Why people take fiction seriously?

I remember many years ago, back when I was a little kid, watching the scene in Splash where the young Tom Hanks explains to a weeping Darryl Hannah that the television movie she is watching which is making her cry is just…a movie.

“There’s no need to cry. The person didn’t really die. It’s just fiction.”

I am paraphrasing of course, but you get the point.

But did it really matter? I remember another time many years later when I was in college getting involved in a very passionate and heated debate about the ending of a movie we had just seen (which we found rather controversial). At one point, a certain guy who was getting tired of the noise we were making impatiently snapped at us that it’s just a damn movie. But we ignored him and kept on arguing.

If this happens with movies, it is even more true of novels, especially novels that are well written and thus impossible not to take seriously. I was frothing in anger for weeks about something that deeply annoyed me within the story of a Stephen King novel that I read when I was a teenager. Even telling myself repeatedly that “it’s just a made-up story” did nothing at all to sooth me or make the pain go away.

So why do people tend to take fiction stories seriously even when they know that they are made up?

There’s an insightful answer to the question provided by a renowned literary author on a youtube video. He explains that people see ‘truth’ in fiction. But it isn’t the factual or historical kind of truth; rather it is one of emotional or experiential truth. In other words, what happens in fiction stories is a reflection of our human reality which we readily recognize.

I tend to view the answer to the question at a slightly different angle, one which might be even more explorative and expansive on the explanation we already have. As I outline in a different article ‘Where do stories come from’, I personally tend to view fiction stories as existing in a parallel universe – or parallel universes – from ours. I think what lies deep at the heart of the tendency for us to take fictive stories seriously is the concept of reality itself and its ambiguity.

It has long been a fundamental and universally recognized solipsistic truth in philosophy that the only thing that each of us can really be sure exists – or is ‘real’ – is our own subjective conscious experience. We cannot know with absolute certainty that what we perceive everyday around us of the ‘external world’ really exists. In this sense, the line between the events we perceive in our ‘external world’ and those that are presented in fiction stories are quite blurred. Sure, we can say that the ‘real’ external world affects or potentially affects our physical reality. But what about the parts of it that don’t and never do? What about those parts of the ‘real’ world that are not affecting our reality at least in any way that is perceptible or even conceivable to us? What about, for example, a tiny event – like the rolling of a small solid mass – that happens in a different galaxy millions of light years away. If it doesn’t affect our own reality in any way, does that mean it isn’t real?

And what about events that happen in other (possible) universes in a larger multiverse which can never interact with ours?  Are they not ‘real’?

The point is that, for all we know, the events of a fiction story might as well have happened or can happen at some point in the boundless history of the universe. As long as it is rationally conceived, it might as well be real. Deep down, people see that, even if they don’t consciously think of it that way. The only thing that matters as to whether it can be taken seriously or not is its logical coherency. And the ‘logic’ here isn’t merely about the mechanical logic set by the laws of the physical world. In fact, it isn’t necessarily about that for the laws in some cases could be slightly different from ours. More importantly, it’s about the logic of human nature as well as other sentient creatures that play a part in whatever story we are presented with.

Thus, when we get emotional over a work of fiction, it’s largely because we know that it is real in an important sense. It may not be ‘real’ in the sense of being a historical fact. But it is real in a timeless sort of way; in a way in which our strict day-to-day understanding of the four dimensions of the immediate surroundings of our ‘external world’ are no longer relevant. And sometimes, as casual spectators, we may like or dislike certain aspects of reality being presented to us and thereby colliding and interacting with our own internal conscious universe.

All in all, it means that fiction will always have its place in the human heart and in our world. And that, for most writers (and film makers), is a good thing.