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Forthcoming in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. This is the version of the manuscript that is to be typeset.
Fictional Creations
Maarten Steenhagen Uppsala University It is commonly assumed that fictional entities do not exist, at least not actually. ‘There is no Dracu- la!’ we tell the children before bedtime, ‘It’s only a story.’ That no fictional entity exists is however a substantive philosophical claim, and some philosophers have even gone so far to claim that no fic- tional entity can exist in the actual world. I will show that both claims are false. To say that fictional entities do not exist, or to claim that they could not exist, is mistaken, I will argue, for reasons that have little to do with the distinction between fiction and reality.
1. Fiction and Encapsulation It is undeniable that some works of fiction tell us about and refer to specific paintings, poems, or plays painted, written, or scripted by merely fictional characters. The acts of writing, painting, com- position, etc. that (according to the fiction) brought these works into being, are merely fictional cre- ative acts. I will call such fictional works of art fictional creations. What makes fictional creations special, compared to ordinary creations such as Vermeer’s View of Delft or Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch , is that fictional creations find their origin in a merely fictional creative act. The picture of Dorian Gray is the result of a fictional act of painting, and consequently it has never actually been painted. Because fictional creations are created merely ‘according to a story’, fictional creations are fictional entities, on a par with Sherlock Holmes and the titular antag- onist of Stephen King’s It. Yet, unlike Holmes and It, some fictional creations actually exist as the works of art they are. I will elaborate one example in detail. In W.H. Mallock’s satire The New Republic (1877) we read about the meeting of a party of friends, who end up discussing increasingly philosophical matters. Eventually they become gripped by a Platonic question, what is the essence of a good society? Many of the novel’s characters satirise famous aesthetes in Victorian society, such as Walter Pater, Violet Fane, and Matthew Arnold. Mal- lock portrays his characters often as over-sensitive and as seeping with poetry. Their conversations are littered with remembered lines of Tennyson, Browning, and Goethe. However, some of the poems, letters, and sermons that are printed in the novel are entirely fictional. Mr Rose, whom Mal- lock intended to represent Pater, explains that the ideal society shall be quite without prejudice or bigotry. It will allow for a variety of styles, he says, ‘whether they be pagan or Catholic, classical or mediaeval.’ To illustrate his point, Mr Rose produces a piece of paper from his pocket. ‘These lines,’ he says, ‘were written by a boy of eighteen – a youth of extraordinary promise, I think, whose edu- cation I may myself claim to have had some share in directing. Listen,’
Three visions in the watches of one night Made sweet my sleep – almost too sweet to tell. One was Narcissus by a woodside well, And on the moss his limbs and feet were white; And one, Queen Venus, blown for my delight Across the blue sea in a rosy shell; And one, a lean Aquinas in his cell, Kneeling, his pen in hand, with aching sight Strained towards a carven Christ; and of these three I know not which was fairest. First I turned Towards that soft boy, who laughed and fled from me; Towards Venus then; and she smiled once, and she Fled also. Then with teeming heart I yearned, O Angel of the Schools, towards Christ with thee! When Mr Rose puts away the paper he expresses his approval of the sonnet to Miss Merton, one of his interlocutors. It captures the true spirit of modern aestheticism, he says – the spirit in which the architects of the ideal state will set to work. The eighteen year-old poet who composed the sonnet for Mr Rose remains unnamed in the novel, and it is also unclear if the poem has a title. I will refer to the poem as Three Visions. Mr Rose’s gif- ted student does not actually exist. Nor could he actually exist, it seems, for the undergraduate au- thor of Three Visions is a purely fictional person, and fictional people cannot also exist actually. Also the piece of paper on which the sonnet was drafted, and that was handed to Mr Rose, probably as a gesture of fondness, is a merely fictional piece of paper. The composition of the poem, an event that is part of Mr Rose’s backstory, inherits its fictionality from the boy of eighteen who carried it out (cf. Nolan and Sandgren 2014: 616). Therefore, Three Visions is a fictional creation. But does it follow that it is necessarily a merely fictional entity, or can Three Visions exist actually? Many assume that individuals that find their origin in a fiction are ‘encapsulated’ in that fiction, or at least in the world of fiction. Such originally fictional individuals haven't migrated from the real world into a fiction (as can be said of Napoleon, who figured in Tolstoy’s fiction War and Peace ), but are pure inventions of the literary imagination. When we tell children that Dracula is only a sto- ry, we build our words of comfort on the assumption that what is purely imaginary isn’t real. Even stronger, it is not just that Count Dracula doesn’t happen to exist actually, it is commonly assumed that he cannot actually exist because he is an originally fictional individual. The credo is that what happens in the fiction, stays in the fiction. This ‘Encapsulation Thesis’ underpins many of our be- liefs and theories about fiction, and I think it is a philosophically interesting thesis. Encapsulation Thesis: originally fictional individuals cannot exist in the actual world The possibility of fictional creations such as Three Visions presents us with potential counterexam- ples to the Encapsulation Thesis. Note, the Encapsulation Thesis, as it underpins beliefs and theories, does not rule out that Dracula actually exists as a fictional character. Some authors have wished to claim that fictional characters actually exist, as some sort of cultural construction (e.g. Thomasson 1999). Such realism about fic- tional entities is compatible with the idea that Dracula is harmless to us, because according to the
