Thus far I have developed topics such as the absolute, ugliness, and fire. This time, the theme is the invisible: How can you show what cannot be seen?
In this case, I will talk about the fact that we do see some curious entities that are not natural—if by that term we mean beings produced by nature, such as trees and humans. There are other entities that live among us that we talk about as if they were real. I am referring to beings in stories—or better, the fictional characters we encounter in literature.
Fictional characters are inventions of the imagination, and therefore common sense tells us they are nonexistent and cannot be seen. But they are also invisible in the sense that they are not expressed through images but through words, and frequently those words neglect to describe their physical characteristics in much detail.
Yet these characters exist in some way outside the novels that have introduced them to us, and they can live anew through countless images of all kinds. So I am going to resort to images of many invisible things and this will not be a simple rhetorical stratagem. The fact is that some fictional characters have become highly visible because of the many portrayals we have made of them outside the texts in which they came into being. What does it mean for the character created by a text to live outside it? If you think about it, this is no mean problem.
Tolstoy does not tell us much about the physical aspect of Anna Karenina beyond that she was beautiful and charming. Let’s read the descriptive passages:
Vronsky … felt he must glance at her once more; not because she was very beautiful, not on account of the elegance and modest grace which were apparent in her whole figure, but because in the expression of her charming face, as she passed close by him, there was something peculiarly caressing and soft. As he looked round, she too turned her head. Her shining grey eyes, that looked dark from the thick lashes, rested with friendly attention on his face, as though she were recognizing him.…
Kitty had been seeing Anna every day; she adored her, and had pictured her invariably in lilac. But now seeing her in black, she felt that she had not fully seen her charm. She saw her now as someone quite new and surprising to her. Now she understood that Anna could not have been in lilac, and that her charm was just that she always stood out against her attire, that her dress could never be noticeable on her. And her black dress, with its sumptuous lace, was not noticeable on her; it was only the frame, and all that was seen was she—simple, natural, elegant, and at the same time gay and eager.…
She was fascinating in her simple black dress, fascinating were her round arms with their bracelets, fascinating was her firm neck with its thread of pearls, fascinating the straying curls of her loose hair, fascinating the graceful, light movements of her little feet and hands, fascinating was that lovely face in its eagerness, but there was something terrible and cruel in her fascination.
The description could equally be applied to Sophia Loren, Nicole Kidman, Michelle Obama, or Carla Bruni. And we know how many Kareninas have come down to us from the tradition.
Not bad for an invisible person.
In 1860, after setting sail to join Garibaldi in Sicily, Alexandre Dumas stopped over in Marseilles and visited the Château d’If where, before becoming the Count of Monte Cristo, his character Edmond Dantès had been imprisoned for fourteen years, and had been visited in his cell by the abbé Faria. In the course of his visit, Dumas discovered that visitors were shown the Count’s cell and the guides talked about him and Faria as if they had actually existed in history, whereas they neglected to mention real historical figures such as Mirabeau who had been imprisoned there.
Dumas remarked on this in his memoirs: “One of the privileges novelists enjoy is creating characters who kill off those of the historians. The reason is that historians call up mere ghosts while novelists create people in flesh and blood.”
The Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden claimed that, in ontological terms, fictional characters are not fully determined—in other words, we know few of their properties—whereas real people are fully determined and we can predicate their every difference. I think he was wrong: in reality no one can list all the properties of a given individual, because they are potentially infinite, whereas the properties of fictional characters are strictly limited by the text that talks about them—and only those properties mentioned by the text count for their identification.
And in truth, I know Alessandro Manzoni’s character in The Betrothed, Renzo Tramaglino, better than my father. As far as my father is concerned, there are episodes in his life—goodness knows how many—that I do not know and will never know. There were secret thoughts he never expressed, anxieties he concealed, fears and joys he left unsaid. So, like Dumas’s historians, I shall continue to call up this dear ghost to wonder about. Conversely, I know everything about Renzo Tramaglino that I ought to know. Whatever things Manzoni has not told me about him are irrelevant to me, just as they are to Manzoni and for that matter to Renzo, inasmuch as he is a fictional character.
