folly

for some time, a romantic era dwelt

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folly
@folly

listening to the most recent GSSB on Narrative as Virtual Reality and having a really similar physical reaction of confusion and defensive-feeling as particular parts of HMTW. Specifically — this idea that there is nothing in art that exists "autonomously", as they put it; that characters and worlds strictly have no existence beyond the literal page. This might be true from a material standpoint, but it seems foreign to the point of anathema to me from a human or phenomenological standpoint!

Like, the point of engaging with fiction, especially fantastic fiction (like we might broadly encompass with terms like science fiction or fantasy, but not limited to these genres or marketing terms) is the experience, insight, and meditation of a world that is real while being unreal. If all that ever existed in a work was an arbitrary collection of letters, if all visual media were only the arrangement of pigments and photons — there would be no art! Of course it's not a pipe "in reality", but to your brain it really is a pipe without needing to be one in reality. I experience something like a witness to pipeness! I consider what Therem harth rem ir Estraven is doing when he's not onscreen; or how she might act in an otherwise circumstance. It's easily possible to inquire or critique that a particular characterization is "not true to the real character", even though the character isn't a real flesh and blood person!

The attitude that art does not transport you anywhere seems so far from my experience reading, playing, listening, embracing, and embodying any number of texts. The text can and does transport me when I read, I am at that place and I feel those things and I hurt and celebrate in that way, and this overarching dismissal makes me deeply sad, for one of us must be wrong, mustn't we? Either I am naive and must be disabused of the notions I think I feel so deeply or actively experience... or they must be divorced from something in a way I just cannot follow.


(see @ckunzelman's response rebug here)

ckunzelman
@ckunzelman

Was perusing the tags this evening and ran into this really great post that I agree with entirely. I realized that if this post exists, and I agree with it, and yet it's still felt as a disagreement, then I should probably take a minute to "yes, and" to talk through some details that make me think we agree but that make OP feel like we do not.

I think sometimes lutz and I are misunderstood on this issue in this exact way, and it happens enough that it's on us -- communication is a two-way street.

When I say things about how these characters aren't real, I am speaking in reference to a long history of literary and cinematic discussions that "naturalize" themselves. Free indirect discourse, which Ryan brings up, is a style of writing that seeks to evaporate the barriers between different parts of the text -- the experience of the characters, the description of their world, the images that make up those worlds. As a style, it blurs boundaries, and as Ryan says it is presented as a way of collapsing our experiences as readers and the characters' experiences as people in their world.

(The invisible style in cinema accomplishes the same, removing any and all artifice to focus on "naturalistic" representations that try to disavow the fundamentally constructed nature of the thing.)

In both of these maneuvers, these media are trying to make you take them as fully natural and miraculously occurrent: "these are real people in real places," the media forms tell us, and the motors of words on the page or the cuts on the film are minimized to encourage us to take it at face value.

The reason that lutz and I hammer on this pretty often, and why I call myself a "naive materialist" on some of these issues, is that I want to put a pause or a break here on purpose to get us to think about the constructed nature of the thing. The characters are not real. Their worlds are not real. You come to understand them through the media they are a part of, and they are just assemblages of symbols that we decode into a universe in our mind. This decoding happens alongside the media form they are a part of -- books tell you how to read them, films tell you how to watch them, games tell you how to play them, and so on. Dominant cultural objects want you to treat the words or the images or the mechanics as transparent windows that we look through to see the worlds they present.

And that works! We do experience those worlds, and it is great. The OP is fundamentally correct here. But we also experience this world as natural when it is deeply technological. Specific words, sentences, idioms, images, shots, scenes, mechanics construct specific worlds. The characters we fall in love with or hate are structured by the formal elements around them. We desire or loathe a holographic projection that is fully dependent on that substrate of media form.

And so I think the OP is completely right. I think about what Estraven is doing all the time -- sometimes I get emotional about him, even! But everything I know about Estraven, every thought she has, is dependent on the arbitrary symbols that make up Gethen. Much like with Gandalf, when we engage with the process of imagining that Estraven is real, we are engaging in speculation and inference.

Our ability to speculate is a powerful thing. It's imagining the world as it is not; it might be the most important thing we can do as a species. I think it is so important, and I fundamentally agree with the OP so much, that I wrote a book about it.

Characters have lives off the page for us, and so when I say that these characters are fake, I am trying to highlight the fact that we're engaging in speculation. We're taking the thing in front of us, the dead words and letters and images and everything else trapped there, and enlivening it with our thoughts and energy. We make things that have no existence on their own lead full and comprehensive lives in our heads and in our communication acts with one another.

So when I pump the brakes by saying this is all fiction, I am not saying that people do not have attachments, experience speculation, or engage heavily. I am to highlight those things, and to think more about what produces them, and in doing so valorize the work that is happening on the part of the reader rather than simply saying that these things are somehow in the work.

Gamzee does not have a mind-independent reality as a creature running around in the world. Everything that he does is either pressed onto the page by a thinking human hand, making decisions about how the lines and letters are scribed into reality, or imagined by someone making speculations based on their impressions of those lines and letters. When we disagree about what Gamzee or Santa Claus or Kim Possible or the Babadook are doing, we are creating competing scenarios that have been enlivened off the page by our fantastic ability to think the world as it is not. We are not getting a telescope into a real being's experiences; we are being given a set of media technologies that prompt us to think beyond the world as given to us.

In the last instance, I think these media technologies are not access to full worlds, but prompts for us to produce them ourselves. We are always, in the moment of experience, post-canon. [I have more complicated, less abstract feelings about canon.]

To go all the way back, then, when I disagree with Ryan it is in defense of the human imagination. It is trying to hold out for the projective capability we share. I want to put focus on the fact that our engagement with media is not, for me, a window into another universe. It is a construction set, a set of tools and raw materials, that we then put into practice every moment that we are reading. The texts themselves put boundaries and bumpers on how we imagine, and structure the imaginations we have, but within that massive possibility space we can engage and build and speculate and perform wonders.

As a great writer once said: it's not a lake, it's an ocean.


folly
@folly

a comprehensive and generous rebuttal! I appreciate the explanation of this point of view—to be very honest, I'm guilty of looking at art as though it were a window, or a mirror up to nature, and a backstop is welcome to remind us it's a human construction we each co-create.


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in reply to @folly's post:

I’m not a critic, but I think the synthesis here is that those you describe are your experiences, or the shared experiences of a group of people (disseminated and mediated by discussion, media production, etc.) rather than phenomenology ascribable to an entity evoked by the work of art. They’re real and important, but they do not belong to the work, even if it evokes them.

i've been thinking on this in the back of my head and like wondering what there is for me to say on the topic (as i'm certainly closer to them than you on this axis) but while i don't know that i can succinctly justify my experience of art as meaningful what i can say in brief is that i don't agree with the thought that "one of us must be wrong, mustn't we" - while i see how one might get there I think the idea that there is one true and correct way to experience and conceptualize art and its relationship to lived experience is a pitfall that should actively be avoided - in the multiplicity of ways to interact with art and the world and think of how stories operate i think one needs to accept the idea that there may not be a single thread of internally consistent Truth about how these things work

in reply to @ckunzelman's post: