April 8, 2024
What Is Fiction? The Problem of Defining Reality
I love deceptively simple questions. “What is fiction?” definitely counts because, on the surface, it appears childishly obvious. One might say “Fiction is writing stories that aren’t real”, or something of the sort. Probably you couldn’t even entirely disagree with that. And yet, this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.
Obviously enough, if we want to talk about fiction and reality (aren’t they, after all, supposed to be antonyms?) there are special cases, too. “What is fiction?” seems to have a different answer if we offered as an example fantasy fiction, and yet a different one if we talked about, say, historical fiction. And what about memoirs? Not to mention the crazy notion (of yours truly) that all books are autobiographical.
The problem of comprehensively answering the question “What is fiction?” boils down to two main issues:
- Who is the author of a work?
- What is reality?
I told you, I love deceptively simple questions. “The author of a work is the person who wrote it, you dummy!” I hear someone telling me. The same person might even roll their eyes hearing me asking what is reality.
But, as you will see in this post, neither of these questions has a clear answer. And this complicates our attempt to answer “what is fiction?” as well. Though worry not, I’ll face the challenge!
Who Is the Author of a Work?
On the surface, this seems simple. The author of a work is the person who thought of the idea and put it together – wrote it, in the context of writing fiction.
The trick part is in tracing the borders of “thought of the idea”. Partly even “put it together” is affected by the same ghostly force that frustrates our giving a clear answer to the question, Who is the author?
That ghostly force is the subconscious.
On a personal level, you have surely realized that our everyday existence is a constant battle of wills. As I said in my post on writing motivation, we mostly eat when we’re hungry, but there are cases when we eat because we’re sad; or angry; or because we’re visiting Grandma and we don’t want to insult her.
The truth is, it’s not quite clear even to us why we do certain things. The same (only more powerfully) applies to why we think certain things. As you realize, tracing an idea that later becomes a book – and, indeed, continuously informs its materialization – isn’t quite as easy as it might seem.
This only becomes all the more difficult considering humans are social beings.
What Is Fiction in a Fluid Society?
You might like chocolate ice cream and coffee with milk, and you might hate tomatoes. Perhaps you really like postmetal music – if you do, check my bandcamp 😎 – while you dislike watching sports. Maybe you’re an atheist and you love reading Donald Duck.
Here’s something you perhaps haven’t realized: These are not your opinions.
Well, of course they are, but they are not yours alone. If you had been born to, say, a rural family in Mongolia in the late 1930s, you would’ve had very different opinions.
Who we are reflects our sociocultural context. We are never truly ourselves, as our identity is a continuation, an echo, at the very least a side-effect of the collective social ideas surrounding us.
In this framework, the books you write, the music you compose, your art in general, is at least partly informed by other factors. Even in an ideal scenario – here defined as one where you don’t try to please an audience or consider genre and you only focus on art – you inevitably bring an ideology to your writing.
What Is Reality?
Are the characters of a book real? How about Sims? I’ve talked about the reality of narrative worlds before, and the repercussions should be clear: Reality isn’t an entirely binary process.
Remembering our attempt to answer, What is fiction? we should focus on the processes of reality (you could even call them “degrees of reality”!) that are involved in the making of a work of art, like a novel.
- Fictional worlds are still real in that they are anthropocentric. That is, even a science-fiction novel set on an alien planet necessarily involves events, communication, behavior, etc., easily recognized as human. After all, the book’s intended audience is human, not alien – and we could even complicate things further by pondering on the universality of experiences. Perhaps an alien civilization would also have a concept of love.
- Fictional worlds reflect experiences that are real. This operates both on a personal level (the author’s experiences inform the novel) and on a societal level (see the earlier section).
- Crucially, some of these expressions are subconscious – especially on a societal level, as we saw. That is to say, the author isn’t fully aware that they incorporate their sociocultural context in their fiction. Not to mention, very often books simply write themselves!
- Are ideas “materializing” in dreams real? Are they any less real compared to “coming up with stuff” in waking consciousness?
“What is fiction?” becomes a more complicated question considering the difficulty of answering “what is reality?” in a sort-of-mathematical, one-plus-one manner.
“What Is Fiction?” is about Affect, not Reality
For the reasons we saw, and many others, the answer to “What is fiction?” cannot be predicated on reality. Something else is needed. And as you have likely guessed by the subheading, that “something else” is affect.
In other words, to the question, What is fiction? my answer would be: a text whose ideation, style, and overall presentation is inspired by and communicates feelings, thoughts, states of mind. If you’d like a contrast to nonfiction, a text of nonfiction – such as a dissertation, an essay, or a news article – is inspired by and communicates knowledge and expertise.
On this theoretical foundation, what is fiction isn’t about reality at all! Most fiction books are “fictional” (that is, they generally don’t correspond to historical events or people – though see this post!) but only because abandoning strict historical factuality allows the writer to focus on affect.
It is a monumental task to separate fact from fiction: Even the Greek myths about Pegasus, Zeus, and so on, are metaphors for human behaviour, as are Aesop’s (and La Fontaine’s fables)
More recently even Cinderella is a metaphor for human types: The ugly sisters – difficult, abrupt, uptight, crass, but ugly
Cinderella: Accepting, calm, modest, compassionate, but beautiful. I’m imagining beauty in this circumstance of an apparent fairy tale to be character thought and perception.
Ah, yes! The mythology is a very apt reference, highly indicative of the predicament involved.