Is this how things really are? Precisely because it tells us about invented things, which are therefore never verified in the real world, a statement in a novel should always be false. Yet we do not consider statements in novels as lies, nor do we accuse Homer or Cervantes of having been liars. We know perfectly well that in reading a work of fiction we make a tacit pact with the author, who pretends to say something true and we pretend to take him or her seriously. In doing this, every fictional statement designs and constructs a possible world and all our judgments on truth and falsehood will refer not to the real world but to the possible world of the fictional one. So it is false in the possible world of Arthur Conan Doyle to say that Sherlock Holmes lived on the banks of Spoon River, and in Tolstoy’s possible world it is false to say that Anna Karenina lived in Baker Street.
There are many possible worlds: for example, there is the possible world of my desires in which I imagine what would happen if I were shipwrecked on an uninhabited Polynesian island with Sharon Stone. Every possible world is by nature incomplete or chooses as its background many aspects of the real world: in the world of my fantasies, were I shipwrecked in Polynesia with Sharon Stone, the island would certainly have a crown of palm trees around a beach of white sand and other such things that I might encounter in the real world.
Fictional possible worlds never take as their background a universe that is too different from the one in which we live, not even fairy tales, in which the forest—even though there are talking animals in it—is still like the ones in our real world. The Sherlock Holmes stories are set in a London as it is or was, and we would find it disconcerting if Doctor Watson suddenly crossed Saint James Park to visit an Eiffel Tower on the Danube by the corner of Nevsky Prospekt. A writer might even introduce to us a possible world of this kind but she would have to employ many narrative artifices to make us accept it (for example, by introducing a phenomenon such as a space-time warp or something of that sort). Ultimately, if the story is to have any zest, the Eiffel Tower has to be the one in Paris.
Sometimes a fictional world can reveal conspicuous contradictions with respect to the real world. For example, in A Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare tells us in Act II, scene 2 that the action takes place in Bohemia in a deserted wilderness near the sea—whereas in the real world Bohemia has no beaches, just as there are no Swiss seaside resorts. But it costs us nothing to accept (or pretend to believe) that in that possible world Bohemia is by the sea. Those who subscribe to the fictional pact are usually not hard to please, or are sufficiently uninformed.
Once we have established these differences between the fictional possible world and the real one, we will usually admit that the statement “Anna Karenina committed suicide by throwing herself under a train” is not true in the same way in which the historical statement “Adolf Hitler committed suicide in a bunker in Berlin” is true.
Nonetheless, why is it that we would fail a student in a history exam if she said that Hitler was shot on Lake Como but we would also fail a student in a literature exam if he said that Anna Karenina fled to Siberia with Alyosha Karamazov?
The matter is easily resolved in logical and semantic terms, by recognizing that it is true that “Anna Karenina commits suicide by throwing herself under a train” is only a conventionally quicker way of saying “It is true that in the real world Tolstoy wrote that Anna Karenina commits suicide by throwing herself under a train.” So it is Tolstoy and Hitler who belong to the same world, not Hitler and Anna Karenina.
So, in logical terms, that Anna Karenina commits suicide would be true de dicto while Hitler committed suicide would be true de re. Or better yet, what happens to Anna Karenina does not concern the meaning of the expression but its signifier. To put it another way, we can make true statements about fictional characters in the same way that we can say that it is true that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is in C minor (and not in F major like the Sixth) and begins with “G, G, G, E flat.” It would be a judgment on the score. Anna Karenina begins with a maxim (“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”) which is a matter of opinion, but one immediately followed by a factual statement (“Everything was upside-down in the Oblonsky household”) with regard to which we must not wonder whether it is true that everything was upside down in the Oblonsky household but whether it is true that in the score called Anna Karenina it really says “Everything was upside-down in the Oblonsky household,” or its Russian equivalent.