to a reading of Three Visions? Or, closer to your present situation, wouldn’t you accept that the son- net I reproduced a few paragraphs back was Three Visions? And isn’t this just the poem composed by that unknown student of Mr Rose in Mallock’s story? I think the answers to these questions should be affirmative. But this means that a fictional individual can, and in fact has, transferred into the actual world.
2. Authorship in fiction At this point a critic could object that we have been too quick in our attributions. No eighteen-year- old Oxford undergraduate wrote Three Visions. Mallock did. Of course, this critic – is it you? – will say: ‘It is true that in the fiction that Oxford undergraduate composed the sonnet, but in reality it was Mallock who did so’. If what this critic claims were true, then Three Visions would have originated in an actual act of composition, one undertaken by Mallock. And that is the crucial fact that would mean Three Visions isn’t a fictional creation at all. It would be Mallock’s poem, a poem actually written by an actual writer, only to be embedded in a fiction. And of course, reproducing or reciting a poem that was ac- tually written by an actual writer does not count as a counterexample to the Encapsulation Thesis. This objection needs to be addressed. It is true that the thought that Mallock composed Three Visions may seem attractive at first. But any such attractiveness disappears once we pull apart some ideas that are easily confused. To begin, it is no general truth that in order to write a story about a work, you also need to author that work. True enough, all poems have some author, just as all paintings were painted by someone. But sometimes these authors or painters are merely fictional. Just as someone can paint a picture of a book without writing a book, a writer can write a story about a painting without ever touching a brush. This is just to reiterate that there can be fictional creations: that some stories can be about originally fictional works of art, where an originally fictional work of art is a work of art that was not actually created. That there can be fictional creations in this sense is uncontroversial. Accordingly, the critic must have something more specific in mind. What the critic must have in mind is that Mallock at some point sat down to arrange and write down the specific collection of words that constitutes Three Visions. Mallock’s novel does not only refer to and describe Three Vis- ions , the novel incorporates the very words and lines that make up the poem. Therefore, the critic urges, Mallock’s act of writing those lines couldn’t have been anything else than the act of authoring Three Visions. But this is not true either. First of all, there is no general principle that says that whenever someone arranges and writes down a collection of words that form a poem, they are also and thereby the au- thor of that poem. If I write a biography of Oscar Wilde and I decide to write about his poem Ravenna , perhaps letting one of Wilde’s close friends recite portions of it in my narrative, I may also find myself writing lines of verse while drafting my manuscript, in much the same way Mal- lock did. Yet it is clear that I am not the author of Ravenna. Of course the critic might say that this again misses the point. Wilde’s poetry already existed well before biographies about him were written, and so Wilde’s biographers solely reproduce his poems when they overtly incorporate them in their biographies. In the case of Three Visions , the critic in-
sists, with Mallock’s act of composition of those lines the poem was authored, because prior to Mal- lock’s writing those lines, Three Visions simply did not exist. This response brings us to the heart of the objection. Ultimately, the critic relies on an illegitimate move from what is actually true to what is true according to a fiction. This is because the critic must assume that when Mallock wrote the lines that make up Three Visions while drafting his novel, he created the poem because no one else had yet done so. But that no one else had done so is only part- ly true. It is true that no one had actually composed the poem Mallock wrote down. This should have been obvious all along, given that Three Visions so clearly seems to be a fictional creation. However, what the critic must assume as well, and without good reason, is that, if no one had in actuality composed the poem, then no one had composed that poem according to the fiction Mallock was working on. This is clearly false. The poem Mallock included in his manuscript had been composed by one of Mr Rose’s students (at least according to the story), and this student had done this (again, according to the story) long before Mr Rose produces the piece of paper and recites Three Visions to Miss Merton. It is perfectly consistent to suppose that by the time Mallock came to write Mr Rose’s recitation of the poem, it was true according to Mallock's story that