Stories
Peter Cave has an entertaining new book of philosophical puzzles, Can a Robot be Human?. The pieces are cross-referenced; one interesting pairing is of a chapter (2) on the way we feel real emotion about fictional characters and their situations, and another (8) on love, what selves are, what stories we tell ourselves about people we love.
It is very odd, and even somewhat mysterious, what powerful emotions we can feel about fictional characters. The oddity becomes more obvious if you try to imagine animals doing it. The idea is absurd – yet we’re so used to doing it ourselves that we forget how odd it is. What’s that about, do you suppose? Other minds, probably. Right? Must be. The social animal thing. Our brains would have been too expensive to have evolved if they didn’t have a huge payoff; the payoff is social collaboration; for that we need a working theory of mind. So we have this hypertrophied faculty of thinking and feeling about the interior worlds of other people – so hypertrophied that it works even (or especially) on people who don’t actually exist. Page 9:
The most rational of people can be moved by fictions yet, even when moved, know full well that they are seated in a theatre, reading a book, or watching television. Or do they? Perhaps, one way or another, they suspend their belief in the stagy surroundings, suspend their memories of the tickets they purchased or block out the sound of the book’s rustling pages. Perhaps they fall for what is being represented as real, as being, indeed, all for real. Remember, though, they cannot be taken in that much; if they were, they would be warning of danger…
It is a peculiar mental state. Peculiar and delicate. It is easy to be jostled out of it – to be deeply in it one moment and the next to remember that you’re sitting in a chair holding and looking at a rectangular box-shaped object packed with slices of paper with black marks on them in rows. But then it’s easy to jump right back into it again. Story-telling seems to work that way. Peter Cave suggests that romantic love does too. Page 44:
When we attend a play, we can lose ourselves within the action. Despite awareness of the theatrical surroundings, we cannot help being moved by the characters on stage. My suggestion is that such fictionalism spills over those in love, generating an erotic fictionalism. When in love, we often cannot help feeling, and believing in, the eternity of that love, despite knowing that, transient and fickle creatures that we are, things may be so very, very different later on; even as early on as the following morning.
Indeed. You’re so wonderful. Oh wait, no you’re not. Human life in eight words.
The pay-off is not necessarily social collaboration; the other main possibility is sexual selection. And, could animals not get caught up in fiction were it presented in a form that they can absorb, say film instead of the written word? I don’t know of any evidence on this OTOH, but I will research. Of course, the alternative interpretation would be that they got caught up because they thought the film was real, but one would need to do careful experiments to tease this out. Cartoon chimps, perhaps?
I like the 8 words. If you could run to 12, you could vary the plot by inserting “I am so unhappy” after the one sentence or the other.
Oh right – I was trying to remember how solid the social collaboration interpretation was, while also trying to figure out how to qualify the statement without being too boring, so in the end I gave up and just slapped it down as an assertion, figuring it was probably fragile.
I was wondering about animals too – was wondering if anyone has tried chimps or Koko with movies or tv. But that gets back to the Theory of Mind problem we were discussing with Jean awhile ago. So far the tests seem to show chimps have little if any TOM. Without TOM, stories don’t really make any sense, surely…
The 12 words – we’d have to make it 13 – I am so unhappy/happy. They still fit after one or the other. (The joy, sometimes, of ‘Oh wait, no you’re not.’)
Not only social collaboration, but learning of social patterns – scripts -according to your situation and environmental situations. Builds library of contingent behaviours, experienced in simulation without paying the learning cost over again for each individual.
Mmmm, ah lurve the smell of memetics in the morning…
There is also the rather obvious point that experiencing strong emotion in repose is pleasurable in itself – perhaps simulating it is just one of the ways that humanity has discovered to give oneself a shot of endorphins…
Perhaps we became a story-telling species for the same reason, allegedly, we became an agricultural one – because that way we could make booze. Stories = hooch…
“on the way we feel real emotion about fictional characters and their situations, and another”
I would wish to make a contribution to the latest “Stories” B&W N&C. But alas, I cannot debate, as philosophy to me is like a foreign language/maths and I have great difficulty with both, in trying to suss out the logic/reason behind same. Nonetheless, I think to me, the following article does make sense to the above philosophical
sentence.
