Thinking Fiction discussion
Rest of July Discussion Question
Look no further than Ayn Rand's books for this answer. (Bad fiction and bad philosophy, but still.) Philosophy has an abstruse, precise jargon that enables thinkers to communicate in precise terms about imprecise things, that is to say thoughts.Fiction can use or discard these jargon words, fiction can illustrate in depth the concepts and arguments of philosophical positions, fiction can present point and counterpoint without ever breaking a "fairness" sweat, fiction can proselytize and propagandize and persuade its readers without (in skilled hands) tipping its cards seeking a desired result.
Philosophy is eat-your-spinach reading for the vast, enormous bulk of us. Fiction, happily, is not! Well, I should say "agreeably presented fiction" but let's let that be a given and leave it to the reader to determine their (deliberately used, the awkward and unpleasant "his or her" is goin' down and I'm here to help) own definition of "agreeably presented."
I guess I find myself disagreeing with the premise. Fiction, or any other kind of art, in my view, is an effort to get beyond words to create an experience. Someone tells another about a great movie and they are consistently disappointed in the listener's lack of excitement. That's because the speaker is trying to convey an experience he had in words, but the experience itself was in a different medium, film, and wasn't constructed to be explained or to explain; it was built to pass, or better yet, through the limit of words to something particular enough and engaging enough that one can only say to the other, come watch, come listen.This is not to say that philosophy and fiction are not closely related. They often are. Just as one moves through words to get to an understanding past explanation, one moves through philosophical ideas to reach similar unspoken places. I think it is impossible for fiction to explore ideas to the length that true philosophy does because they aspire to different ends. Philosophy wants to make sense of experience it, quantify it so we can talk about it, which is vital. Fiction like all art, like religion even, requires the mystery and faith of the viewer. That's where the magic is. Philosophy's magical powers lie in the beauty of their answers to the questions that trouble us. Art's is, again, similar to religion, in that it is interested less in answers than in embracing the questions.
I think some people (like myself) have a difficult time understanding abstract philosophical concepts and find it easier to see them played out in fiction.So in that regard, I would say that no, fiction cannot be philosophy, but it can demonstrate it in an approachable way.
The OED defines philosophy as "The study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence, especially when considered as an academic discipline." Merriam-Webster offers a broader definition of "a particular set of ideas about knowledge, truth, the nature and meaning of life, etc." Given either of those definitions, particularly the latter, I think we could, in broad strokes, often consider fiction akin to philosophy for the following reasons.
As a writer, my novel, short story, etc. will usually include a series of events and a collection of characters. Those elements, by themselves, are not a story. It's not until we establish motivation and stakes, emotion, twists and turns of behavior, thoughts, and actions that we begin to see the story emerge. Even contrary views and villainous characters must be examined and understood to some extent. Most competent writers put a great deal of thought into these things. In the process of devising the story, the author often discovers other meanings, cause & effect, etc. That is very much in alignment with our definitions of philosophy, is it not?
As a reader, I mentally ingest all the thought and inventiveness the author has baked into her novel. It may move me, make me laugh, frighten me. The reason we crave stories is because we want to go on that journey with the characters and experience those emotions. And that experience will generally make us think. The great novels can change our entire way of thinking, change our lives.
Given that stream of thought, fiction, good, well crafted fiction, may be the most effective philosophy ever devised.
Mod
Jim wrote: "I generally prefer looking further than Ayn Rand whenever possible (much, much further)*chuckle*
she does raise an interesting question. Is there for you a distinction between what Rand was doing--essentially writing a series of long-form advertisements for her philosophy--and what Melville did in setting up his Moby Dick characters as representatives of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Platonism?"
No difference at all, except in grace and elegance of execution.
Keith wrote: "As a reader, I mentally ingest all the thought and inventiveness the author has baked into her novel. It may move me, make me laugh, frighten me. The reason we crave stories is because we want to go on that journey with the characters and experience those emotions. And that experience will generally make us think. The great novels can change our entire way of thinking, change our lives. Given that stream of thought, fiction, good, well crafted fiction, may be the most effective philosophy ever devised."
