why wouldn't you worry about how Hamlet's friends cope with his death?

[edenfalling]

I think I may have figured out why so many people are boggled by fanfiction. It is because they think like this:

I have argued that our emotions are partially insensitive to the contrast between real versus imaginary, but it is not as if we don't care—real events are typically more moving than their fictional counterparts. This is in part because real events can affect us in the real world, and in part because we tend to ruminate about the implications of real-world acts. When the movie is finished or the show is canceled, the characters are over and done with. It would be odd to worry about how Hamlet's friends are coping with his death because these friends don't exist; to think about them would involve creating a novel fiction. But every real event has a past and a future, and this can move us. It is easy enough to think about the families of those people whom O.J. Simpson was accused of murdering.

That is an excerpt from The Pleasures of Imagination, an article by Paul Bloom. (Emphasis is mine.)

It's a very interesting article, mostly to do with why telling and experiencing fictional stories is such a hugely common human activity, and why 'playing pretend' in all its varied forms is so important to us that even babies have the mental capacity to do so (at least to some degree). I found myself agreeing with most of it, but that paragraph stopped me cold.

Because while I know perfectly well that fictional characters are fictional, I do wonder what happens to them before, during, and after their stories. I do wonder about the implications of their actions. I don't think that is in any way more difficult or unusual than wondering about nonfictional people -- in fact, I think it's easier, partly because we can know fictional people in ways we can never know real people, which means we have a much richer basis for speculation, and partly because, well, they're fictional. Telling myself stories about fictional people lacks a certain sense of voyeurism I feel when reading human interest articles about real people. (Obviously YMMV on that last point, as the popularity of RPF shows!)

Yet apparently this instinct to see stories as 'closed' -- as if they have no continuing existence in readers' minds once we reach the words "The End" -- runs very deep in Paul Bloom's mind, since he cannot conceive of considering fictional people as if they and their worlds continue beyond the boundaries of the particular time-and-place in which he encounters them.

I don't understand that mindset at all.

...

Thoughts, anyone?

Comments

Here from metafandom

[legionseagle]

As a matter of fact Aleathea Hayter wrote a brilliant book on how Hamlet's friends coped with his death called Horatio's Version and the world would be a poorer place without it. John Sutherland has written various volumes of critical essays including Can Jane Eyre be Happy?

It seems to me that whether Bloom shares the mindset or not, stating as a fact that it doesn't exists constitutes wilful ignoring of an awful lot of contrary evidence.

Re: Here from metafandom

[edenfalling]

Horatio's Version sounds fascinating -- I must put it on my to-read list!

Yeah, while Bloom is probably giving an accurate report of how he approaches stories, to universalize from that is pretty short-sighted. Where else does he think sequels and remakes and things like, oh, that book about Rochester's mad wife (Wide Sargasso Sea, IIRC?) come from?

Re: Here from metafandom

[shayheyred]

Horatio's Version rocks. I loved it. Also "My Nephew Hamlet," the diary of Claudius, found after the tragedy ends. Also "The Mysterious Affair at Elsinore," a radio play about the investigation after the play is over.I've always, ALWAYS been fascinated by the "Act VI" of Shakespeare's plays - what happens the first time Orsino sees Viola dressed as a woman? How can Petruchio and Katherine possibly live together without killing each other? Do the witches screw with the succession in Macbeth? And on and on, and it translates into other post-canon questions for so many of my fandoms. I cannot imagine NOT wanting to know what happens after!

Re: Here from metafandom

[edenfalling]

Oooh. *makes notes for further reading*

Re: Here from metafandom

[shayheyred]

The Mysterious Affair at Elsinore exists, I believe, only at the Library of Congress...except I have a very old xerox copy, and am happy to send you one if you contact me off-LJ at redchance at aol.com. As for "My Nephew Hamlet," I bought it in England, and it's by someone named John...Turogh? Turok? Something like that. Alas, I loaned it to someone and will probably never seen it again.