This solution, however, leaves us dissatisfied. A musical score (apart from the infinite problems of interpretation that it implies) is basically a set of instructions for the production of a sequence of sounds, and the real problem of the enjoyment, aesthetic judgment, and the feelings aroused by the Fifth come later. Likewise, what is written on the first page of the novel called Anna Karenina makes us think about a state of affairs in the Oblonsky home and it is that state of affairs that determines whether we take something as true or false. In other words, to be strictly obvious, even if we take as true that at the beginning of Anna Karenina it says, “Everything was upside-down in the Oblonsky household,” we have not yet decided whether it is true or not that everything really was upside down in the Oblonsky house, and especially if, in addition to being true in Tolstoy’s possible world, this disorder is not in some way true for us, in our everyday world.
It is true that the score called the Bible begins with “Bereshit,” but when we say that Abraham was about to sacrifice his son (and we frequently try to interpret this event allegorically, mystically, or morally) we are not referring to the original Hebrew score (which ninety-nine percent of those who talk about Cain or Abraham do not know); further, we are talking about the meanings and not the signifiers of that book—and those meanings can also be interpreted with other words, frescoes, or films that do not appear in the original score.
The problem as to whether we can make true statements about fictional characters has nothing to do with the problem of the words used to introduce them to us. As children, many young Italians will have read the beautiful books in the Scala d’Oro series, which were abridged versions of the great works of literature written for younger readers by excellent writers. Anna Karenina was obviously not one of them, because it is difficult to summarize this work for children or adolescents, but the series did include, for example, Les Misérables and Le capitaine Fracasse. Thanks to these books, many Italians know who Jean Valjean and the Baron de Sigognac are without having ever seen the scores that were the original texts. How are these characters able to survive, and rather well at that, outside the score that created them?
No one can reasonably deny that Hitler and Anna Karenina are two different entities, with a different ontological status. But we have to admit that many times even our historical statements are de dicto—just like those regarding fictional characters. Those students whose modern history essays state that Hitler committed suicide in a bunker in Berlin are not referring to something they know from direct experience, they are simply asserting that this is what it says in their history books.
In other words, with the exception of judgments that depend on my direct experience (such as “it’s raining”), all the judgments I can make on the basis of my cultural knowledge depend on information recorded in an encyclopedia, from which I learn both the distance from Earth to the Sun and the fact that Hitler died in a bunker in Berlin. Since I was not there to see if that was true, I trust this information because I have delegated both the information on the Sun and that regarding Hitler to expert scholars.
Moreover, every truth in the encyclopedia is open to revision. If we have a scientifically open mind, we must be prepared to discover new documents one day telling us that Hitler did not die in the bunker but escaped to Argentina, that the body burned in the bunker was not his, that his suicide was invented for propaganda reasons by the Russians or even that the bunker never existed; and in fact even though there is a picture of Churchill sitting where the bunker was, others claim that its location is doubtful. But the fact that Anna Karenina committed suicide by throwing herself under a train cannot and never will be questioned.
Fictional characters have another advantage over historical ones. In history, we are always uncertain about the identity of the Iron Mask, or Kaspar Hauser, and we are not sure if Anastasia Nikolaevna Romanova was murdered with the Russian royal family or whether she survived and was the attractive claimant to the throne later played by Ingrid Bergman. Conversely, when we read Arthur Conan Doyle, we are sure that when Sherlock Holmes refers to Watson, he is always referring to the same person, that there are not two people in London with the same name and the same characteristics, and that the person mentioned in every story will always be the one in A Study in Scarlet who is introduced as Watson for the first time by a fellow named Stamford. It is possible that in some unpublished story Conan Doyle might tell us that Watson had lied about being wounded at the battle of Maiwand during the Afghan War, or about holding a degree in medicine, but in this case, too, the man who would be unmasked as a charlatan would still be the person called Watson by Stamford in A Study in Scarlet.
The problem of the strong identity of fictional characters is an extremely important one. In 2007, a novel by Philippe Doumenc (Contre-enquete sur la morte d’Emma Bovary) was published, in which a police investigation reveals that Madame Bovary did not commit suicide with arsenic but was murdered. It is an amusing little game, but one that becomes interesting only because the readers know that Emma Bovary really did poison herself. If they did not know this irrefutable truth they would not enjoy the counter-story, just as in so-called uchronic novels if we are to appreciate a story in which Napoleon won at Waterloo we must know that it is an encyclopedically accepted truth that he lost.
