A post by Julia Langkau.

In his post ‘Choosing your own adventure?’, Peter Langland-Hassan argued that our affective responses to fiction are driven by our beliefs about the content of the fiction rather than by what we imagine, and in last week’s post, Luke Roelofs appealed to the fact that fiction is an ‘objective social entity’ and that our desire to ‘align our imaginings with others’ might explain why simply imagining a happier ending of Romeo and Juliet after having watched the play will not make us feel better. I will suggest yet another explanation of this phenomenon, and my explanation is based on how we engage with and experience literary works like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. 

But I’ll start out from a slightly different angle. The question of whether we can get acquainted with new experiences through imagination has recently been much discussed. Can I get to know what it is like to smoke a cigarette, given that I’ve never smoked before? And can one get acquainted with a radically new, ‘transformative’ experience (see Paul 2014)?

Suppose we can, in principle, get acquainted with radically new experiences in a phenomenal way (Kind forthcoming), at least to a certain degree (Cath 2018). One might wonder what could be a reliable guide in the effort to achieve acquaintance. Testimony is probably the first to come to one’s mind, either personal or through some medium such as text or video. But some authors have thought that literary fiction is particularly well-suited to provide us with substitute experiences (e.g., Pippin 2001). Usually, the kinds of experiences are such as going to war or experiencing new forms of love, and usually, they are thought to be experiences that are new in a substantial, maybe even transformative way. 

There is a tradition of understanding immersion, the phenomenon of being drawn into the world of the fiction, as something like an illusion of reality. The idea is that we are experiencing events in the fiction in a way that resembles real-life experience, although we are at all times aware that we are concerned with a medial artefact and not with real life (e.g., Wolf 2004). Given the level of immersion and affective response we experience in our engagement with literary fiction, this thesis seems plausible at first.

But I think that the kind of experience we have when engaged with literary fiction does not have much in common with how we experience real life. Note that I’m not talking about any kind of experience we might ever have while reading a book. I’m interested in the specific experience we can (but don’t necessarily) have when we engage with fiction as a form of art. One feature of literary fiction is that characters, situations and events are presented with a certain purpose within the work, or in terms of something else, to create meaning on a higher level. As Martha Nussbaum puts it: “Life is never simply presented by a text; it is always represented as something” (1990, p. 5, see also Lamarque and Olsen 1994). I think that this is reflected in the experience we have when we engage with literary fiction.

The thesis is that the experience evoked by literary fiction is an experience of an imagined X in terms of a Y. For instance, when reading a literary work about the situation of an Iraqi refugee in Europe, I thereby don’t get to experience, in the imagination, what it is like to be an Iraqi refugee in Europe. I rather experience something imagined, namely being an Iraqi refugee in Europe, in terms of whatever the literary text offers. In order to experience an imagined X in terms of a Y, I don’t have to imagine X phenomenally. For instance, Usama Al Shahmani’s 2019 novel presents the experience of being a refugee in Switzerland, amongst other things, in terms of talking to and becoming ‘friends’ with local trees rather than with people, and thereby slowly overcoming the trauma of having been forced to leave everything he knows and loves behind. The literary text aims to link the imagined target experience with certain experiences the phenomenology of which might be familiar to the reader, such as aspects of nature or loneliness. The literary text thereby makes us experience some of the value and meaning the target experience could have by letting us imagine it in terms of experiences we are acquainted with.

This idea of what literary experience is de-emphasizes empathy and more generally perspective-taking and its role in the literary experience. It also de-emphasizes the role of imagination as simulation: we are rather experiencing a certain imagined target in terms of a concept, an idea, or familiar experiences. Note that we can have experiences of an X in terms of a Y with respect to perceived objects or events in real-life as well. For instance, I can look at the rotting Halloween pumpkin in front of me in terms of mortality, which may give me an experience similar to a literary experience. Usually, such experiences are not part of ordinary life as we live it; they rather constitute ways of coping with aspects of life.