+1
Mod
I'd appreciate it if you developed this distinction a bit more carefully. It's true that descriptions of The Godfather to someone who'd never seen it would lose a great deal in the summarizing. But it's also true that summarizing Hume's An Enquiry on Human Understanding would leave much of its meaning back on the page.
Let's imagine instead that both conversation partners saw The Godfather or read Enquiry. Couldn't they then set about the task of evaluating and analyzing their shared experience through language? We spend a lot of our lives discussing, evaluating, and limning our experiences--artistic and otherwise--with other people who've shared them. We don't move beyond words in these situations. We pass them back and forth furiously, sometimes for years. So I'm not sure your example does the job you want it to do.
It can be argued that both The Godfather and Enquiry are attempts to interpret the world through language (film, with its choices of lenses, film stock, and editing style, has a language). In this view, both are doing the work of phenomenology, attempting to clarify and capture what it is like to be in the world and communicate it to an audience.
Is the line you're trying to draw that fiction seeks to create ineffable experiences while philosophy tries to define them? If so, I'm not sure I agree. Experience in fiction (or in any art for that matter) doesn't come to us unmediated. Fiction always filters experience through an intelligence (the narrator's or point of view character's) who works both to understand and to convey experience through language. Fiction does create experiences, yes, but at the same time, it tries to make sense of them.
Or are you saying there's something beyond this that I'm missing? I think you might be, but I'm not sure. By all means help me out.
My fiction and art -- and just about everything I do -- stem from the essential questions that drive me as a person and as a thinker. So, I would say that I don't see a dividing line between philosophy and story. I ask myself "why do we hate?" or "what is the root of war?" or "can humans live and create without conflict?" And my attempts at answers are the stories that I tell myself, the characters that end up living within me, demanding that I write their tales.
Mod
My first professor at my MFA program put particular emphasis on one part of the story summaries we were supposed to turn in every week: Why. Not, why does the character do such-and-such or why this plot point, but why were we writing these stories? Why did they matter to us? Until we could satisfactorily answer that question, he said, we weren't ready to write the story.
Sally wrote: "My fiction and art -- and just about everything I do -- stem from the essential questions that drive me as a person and as a thinker. So, I would say that I don't see a dividing line between philos..."One question I'm always turning over in my mind is, "does a world without conflict violate the same fundamental law that frictionless momentum does?"
As Harry Lime in "The Third Man" said, "Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
Jim wrote: "Bruce wrote: "I guess I find myself disagreeing with the premise. Fiction, or any other kind of art, in my view, is an effort to get beyond words to create an experience. Someone tells another ab..."Jim wrote: "Bruce wrote: "I guess I find myself disagreeing with the premise. Fiction, or any other kind of art, in my view, is an effort to get beyond words to create an experience. Someone tells another ab..."
This is all a little slippery and I probably didn't provide a clear enough explanation. Perhaps because I'm not sure how to. I certainly recognize the notion that truth can be relevant to the speaker or seer. I think the act of creating art is an effort to reach past the limitations of form and language in the case of fiction. Point of view or authorial perspective (which is as close as I can come to phenomenology is just part of the form with my middling understanding of formal philosophy). Yes, I have a view that is limited to my experiences or thoughts, but creating art seems to me when it is at its peak, moves beyond my limits. I write sentences that I didn't know were going to happen until they did. I think things I had not thought before, or separate things come together in ways I didn't see until the act of writing them. I've spoken to painters and sculptors who view it similarly. A line, a stone's shape leads them to another line or blow with the chisel. It's something outside of thought. It seems to me when I read a piece of art or look at a painting and a sculpture and it works for me, I have a similar response to it. Philosophy can be the line the artist draws, but in my experience the next line in art is intuitive as opposed to logical, which it appears to me the realm of philosophy. By the way if I followed your MFA instructors advice I would have never written anything. I think those questions are best addressed while one is working or when one moves from one draft to the next. I disagree with him completely and I think it is rather pompous of anyone to assume their process is the only way to create art. It might work for some, but young artists need to be encouraged to find the best way to do work that matters. Story summaries. For God's sake, I don't wan to know what happens next in my own stories. That's why I write them: to find out. Maybe it works for him and for others, but there's lots of ways to create art, too many for such a doctrinaire approach to teaching.