And so, even though there is an undoubted ontological difference between Hitler and Anna Karenina, I am nonetheless able to underline how novelistic statements, considering the way in which we give credence to them, cite them, and refer to them in our everyday life, are indispensable for the clarification of what we mean by irrefutable truth.
If someone asked us what it means for a statement to be true, we could follow Tarski and reply that the statement “the snow is white” (between quote marks, as a verbal signifier or corresponding proposition) is true if and only if the snow is white. In other words, if the snow is like this or that regardless of the way in which we define it. Nonetheless, while this definition may satisfy logicians, it does not satisfy ordinary people. I would prefer to say that a statement is indubitably true when it is as indubitable as the statement Superman is Clark Kent (and vice-versa).
The Pope and the Dalai Lama can debate for years the truth of a statement such as Jesus Christ is truly the son of God, but if they are sensible (and informed of the facts), they cannot fail to agree that Superman is the same person as Clark Kent. And so, to know if Hitler died in a bunker in Berlin is undoubtedly true, we must check to see if it is as undoubtedly true as Superman is Clark Kent.
Thus the epistemological function of novelistic statements is that they can be used as a litmus test for the irrefutability of all other statements.
But what does it mean when we say it is true that Anna Karenina commits suicide instead of saying only that it is true that in the novel by Tolstoy it says that Anna Karenina commits suicide? Because it is obvious that if people are moved by the fact that Anna Karenina commits suicide, this does not mean at all that they are moved by the fact that Tolstoy wrote that Anna Karenina committed suicide!
This brings us to the reason I began to get interested in these problems. Some time ago, a colleague of mine suggested that I should organize a seminar on why we cry (or, at any rate, feel emotions) about things that happen to fictional characters. At first I told him that it is a matter for psychologists, who have studied the mechanisms of projection and identification. After all, I said, don’t we occasionally dream or even fantasize that a loved one dies, and are then moved to tears? So is there any reason why we cannot be moved by what happens to the female lead in Love Story?
Then I told myself that, no matter how people may be moved by imagining that their beloved has died, after a while they realize that it is not true, and stop crying; in fact, they are relieved, whereas swarms of young romantics killed themselves after weeping over Werther’s suicide, even though they knew both before and after that he was a fictional character. Which means that these readers kept thinking that in some world Werther really killed himself.
It is probable that none of my readers has wept over the misfortunes of Scarlett O’Hara, but no one can tell me that he was unmoved by those of Medea. I have seen sophisticated intellectuals wiping away stealthy tears during the last act of Cyrano de Bergerac, even though they had seen it several times, even though they knew very well how it was going to end and had gone to the theatre only to compare Dépardieu’s Cyrano with Belmondo’s. As a sensitive lady friend of mine once said: “Whenever I see a flag fluttering on the screen, I cry, and I don’t care which country’s flag it is.”
So there is a difference between pretending that the person we love has died, and pretending that Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary dies. In the first case the delusive state lasts almost no time at all, in the second we continue to talk seriously about the misfortunes of the two women, and we write books about them.
In any case, if we look at two versions of Madame Bovary—Umberto Brunelleschi’s 1953 illustrations and the one portrayed by Isabelle Huppert in the 1991 film—at least one of them has nothing directly to do with the novel. It is as if she had left it and gone to live in some other means of expression—the cinema, in this case. Then there is the petit bourgeois Bovary and the risqué Bovary, all the way down to the Bovary used in advertisements for recipes.
Why talk about these versions of the lady? The fact that there are so many types of Bovary who act in ways different from Flaubert’s text means that we are no longer dealing with a character from Flaubert’s world, but a fluctuating character.