this poem was written by one of Mr Rose’s undergraduate students. What Mallock did was commit to paper a poem that, according to his story, had already been composed by Mr Rose’s undergraduate student. We may suppose that all poems have some author, and may suppose that according to the fiction one of Mr Rose’s students wrote Three Visions. We may also suppose that no one actually wrote Three Visions before Mallock wrote down the lines that make up Three Visions. But from these as- sumptions it is logically invalid to infer that Mallock himself was the actual author of Three Visions. For all we know no one in actuality wrote the poem—something that should not even be surprising, given that Three Visions is a fictional creation. Of course this does not mean that Mallock had no role to play in the story’s fictional creation. He obviously did. It was Mallock who imagined The New Republic ’s story about this group of aesthetes in the first place. So it should be clear that Mallock’s writing the lines that make up Three Visions was only possible because of an overarching (and aesthetically impressive) imaginative project. And with regard to the poem specifically, Mallock's creative contribution was to write a story that was in part about Three Visions. In writing this story, he ended up writing about the poem too, and by reproducing the poem when drafting Mr Rose’s speech to Miss Merton, even made Three Visions quite explicitly part of a fictional world. It is only in this broader sense that Three Visions originates with Mallock, as part of a novel he wrote. And it is for this reason that in many situations we would be right to give Mallock credit for it. Ultimately, it was a fictional world that sprung from his imagination. But this doesn’t make Mal- lock the author of Three Visions. As it happens, Otho Laurence, who in the novel represents Mal- lock himself, at some point even says, ‘I don’t think I ever wrote any original poetry’ (p. 203). (This happens when Lady Ambrose is reading out one of Laurence’s own published poems, which Mr Rose points out is in fact a translation of Euripides’s address to Artemis of Hippolytus.) Where does that leave us? I have suggested we can actually recite or print a fictional creation such as Three Visions. If one can actually reproduce a fictional creation – it doesn’t matter in what form –
However, a play is not just any sort of individual. It is a repeatable individual or, in P.F. Strawson's way, a type (Strawson 1959: 231). What is philosophically significant about types is that multiple ‘tokens’ of the same type can exist simultaneously in entirely separate locations without any diffi- culty. When this happens, we may say that a single thing (the type) is found in many places (the locations of its tokens). Think of how both of us can at the same time have the £5 note in our wal- lets. Here we have one individual (i.e. a type, the £5 pound note), existing simultaneously in en- tirely separate locations. Given that poems and plays are types, it could be thought that their repeatability liberates them from their historical situation. Put differently, it could be thought that the objection presented above can be defused by pointing out that poems and plays are not just individuals, but repeatable individuals, and so it simply lies within their nature that they can exist both in and outside a story. Yet I think this response would be too quick. The current objection nicely brings out that point. For, even types, as repeatable individuals, seem to be confined to their historical setting in a way that still seems to confirm the Encapsulation Thesis. Take an etching, for instance. Etchings are types, repeatable individuals. Two museums can have the same self-portrait by Rembrandt in their print collections, because both may have been able to get hold of different impressions (tokens) made from the original copper plate. Yet, there is no way you can hang a print in your house pulled from an etching done by a merely fictional character. Why not? Well, for it to be such a print, the paper on your wall would have had to have touched a merely fictional etching plate. Impossible! Touching requires just that kind of historical path that is unavailable to a creature of fiction. And this I think is the grain of truth in the Encapsulation Thesis. So the critic does seem to have a point. Earlier I suggested that there seems to be no good reason why some actual poetry lover could not burst out and recite Three Visions , or include it in her col- lection of Victorian sonnets. The critic now thinks to have such a reason: individuals, even repeat- able ones, are tied to their own historical setting in a way that forever confines them to this setting. It seems that individuality trumps repeatability. This is almost entirely correct. Yet it overlooks the role of notation or scoring. At least on a plausi- ble and widespread understanding of repeatable individuals, not all instances of them depend on such moments of physical touching, on a spatiotemporal path from original to print, cast, or repro- duction. As we typically conceive of them, all repeatable works allow for further instances of those works to be generated either by mechanically copying from existing instances (e.g. from an original or mould), or else by producing instances by following a set of guidelines or recipe (cf. Walters 2013). Accordingly, even if we cannot mechanically copy a fictional creation, we may still be able to generate instances of it by following a set of guidelines or recipe, if these are available. (I should note that this does not require assuming a Platonism about types, according to which types are a kind of universals, such as developed by Dodd 2007. Universals also allow their instances to be spatiotemporally isolated, but in addition they exist without being created. Types, as I conceive of them, are created individuals.) It is important to keep sight of the fact that notation or scoring makes it that created types such as plays, poems, sonatas and the like are a special sort of repeatable individuals. They are allographic , to use Nelson Goodman's term (but without accepting the specific theory of work identity he builds on top of it). Even when fictionally created, allographic repeatables can be printed, performed or recited in real life, as long as their fictional scores or scripts are accessible. And for some fictional
