Last week I noted that a large number of people, when they read novels, find it difficult to distinguish between reality and fiction, and tend to assume that the characters’ feelings and thoughts are those of their author. As confirmation, I’ve found a website that records the thoughts of a number of authors, and among “the phrases of Umberto Eco” I find the following: “The Italian is an untrustworthy, lying, contemptible traitor, finds himself more at ease with a dagger than a sword, better with poison than medicine, a slippery bargainer, consistent only in changing sides with the wind.” It’s not that there’s no truth to it, but it’s one of those centuries-old commonplaces promoted by foreign writers, and appears in my novel The Prague Cemetery, written by a man who has expressed every kind of racist impulse using the most hackneyed clichés. I try to make sure my characters are never banal, otherwise I’d end up being attributed with such trite propositions as “You only have one mother.”
Now Eugenio Scalfari, commenting in L’Espresso on a recent article of mine, raises a new issue. Scalfari accepts that some people confuse narrative fiction with reality, but thinks, and correctly thinks that I think, that narrative fiction can be more real than the truth, that it can inspire a sense of identification with and perception of historical phenomena, that it can create new ways of feeling, and so on. It’s a point of view with which one can hardly disagree.
Narrative fiction, moreover, produces aesthetic effects. A reader can be perfectly aware that Madame Bovary never existed and still enjoy the way in which Flaubert constructs his character. But the aesthetic aspect takes us back to the “alethic” aspect—in other words, that notion of truth shared by logicians, by scientists, or by judges who have to decide whether or not a witness in court has given a correct version of events. They are two different aspects: woe betide a judge who is moved by a guilty man’s lying in an aesthetically appealing manner; I was referring to the alethic aspect, since my line of reasoning started off from a discussion about falsity and lies. Is it false to say that a television conjurer can make your hair grow back? It’s false. Is it false to say that Don Abbondio encounters two bravoes? From the alethic point of view, yes, but Manzoni isn’t trying to tell us what he’s narrating is true. He’s pretending it’s true and asks us to pretend too. He is asking us, as Coleridge suggested, to “suspend disbelief.”
Scalfari quotes Werther, and we know how many young romantics killed themselves having identified with Goethe’s protagonist. Did they perhaps believe the story was true? Not necessarily. We know that Emma Bovary never existed, and yet we are moved to tears by her fate. We recognize fiction as fiction, and yet we identify with the character.
Madame Bovary never existed, though we feel that many women like her have existed, and that we are also perhaps a little like her, and we learn something about life in general and about ourselves. The ancient Greeks believed that what happened to Oedipus was true, and used it as an opportunity to reflect upon fate. Freud knew well that Oedipus never existed, but he interpreted his story as a way of understanding how the unconscious works.
What happens to those readers who are totally incapable of distinguishing between fiction and reality? Their response produces no aesthetic effects, because they are so busy taking the story seriously they don’t ask whether it’s told well or badly, they make no attempt to learn from it, and they fail to identify with the characters. They simply exhibit what I would call a fictional deficit; they are unable to suspend disbelief. Since there are more such readers than we might imagine, this bears thinking about, because we know that all other aesthetic and moral questions elude them.
2011