Truths in Fiction

Richard Gerrig's book Experiencing Narrative Worlds has given me much to ponder recently. It's somewhat strange that this book managed to "find" me (and not the other way around). But it was a green book that was just sitting in the desk beside me when I was at the OISE library. Upon perusing the book's curious cover and topic, I immediately was caught by the topic and the idea.
   One  of the key claims made by Gerrig in this book is the way in which "the only experiential distinctions between fiction and nonfiction are those that readers effortfully construct...all information is understood as true until some is unaccepted. My general conclusion is that fictions will fail to have a real-world impact only if readers expend explicit effort to understand them as fictional" (p.240).
   This is quite interesting because it makes me wonder what the mind actually experiences to process something as fictional as opposed to non-fictional. I have read many stories (among them by Phillip Roth, Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag and others) that felt so real to me precisely because the observations being made felt like reality. But then what does "reality" feel like anyway? Gerrig seems to evoke for me the idea that reality is a kind of set of frameworks that are used as reference points, a little bit like a net that surrounds every new idea or concept. But what makes Gerrig's findings unique is that he positions the reader as someone who needs to believe in the validity of fiction before she or he can establish whether it should not warrant inclusion in our lived worlds. This makes sense to me, because it positions literature as a little bit like having a conversation with a stranger. Although we are not going to dogmatically accept everything a stranger says as absolute "Truth" or gospel, we are just open enough to that stranger to entertain the possibility that her or his life intersects with ours. Even when we haven't experienced the things which they have or traveled to places to which we haven't gone, we have faith that their experiences have a relevance to our world. It's only when I might hear a person ranting about an obsessive idea, such as a lost ancient civilization that has scant factual evidence, that my stance toward that person switches from engaged to somewhat ironic or skeptical.
   In the same way, fictional worlds might be thought of as conversations, in which readers are willing to step into the world under the implicit faith that no world is ever completely alien to one's own. Even when the literary world in question looks sinister (such as in the paranoid world of Burrough's Naked Lunch), we bring to it a kind of spacious attention which says that we are willing to try to figure out what it might mean to ourselves and how it fits into our acquired schemas and identities. As Gerrig suggests, it's only when I make a judgment that the world is perhaps dangerous to society (as Plato did in many cases) that I stop swimming in it or engaging in its signs and symbols.
   Gerrig reaches the somehow frightening yet exhilarating suggestion that we take things to be real even though there is no objective "proof" in an external source. Then comes my question: what makes us understand that our books are "fiction" and not "non-fiction"? I think it always comes down to context, regardless of whether it's fiction or nonfiction. That is: it's only in the process of making sense of the text, the narrator's stance, my intended role as reader, and the way the text relates to other life texts, that I can tell whether the work is to be taken as fiction or non-fiction. In other words, I am really not appealing to a fixed "external" reality when I am reading books. In fact, when you think of it, this 'external' reality is an illusory thought. What could possibly be "out there" beyond my senses which clarifies that the words I am currently processing are referring to "real" things? The idea of a factual objective "out there" is a comforting reality indeed, but it doesn't accord with the way we experience and process texts.

Gerrig, R. (1993). Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press