The consequence of this view is that in an effort of getting acquainted with the phenomenology of a radically new experience, literary fiction cannot be our guide, and the reason is that the structure of the experience is much different from the structure of the target experience. We don’t get to know what it is like to be a refugee in Switzerland if we’ve never been one by reading literary fiction. What we ideally get to understand is what it could mean for someone to be a refugee. But rather than discussing this in more detail, I will outline some implications of my view with respect to our affective responses to literary fiction.

I agree with the description of the phenomenon both Peter and Luke refer to: simply imagining that Romeo and Juliet survive won’t make my pain about their fiction-prescribed death go away. And here is my explanation as to why this is the case: our emotional responses to literary fiction are driven (at least partly, but I think crucially) by the kind of experience we make when we read literary fiction. I’m not sad about Romeo and Juliet's suicide in a way I would be about a similarly motivated suicide in real life. My sadness about the death of the fictional lovers is imbued with fascination and delight, because I experience it within the context of the play and because it has a certain significance within the work. This, of course, doesn’t mean that my emotions aren’t real; they are simply different. In real life, I should be shocked and devastated as a reaction to a couple’s suicide (and I will be, given the corresponding desires), and seeing significance and beauty in their death would – at least as a first reaction – be morally questionable.

As Luke suggests, I could try to make sense of the couple's living happily ever after in terms of a different literary work. We certainly do this sometimes, mostly when we think a work failed on the subject level. For instance, we might think that in order to make sense of a work and for it to be affectively satisfying, a certain character should have been killed rather than sent to prison. But good luck trying to compete with Shakespeare in creating a meaningful, yet positively moving work by changing the ending of Romeo and Juliet! Alternatively, I could imagine Romeo and Juliet living happily ever after for my own sake, in an attempt to feel better. Luke’s explanation as to why this won’t work is the following: “Fictions accomplish such alignment [with other people’s imaginings] - either actually, when they are seen by many, or potentially, when they are seen only by us but have an objective form that others could view - and this gives them a greater hold over us than imaginings that remain ‘in our heads’.” I disagree. First, I think an author can have very intense emotions even if they know that nobody will ever read their work (maybe because they will destroy it right away, etc.). Moreover, I could simply tell and thereby share my alternative imaginings with whomever I am watching Romeo and Juliet with – and it would still not comfort me.

The explanation that follows from my view is that our emotional reactions to literary fiction are driven by a fundamentally different kind of experience: a literary experience. If we imagine a different ending to a work just for our emotional sake, we are engaged in a completely different activity which can at most distract us from the effect of the work. If watching Romeo and Juliet is too painful for us and we need distraction, we might as well think of something random and very likely more effective – chocolate for instance, or an upcoming trip to the beach.

References:

Al Shahmani, Usama. 2019. In der Fremde sprechen die Bäume arabisch. Limmat Verlag.

Cath, Yuri. 2018. “Knowing What It is Like and Testimony”. Australasian Journal of Philosophy: DOI: 10.1080/00048402.2018.1433697

Kind, Amy. Forthcoming. “What Imagination Teaches”.

Lamarque, Peter and Olsen, Stein Haugom. 1994. Truth, Fiction, and Literature. A Philosophical Perspective. Clarendon Press.

Langland-Hassan, Peter. 2019. “Choosing your own adventure?” On The Junkyard: A scholarly blog devoted to the study of imagination. https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2019/10/18/choosing-your-own-adventure

Nussbaum, Martha. 1990. Love’s Knowledge. Oxford University Press.

Paul, L.A. 2014. Transformative Experience. Oxford University Press.

Pippin, Robert. 2001. Henry James and Modern Moral Life. Cambridge University Press.

Roelofs, Luke. 2019. “Choice and constraint in fiction?” On The Junkyard: A scholarly blog devoted to the study of imagination. https://junkyardofthemind.com/blog/2019/10/28/choice-and-constraint-in-fiction

Wolf, Werner. 2004. “Aesthetic Illusion as an Effect of Fiction,” Style, 48: 325-351.