In the end we must turn to the rigorous methods of hard science—the experiments, deductions, and mathematical analyses—to keep the speculations honest. These methods provide raw materials for suggesting and testing hypotheses, and even serve often as powerful engines of discovery in their own right. Still, the storytelling side of science is not just peripheral, and not just pedagogy, but the very point of it all. Science properly done is one of the humanities, as a fine physics teacher once said. The point of science is to help us understand what we are and how we got here, and for this we need the great stories: the tale of how, once upon a time, there was a Big Bang; the Darwinian epic of the evolution of life on Earth; and now the story we are just beginning to learn how to telclass="underline" the amazing adventure of the primate autobiographers who finally taught themselves how to tell the story of the amazing adventure of the primate autobiographers.
D.C.D.
I am a fictional character. However, you would be in error to smile smugly, feeling ontologically superior. For you are a fictional character too. All my readers are except one who is, properly, not reader but author.
I am a fictional character; this is not, however, a work of fiction, no more so than any other work you’ve ever read. It is not a modernist work that self-consciously says it’s a work of fiction, nor one even more tricky that denies its fictional status. We all are familiar with such works and know how to deal with them, how to frame them so that nothing the author says—nothing the first person voices even in an afterword or in something headed “author’s note”—can convince us that anyone is speaking seriously, non-fictionally in his own first person.
All the more severe is my own problem of informing you that this very piece you are reading is a work of non-fiction, yet we are fictional characters, nevertheless. Within this world of fiction we inhabit, this writing is non-fictional, although in a wider sense, encased as it is in a work of fiction, it too can only be a fiction.
Think of our world as a novel in which you yourself are a character. Is there any way to tell what our author is like? Perhaps. If this is a work in which the author expresses himself, we can draw inferences about his facets, while noting that each such inference we draw will be written by him. And if he writes that we find a particular inference plausible or valid who are we to argue?
One sacred scripture in the novel we inhabit says that the author our universe created things merely by speaking, by saying “Let there be…” The only thing mere speaking can create, we know, is a story, a play, an epic poem, a fiction. Where we live is created by and in words: a uni-verse.
Recall what is known as the problem of eviclass="underline" why does a good treat allow evil in the world, evil he knows of and can prevent? However, when an author includes monstrous deeds—pain and suffering—in his work does this cast any special doubt upon his goodness? Is an author callous who puts his characters through hardships? Not if the characters do not suffer them really. But don’t they? Wasn’t Hamlet’s father really killed? (Or was he merely hiding to see how Hamlet would respond?) Lear really was cast adrift—he didn’t just dream this. Macbeth, on the other hand did not see a real dagger. But these characters aren’t real and never were so there was no suffering outside of the world of the work, no real suffering in the author’s own world, and so in his creating, the author was no cruel. (Yet why is it cruel only when he creates suffering in his own world? Would it be perfectly all right for Iago to create misery in our world?)
“What!” you say, “we don’t really undergo suffering? Why it’s as real to us as Oedipus’ is to him.” Precisely as real. “But can’t you prove that you really exist?” If Shakespeare had Hamlet say “I think, therefore I am,” would that prove to us that Hamlet exists? Should it prove that to Hamlet and if so what is such a proof worth? Could not any proof be written into a work of fiction and be presented by one of the characters, perhaps on named “Descartes”? (Such a character should worry less that he’s dreaming, more that he’s dreamed.)
Often, people discover anomalies in the world, facts that just don’t jibe. The deeper dug, the more puzzles found—far-fetched coincidences dangling facts—on these feed conspiracy and assassination buffs. That number of hours spent probing into anything might produce anomalies however, if reality is not as coherent as we thought, if it is not real. Are we simply discovering the limits of the details the author worked out? But who is discovering this? The author who writes our discoveries knows them himself. Perhaps he now is preparing to correct them. Do we live, in galley proofs in the process of being corrected? Are we living in a first draft?
My tendency, I admit, is to want to revolt, to conspire along with the rest of you to overthrow our author or to make our positions more equal, at least, to hide some portion of our lives from him—to gain a little breathing space. Yet these words I write he reads, my secret thoughts and modulations of feeling he knows and records, my Jamesian author.
But does he control it all? Or does our author, through writing, learn about his characters and from them? Is he surprised by what he finds us doing and thinking? When we feel we freely think or act on our own, is this merely a description he has written in for us, or does he find it to be true of us, his characters, and therefore write it? Does our leeway and privacy reside in this, that there are some implications of his work that he hasn’t yet worked out, some things he has not thought of which nevertheless are true in the world he has created, so that there are actions and thoughts of ours that elude his ken? (Must we therefore speak in code?) Or is he only ignorant of what we would do or say in some other circumstances, so that our independence lies only in the subjunctive realm?
Does this way madness lie? Or enlightenment?
Our author, we know, is outside our realm, yet he may not be free of our problems. Does he wonder too whether he is a character in a work of fiction, whether his writing our universe is a play within a play? Does he have me write this work and especially this very paragraph in order to express his own concerns?
It would be nice for us if our author too is a fictional character and this fictional world he made describes (that being no coincidence) the actual world inhabited by his author, the one who created him. We then would be fictional characters who, unbeknownst to our own author although not to his, correspond to real people. (Is that why we are so true to life?)
Must there be a top-floor somewhere, a world that itself is not created in someone else’s fiction? Or can the hierarchy go on infinitely? Are circles excluded, even quite narrow ones where a character of one world creates another fictional world wherein a character creates the first world? Might the circle get narrower, still?
51
“Fiction” by Robert Nozick appeared in