Alex Neill: “Are emotional responses to fiction rational? Why aren’t they irrational, given that we know the fiction is not real? This theory claims that: Emotional responses are typically founded on belief. And belief (it is claimed) is absent in fiction, thus emotions founded on belief are not appropriately directed at fiction. What one can feel for or about a fictional character can be more intense than ….We value works of fiction because they can cause these powerful emotions…”
http://www.cofc.edu/hettinger/Aesthetics_Spring_2006/Neill_Fiction_and_the_Emotions.htm
“It is very odd, and even somewhat mysterious, what powerful emotions we can feel about fictional characters.”
Yeah, take for example Fidelio above, which tells us “True love’s fidelity triumphs over tyranny. It is a celebration of humanity’s desire for freedom and justice. This fictional drama of wrongful imprisonment and the triumph of true love remain as relevant as ever.” As it stirs up within us very powerful emotions! We identify with the protagonist who is “unjustly incarcerated by a ruthless oppressor, Florestan who languishes in a secret prison, held without charge or trial. His wife Leonore, desperate to find him and willing to die if she must adopts the disguise of a young man – Fidelio – and becomes the jailer’s assistant, hoping to free her beloved husband.”
As Director James Conlon says, “This astonishingly forceful contemporary production resonates with edge-of-your-seat excitement and matchless music, complete with stunning arias, inspiring choruses, two of the most famous quartets in all of opera, and exuberant orchestral writing.”
Yeah, even Tingey was overcome with powerful (fictional) emotion – “Oh welche lust, in freie luft den Atem, leicht zu heben” echoed around me, I found tears on my face, as “Fidelio” released the political prisoners ….”
On another comparable note… The other day as I was on foot down Temple Bar I came upon a person I knew who hurriedly/excitedly told me she was heading off to see a film in the nearby Irish Film Institute. As it was then only 10: am, I logically remarked, “as much as I enjoy visiting the ICI, I do not think I would so early in the morning find myself going to see a film there“. I then proceeded to ask her “do you think even the ‘free film’ is worth going to at this unearthly hour of the morning”? She replied, “Yes, of course it is – I believe it a fierce emotional/tear-jerker film, and I want so desperately to have a real good cry. Admittedly, I was taken aback, when she said, “I want to have a real good cry.” Good God, I thought, does she not have anything ‘in reality’ to have a real good cry about, that she has to resort to going (so early in the morning) to see a fictional film – in order to feed off the emotionality of pretended perhaps fictional people. I was confused. I, for example, only have to log on to OB’s B&W, In Focus, ‘Women under Theocracy’ section and it is enough to make one permanently cry. Alternatively, even think back on the dreadful childhood in Goldenbridge Industrial School. I am still left wondering , -are those who ‘go outside themselves’ to cry, to seek self -consolation from fictional sources more out of touch with their own empathetic selves. Alternatively, have they not sufficiently themselves suffered to be able to from within?
Continuation…find the tear-jerker button. Must they find it from fictional outlets. Gosh, am once again going off on a tangent. Please ignore if none of this makes sense.
Great comment, Tingey. And Peter Cave talks about opera in that fiction chapter.
Othello…that’s interesting…I wonder why Othello and not Lear, for instance. You would think there’d be just as much temptation for people to shout at Gloucester when Edmund is fooling him – ‘Don’t listen to him, he’s lying
Well wait, maybe I’ve thought of a reason after all. Iago has no real reason to do what he does to Desdemona and Othello; Edmund does have real reasons for his malice; maybe that complicates the audience’s reactions enough to inhibit shouting. It’s funny…or rather not funny, but a bit of Sxhpr’s craftiness, that Edmund’s reasons are signposted just a few lines into the play, when Gloucester cheerfully and idiotically tells Kent in Edmund’s hearing a) that there was good sport at his making and b) that away he shall again.
