Fictional characters

[Julie Bertagna]

I meant to put this up ages ago, from the blog Butterflies and Wheels, a thoughtful discussion on fictional characters, prompted by a book called Can Robots Be Human? by Peter Cave.

"It is very odd," says Butterflies and Wheels, "and even somewhat mysterious, what powerful emotions we can feel about fictional characters. The oddity becomes more obvious if you try to imagine animals doing it. The idea is absurd - yet we're so used to doing it ourselves that we forget how odd it is. What's that about, do you suppose? Other minds, probably. Right? Must be. The social animal thing. Our brains would have been too expensive to have evolved if they didn't have a huge payoff; the payoff is social collaboration; for that we need a working theory of mind. So we have this hypertrophied faculty of thinking and feeling about the interior worlds of other people - so hypertrophied that it works even (or especially) on people who don't actually exist."

Cave's Can Robots Be Human? says: "The most rational of people can be moved by fictions yet, even when moved, know full well that they are seated in a theatre, reading a book, or watching television. Or do they? Perhaps, one way or another, they suspend their belief in the stagy surroundings, suspend their memories of the tickets they purchased or block out the sound of the book's rustling pages. Perhaps they fall for what is being represented as real, as being, indeed, all for real. Remember, though, they cannot be taken in that much; if they were, they would be warning of danger...

It is a peculiar mental state. Peculiar and delicate. It is easy to be jostled out of it - to be deeply in it one moment and the next to remember that you're sitting in a chair holding and looking at a rectangular box-shaped object packed with slices of paper with black marks on them in rows. But then it's easy to jump right back into it again. Story-telling seems to work that way."

It's one of the best descriptions I've read of the everyday magic of reading a book.