Mod
Okay, Bruce, let me come at this from a different angle. You say that fiction is an effort to get beyond words to create an experience. Is this "getting beyond words to create an experience", however you see it, a necessary condition for a work of fiction to be a work of art? Or is this characteristic a preference of yours, not required for a work of fiction to be a work of art, but required if that work of fiction is to be one that you like?
Well, in one of the institutions I teach at, fictional narrative (film) as philosophy is presented as a fully-fledged course, so, the powers that be there do believe that narrative can be philosophical, or, at least, can carry, philosophical ideas. And, of course, we can see how it can, not just in a subtle way, by the way it encodes messages through structure and action and theme, but in what the characters in the story convey through dialogue. As a writer of fictional narrative (novels), and a bit of a philosopher myself (I hold a DPhil on new narrative structures in Hollywood cinema), I'd say that fiction can be philosophy, but I believe it ought not to be so as priority. Fiction, in my opinion, ought to engage the heart before attempting to explore philosophical ideas. Film or the novel is not the ideal medium for philosophical exploration and debate, although it can ignite interest in a topic and drive the reader or viewer to more appropriate forums. After all, if a story doesn't take charge of our emotions and make us pay attention, we won't care enough to explore the underlying ideas and concepts it may espouse. Besides, the 'rules' and guidelines for writing good fiction, in my opinion, are not those for writing good philosophy.
Stavros wrote: "...After all, if a story doesn't take charge of our emotions and make us pay attention, we won't care enough to explore the underlying ideas and concepts it may espouse..."And in support of this, I offer the ouevre of Robert Pirsig.
Hollywood has new narrative structures? I'd enjoy a bit of education on this subject, please sir.
Story is hard-wired into the human psyche. Through it we understand and our subconscious draws lines that our conscious needs or wants but didn't know existed. For me, story (and the characters who create it within me) is everything. But the underlying self, the subconscious that creates that story, that makes connections for me even as I write the sentences that I didn't know would come out, that is where answers (and more questions) lurk. I am a philosophical creature. Therefore, all are questions and the attempts at answers, seen from different perspectives, until, in my blindness, I can try to fathom the shape of the camel or horse (as the saying goes).
Jim wrote: "Bruce wrote: "Jim wrote: "Bruce wrote: "I guess I find myself disagreeing with the premise. Fiction, or any other kind of art, in my view, is an effort to get beyond words to create an experience...."Well, I suppose for me art is about that experience. Emily Dickinson famously said she could tell when she read a poem because the it felt like the top of her head came off. I guess I feel that's true of my response as well. So if the top of my head doesn't come off, it's not a poem, though it may look like one. It may also be a poem for others because it takes the top of their heads off. But I don't think its art unless something like that happens to me. I can like or dislike Camus' Sisyphus, but it doesn't take the top of my head off. The Stranger, however does.
I believe every work of fiction actually is an echo of the writers philosophy. When I write my works of fiction they also represent my ideas and my feelings. Even when the work has nothing to do with my own life the way I think about things is going to sneak into my books and therefore my philosophies are represented.
Well, Richard, Hollywood experimented with multiform and multistrand narratives for some time. Harvey is an example of the former, but films such as Pulp Fiction, Donnie Darko, Jacob's Ladder, and much later fare as Source Code and the recent Edge of Tomorrow are becoming commonplace, aided by digital media and its effect on the way we communicate and experience stories.
OIC, thanks!I think of that as f/x, and never consider how it alters the storytelling and the stories told. Eye candy, not brain candy. It makes sense to see it as brain candy, though, since the technology opens up so many possible stories once too expensive/time-consuming/onerous to film.
I love being educated to see familiar things from a new perspective.
And not just F/X but the growth of computer games and the way they restructure narrative by allowing one to replay the level—to resuscitate the character who may then try again. Isn't that what Source Code and The Edge of Tomorrow do, but in a linear and sequential fashion?
