This is going to sound like a dumb question, but what is the difference between a fictional character and a person who is real but who you don't really know that well, whether it be a celebrity or someone you hear about on the news or just some random person on the other side of the world?
I’ve been thinking about Michael Chabon's Holocaust Hoax, and I think it kind of illustrates what I’m trying to ask. There was a thread specifically about this on I Love Books and you can read the article, but essentially, Chabon told a story about his childhood in the context of a lecture, and this story, once the reporter did some research, turned out to be completely made up. Chabon didn't specifically state it was a true story, and he’s most famous as a writer of fiction, but in the context in which it was presented, almost everyone who heard him give the lecture assumed it was true. My thought: Michael Chabon is a real person, but to 99.99999% of the world's population (everyone outside of his close personal friends and family), "Michael Chabon" might as well be a fictional character. We read about him, know maybe a few small things about him that he or his publicist allows to be printed, and never come in contact with the actual person. So what difference does it make if the story is true or not?
Overall, whenever we're dealing with the concept of a person who we don't know directly and personally, we're creating an image of that person in our mind. When I read about, say, Gandhi, I create an idea of Gandhi in my mind, but when I read about Sherlock Holmes, I do the same thing. So to me, how is Gandhi more real than Sherlock Holmes? Then I worry because this thought process seems kind of nihilistic or unhealthy. This is what lead to the Terry Schiavo joke backlash a month or so ago: some people are ok with making jokes about her because to most of us, she’s no more real than a character on ER, but other people are uncomfortable with this, because she was a real person.
Again, I realize this is a very poorly phrased question, so try and figure out the essence of what I'm asking instead of making fun of how I'm asking it.
― n/a (Nick A.), Friday, 6 May 2005 18:43 (twenty-one years ago)
(I'm lucky - I got poxy fuled the first time I tried to post this and ended up editing out stuff about the theory of the fictional Jesus, the new Hold Steady album, and a Borges story I read yesterday. Wait, maybe it's you guys that are lucky.)
― n/a (Nick A.), Friday, 6 May 2005 18:44 (twenty-one years ago)
This is not a silly question at all, and in a way gets at the heart of why reading fiction is so valuable. You know how people you know often serve as object lessons, examples of this and that personality type, things to aspire to and things to avoid? Fiction does the same thing. Read well and thoroughly, fiction can help you map your own life better than any other artform, or indeed any other artificial construct.
― slightly more subdued (kenan), Friday, 6 May 2005 18:48 (twenty-one years ago)
To more directly answer the thread question: functionally, there is no difference, and there need not be.
― slightly more subdued (kenan), Friday, 6 May 2005 18:49 (twenty-one years ago)
I don't have the concentration at the moment to think deeply, but as a rough pointer, fictional characters do not exist outside of the work in which they're portrayed. They aren't people but a collection of rhetorical tropes and to speculate outside of what a text actually says about them is meaningless, or at best a further fiction.
Real people are historically situated and we can arrive at knowledge about them through multiple sources: their actions and words, accounts of people who knew them, all kinds of historical source material. Our speculations about what they are like are informed by the knowledge that we have pieces of a puzzle, not the whole thing. Speculation is logical here because there is always more that could be learned about a Real person.
I'm just throwing ideas out.
― TV's Mr Noodle Vague (noodle vague), Friday, 6 May 2005 18:53 (twenty-one years ago)
or at best a further fictionBut that's the whole point. We construct fictions about real people all the time, anyway, even people we know. Even people we love.
― slightly more subdued (kenan), Friday, 6 May 2005 18:54 (twenty-one years ago)
I don't think our theses about other people are fictions in the same way. They're like thought experiments, ideas tentatively held to be discarded when contradicted by new information, unless you're in some way deliberately objectifying the person. But we never learn more about fictional characters than our first reading. We might learn more about the text, or develop our ideas about it, but that's totally not the same thing.
― TV's Mr Noodle Vague (noodle vague), Friday, 6 May 2005 18:59 (twenty-one years ago)