Many fictional characters can live outside their own text of origin and act in an area of the universe that is difficult to identify and delimit. Sometimes they even migrate from one text to another, as in novels or films about the sons of the musketeers or Pinocchio the aviator. They no longer belong to the source text. To become a fluctuating character it is not necessary to come from a great work of art, and we should study elsewhere why both Hamlet and Robin Hood, Gargantua and Tintin, Heathcliff and Milady, Leopold Bloom and Superman, Faust and Popeye have all become fluctuating characters, while those who have not include Baron de Charlus, Le grand Meaulnes, Stelio Effrena, and Andrea Sperelli.
A survey showed that 25 percent of Britons believed that Churchill, Gandhi, and Dickens were fictional characters while some percentage (I don’t remember how great) believed that Sherlock Holmes and Eleanor Rigby really did exist. So it is possible to become a fluctuating character for a great many reasons. Disraeli does not fluctuate but Churchill does, Scarlett O’Hara does but the Princesse de Clèves does not. (Nicolas Sarkozy has repeatedly stated that he could never read that novel by Madame de La Fayette, and my French friends tell me that this fact has proved a shot in the arm for the unfortunate Princesse de Clèves because, out of spite toward Sarkozy, many people have now started to read it.)
Many characters have become so fluctuating that most people know them better through their extratextual avatars than through the text that introduced them in the first place. This is the case with Little Red Riding Hood, for example. Perrault’s version differs from that of the Grimms (in Perrault, the hunter does not come to rescue Riding Hood and her grandmother), but the fluctuating story that mothers tell their children, even if they stick to the ending in the Grimms version, merges the two versions and sometimes deviates from both.
Even the three musketeers are no longer those of Dumas.
Every reader of the Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin stories knows that Wolfe lived in Manhattan, in a brownstone at a certain number on West 35th Street. In reality, over the years Rex Stout gave us at least ten different numbers on 35th Street—in which, among other discrepancies, there are no brownstones. But at some point a sort of unspoken pact among Wolfe fans convinced everyone that the right number was 454. On June 22, 1996, the city of New York and The Wolfe Pack put up a bronze plaque at 454 West 35th Street to commemorate the fact that the famous brownstone once stood there.
So Medea, Dido, Don Quixote, Monte Cristo, and Gatsby have become individuals who live outside their original scores and even those who have never read those scores hold that they know them and can make correct statements about them. Some characters, in their wanderings outside the original texts, have become muddled amalgams of one another, such as Philip Marlowe, Sam Spade, and the Rick Blaine of Casablanca fame. (I should point out that Casablanca was originally a play called Everybody Comes to Rick’s.) These characters, having become independent of the texts of origin, live among us in a certain sense; often they inspire our behavior, and sometimes we elect them as criteria of judgment, saying that someone has an Oedipus complex, for example, or a gargantuan appetite, or the jealousy of an Othello, or Hamletic doubts.
So when we assert that it is true that Anna Karenina committed suicide or that Holmes lived in Baker Street, we make statements not on a given score (that is, what a given author wrote) but on a fluctuating creature, whose ontological status appears fairly bizarre, because it should not exist and yet somehow it moves among us and can occupy our thoughts.
Is it possible to fluctuate without existing in a physical form? Are there any objects that do not necessarily exist in physical form? Of course, it would be enough to define as an object every entity we can conceive of and some of whose properties can be predicated. For example, let’s consider the case of the husband and wife, one a history teacher and the other a math teacher, who often talk about both Julius Caesar and the right-angled triangle, but would also like to have a little girl.
So they begin to talk every day not only about Julius Caesar and the right-angled triangle but also about the child they would like to call, as one does, Gessica (with a G of course): how to bring her up, which sports she should play, and how nice it would be if she became a showgirl. So husband and wife are talking (i) about someone who has existed physically but physically no longer exists (Caesar), (ii) about something that some call an ideal object although it is not clear where it exists, unless we assume platonically that there is a world of ideas, and (iii) about someone who hopefully will exist physically but does not yet exist (Gessica). But what happens if, apart from these things, the couple also start talking about freedom and justice?
Freedom and justice are certainly objects of thought, but different from Caesar and Gessica—first and foremost, because they are not so well-defined as Caesar and Gessica, because depending on the various cultures, places, historical periods, and religious beliefs peoples have had contrasting ideas about them, and second, because they are not individuals but concepts. And yet, there are concepts, such as the right-angled triangle, that are better defined than the concept of justice.