It does. The world is absolutely packed to the rafters with prisoners and people surveilling them. It would be nice if we could start to do better one of these days. (Fucking Musharraf, going in the wrong direction…)
This is pertinent, if a bit geeky;
“Edward Bullough’s conception of aesthetic distance includes a paradox of sorts: an artist’s work will be most powerful when it is most personal, but s/he can only formulate an effective artistic expression by assuming a certain detachment from it. Similarly, a viewer’s experience of a work of art will be augmented if s/he has experienced something similar, but if a certain aesthetic distance is not maintained, the art is superseded by the viewer’s own emotional state. Bullough formulated the principle in this way: “What is…most desirable is the utmost decrease of [aesthetic] distance without its disappearance.”
The reason I mention it is that one of the examples Bullough gives of the breakdown of this phenomenon is a man leaping onto the stage to prevent Othello murdering Desdemona.
Well the whole discussion is geeky! And a good thing too. The geekier the better, that’s what I say.
It’s very actory, very theatre-geek, that Sxhpr was good at moments like that – moments where the audience wants to shout warnings. In Macbeth, in Much Ado, in Lear, Hamlet, Henry IV – lots of places. Places where if only the protagonist knew what we knew. Don’t drink it! Watch out, the sword is poisoned! He’s lying, he wasn’t even there! He’s lying, he’s planning to kill you!
In the movie ‘The Piano’ they showed something like this in colonial New Zealand. Watching a shadow play of Bluebeard, the Maori audience decided enough was enough and leapt with their weapons on stage to kill the evildoer and avenge the oppressed women… no hilarity ensued, though bloodshed was averted.
If it is of any interest I try to address the fiction question at my place: http://www.georgeszirtes.co.uk/index.php?page=news#d54c261ec515e54926a93ceb660b9ecd
Fictional empathy depends very strongly on the quality of the representation.
My parents once saw a dire adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank for the theatre. Given the subject matter and, of course, the fact that real events were depicted, you’d think there’d be maximum scope for emotional involvement.
But so rotten were the acting, script, direction, etc., that when the Nazis knocked on the front door somebody in the audience shouted out: “They’re in the attic!” Apparently it brought the house down.
More seriously, I’ve posted a couple of thoughts on this if anyone’s interested: http://viva-freemania.blogspot.com/2007/11/fictional-empathy-we-cant-help.html
Also, caring about fictional characters does not seem to relate in any way to caring about people in real life. Two examples:- Tolstoy’s anecdote about the lady weeping at the opera, while keeping her coachman freezing outside while he waits for her to come out of the opera and that incident in The Catcher in the Rye when Holden overhears a woman in the audience crying at a sad movie while ignoring her child’s pleas to be taken to the bathroom.
Something else occurs to me that we love stories from a very young age – from about four or five. And have to be reassured that the Big Bad Wolf is only a story and will not come and eat us up. And is there any culture that does not have them? There seems to be something rather fundamental there.
“Holden overhears a woman in the audience crying at a sad movie while ignoring her child’s pleas to be taken to the bathroom.”
Yeah, KB Player, this sadly reminds me of the person I encountered, who was -so early in the morning going off to see a free ‘tearjerker’ film. One only had to take cognisance of the person in question’s physical demeanour to conclude that it was ‘genug’ to make one cry. We sometimes cannot get our own lives into perspective, nevertheless, we can with the drop of a hat, turn the tap on to see the pitfalls, and sorry state of affairs of other fictional/real people’s lives.
Just like the mother and the person who wanted to have a good cry at the film – we too oftentimes have our wires so mixed up.