Forum: Enlightenment (in partial
fulfillment of the requirements for participation in the Enlightenment First
Annual Meeting, 2001)
The Status of Fictional Characters.
Radcliffe argues that Ray is mistaken in denying
existence, and thus the possibility of reference, to fictional characters. Discussing the status of Elizabeth Bennet, a
character from Austen’s Pride and Prejudice,
Ray says:
For example,
suppose that we are aguing about
Elizabeth’s moral charcter, and someone who has not read the book overhears
us and thinks that we are analyzing one of our friends. Our audience also knows the concepts we are
using, and she thinks that they refer to something in reality. She is deceived, because she extends her
concepts to include an unkown as a real thing.
The difference between our discussion and what is overheard is that we know that Elizabeth is Austen’s creation,
that it is really her intentions that we must analyze through her words; while
our hapless eavesdropper thinks we are gossiping.
But we are all
making mistakes. You and I are making
the mistake of talking about this figment as though it is a woman... [Ray 99:Ch8]
I wish to argue contra
Ray and with Radcliffe that fictional entities exist, but that
Radcliffe is mistaken about what sorts of things they are.
Ray is precisely correct when she says that the
issue is whether fictional entities have determinate identity. On a naive view of the nature of fictional
(as well as imaginary and mythological, fictional objects would indeed fail to
have an identity. Specifically, they would fail to meet the requirements of the
law of exluded middle. Imagine a
typical chicken. Now, how many feathers
does this imaginary chicken have? The
answer is indeterminate. But any real
chicken would have just so many feathers.
Our indeterminate imaginary chicken fails to have an identity, in the
strict sense of identity required by the law of excluded middle and the law of
identity. We do not, and could not,
imagine objects with the determinacy required by the formal requirements of
identity. Nor could an author specify
the identity of a character determinately.
How many hairs are on Elizabeth’s head?
Is her right ring finger longer than her index finger or not? For all real women, there would be a
determinate answer to these questions.
But not for fictional women or imaginary chickens.
Radcliffe attempts to avoid this difficulty by
denying, sensibly, that Elizabeth is a woman. He says:
There is an
entity, created by the action of my mind, named “Elizabeth Bennet. This entity has properties that are very
similar to the properties of a memory, but instead of being created by my
perceptual experience of a living woman, it was created by my reading a book. Anything I might remember about a woman I
might also know about Elizabeth Bennet, and if you and I have read the same
book the entities we created in our minds are likely to be similar; so similar
that we may abe able to treat them as identical. But they are not identical: there are at least as many Elizabeth
Bennets as there are readers of Pride and Prejudice...Thus Elizabeth Bennet is in fact a concept that subsumes all the mental entities named
Elizabeth Bennet in the minds of all the readers of Jane Austen’s novel.
But Radcliffe’s suggestion conflates objects
with concepts of those objects.
Elizabeth Bennet is a fictional character created by Jane Austen, not
the multiple and differing concepts that readers might have of that character. To be sure, I have a concept of Elizabeth,
as do Ray and Radcliffe and all the other Austen fans. But surely our concepts, our interpretations
of Austen’s text, are not identical with Austen’s creation.
Radcliffe’s wantonly promiscuous multiplication
of Elizabeths calls to mind Derrida’s self-refuting dictum that “there are no
texts, only interpretations.” If
Elizabeth just is the multiple and varying concepts that different readers
have, this would make it difficult to claim that there could be incompetent
readings of Austen (a Derridean problem indeed). Suppose that someone says that Elizabeth is a silly, empty-headed
woman of loose morals and no self-respect.
We would presumably want to say that is a misreading of the novel. On Radcliffe’s account however, that person
is speaking of his concept of Elizabeth.
How are we to disagree with our incompetent reader? If we reply that, no, Elizabeth is far from
silly or empty-headed, we are speaking of our concept, not his, and so we have
failed to disagree.
In order to disagree, we must be speaking of one
and the same thing: the one and only Elizabeth Bennet, the Elizabeth Bennet
created not by readers but by the author.
But what is it that the author created?
What Austen created was a text, a novel. Elizabeth is a character in that novel--a “woman depiction”, if
you will. Not a depiction of a woman
(unless Austen was writing a biography), but a woman-description. That woman-description includes the relevant
predicative descriptions from the novel: “...is proud”, “...is stubborn”, etc.,
and the logical implications of those predications.
Treating fictional or mythological objects as a
relevant subset of the text of a work (and the implications of that portion of
text) avoids the logical violations of the naive view. Woman-depictions are extensional; they
conform to the law of excluded middle, and all other logical constraints. And they are not (merely) mental entities
(if such exist--though I’m inclined to agree with Radcliffe that there are
mental entities). Fictional characters
are not figments.
