Hinting at the difference

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greek names

James Axton is an American who lives in Greece and works as an investigator for an insurance company with interests in Mediterranean and Middle East countries. He doesn't speak Greek well (and tends to avoid the ancient cultural monuments). Often when he talks to Niko, the concierge of his apartment building, he is ashamed of his bad pronunciation; so after a while he answers questions about where he is going not by telling the names of the actual places he goes to, but instead by giving those names he can easily pronounce. He is a little uneasy about doing so, however.

I felt childish, of course. [...] But the lies began to worry me after a while in a way that had nothing to do with childishness. There was something metaphysically disturbing about them. A grave misplacement. They were not simple but complex. What was I tampering with, the human faith in naming, the lifelong system of images in Niko's brain? I was leaving behind in the person of the concierge an enormous discrepancy between my uttered journey and the actual movements I made in the external world, a four-thousand-mile fiction, a deep lie.

The lie was deeper in Greek than it would have been in English. I knew this without knowing why. Could reality be phonetic, a matter of gutturals and dentals? The smoky crowded places where we did business were not always as different to us as the names assigned to them. We needed the names to tell them apart [...]. (Don DeLillo, The Names; p. 103 in my paperback edition, NY: Vintage Books 1989.)

James is a character in Don DeLillo's novel The Names, and his reflections on his own escape technique throw an interesting light on what I've previously called sedimentation of unreality: when unreality in whichever form (fiction, hypotheses, lies — even those harmless ones of the kind James uses) is taken for real and acted upon, when others build their views on them, then it quickly becomes a layer of reality itself, and irreversibly so.

In DeLillo's book, reality and its relationship with signs, language, and texts is hard to get a grip on. The quoted passage somehow fits with the main plot line of a curious sect which seemingly randomly kills people whose names' initials match those of the location of the murder: there is a suspicion that there is nothing meaningful, no structure or direction behind their path, any more than behind the faceless nondistinct business surroundings referred to above in the quotation; only the arbitrary symbolism of the names brings some kind of distinction into it at all, but that hasn't any real meaning to it, either.

The novel presses this motif home when one cult member defects and starts explaining. At first his account seems to provide "an element of motivation, of attitudes and needs", whereas "[t]he cult's power, its psychic grip, was based on an absence of such things. No sense, no content, no historic bond, no ritual significance." (216) But then again, this is quickly revealed as the personal recoil of a dissident; quite opposite from giving an insight into the mindset of the cult, it once more only gives an impression of what is missing. "These meetings were a way of turning himself toward the air of worldly reason, of conventional sense and its manipulations. He was raising a call for pity and forgiveness." (Ibd.)

Things are systematically left obscure; only the constant flow of symbols remains — names —, and there's nothing behind those. The effect is a deep uneasiness in us as readers (a commentator has called the book 'haunting'), not quite unlike the one James Axton professes to feel in the quote above. There is a deep suspicion that drifting away too far from reality (and even being led away from reality systematically and intentionally), isn't good for us.

Unreality and prefiguration of death (in Venice)

I've finally completed a paper that collects various ideas from my online journal over at leiffrenzel.de; together they make up an interpretation of Thomas Mann's novella Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) which has various connections to the discussion of unreality here. In fact, the origin of several ideas I have outlined on this blog lies in my reading of Death in Venice, along with Kafka's Trial one of my preoccupations over the past couple of years.

The full text of the article can be found on my Papers page; here's the abstract for your convenience:

Thomas Mann’s “Der Tod in Venedig” ends with Aschenbach’s, the protagonist’s, death; but that death isn’t simply the conclusion of the story, it rather is its central topic: it gives the work its title, it is what all the plot lines have as their vanishing point, and above all, it’s alluded to and symbolized by characters and events all the time. These prefigurations in the story are the focus of this essay.

In addition to structural allusions to later passages in earlier ones and characters whose description suggests reading them as death personalized, there are more aspects to the prefiguration technique. Most importantly, they connect several tendencies in the story which all contribute to Aschenbach’s fate: mental and physical fatigue, an increasing inability to withstand temptations and weaknesses, and a feeling of drifting towards unreality. By prominently employing prefiguration to bring out all these tendencies, Mann not only achieves a high coherence between earlier and later parts of the story, but also highlights the interconnectedness of these tendencies.

Aschenbach’s development (or decline) over the course of the story reflects a growing willingness, albeit one which always had been rooted in his personality, to accept and even actively engage in deception along with other (including more artistic) deviations from reality: in the service of beauty, that shimmer of unreality.

Spaces of possibilities

Consider this passage from the beginning of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (by Stieg Larsson): A retired industrialist receives a gift-wrapped pressed flower.

"[It] was altogether an unpretentious flower. It had no known medicinal properties, and it could not induce hallucinatory experiences. It was neither edible, nor had a use in the manufacture of plant dyes. On the other hand, the aboriginal people of Australia regarded as sacred the region and the flora around Ayers Rock [where it presumably grows]."

Passages such as this one are part of writing craft of course; there's nothing very special about the particular novel or author. But I want to note it as an example use of the space of possibilities technique. Let's look at the function of the passage, the purposes it serves.

1) First of all, it belongs to the opening episode which is primarily a teaser. We're not told anything more about the flower until much later. True, we only gradually learn that we don't, when we read on. For all we know at the time of first reading the passage, the secret might be lifted right away. But in fact it's not; the story switches to a different line of development first, which doesn't have do do anything at all with the flower, and that creates a nagging curiosity that drives us to read on.

2) Besides that dramaturgical function, the quoted passage has another one: it opens up a space of possibilities. It does that in two senses, one more internal to the world (and the characters) of the novel, the other having to do with the audience and its relationship to that world.

First, then, it's the sort of a space of possibilities that a policeman or forensic investigator would consider when receiving a parcel with an unexpected content: is it a bomb? a spying device? seeing that it's only a flower, could it be poisonous? might it convey a message? stand as a symbol for something? is it evidence, a lead, a reminiscence, a threat? or is it simply just something without any meaning? (But then, who'd have made the effort of sending it, and why?)

The second sense in which the passage spans a space of possibilities is in a play with the audience's expectations: the novel is a piece of crime fiction (of which the model reader, that is, the sort of reader which the author had in mind, is well aware). But there's many different kinds in that genre, still. What sort will this one be? A realistic one where sending flowers is plainly what it is in everyday life (a nice gesture)? A complicated whodunit where they are the murder weapon in some devious and nearly untraceable way? A sinister serial killer psychogram where they symbolize a childhood drama that now triggers a string of gruesome events? (Normally, readers would not expressly and distinctly go through these options in their head, but they're still there as part of the underlying set of expectations.) By alluding to these options, our passage and its context make us aware of that space of genre possibilities as well. Even if the actual novel then proceeds to pin down its own type, having walked us briefly through that space it has heightened our sense of the scope of that field into which a piece of fiction might lead us.

3) All this play with expectations (by having a teaser question that isn't answered for a while, and by spanning a space of possibilities) awakens our imagination and generates curiosity. This gets us more smoothly over the first part of the book which will necessarily have a lot of expository stuff (introducing characters, rolling out backstories, describing settings) and not that much of a plot yet. It also plugs us into the realm of unreality, if you will. (Though that is of course not much more than high-flown language for the earlier point that it whets the imagination.)