Are fictional characters entities like Caesar and Gessica, or the right-angled triangle, or freedom?
They have something in common with Caesar, Gessica, the triangle, and freedom because they are semiotic objects—that is to say, sets of properties expressed by a given term, which a culture recognizes by mutual consent and records in its encyclopedia. Examples of semiotic objects are the right-angled triangle, woman, cat, chair, Milan, Everest, Article Seven of the Constitution, the quality of being a horse. Semiotic objects also include those expressed by proper names, and in this sense semiotic objects include not only Julius Caesar (who now exists for us only as a set of properties) but also, assuming they exist somewhere or other, a John Smith or Joe White who, regardless of the fact they are physical entities, are also, when we mention them with a name, sets of properties (and even without ever having met him we could identify Joe White as the son of Tom, born in Slough, currently a cashier with the Bank of such-and-such, living in such-and-such street, and so on). And since the properties expressed by a proper name include those of having existed in the past or existing at present, or those, recorded in any good encyclopedia, of being a mythological entity or a character in a story, so fictional characters are semiotic objects, too.
The boundaries of many semiotic objects are defined so to speak ab aeterno (for example, the properties whereby a square is recognized as such are not subject to variation or negotiation in approximate terms); others have defined boundaries (for example, the frontiers between two states) but can take losses or additions of property (Italy has remained identifiable as such even though it has been deprived of Zara or Nice); and a great many others are variously fuzzy.
For example, we are able to recognize that German shepherds and chihuahuas are both dogs. They share only some salient properties that for now I will limit myself to define as diagnostics. But this also happens for entities such as the city of Milan—otherwise, those who saw it for the first time, like me, in 1946, half destroyed, without either the Pirelli building or the Torre Velasca, would be unable to identify the modern city as the postwar one. And the same happens, for example, with historical figures, otherwise it would not be possible to make statements such as if Cleopatra’s nose had been a little longer it would have changed the history of Rome (in other words, we can take our idea of Cleopatra and remove some properties from it without this causing us to stop recognizing it as such—and we can imagine counterfactual situations such as what would have happened if Caesar had not been killed on the Ides of March).
Which diagnostic properties must be kept in order to identify something as belonging to the same species or class is an open problem, and in any case we ought to think that a property becomes or remains diagnostic depending on the context or the universe of discourse.
Fictional characters are fluctuating semiotic objects because they can lose some of their properties without losing their identity—so much so that, in the popular imagination, D’Artagnan is a musketeer while we know that in The Three Musketeers he is merely a cadet. If Madame Bovary had lived in Italy rather than in France her story would not have been so different. What then are the truly diagnostic properties of Madame Bovary? One would say that she committed suicide for sentimental reasons. So why can we read a parody like Woody Allen’s The Kugelmass Episode, where the protagonist uses a time machine to take Madame Bovary from Yonville and carry her off to New York to live the good life she had always dreamed of? Only because the context stresses Madame Bovary’s diagnostic property as that of being a provincial petit bourgeois with kitsch passions? In fact, the parody works because the main character hastens to take her back before she commits suicide.
While on the one hand this suicide does not occur in the parody, it remains essential, radically diagnostic, for the identification of Madame Bovary. And this point should be emphasized because, as we shall see at the end, the fascinating thing about fictional characters is that their destiny cannot be changed. We can imagine what would have happened if Napoleon had won at Waterloo, and such a counterfactual exercise would certainly be very interesting, but a story in which Madame Bovary did not kill herself and lived happily ever after somewhere would be insipid to say the least …
Why can we be moved by semiotic objects such as fictional characters? We might answer: for the same reason that many people die for justice or liberty. But there is a difference between being moved by Anna Karenina and being moved by the right-angled triangle. (I believe Pythagoras was the only one to experience the latter.)
