Fictional Characters, Transparency, and Experiential Sharing
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Fictional Characters, Transparency, and Experiential Sharing Marco Caracciolo1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Abstract How can providing less textual information about a fictional character make his or her mind more transparent and accessible to the reader? This is the question that emerges from an empirical study of reader response conducted by Kotovych et al. Taking my cue from this study, I discuss the role of implied information in readers’ interactions with characters in prose fiction. This is the textual strategy I call ‘character-centered implicature.’ I argue that the inferential work cued by implicature creates an intersubjective dynamic analogous to what philosophers Zahavi and Rochat discuss under the heading of ‘experiential sharing.’ Effectively, readers complement the textual evocation of mind by drawing on their own past experiences, which leads to a distinctive first-person plural (‘we’) perspective—a sharing of cognitive resources that is responsible for the perceived transparency of the character’s mind. While this experiential sharing may result in empathetic perspective-taking, not all instances of empathy for fictional characters involve sharing. Keywords Empathy · Implicature · Fictional characters · Intersubjectivity · Transparency · Qualia
1 Introduction In Transparent Minds, an influential contribution to the field of narrative theory, literary scholar Dorrit Cohn advanced the argument that characters’ minds in fiction are potentially ‘transparent’ because readers can know them ‘in ways [they] could never know people in real life’ (1978, p. 5). Cohn captures an important intuition about readers’ engagement with characters: readers of fiction do indeed talk about the minds of certain characters as if they had unmediated access to them, and as if such level of access was impossible or at least unlikely in everyday intersubjectivity. It is, of course, not entirely accurate to see fictional characters has having a mind. Fictional characters, including the minds that readers attribute to them, are what Katja Mellmann (2010) calls ‘psycho-poetic effects’: the result of a particular mimetic illusion that readers of fiction entertain—namely, the illusion that they are dealing with minded beings and not with words on a page. This is certainly a widespread illusion, and central to literary fiction as we know it. In Strange Narrators in Contemporary Fiction, I discuss it under the rubric of ‘character-centered’ illusion; * Marco Caracciolo [email protected] 1
Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium
when they are under this illusion, ‘audiences can have the sense of “getting to know” [a character] as they would know a real person: they can understand the character’s personality and past experiences, predict his or her behavior, or even project it outside of the fictional world to which the character belongs’ (Caracciolo 2016, p. 8). The sense of transparency that Cohn theorizes is possible only once readers develop this illusion: transparency is not an intrinsic feature of fictional minds, but
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