creations, such scores or scripts may be accessible. An author, for example, can write about them in a novel. Ultimately, then, notation trumps individuality.
4. Real-word immigrants I have shown that the Encapsulation Thesis faces counterexamples. This is not because fictional creations can be repeatable individuals, but, more specifically, because they can be repeatable indi- viduals of the allographic sort. That is, they can be individuals created at a specific point in a fic- tional history that allow for instances to be generated in light of a set of rules or following a proce- dure. This liberates them, at least potentially, from their original fictional setting. All that is required is that someone (fictional or not) pick up the task of following the rules or instructions, or of execut- ing the relevant procedures. This entails that fictional creations can break free from their spatio- temporal setting in a way that is impossible for other sorts of individuals, such as people, buildings and etchings. If this is right, then potentially some of the individuals we can find in the world around us may have originated in a merely fictional world. To stretch somewhat the terminology suggested by Parsons (1980: 51–52), it is possible for the actual world to contain ‘immigrants’, individuals that came into existence due to what happened in a merely fictional story. Native to some fiction or other, such immigrants would have found their way into the real world because someone generated an actual instance of them, for example by performing a fictional play, or reproducing a fictional poem. I should emphasise, the range of possible real-world immigrants is restricted. At least on the basis of what I have said so far, we have only reason to point to possible candidates that fall into the spe- cific allographic class of repeatable individual. My argument doesn’t set Dracula free, for instance, and neither the portrait painted of Dorian Gray. In the next section I want to consider one way of pushing the argument one step further. 5. Embodiment and type existence As I formulated the Encapsulation Thesis, it maintained that fictional individuals do not and cannot exist in the actual world. This is untenable as a general thesis, because, as I have shown, we can find counterexamples. My argument so far thus only builds on examples of such real world immi- grants – by reproducing Three Visions here I have released the poem into the actual world, thereby establishing the point. This is enough to undermine the Encapsulation Thesis, which denies the pos- sibility of real world immigrants. Yet if we replace one of my argument’s premises with a stronger version, we can use the argument to establish that some fictional creations actually exist regardless of whether anyone actually repro- duces them or not. In other words, it would show that simply by figuring in a fictional work in a certain way can be enough for a fictional creation to exist as a work in the actual world. This may seem surprising, but the point is easily illustrated with an example. The Murder of Gonza- go (or The Mouse Trap ) is a fictional play that is performed in Hamlet. Moreover, we may assume that the script of Hamlet gives enough information about The Murder of Gonzago for an actual the- atre company to stage the play in an actual theatre. Actually performing the play would be enough for the the play actually to exists: a repeatable work actually exists if some instance of that work actually exists. But could it be that it existed even before that, just in virtue of the completion of
It is the existence of the embodiment of a type that enables the production of (further) tokens of the type. What is important for the existence of a type is, then, the possibility of generating tokens of that type––that is, that some embodiment of the type exists. (Walters 2013:463) An embodiment, as Walters understands it, is not itself a token, but some individual that counts as standard or rule for the generation of instances or ‘tokens’ of a repeatable work. As examples he mentions both pre-existing exemplars, and recipes for producing tokens of the type, such as musical scores. Embodiments can be stored in various ways: in museum storage, on film, or in human or computer memory (Walters 2013:462). Together with Walters I think that the idea behind (4*) captures well the persistence conditions of repeatable artworks as experts and laypeople alike conceive of them. Whether a piece of music ex- ists or not depends on the availability of its score, regardless of whether the work in question is ever performed. Whether such a score, or a theatrical script, is accessible clearly doesn't turn on the actu- al existence of any token performance or staging. If this is right, then given that Shakespeare’s Hamlet exists, and given that Hamlet contains an em- bodiment of The Murder of Gonzago, we must conclude that The Murder of Gonzago already exists as a work of art.