Stavros wrote: "And not just F/X but the growth of computer games and the way they restructure narrative by allowing one to replay the level—to resuscitate the character who may then try again. Isn't that what Sou..."I'll take your better-informed word for it. I detest computer/video games.
I hear you with a very sympathetic ear, but their influence is nonetheless creeping into the way we are structuring linear narratives, the way we are understanding and perceiving stories.
Stavros wrote: "I hear you with a very sympathetic ear, but their influence is nonetheless creeping into the way we are structuring linear narratives, the way we are understanding and perceiving stories."I was sure this would happen when, 15yrs ago, I watched my nephew play some of the best out there. Like the "Choose Your Own Ending" novels my daughter liked, only faster, easier, and slicker.
Ugh.
Mod
I'm curious how you and your department
teach narrative film as philosophy. Could you give us a sense of the material you use in classes and how you and your students engage it?
Mod
Can a novelist write philosophically? Even those novelists most commonly deemed “philosophical” have sometimes answered with an emphatic no. Iris Murdoch, the longtime Oxford philosopher and author of some two dozen novels treating highbrow themes like consciousness and morality, argued that philosophy and literature were contrary pursuits. Philosophy calls on the analytical mind to solve conceptual problems in an “austere, unselfish, candid” prose, she said in a BBC interview broadcast in 1978, while literature looks to the imagination to show us something “mysterious, ambiguous, particular” about the world. Any appearance of philosophical ideas in her own novels was an inconsequential reflection of what she happened to know. “If I knew about sailing ships I would put in sailing ships,” she said. “And in a way, as a novelist, I would rather know about sailing ships than about philosophy.”
Some novelists with philosophical backgrounds vividly recall how they felt when they first encountered Murdoch’s hard-nosed view. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, whose first novel, “The Mind-Body Problem” (1983), was published after she earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton, remembers being disappointed and confused. “It didn’t ring true,” she told me. “But how could she not be being truthful about such a central feature of her intellectual and artistic life?” Still, Goldstein and other philosophically trained novelists — including David Foster Wallace, William H. Gass and Clancy Martin — have themselves wrestled with the relationship between their two intellectual masters. Both disciplines seek to ask big questions, to locate and describe deeper truths, to shape some kind of order from the muddle of the world. But are they competitors — the imaginative intellect pitted against the logical mind — or teammates, tackling the same problems from different angles?
The whole thing's worth a read if you can get past the paywall.
Jim, I don't teach the course of film as philosophy myself. My field is more narrative structures and screen writing. But the course involves obvious overlaps with film theory, but also the idea of film as thought experiment a la Stanley Cavell, et al.
Mod
I'm afraid I'm not up on my Stanley Cavell. Would you mind expounding on the idea of film as thought experiment a bit more, please?
Mod
One of my favorite pictures.
How do you go about aligning your work with your philosophical interests in the experience of conflict? How have the issues that drive you informed your selection of characters, settings, and situations?
Jim, the film The Philosophers illustrates this idea very nicely. A group of graduating philosophy students is asked to imagine some of the great philosophical problems with themselves as participants so as to better understand/experience the issues—so, for example, would you sacrifice an innocent person to save the lives of the many? The basic Utilitarian Ethics question. Each iteration in the film resets the beginning of the thought experiment after the previous choice typically leads to disaster. Philosophy as thought experiment, through film, is a way to vividly reimagine the consequences of the ethical or metaphysical choices we make.
Mod
Did you think The Philosophers (released under the title After the Dark in the US) succeeded as both a film and a thought experiment?
Jim, my underlying philosophy is so integral to who I am as a person and as a creative individual that there is no conscious aligning. Characters are born within me, their stories unfold, and the philosophical issues that drive me inform the stories, the dialog, the essence of the books. For instance, my novel "Jo Joe" explores the nature of prejudice, misunderstandings and the two-edge sword of anger/hate/preconceptions. But it started out as a story about two people who once loved each other. Still, my subconscious created the seed of the story to help me try to understand a question that haunts me "Why do we hate?"