[katta]

Came here via metafandom, and yeah, I came to the conclusion a while ago that either your brain processes fiction as if it were real or it doesn't, and if it doesn't you'll never understand fanfiction. To me, "What happened before?" "What will happen later?" "What are they thinking?" are questions that pop out automatically whenever I'm properly involved in a story. It doesn't mean I don't know it's fiction, just that the joy of fiction to me depends on imagining an entire world outside of it. So yes, I quite agree with you.

[edenfalling]

Huh. So perhaps Paul Bloom cannot make the jump to experience fiction as if it's real? I think that's sad. I mean, I can see not wondering about continuations or implications or stories that didn't really grab me, but if no stories ever grabbed me and made themselves at home in my mind... well, I suppose I wouldn't know the difference, but that sounds like a rather gray and drab way of experiencing the world.

[katta]

So perhaps Paul Bloom cannot make the jump to experience fiction as if it's real?

Well, I can't say specifically in his case - maybe he does, but just more rarely. But I have noticed that for some people, the outside perspective (Doylist, if you will) isn't just one way to engage with a book, to step in and out of, but the primary or even only way. I suppose it's the Verfremdungseffekt in action.

here via metafandom

[ellia]

I don't get that mindset at all, my very first fic ideas, (thankfully unpublished as the internet didn't exist back then) came from wondering about what happened to the Dr Who's companions after they were dumped back on earth and had to return to their normal lives.

Re: here via metafandom

[edenfalling]

One thing I especially love about New Who is that the showrunners are making some attempt to answer that question. Which just goes to show that they wondered too, and the story and world were alive in their minds beyond the show's cancellation. :-)

here via metafandom

[meridian_rose]

do wonder what happens to them before, during, and after their stories. I do wonder about the implications of their actions
Exactly. I was first going to say that its a question of writers vs not-writers, where writer's imaginations are primed by the text [of whatever kind] and not-writers accept or analyze but don't want to add to the text. But I have lots of conversations with family and friends who aren't writers but do have questions and ideas about the pre-, post- and what-ifs of the text/media artefact we're discussing.
Instead I think it's a question of engagement. I don't get "fannish" about texts that do not engage me. The more engaged I am, for whatever reason, the more I talk about the text, question the text, imagine possibilities for the text, and create fanworks about the text. And when I'm engaged with a text, of whatever sort, I can't imagine *not* wondering, questioning, creating. But then I also can't grasp the idea that other people are not constantly imagining or "writing in their head", or however you want to perceive the notion of creativity.
Thank you for an interesting post.

Re: here via metafandom

[edenfalling]

I think you may be right! I also have family and friends who consider fanfiction my slightly peculiar hobby, but they also engage with stories and fictional worlds and try to figure out how they work and what might come next. At least some stories are alive for them, even if they don't feel a need to add to the text. (Now I am trying to figure out what makes the difference between people who simply engage with stories and people who actively create stories -- not-writers vs. writers, as you say.)

Anyway, as I said above to katta, I think that never properly engaging with a story to the point that it becomes real in one's mind would make for a rather grab and drab experience of the world.

[dameruth.livejournal.com]

Thoughts: I completely, utterly agree with you and am equally mystified by Bloom's viewpoint. If I like a story, I will keep retelling it in my head, complete with embellishments and new chapters and all that.

However, like you, I suffer genuine voyeurism and invasion-of-privacy squick when extrapolating such things about *real people*. This is why I run screaming from RPF and even, I think, why I don't care much for historical fiction about actual historical figures. I feel free to write any damn thing I like about fictional characters (like the ever-infamous alien/human-worm!porn-slash), and even to make free with descriptions of them based on the physical features of actors who portray them . . . but I would die of embarrassment before writing anything fictional about the actors themselves, even something quite innocuous in nature.

Hm. Would be interesting to do some sort of poll and see what % of the population views fictional stories as "open" vs. "closed" . . . and what their relative views on, say, fanfic are. ;)

[edenfalling]

I dreamed up fanfiction ideas years before I knew what fanfic even was. I didn't write them (which is probably a mercy), but I was definitely thinking beyond the boundaries of any given narrative, as if it were simply a small snapshot of a world as large as the real one. That impulse -- to ask something as simple as "what happens next?" or as complicated as "if this plot device does that, then what if someone did something similar over there two hundred years ago, with such-and-such results, and then someone from over there sent a message to the main characters..." -- is as natural as breathing.

