So I was reading through “Allan Hazlett’s”:http://www.cassetteradio.com/hazlett/papers.html paper on “impossible worlds”:http://www.cassetteradio.com/hazlett/twoarguments.pdf and I was struck by one of the passages from Dave Eggers he quoted.
bq.. He was such a skinny kid when he was little, always looked smaller, just amazing, in the pool, in the ocean, a beautiful stroke. I try for a second, something to do, to time my breaths with his, watching his chest rise and fall, the rest of his body immobile, the hands in fists, the hands tied down, as the color continues to drain I watch the stupid [ ] asshole sleep.
Then he gets up. He is awake and he is standing, and pulling the tubes from his mouth, from his arms, the nodes and electrodes, barefoot. I jump.
Jesus [ ] Christ. What are you doing?
[Screw] it.
What do you mean, [screw] it?
I mean, [screw] it, asshole. Im leaving.
What?
Screw it, Im not going to be a[n] anecdote in your stupid book.”
p. Now that’s not quite “what Eggers wrote”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0375725784/ref=sib_aps_pg/002-0426123-8953628?%5Fencoding=UTF8&keywords=anecdote%20in%20your%20stupid%20book&p=S08V&checkSum=C4GcysICIPWMgwtHqtHZr%252FaMJFICw7Wcwswk%252B55DVW4%253D. Many would say that what Eggers wrote isn’t really acceptable discourse in a philosophy paper. So then what are one’s options. As I see it, there are basically four options.
# Quote Eggers completely.
# Replace some letters with !@#$ or ****
# Bowdlerise, as Allan did.
# Use a different quote for the example.
I think my rough preference ranking here is 2, 4, 1, 3, but I don’t have any good argument for that. I just think screwing with what someone wrote just because it doesn’t match the sensibilities of _your_ target audience isn’t really right.
Anyway, the philosophical point Allan is making here is interesting. He wants to argue that nothing can be both a fictional character and a real person.
bq. John realized he was a character in a book, and didnt like the way he was being treated by the author. _Realize_ is factive, so it was also true in this fictional scene that John was a character in a book. But on Lewis-style accounts, it seems, this is impossible. There is no possible world where it is told as _fact_ that John realized he was a character; there is simply no world where it is true that John is a character in _A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius_, save (in a sense) the actual world … One and the same thing cannot be treated as factual and fictional at the same time by the same person.
Well that last line isn’t quite right because of the old examples of real people turning up in fictions. Most stories I write include real people. All the characters in the stories in “this post”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/001079.html are real, though none of them really did the things I attribute to them. So Allan’s claim needs to be qualified a little to be true.
Still, there’s a sense in which what he’s getting at seems true. It certainly feels right that “Six Characters in Search of an Author”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0486299929/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20 is an impossible fiction. (And maybe I should use that fact in my stuff on resistance.) But clarifying just what that sense is turns out to be a little tricky I think. (My next example involves quite a few *major* plot spoilers for “Atonement”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/038572179X/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20 so it’s going below the fold.)
In the first 300 or so pages of “Atonement”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/038572179X/ref=nosim/caoineorg-20 Briony is a character in a work of fiction. She then ‘jumps off the page’ and becomes a real character, or at least as real as Eggers’s friend John, in the last 30 or so pages. It turns out (or at least it’s presented as if it’s turned out) that the first 300 or so pages was a book written by Briony. But, and here’s where things get tricky, that book is _in part_ a work of fiction. And, just as I put myself into some fictions, Briony has put herself into this one. So it seems in _Atonement_, Briony is both a fictional character and a real person.
That needs a little qualification. What we find out is that not quite everything in Briony’s book is quite true. Does that make it a work of fiction? Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s a flawed, i.e. inaccurate, work of non-fiction. Arguably that’s how _Briony_ intends to present it. (Actually I couldn’t quite work out Briony’s motivations at the end, and I was too annoyed by it all to go back and try and figure out exactly what McEwan intended us to think had happened.) But it isn’t absurd to think of it as a work of embedded fiction.
None of this is to say that Allan’s wrong about _Heartbreaking_. But I think the thesis he’s looking for needs to be stated a little more carefully than he has done to really be right.
Now the hard question – do we have asymmetric compound impossibilities true in fiction here? I sure hope not!!