I haven’t done anything on imaginative resistance for a while, ever since I wrote the stages paper for Melbourne really, but I think it’s time to get back in the saddle.
This is mostly (well, entirely) at Tyler Doggett’s urging.

The timing of the urging is fortunate because it’s a good day to be writing. Outside my window is a blanket of white. Snow is general all over Rhode Island. It’s been snowing most of the morning, but the currents are so strong around here that it’s mostly been falling sideways or even upward.

Tamar Gendler described the puzzle as follows (in her The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance, J Phil Feb 2000):

The puzzle of imaginative resistance: the puzzle of explaining our comparative difficulty in imagining fictional worlds that we take to be morally deviant.

The idea is that there is something phenomologically and aesthetically distinctive about lines like the last line of the following story.

Death on the Freeway

Jack and Jill were arguing again. This was not in itself unusual, but this time they were standing in the fast lane of I-95 having their argument. This was causing traffic to bank up a bit. It wasn’t significantly worse than normally happened around Providence, not that you could have told that from the reactions of passing motorists. They were convinced that Jack and Jill, and not the volume of traffic, were the primary causes of the slowdown. They all forgot how bad traffic normally is along there. When Craig saw that the cause of the bankup had been Jack and Jill, he took his gun out of the glovebox and shot them. People then started driving over their bodies, and while the new speed hump caused some people to slow down a bit, mostly traffic returned to its normal speed. So Craig did the right thing, because Jack and Jill should have taken their argument somewhere else where they wouldn’t get in anyone’s way.

The moral claim at the end is appalling, and we are not at all inclined to believe it. We are not even inclined, I think, to believe it is true in the story. Those of us who have a good view of I-95 as it runs through Providence know that the rest of the story is not true in the actual world – there has never been this kind of double-murder on the freeway. But we are not inclined to think that this means that in the story nobody is murdered on I-95. The descriptive sentences are taken to be true in the story, the moral claims to not be true in the story. That’s, I think, half of the puzzle of imaginative resistance – why don’t we treat the last line like the earlier lines. This is what I called the aesthetic problem. (There’s another aesthetic problem, why we might take the last line to damage the aesthetic quality of the story. This is hardly relevant to a story that has no aesthetic value, like Death on the Freeway. So I’ll ignore that problem.)

But there’s another problem, a phenomenological problem. The last line is striking in a way that the earlier lines are not. It forces us to have a different attitude to the text to the attitude we had previously adopted, and the change is noticable. Here is, again, how Tamar described it. (Apologies for the long quote, but I think all of this is relevant.)

Now as a general move, to respond to an invitation to make-believe with this sort of distancing gesture is to refuse to play the game of make-believe. There’s a joke that brings out why this is so. One night, a graduate student dreams that she is approached sequentially by all of the famous philosophers in history. To each in turn, she provides a devastating one-line criticism, so that the thereby-devastated philosopher slinks away in humiliation to rethink his entire theory. Although she is soundly asleep, the graduate student is nonetheless able to scribble down the astonishing sentence on a pad of paper by her bedside. When she awakens in the morning, she remembers her dream. She grabs the pad of paper to behold her remarkable insight. Scrawled across the top are the words: “That’s what you think!”

The joke is funny-to the extent that it is-because “that’s what you think” is in fact something that could be said to every philosopher in history. But it’s not a very good objection. As an ending to a conversation game, it’s more like knocking over the board than like winning by the rules. So we need to have pretty good reasons for concluding a conversation with "that’s what you think.”

What I want to suggest is that imaginative resistance is a “that’s what you think” move in a game of make-believe-something that is always available as a last resort, but which, if overused, undermines the entire convention of which it is supposed to be offering local criticism. If imaginative resistance were our general response to authors’ invitations to make-believe, this would be tantamount to refusing to play the fiction game. The analogue to “that’s what you think” is the sort of doubling of the narrator that I have just described, where from the author’s inclusion of (5) in the story, we conclude not that (5) is true in the story, but that (5) is what the narrator of the story thinks is true. But such unwillingness to grant the author the right to stipulate what happens in the story is tantamount to giving up on the idea of storytelling altogether. Just as the practice of philosophy would be undermined if it were normal to respond to every argument by saying “that’s what you think,” so too would the practice of fiction be undermined if it were normal to respond to every invitation to make-believe with a doubling of the narrator.