I do sometimes read RPF written by authors I like for their other work, but always with a kind of squiggling feeling in my gut. It fascinates and discomforts me in the same way as watching a car crash or a house fire. I really have no idea how people perform the mental trick of seeing real people as characters while also paying enough attention to their real lives to build the equivalent of an agreed-upon canon knowledge base.

I would do a survey, but obviously any response based on my f-list would be massively fandom-biased. *wry*

[leahnari.livejournal.com]

Huh, that's interesting. And I agree, why wouldn't you wonder and elaborate and think about what happens next? Why wouldn't you want to wander more around Amestris or come up with a way for this plot point and that one to actually make sense in the canon? Or write what would have happened if So-and-So had lived, and impacted the life of the protagonists?

I agree with dameruth on RPS (I actually have the same squicks, sometimes extending towards fictional characters, oddly), but fiction? Fiction is a playground.

[edenfalling]

I wonder, also, how much of this is related to the difference between being a writer/storyteller and being a more passive consumer of other people's stories. If one has the storytelling bug (in addition to the 'let's pretend' bug that everyone seems to have), one is more likely to be pulling stories apart and thinking about them in depth.

[joisbishmyoga.livejournal.com]

I think the instinct actually is to wonder about the characters and their world, but little kids aren't capable of maintaining that curiosity in the face of "they lived happily ever after". It seems to answer their question, after all. So by the time they get to an age where that answer isn't enough, they've quit thinking about it.

("And then they lived happily ever after, the end" sounds an awful lot like a tired parent trying to make their kid shut up and go to sleep already. So we get trained not to wonder anymore.)

[edenfalling]

Interesting theory! You may have a point there -- I do not recall wondering what happened to fairy tale characters after 'happily ever after.' And yet, I remember thinking about ways stories could have gone differently, or things that might happen around their margins, when I was very young. Perhaps it's that I started reading 'above my age level' and there's simply more meat for speculation in longer books?

("And then they lived happily ever after" always suggested, to me, that the characters wound up rather like my own family... which, yeah, is not especially interesting. What's interesting is something new and different, not something I'm living every day myself.)

[proanon.livejournal.com]

I imagine any responses you get here are going to be a little skewed; the internet fanfiction community is fairly obviously tilted in the direction of those who do read a story and then expand upon it in their minds. That said, "But what then?" is a fairly common question.

It may reflect a level of engagement in the story, or of imaginative flexibility. Some people may find it difficult to infuse 'reality' into texts they read and shows that they watch. A fair amount of what we get from stories depends on what we put into them, after all. And there's also the question of what one reads or watches. Some mediums tend to lend themselves to imaginative expansion more than others. (Or perhaps, some genres would be a better way of thinking about it.) A story that was clearly wildly imaginative to begin with may invite further imagination, while a story that clings very closely to a fictional but realistic depiction of the world, perhaps less so.

[edenfalling]

Yeah, I am obviously preaching to the choir, as it were. :-)

The thing is, based on Bloom's theory of real life trumping fiction, one might expect more realistic stories to produce more "and what next?" responses, since they would be more likely to 'fool' people into treating them as real. Yet in my experience of fandom, I would say that the more fantastic elements a story has (whether actual fantasy/sci-fi elements, or simply elements foreign to the average person's life, such as spies, mysteries, foreign settings, violence, etc.), the more likely people are to explore it further. I would be curious to see what he'd make of that apparent contradiction of his theory.

[hungrytiger11.livejournal.com]

No, I don't understand that mindset that stories are "closed" at all. (probably most of fandom will be like that too). As you said, in some ways stories allow us to experience in different ways than real life events including the fact that we can get to know the characters in a way we never will in real life events. Part of the use of story is to learn about experience outside our own, so in that we are better able to empathize with each other. Stories might not match the depth of understanding as living the experience for ourselves, but still. That is why stepping into the characters' shoes is so important. Whether the story is something deep and moving, like Of Mice and Men or lighter like Sailor Moon their is something we take from that.