We are moved by Anna Karenina because, having signed the fictional pact, we pretend to live in her world as if it were ours, and after a while (as if seized by some mystical rapture, certainly due to some qualities of the narrative) we forget that we are pretending. Not only that, but since we are not signed up to that world—so to speak—or we are not a relevant presence in it, we instinctively try to take the place of some rightful inhabitant or inhabitants of it with whom we share the most aspects.
If we accept this definition of fictional characters, we see that the gods of all mythologies are semiotic objects, like dwarves, fairies, Santa Claus, and the entities of the various religions. Some may think that comparing religious entities with fairies is merely an expression of atheism, but I invite every believer to try a mental experiment: imagine being a Catholic and believing that Jesus really is the son of God. Fine: in this case, Shiva, the Great Spirit of the prairies, and the Exu of Brazilian cults are merely fictional characters. But imagine now being a Hindu: if Shiva really exists somewhere, then it is obvious that the Great Spirit, Exu, and the God of Israel are fictional characters. And so on, until we have to admit that, whatever our religious belief, all religious entities minus one are fictional characters. And therefore, even if we refuse to decide which one defies the general law, we can be certain that 99 percent of religious entities are fictional characters, who, like Madame Bovary or Othello, are usually born from a text. The only difference is that the number of people sharing opinions and beliefs about Shiva is greater than those who know Madame Bovary—but let’s not get involved in quantitative or statistical matters.
The fluctuating characters of fiction are made of the same stuff as the characters of mythology. Oedipus and Achilles were fluctuating entities like Anna Karenina or Pinocchio, except that the former were created in ancient times and the latter were born, as it were, as secular myths. And we feel entitled to say that it is true that Pinocchio was born from a piece of wood just as we feel authorized to say that it is true that Athena was born from the head of Jupiter.
It is not enough to say that the ancients thought that Jupiter and Athena really existed whereas anyone who thinks of Pinocchio as a fluctuating character knows that he never existed. I would say that these are psychological accidents, and I might add that a great number of believers have fairly fuzzy ideas about the degree of existence of their gods—that there have been young shepherdesses who say they have spoken with Our Lady; that some romantic girls killed themselves for love of Jacopo Ortis; that at the Sicilian puppet theatre, the audience used to insult the villain Gano di Maganza; that there are teenagers who are madly in love with a character, not a movie star; that there is no saying that Caesar believed in Jupiter; that Christian poets continued to invoke the Muses—and so we enter a universe of feelings, fantasies, and private emotions where it is difficult draw precise boundary lines.
The kind of existence we have allowed to fluctuating characters also explains their moral function. I know I have already written and talked about this topic, but I cannot overlook it in bringing this contribution to an end.
Although these characters fluctuate, they seem irremediably bound to their destiny. Of course, when we weep at their stories we hope sometimes that things might go differently, that Oedipus might take another path and not meet his father on the road to Thebes, that he might arrive in Athens where he could couple with Phryne, that Hamlet might marry Ophelia and live together happily ever after on the throne of Denmark, that Heathcliff might put up with a little more humiliation and stay on those wuthering heights until he can marry his Catherine and live with her as a perfect country gentleman, that Prince Andrey might get well, that Raskolnikov might not conceive the mad idea of murdering an old woman but finish his studies and become a respectable state official, that when Gregor Samsa is transformed into a horrible insect a beautiful princess enters his room, kisses him, and transforms him into the richest man in Prague. Today, computers could even offer programs that rewrite all these stories to our liking. But do we really want to rewrite them?
Reading fiction means knowing that the character’s destiny is ineluctable. If we could change the fate of Madame Bovary, we would no longer have the comforting certainty that the assertion Madame Bovary committed suicide is the model of every indisputable truth. Entering a fictional possible world means accepting that things went, and will always go, in a certain way, regardless of our wishes. We must accept this frustrating fact, and through it experience the thrill of destiny.
I believe that this lesson on fate is one of the main functions of fiction, and constitutes the paradigmatic value of fictional characters, saints of the secular community—and also of many believers.
Only the fact that Anna Karenina inevitably dies makes her fondly, imperiously, and obsessively present as the melancholy companion of our existence, even though she never physically existed.
[La Milanesiana, 2009]