6. Kripke and Gonzago's murder Before concluding I want to bring out how my conclusions contradict a point emphasised by Saul Kripke. In his John Locke Lectures from 1973, Saul Kripke maintains that the characters in a fictional cre- ation such as Three Visions or The Murder of Gonzago at best exist as fictional fictional characters; they are not or perhaps cannot exist as fictional characters. A fictional character, according to Krip- ke, is actually a socially constructed entity, even though such entities can according to a story be, say, human beings or tropical islands. Kripke’s point is that Gonzago (a main character of The Murder of Gonzago ) is only a fictional character according to the story of Hamlet. And so Gonzago does not actually exist as the socially constructed entity a fictional character would be, but only ac- cording to a story exists as such a socially constructed entity. He writes the following: Only in the play Hamlet , or let’s suppose so, is it said that there is such a play as The Murder of Gonzago. If so, we can say that there is no such fictional character as Gonzago. Here we are not re- porting on what is in the play, because the play does say that there is such a fictional character as Gonzago. We are speaking now about the real world. There is in fact no such fictional character as Gonzago, though the play pretends that there is. There is, however, a fictional fictional character called ‘Gonzago’. This is true in virtue of the existence of the play Hamlet. (Kripke 2013:72) Kripke thinks that the mere fact that Hamlet contains a fictional play that tells us about Gonzago does not entail that Gonzago actually is a fictional character. Stronger, even, he seems to think the mere fact that according to Hamlet there is a play about Gonzago rules out that ‘Gonzago’ can refer to any actual fictional character. Just as there is no possible blood-guzzling creature that we call ‘Dracula’, Kripke thinks that there is no possible fictional character which we call ‘Gonzago’. I think that here Kripke falls prey to the kind of over-generalisation I discussed above. He assumes that because The Murder of Gonzago is a fictional individual, it cannot exist in the actual world. But
as I have brought out, The Murder of Gonzago is not just any fictional individual. It is a repeatable. It that allows instances of it to be generated via a script and stage directions. Assuming that Hamlet makes that script and directions accessible to a real-world performer, The Murder of Gonzago surely could exist as an actual work of theatre, or, if we embrace the stronger premise (4*), in fact already so exists. Even by Kripke's own lights, characters of actually existing plays do themselves actually exist as fictional characters. And I suppose Kripke would agree that from this it follows that characters of possibly existing works of theatre possibly exist as fictional characters. And so, even if the exist- ence of Hamlet , as a work of fiction, does not entail the actual existence of The Murder of Gonzago , it at least entails the possibility of that play’s actual existence. This implies that there is a possible fictional character which we call ‘Gonzago’, contrary to what Kripke insists.
7. Conclusion I have wanted to draw attention to a specific puzzle about fictional creations. I argued that, given a plausible understanding of the nature of created types, the possibility of fictional creations has rami- fications for our conception of fictional entities. Instead of being necessarily encapsulated in the world of fiction, some fictional individuals can and perhaps even do exist as real world immigrants in the actual world. The examples of such immigrants I have discussed are all allographic and re- peatable fictional works of art. Although it is difficult to draw a sharp line, it is clear that there are more potential real-world immi- grants. Some of these will be marginal. Others may come to figure prominently in our lives. Think of types of artefacts first invented in works of science fiction, and only decades later assembled in real life. When people say of something that it is as if it came straight out of a story, they could in fact be right. [email protected] March 2021