Plus, like you and some others commenting here, I find the obessive following of some real world events can become voyeristic, feeling we should give people dignity in letting them experience their joys and griefs without eyes upon them. Also why I dislike RPFs (though historical fiction stories with real people as characters generally doesn't bother me, and I enjoy memoirs and biographies. Maybe because for the former, real people in historical fiction are generally supporting and for the latter the people the books are about have given permission in some manner...idk).

Still, my grandfather never liked stories all that much, period. I think he felt that nonfiction and news were more relevant to him. I think a lot of what this Paul person is saying is how he'd feel. So there must be people like that, who just miss the point of story, let alone the point of wondering what happened after a story finished. Then there are others who maybe feel that once the story is done they know what happens (the characters lead a quite live no unlike the reader's own).

Lastly...totally silly but the line "It would be odd to worry about how Hamlet's friends are coping with his death because these friends don't exist;" made me laugh so much. The author wasn't meaning it in this sense, but by the play's end, that is narratively true! Except for Horatio, all his friends and family are dead. (Well, maybe Ophelia's brother, Leartes, and Hamlet were friends before the play began, and I guess maybe Hamlet was friends with people off screen like the pirates but....still. They have a graveyard in the courtroom by the time Fortinbras shows up practically.)

[edenfalling]

I get squicked by tabloid coverage of various scandals, actually. I work in a magazine shop that also sells newspapers, so it's impossible to ignore the headlines. And my overwhelming reaction to most of the cover-page stories is sympathetic embarrassment and shame for the people being written about, because it's such an invasion of privacy.

There are a lot of people out there who don't seem to get the point of stories. I think that's sad, but to each their own, I suppose. *sigh*

You're right about Hamlet's friends! Horatio survives, and maybe Hamlet had other old college friends we never hear about, but everyone else is dead. To be honest, what I mostly wondered about at the end of Hamlet was the political mess Denmark was now in, and whether someone would rebel against Fortinbras (or claim that he had actually killed the royal family himself and was trying to pass it off as Hamlet's fault to make himself look blameless).

[hungrytiger11.livejournal.com]

whether someone would rebel against Fortinbras (or claim that he had actually killed the royal family himself and was trying to pass it off as Hamlet's fault to make himself look blameless).

There is probably fic for that. Thank goodness some people do see stories as open. :)

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

...I have never heard of that mindset before, even when people are telling me why they don't like fanfic. :O

[edenfalling]

It's a very strange way to think, isn't it?

"There are no happy endings, because nothing ever ends," to quote Schmendrick.

[lynati-1.livejournal.com]

"But every real event has a past and a future, and this can move us."

...So...he was never moved by a fictional event? He never cried at the death of Bambi's mother, or cheered when the Death Star blew up? Or had any range of emotions that sympathized with the plight of a fictional character, wanting to see him triumph, and the plans of his enemies fail?

Conversely, he is able to be moved by every real-life event as deeply as those who experienced it? He's never felt too distant from a huge, horrible event to the point where it didn't feel real to him? Knowing something happens isn't the same as experiencing it. And when you're immersed in a story, you tend to feel more connected to what is happening than when you're reading a snapshot, list-of-facts news story about an event.

It's easier to be upset by the abstract concept of loss of life, what the world or a family may have lost from it, than it is to be upset by the death of a specific person when you never met them; never had any kind of connection with them. I don't know them at all, I don't know their story or what kind of person they where, and as such, they feel less real than somebody whose story I do know, even if that person is made up.

There's this one line at the end of the Joy Luck Club that always makes me tear up. And I always have a little smirk for the ending of Spy Game. That's leaving alone hundreds of other moments in literature and media and hell, MUSIC, that completely sucked me into the moment.

One of my favorite movies, both as a child and as an adult, was the Neverending Story. Even as a child, the "ordinary world vs. the book world both being 'real'" bits stuck with me, as well as the narration at the end:
"Bastion made many other wishes, and had many other amazing adventures before he finally returned to the ordinary world. But that's another story."

