The comments on Monday’s complaint about the hero in WATERSMEET facing insufficient consequences for her mistakes have gotten me thinking about the cognition of reading fiction.
Early in our blog, Emily posted about a study finding that fiction readers’ vicarious experiences of characters’ emotions can be observed in the brain. Emily was puzzled about why this is surprising, and so am I: we know that the subjective experience of reading fiction involves identifying with characters; we know that subjective experiences are reflected in the brain somehow; isn’t this finding inevitable? Or at least, wouldn’t it be far more surprising were this not the case?
Today I’m having a different thought on fiction cognition, inspired by also agreeing with what what Emily commented on the WATERSMEET post: I don’t begrudge other people their good fortune in life (well, except those people I already… grudge), but I hold fictional heroes to a higher standard of needing to earn my respect and their good tidings.
And I think this is common; TV writer Alex Epstein, whose blog and books I think are very smart, often stresses that luck and coincidences in storytelling need to work against the hero, not for them. Otherwise it feels like the hero (not to mention the author) is getting the easy way out.
I’ve always thought this was one of those ways in which the rules of fiction simply diverge from relating what would actually happen in life; I’ve remarked on THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN crossing a bit too hard into the “life really works this way sometimes” side of “semi-autobiographical” at the expense of it’s story. The logic of fiction ain’t necessarily the logic of the world.
One reason, I think, is a simple violation of expectations: good stories set up a challenge, two things that both seem necessary and yet incompatible, and then surprise you with how they resolve the contradiction. You read a story trusting the author that you’re going to get such a twisty, hard-fought resolution; letting the protagonist off easy violates this expectation by resolving (part of) the conflict without any such surprise.
If you'd tried as hard as me... actually, you still would have lost, mofos.
(Picture from http://www.flickr.com/photos/wv/)
Which brings me back to storytelling. I’m thinking maybe one reason we can accept bad luck for protagonists but good luck for villains only is that this is how we experience the world as being for ourselves. So, it’s not quite right that fiction just needs to be set up differently than real life; it’s that fiction needs to be like we experience life, not like it actually is. Emily’s post was about getting into characters’ heads; maybe the characters also need to seem like they’re in yours.
What do you guys think?
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May 21, 2009 at 10:00 am
I haven’t read Gilovich’s book, but this is pure attribution theory. The theory would hold that we attribute the success of others, not just their failures, to personal qualities, while attributing our own to situational demands. A firefighter or cop or whoever does something heroic, and everybody thinks he is brave — i.e., he has this permanent personality characteristic of bravery. But the person himself says, honestly and without false modesty. “That’s what we’re trained to do. I was just doing my job.”
May 21, 2009 at 10:58 am
Yes, but Gilovich’s point, as I understood it when I read it, was that there’s a reason for this — namely, that we have full access to the efforts we’ve made but others’ can be hidden from us. So there’s an asymmetry in information driving the asymmetry in judgment.
Not sure how plausible it is, but I took him to be offering an explanation, rather than just a description, of the fundamental attribution error. Now insert disclaimer about how I read this as a freshman in college and may not remember it all right.
May 21, 2009 at 12:27 pm
The attributionistas, as I recall, pay attention to the availability angle. I guess the question for fiction is what information is available to which characters, and to the reader. How many different points of view do we see the world from?
Also, what is luck? Things that the character has no control over? But in fact, it’s the author who creates and controls everything. So what constitutes luck, good or bad, for a character?
May 21, 2009 at 3:17 pm
I agree that sometimes books work too hard to seem real. Like, I can’t think of any examples but when they screw someone over just because, it feels like they’re trying to say, “See? This isn’t a fairy book ending with CLOSURE.”
I’m trying to think of examples where luck worked with the protagonist and it felt a little too pat…nothing’s coming to mind now.
May 21, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Sadako: Oh, I SO know what you mean about “Look how edgy it is that we didn’t give a happy ending!” books. I’m also having trouble thinking of an example, but did you see that Evan Rachel Wood movie THIRTEEN? Where you’re supposed to be all delightfully shocked by how jaded it is? Self-conscious edginess is annoying.
Jay: good question about what constitutes luck in fiction. I feel like fiction often relies on a very deterministic sense of cause and effect, and then good plot twists are ones that manage to simultaneously not be ones you predicted from the rules, but also aren’t ones that challenge the rules in the most fundamental way (because then they feel ad hoc). I’m not sure if this makes any sense — I need examples — but I want to keep thinking about it. But not now, because now I am back to the park, where I am striving mightily to find a topic for my truly last paper of the semester!
May 21, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Oh, I agree with the Thirteen assessment. I felt so irritated by the whole thing. I wasn’t really surprised that a teenager co wrote it. It screamed, “Look, real life sucks! Being a teenager is hard and not like a WB TV show!”
I liked Wintergirls but I felt LHA was trying REALLY hard to make sure it didn’t end too happy. Like there is hope but she clearly didn’t want it to be a happily ever after, girl goes into therapy and all is well after school special.
May 22, 2009 at 11:15 am
Jay: …oops, I realize my reply didn’t say anything about the question I was allegedly answering. I think what I was going for is that “luck” is when an author breaks the rules they’ve set out, and that this is okay when it’s in the service of adding a challenge for the hero, but not solving one? …I don’t know, what do you think?
Sadako: Yes, although I feel like in Wintergirls that was probably a wise choice on LHA’s part. Whereas in Thirteen, there were no wise choices. None.
That movie came out when I was still deep in the throes of Evan Rachel Wood love (from Once & Again), and I was very sad.
May 23, 2009 at 5:53 pm
This is a really interesting post. I’m not entirely sure what I think…will reflect some more. (about half of it went over my head I’m afraid)
May 25, 2009 at 1:14 am
I love that pithy bit from Alex Epstein. Thanks!