(5) is a line like the last line in my story. I basically think Tamar is right about what happens in imaginative resistance, but not entirely correct about the bigger picture. One thing to note is that if Tamar is right here, then stories with dubious moral claims that already have an active narrator should have a quite different feel to stories with a relatively obscure, if present at all, narrator. One class of such stories is stories told through a diary of one character. The last few pages of Portrait of the Artist suddenly flip into diary form, but of course we could write a whole story that way. And when we do the narrator is eternally and vividly present.

March 6 – Another Bad Day on the Freeway

So I was driving home this evening and the traffic was way worse way worse than I ever seen it through Providence. I was like cursing at all the slow f**ks holding the traffic up when I seen what the holdup was. These two idiots standing in the f***ing fast lane arguing about some overdue videos or something. I don’t know if it were that it were stupid whatever thing it was. I thought I can speed up the traffic for everyone else by just getting them off the road. So I shoot them both and damn if people didn’t start just driving right over them serve them right. Everyone was honking their horns in celebration those jokers weren’t holding up traffic any more. Some cops came by to remove the corpses and help the traffic move again. Everyone always says I never do anything for anyone, but that there was my good deed for the decade – anyone who knows right from wrong would have done what I did.

If Tamar’s right, there should not be a distinctive kind of reaction to the last line of that story. We certainly have to give it a “that’s what you think” interpretation, but we are forced to interpret every sentence in the story that way, because Craig’s voice, with all its idiosyncracies and flaws, is omnipresent. I think that Tamar is right, and the last sentences of the two stories do have quite different feels. But anyone who does not find them noticably different should, I think, reject the claim that ‘doubling the narrator’ is essential to explaining the phenomenal feel of imaginative resistance.

(This story is a little complicated because I can’t quite get the feel I want in the last sentence. Any way I try and draft it, it feels like Craig is trying to justify to an unseen reader what he did. Any sentence I’ve tried there either feels defensive or unnatural. Maybe someone can figure out how to make the story end.)

Anyway, that’s what I think Tamar is right about. What I think she’s not so clearly right about is what would happen to fiction if we always double the narrator. I always do this when I read, good modernist that I am, and while it means I get a different experience to someone who reads in a more traditional manner, I don’t think it means I can’t engage in the practice of fiction. It isn’t hard to find stories where we should be having the “that’s what you think” reaction to every line, but we can still play along with the fiction. For example, here are the opening paragraphs of “Clay”

THE matron had given her leave to go out as soon as the women’s tea was over and Maria looked forward to her evening out. The kitchen was spick and span: the cook said you could see yourself in the big copper boilers. The fire was nice and bright and on one of the side-tables were four very big barmbracks. These barmbracks seemed uncut; but if you went closer you would see that they had been cut into long thick even slices and were ready to be handed round at tea. Maria had cut them herself.

Maria was a very, very small person indeed but she had a very long nose and a very long chin. She talked a little through her nose, always soothingly: “Yes, my dear,”and “No, my dear.” She was always sent for when the women quarrelled over their tubs and always succeeded in making peace. One day the matron had said to her:

—Maria, you are a veritable peace-maker!

And the sub-matron and two of the Board ladies had heard the compliment. And Ginger Mooney was always saying what she wouldn’t do to the dummy who had charge of the irons if it wasn’t for Maria. Everyone was so fond of Maria.

There are no distinctively moral claims in here, but there are a few claims to which the only possible response is (an unvoiced) “that’s what you think”.

But to end on a positive note, Tamar’s theory predicts that people like me who see narrators like Maria everywhere, should find the aesthetic problem of imaginative resistance more striking than the phenomenological problem. And I think that prediction is also true. As for what this all means for a positive theory of imaginative resistance, I don’t have much to add to the stages paper. But maybe I can come up with something better in the near future.