Ie, "Just because this part is over doesn't mean that the whole story is. Outside of these walls, the character(s) continue on."

Silly me, I thought this could be applied to ALL stories, everywhere.
Apparently if the author/narrator doesn't explicitly tell me that more happens, I've always been supposed to assume everybody dies and the world is swallowed up into a void as soon as the screen rolls black, as soon as I hit the final page? That nothing but a void existed and the players sprang to life exactly as they are before the curtain went up for the first time, with no rhyme or reason to why they act and think the way they do unless one is explicitly stated?

When a movie is over it often has a closure that, while not necessarily removing all of our wonder about what happens next with the characters, at least answers the questions the movie raised...but when a show is canceled, they often don't have time to do wrap up all the plot lines. And since I don't want to imagine characters I am attached to forever dangling over the proverbial cliff, that is when I am most likely to start wondering about the ways they might get themselves back on solid ground.

To say that when a show is canceled we should immediately lose all curiosity about characters that the creators and writers have spent X amount of seasons and time developing so that we will care about them enough to come back and spend an hour each week watching them seems a little, I don't know, counter-intuitive?

Why would anyone ever read, or write, a sequel if a story is over as soon as the book is done? Why would any studio ever bother to produce a spinoff?

to think about them would involve creating a novel fiction
...and what's wrong with that?

Re: "There are no happy endings, because nothing ever ends," to quote Schmendrick.

[edenfalling]

He does not deny that fictional events and people can move us; he just seems to think the emotions roused are sort of... pale shadows of the emotions roused by real life events. He would have a much better case if he talked about the difference between fictional events and real life events that happen to a person directly. I think he is missing the importance of the sense of connection you talk about -- the idea that we know the person affected by an event. There are many fictional people I know quite well; conversely, there are billions of real people I don't know from Adam. So while I can feel compassion for them in the abstract, as fellow members of the human race and so on, it's hard to care on a personal level.

I really am baffled at the idea that a story stops and its world disintegrates just because the movie ends or the book closes. The story isn't in the book, after all. The book is only the vehicle to transmit the story into readers' minds; after that, it lives in us. I think revivals of old stories (whether trying to breathe new life into movie franchises, or things like the new Doctor Who series) prove quite conclusively that people don't stop caring about stories just because they reach the words "The End" or some equivalent thereof.

to think about them would involve creating a novel fiction
...and what's wrong with that?

Nothing whatsoever. :-D

[rianax.livejournal.com]

ll Bette's stories have happy endings. That's because she knows where to stop. She's realized the real problem with stories -- if you keep them going long enough, they always end in death.

From SANDMAN #6: "24 Hours"
Stories are how humanity interacts with the world, how we build it up, and break it down.

Outside of our intimate circles, we can only care for so long before our lives interrupt with the daily tasks of living. I have cried for and cared for fictional characters with more attention than I give to victims in the nightly news.

Nothing I can do can help or hindered a stranger a thousand miles away or a character in a story-- but one is fiction and is safe to care and cry for.

[edenfalling]

Yes. It is, perhaps, a failing of humanity, but we relate best to people as individuals, and to people who have a story. It's easier to 'feel' the reality of a fictional person we get to know than a real person who is a nameless statistic to us. This is, I believe, why a lot of aid agencies write their pleas for money using one or two sample charity recipients to stand in for large groups of charity recipients -- people are more likely to feel sympathy and empathy for a single person in trouble than for a huge group in trouble.

[(Anonymous)]

It maybe a failing of humanity, but I really think it is failing of being mortal. We are creatures of the finite; time, attention, and energy, we have only so much to give before it grates into our own survival.

My person motto is to try to be harmless; if you can't actively do good in the world, you can at least try not to do harm.

Humans maybe be bastards, but we are extraordinary and surprising ones even still. We are the only species that regularly and almost unfailingly care for offspring that is not even tangentially related to us(or even the same species).

Fiction is cathartic. We can care without any real loss to our lives.