Treating fictional characters as
“person-depictions” also makes evident how it is that, for example, a given
conception of a character can be rationally criticized as incorrect: there is
an objective source, the text, which can be called upon to adjudicate disputes.
Radcliffe’s conflation of concept with object is
evident in the quote above. He says
that Elizabeth is a concept, a mental entity very like a memory. Then in the same passage he says that
“anything I might remember about a woman I might know about Elizabeth...” But the sorts of things that one might
remember about a woman (e.g., that she is tall or highly educated or married)
are not the kinds of things that one could know about a “concept which is very
like a memory.” Concepts can’t be tall
or married or highly educated. It seems
a mistake to identify Elizabeth with anything mental at all.
Are we, as Ray asserts, making the error of
talking about Elizabeth as if she were a woman? I think that there is merit in Radcliffe’s claim that this would
commit Ray to an odd sense of
“mistake”. [Is an actor in a play, speaking lines of dialogue which are
not true, the play being a fiction, making a mistake?] If one says, speaking of Elizabeth, that she
is high-minded and principled woman, this doesn’t commit one to the claim that
there exists an x such that x is a woman and x is named Elizabeth and x is
high-minded. On my analysis, assertions
about fictional characters are to be parsed as assertions about what is
included or implied by the text. They
are assertions about what is constitutive of the depiction. Thus:
The depiction of Elizabeth includes the predicates “...is high-minded
and principled” and “...is a woman.”
Similarly, when we say of the Mona Lisa that she, the woman in the
painting, has a beautiful smile, we are not asserting that there is a woman in
the painting, a woman who has been hanging on a museum wall for many decades
and who is about a 16th on an inch thick, and who smiles interminably though
beautifully. We are not even asserting
that there exists a beautiful smile. We
are asserting, using our knowledge of the conventions of fiction and art, that
this woman depiction includes a beautiful smile depiction.
Ray seems to make different sort of error when
she says, “... Elizabeth is Austen’s creation, [and] it is her intentions that
we must analyze through her words...” I
believe that it is fundamentally wrong to attempt to understand and analyze a
work by understanding the “author’s intentions.” First, the author’s intentions may be, and often are,
inaccessible. Second, even where the
author is available, we face the problem of the subversive or ironic author who
gives disingenuous reports of his or her intentions. Finally, even in cases where we could have confidence in the
sincerity of the author’s report of intentions, it is far from clear that the
author’s intent is transparent even to the author herself. It seems likely that in subtle and complex
works, mixed and complicated intentions, perhaps even unconcious intentions,
enter into the creation. It is likely
that many authors and artists fail to realize all the important implications of
their characterizations, or the “intentions” which moved them to that precise
creation. The difficulties involved in
unpacking the artist’s intent become more evident when we consider visual arts,
particularly painting. What was
Leonardo’s intent in giving Mona Lisa that ambiguous smile? How could such a thing be determined--if in
fact it is determinate?
The most serious difficulty with tying fictional
entities (and their ilk) to the intentions of their creator is the questionable
ontological status of intentions. We
would need, at the least, an account of intentions which permitted them an
identity. It is notoriously difficult
to give a characterization of intentions which avoids the logical problems of
indeterminacy.
I suggest that the work of art is a separate
object, whose identity is separate and distinct from its creator’s
intentions. The painting is what is on
this surface; this novel is the text contained between these covers. And it is from that surface or text that the
work derives its identity. Intentions
are obscure; the work of art is public and objective.
For purely imaginary objects, where there is no
objective independent work of art or text produced, it seems to me that we do
better with an analysis that focuses on the act of imagination rather than on
some purported imaginary object. If I
imagine a pig with wings, there is no “pig with wings in my imagination.” There is not even an image of such a pig in
my imagination. My imagination is not
the sort of thing which could contain images, let alone pigs. Humans have the capacity for a kind of
mental action, “imagining”, and one form which imagining can take is “flying
pig imagining.” If we can thus
characterize the act, we have no need of imaginary objects. All talk about them can be parsed into a
characterization of an action: we are
imagining in a certain way, namely “pig flyingly.”
To belabor the point, imagine that someone
unaquainted with dance wishes to witness one, specifically to see a tango. We take this person to a ballroom where
people are do the tango, and he says to us, “Well, I see all the feet and
bodies moving in a particular pattern--but where is the tango?” The feet and bodies moving so just is the
tango. And so it is with imaginary
objects. They are modulations of the
act of imagining; they are the way in which we are imagining.