not that the author should have known that the things she describes actually happen in her world (the world of the movie and the world of the novel overlapping each other to a significant degree); she finds that out empirically when she writes down the lines about the telephone ringing, and then hears the immediate effect when the telephone actually does ring. The point here, rather, is that insofar events happen in the novel-world, she'd have to know about them, and their motives. That's what seems not to be the case. There seems to be no clear and principled reason why she knows and controls some aspects of the fictional world she created and is ignorant about others. So presumably, there is a price to be paid, in the form of arbitrariness and inconsistency, for bending a law of fictionality.
Metaphysical apartness means that the world of the movie (just as any fictional world, including those of novels, video games, or the like) is separated from the real world, it's 'apart' from it. Intuitively, the criterion for this is that we, the audience, are not in that fictional world, cannot be part of it — we're always outside it, merely observing. (Unless of course we are the author ourselves, in which case we're certainly not just observing, but creating the fictional world in question.) You can't walk or travel into a fictional world, have conversations with the characters in it, influence their actions and so on.
However, there are no limits to poetic license, and what you can't do in the real world, someone might just be able to do in a made-up world: imagine you are watching a movie in which an author writes a novel, and then steps directly into the novel she has written, perhaps with the help of some mysterious machine. Note that now we have three different worlds: the real world (in which you are watching the movie), the world of the movie, in which the author is writing and then entering her novel, and the world of that novel. Metaphysical apartness still holds between the real world and the world of the movie (it always holds between the real world and any fictional world). But there is no metaphysical apartness between the world of the movie and the fiction-within-fiction which is the world of the novel. Or, to put it differently, the law about metaphysical apartness is not in force in the world of the movie.
There is nothing overly surprising about that, of course. Just as you can think up a story which takes place in a universe in which the laws of physics are no longer in place (commonplace in science fiction of a certain sort), you can think up a story where the laws that govern fictionality are suspended. Remember, though, that this only works for fictional worlds and their fictions-in-fiction. It can't work for the relationship between reality and fiction, because the possibility to suspend laws that hold in reality itself can only arise in unreality.
In "Stranger than fiction", a writer (brillantly played by Emma Thompson) creates a fictional world in which the main character (also excellent: Will Ferrell) lives his life. In the beginning of the movie, we observe him going through a morning routine, while the author's voice describes it for us at the same time, thereby introducing the character. Thus far it's an unremarkable situation; it is common to have a voiceover narration in movies to get us into the story. It gets more interesting, however, when it turns out that the character himself can hear the narrator's voice. (A little later in the movie he describes it like this: "It's just a voice in my head. [...] It's telling me what I've already done... accurately, and with a better vocabulary.") This is where we realize that we're in a two-worlds situation (the world of the movie and the world of a novel that's written by one of the movie characters), and one in which the two worlds are not apart enough to prevent interaction between their inhabitants.
Strangely enough, all the impulses that cross the line between the two worlds come from within the inner-fiction world, i.e. from the world of the novel, the fiction-within-fiction. Since it is the world of the novel, however, we'd expect the author of that world to be omniscient (and controlling) of that world, and thus of all the thoughts and actions of its characters, too. In particular, shouldn't the author have known about the attempts of the main character to find her and prevent her from continuing and finishing the book? But she doesn't. (And of course, the movie would have been pretty boring if she had.)
The point here is not that the author should have known that the things she describes actually happen in her world (the world of the movie and the world of the novel overlapping each other to a significant degree); she finds that out empirically when she writes down the lines about the telephone ringing, and then hears the immediate effect when the telephone actually does ring. The point here, rather, is that insofar events happen in the novel-world, she'd have to know about them, and their motives. That's what seems not to be the case. There seems to be no clear and principled reason why she knows and controls some aspects of the fictional world she created and is ignorant about others. So presumably, there is a price to be paid, in the form of arbitrariness and inconsistency, for bending a law of fictionality.
[1] The term 'metaphysical apartness' is originally from Roger Scruton's Aesthetics of music, where it is used in a more narrow sense; I've discussed it a little in an earlier journal entry. Here, I use it in a somewhat different way, but I won't go into the reasons and motivations for that different usage at this point. I've also noted elsewhere a suspension of metaphysical apartness in Jasper Fforde's novels which is similar in some respects to the one discussed here in "Stranger than fiction".
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