The Fact of Fiction

The following can be traced back to a conversation between Nate and myself. I thought that it should be written down at some point, some point being now. I can't remember whose part was whose, and furthermore I don't think it matters in matters of philosophy – chalk it up to the speech of Aletheia, if you must have a source. The question is, what is it that distinguishes fictional entities from real things?

The first answer might be to say, real things exist. But what does it mean to say that things exist? That I can touch and feel them? This might be true for physical things, but it at least makes logical sense to say that non-physical entities exist (does the number 2 exist? How about consciousness?). How about that there is something true about them? But it is true that Santa Claus rides his sleigh around the world, in a fashion of speaking. Social constructions such as Santa Claus have their own specific sort of existence in our shared stories, though I am not saying that I could wake up in the middle of the night and discover him on my roof after the rising of such a clatter. Maybe you don't want to call this “existence”, but then we need to see what existence is, as well as how “non-existent” things can have anything at all true about them.

We proposed the following: real entities are complete and consistent, while fictional entities are not. By complete I mean this: ask whatsoever question you will that is applicable, and there shall be an answer. If I ask about the mating habits of the rarest species of beetle, there is some truth to the matter. If I ask about the mating habits of dragons, however, I may very well be at a permanent loss. We encounter this phenomenon all the time when reading stories – we speculate about what happens, where the characters are coming from, what happens in the middle of plot holes, and we get frustrated when no answer in forthcoming. Think of a murder mystery that never reveals the killer. We feel that there must be an answer, but it may simply be unanswerable – there is a killer, this is true, but there is no truth to the matter about who the killer is.

Consistency may be a bit more tendentious, but I shall proffer it anyhow. I may read one story, and vampires melt when exposed to sunlight. In another story, which I shall now invent and which I have certainly never encountered through any medium, they glitter. Do vampires then melt or glitter in the sunlight? Both, it seems. Now, it might be argued that vampires melt in the first story and glitter in the second, and so there is no contradiction. But that would be saying that there are two sorts of vampires. The oddness of the second story comes about not because we are encountering a second sort of vampire, but because there is one sort of vampire, and they melt. And yet they glitter, too. There would be no possibility of cognitive dissonance without there being one entity between the different stories which has both the essential property of melting and the essential property of glittering without melting. Fictions can therefore be contradictory in a way that real things cannot.

But fictions are beings that are not, beings that are false. The opposite seems to hold as well: all of our falsities and delusions are fictions of a fashion. What is “being” then, by contrast? It is uncreated and imperishable, not one of our unstable fictions; whole and of a single kind and unshaken and perfect. It never was nor will be, since it is now, all together, one, continuous (Parmenides, Fragment 8, KRS). If it is complete, it is whole and does not exist as something that was and now is not (since answers to our questions about the past are currently answerable – history is a viable study), nor similarly is it something that will be yet now is not (the very power of prediction proves the possibility of encountering the future now). If it is consistent, it is all together, one, and continuous, since nothing contradicts anything else.

If this is correct, then the status of fictional entities is more than a study of books and legends. Fiction is the way we live life when it does not align with the above picture, whereas reality by contrast is something unitary and whole and the fertile ground out of which all of our fictions spring – since they too are part of reality in their own way.