Jim, The Philosophers is mediocre, in my opinion, but it does serve to popularise philosophical problems in a way that may intrigue the serious thinker enough to pursue them in more appropriate forums...
Stavros wrote: "Jim, The Philosophers is mediocre, in my opinion, but it does serve to popularise philosophical all problems in a way that may intrigue the serious thinker enough to pursue them in more appropriate..."+1
Mod
Was there a point in the writing or revision process on Jo Joe when you realized that "Why do we hate?" was the issue your novel was exploring, or did that come to you after you'd finished? If it came to you while you were still working on the book, how did this affect subsequent drafts (if at all)?
Mod
Stavros, can you think of a film that succeeded both aesthetically and as a means of dramatizing a philosophical problem?
Jim, the characters and the story they create are the primary issue in writing, rewriting and editing. If that doesn't ring true, if it isn't tight, taut and compelling, then all the philosophy in the world won't make any difference. So, no, the philosophy doesn't come into play as I write or edit, except to keep things ringing true to the underlying character and plot arcs. When creating the study guide for book clubs, and helping create some of the publicity material, that's when I paid attention to the philosophy. For instance, when I spoke to at the annual conference of the Jewish Book Council about Jo Joe. Here's a video of what I had to say to them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvHgB....
Mod
In my process the questions tend to arise much earlier. (I'm not recommending it. It's just a fact.) I'd started my first novel confident I knew what issues the characters had been built to explore, but about 2/3 of the way through, the writing had become a horrible slog.
To rescue the book, I started by asking where I departed from the driving questions of the novel, and soon reached the conclusion that the reason for the slowdown was that the questions I thought were driving the story weren't quite the right ones, and that this mistake had prevented me from giving proper weight to the issues of one of my major characters.
I ended up trashing a little over 150 pages of the first draft, which put me way behind schedule. (This novel was the creative thesis for my MFA program, and I was in the middle of Year 2.) But it was the right move. The book ended up being much smarter for it.
(I enjoyed your video introduction to your book, by the way. Well done.)
Thanks, Jim, re the video.I found Dark City far more satisfying as a story than The Matrix. But then, I prefer good character development over adrenalin any time. Of course, Matrix was well done, just not as satisfying to me as a story.
Sally, The Matrix is strongly story and idea driven, and I don't quite agree with the implication that adrelanin diminishes character development, or that the chracters in The Matrix are not well developed. In fact they all have very strong goals, make descision based on their backstories and character traits, and some have strong character arcs. Additionally, one of my gripes with some stories is that they lack pace, and The Matrix certainly has that.
Agreed, Jim, I'd categorize Dark City as a Scifi/Mystery. It is more languid and dream (or nightmare) like than The Matrix, which is a more post-apocalyptic/scifi/techno thriller.
I guess I'm just not happy with the current push on adrenalin cinema. The barre keeps on raising on how much excitement is thrown at the audience to get their attention.
Sally, agreed that excitement and pace should not be at the expense of other solid dramatic principles, such as character development, but the two are not necessarily in opposition.
Mod
What interests me about both Dark City and The Matrix is their marriages of serious philosophical questions to generic forms normally associated with light entertainment. It puts me in mind of something Kundera said in The Art of the Novel.
The great European novel started out as entertainment, and all real novelists are nostalgic for it! And besides, entertainment doesn't preclude seriousness. The Farewell Party asks: Does man deserve to live on this Earth, shouldn't the "planet be freed from man's clutches"? To bring together the extreme gravity of the question and the extreme lightness of the form--that has always been my ambition. And it's not a matter of purely artistic ambition. The union of a frivolous form and a serious subject lays bare our dramas (those that occur in our beds as well as those we play out on the great stage of History) in all their terrible insignificance.
If the novel, or narrative, can be philosophy, it seems to me it can only be so if we think of it as philosophy combined with play.
Thinking Fiction
Books mentioned in this topic
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (other topics)The Godfather (other topics)
Atlas Shrugged (other topics)
Moby-Dick or, The Whale (other topics)
Discuss. Debate.