Giving Substance to Characters in Fiction
This quote, from Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pnin, is a set of words that come together to form a description of a person - a professor of English and a colleague of the title character. However, to a reader, it evokes an individual with certain specific, or in this case "obvious" characteristics, who may be as real to them as any of the other people they know.
While this may seem like an obvious statement to anyone who has spent much time reading literature, especially fiction, the fact is that the cognitive processes that allow us to know, understand and feel emotions for a fictional character are more complex than we think.
The fact of feeling strong emotions such as hate, pity or fear towards a particular character, is in itself an idea that has been questioned philosophically. Since a fictional character, such as Professor Pnin, does not exist in the real world, the statement that he is a professor of Russian must necessarily also be absurd, in line with the logical positivist view that all statements must be scientifically verifiable as either true or false; in this case, the statement is unverifiable as Professor Pnin does not, per se, exist in the real world.
While logical positivism is perhaps an extreme position from which to judge a work of literature that is by definition not verifiable by ordinary experiences of reality, it is one of many schools of thought that have questioned the emotions and concepts that we have about fictional characters. More recently, the literary theorist Colin Radford dismissed our emotional reactions to works of fiction as "irrational, incoherent, and inconsistent." He also described a paradox wherein we may feel strongly about fictional characters, but that these emotions are ultimately quite hollow, because they may not extrapolate to real life.
However, the way that our brains process fiction may provide an answer to this conundrum. When we interact with a person, our senses are picking up information about them through a process called social perception, which helps us organise in our head a framework that includes this information, emotions that the person evokes, and cognitive processes that initiate and guide our interactions with them.
Similarly, when we read a book about a character or situation, our brain attempts to construct reality, as we create a framework or simulation of their world - one which, in the words of the psychologist Jerome Bruner, "establishes not truth but verisimilitude."
Essentially, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes a theory known as the multiple models theory, put forth by psychologists like Josef Perner, which suggests that when we read fiction, we create a simulation in our mind. We imagine a meta-representation of the universe of the book, which for the time when we are reading and processing it, may be as real to us as any other truth. In other words, while we do not necessarily consider the world of the book to represent the absolute truth, it creates verisimilitude, a model in our minds that is as real to us as our own existence if we suspend disbelief.
However, these models need not be discrete. That which holds true in the simulation may or may not hold true in the real world; for example, the author Sinclair Lewis plays with this notion in Main Street, where he writes that the town of Gopher Prairie, which exists by that name in the simulated world of the book, is identical to many small towns that do actually exist in the American Midwest. Thus, while his satire focused on one small town in Minnesota, it was really meant to be extrapolated to the real world and to countless other small towns in America. In fact, a convergence between our world and the world of a fictional work is perhaps where much of the power of fiction stems from.
Aristotle wrote that when we watch a tragedy, two emotions predominate. Not only do we feel pity for the character whose plight forms the central theme of the play, but also fear that we may someday be in that position. Unconsciously, we identify with them, and draw on past experiences and learning to try and understand how we would react in their plight. Thus, not only do we get a chance to practice and rehearse our own coping mechanisms for stressful situations, but our powerful identification with the character can be a basis for building empathy.
Many studies in social psychology have indicated the role of fiction, especially works that focus on character studies or psychological insights, in building empathy. Recently, the social psychologist Keith Oatley was quoted as saying that fiction was comparable to a "flight simulator" for real-life social skills.
In a 2006 study, Oatley showed that people who were able to relate to characters in fiction often had better social skills in real life as well. In the abstract of this study, he added that "reading a work of fiction can be thought of as taking in a piece of consciousness" that contributes to your comprehension of the external world. Subsequent studies of brain imaging have also suggested that the areas of the brain that are activated while reading fiction, are similar to those that are activated when processing a social situation.
The ways in which we respond to characters and situations in fiction may not be verifiable because they do not exist in real life, creating a putative paradox between these responses and their objects. However, the exact nature of the impact that fiction has on the human mind and its ability to react with empathy and understanding to a social situation is a topic that is still open for exploration. In a world where empathy levels for other people's misfortune have recorded a 48 percent decrease from 1979 to 2009, and where the ability to take someone else's perspective has decreased by 34 percent, the potential of literature and other fictional works to replenish these necessary capacities, cannot be underestimated.
Image credits: By Benh LIEU SONG - Eigenes Werk, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2929515
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