I remember many years ago, back when I was a little kid,
watching the scene in Splash where the young Tom Hanks explains to a weeping
Darryl Hannah that the television movie she is watching which is making her cry
is just…a movie.
“There’s no need to cry. The person didn’t really die. It’s
just fiction.”
I am paraphrasing of course, but you get the point.
But did it really matter? I remember another time many years
later when I was in college getting involved in a very passionate and heated
debate about the ending of a movie we had just seen (which we found rather
controversial). At one point, a certain guy who was getting tired of the noise we
were making impatiently snapped at us that it’s just a damn movie. But we
ignored him and kept on arguing.
If this happens with movies, it is even more true of novels,
especially novels that are well written and thus impossible not to take
seriously. I was frothing in anger for weeks about something that deeply
annoyed me within the story of a Stephen King novel that I read when I was a
teenager. Even telling myself repeatedly that “it’s just a made-up story” did
nothing at all to sooth me or make the pain go away.
So why do people
tend to take fiction stories seriously even when they know that they are made
up?
There’s an insightful answer to the question provided by a
renowned literary author on a youtube video. He explains that people see
‘truth’ in fiction. But it isn’t the factual or historical kind of truth;
rather it is one of emotional or experiential truth. In other words, what
happens in fiction stories is a reflection of our human reality which we
readily recognize.
I tend to view the answer to the question at a slightly
different angle, one which might be even more exploratory and expansive on the
explanation we already have. As I outline in a different article ‘Where do
stories come from’, I personally tend to view fiction stories as existing in a
parallel universe – or parallel universes – from ours. I think what lies deep
at the heart of the tendency for us to take fictive stories seriously is the
concept of reality itself and its ambiguity.
It has long been a fundamental and universally recognized
solipsistic truth in philosophy that the only thing that each of us can really be
sure exists – or is ‘real’ – is our own subjective conscious experience. We
cannot know with absolute certainty that what we perceive everyday around us of
the ‘external world’ really exists. In this sense, the line between the events
we perceive in our ‘external world’ and those that are presented in fiction
stories are quite blurred. Sure, we can say that the ‘real’ external world
affects or potentially affects our physical reality. But what about the parts
of it that don’t and never do? What about those parts of the ‘real’ world that
are not affecting our reality at least in any way that is perceptible or even
conceivable to us? What about, for example, a tiny event – like the rolling of
a small solid mass – that happens in a different galaxy millions of light years
away. If it doesn’t affect our own reality in any way, does that mean it isn’t
real?
And what about events that happen in other (possible) universes
in a larger multiverse which can never interact with ours? Are they not ‘real’?
The point is that, for all we know, the events of a fiction
story might as well have happened or can happen at some point in the boundless
history of the universe. As long as it is rationally conceived, it might as
well be real. Deep down, people see that, even if they don’t consciously think
of it that way. The only thing that matters as to whether it can be taken
seriously or not is its logical coherency. And the ‘logic’ here isn’t merely
about the mechanical logic set by the laws of the physical world. In fact, it
isn’t necessarily about that for the laws in some cases could be slightly
different from ours. More importantly, it’s about the logic of human nature as
well as other sentient creatures that play a part in whatever story we are
presented with.
Thus, when we get emotional over a work of fiction, it’s
largely because we know that it is real in an important sense. It may not be
‘real’ in the sense of being a historical fact. But it is real in a timeless
sort of way; in a way in which our strict day-to-day understanding of the four
dimensions of the immediate surroundings of our ‘external world’ are no longer
relevant. And sometimes, as casual spectators, we may like or dislike certain
aspects of reality being presented to us and thereby colliding and interacting
with our own internal conscious universe.
All in all, it means that fiction will always have its place
in the human heart and in our world. And that, for most writers (and film
makers), is a good thing.