Emotional Illusions

I am currently reading Confessions of a Young Novelist by Umberto Eco. In the chapter entitled "Some Remarks on Fictional Characters" Eco draws upon the experience of Alexandre Dumas to illustrate the way readers can often forget the fabricated aspects of fiction. It brought to mind a recent online debate about the ability to empathize with fictional characters. I am of the opinion that readers cannot feel true empathy for a fictional character because that character doesn't exist. The 'empathy' we feel as characters is little more than a reflection of true empathy, based on our own personal history. At any rate, I found Eco's commentary interesting and thought I would share it here.


In 1860, on the verge of sailing through the Mediterranean to follow Garibaldi's expedition to Sicily, Alexandre Dumas stopped in Marseille and visited the Chateau d'If, where his hero, Edmond Dantes, before becoming the Count of Monte Cristo, was imprisoned for fourteen years and was tutored in his cell by a fellow inmate, the abbe Faria. While Dumas was there, he discovered that visitors were regularly shown what was called the real cell of Monte Cristo, and that the guides constantly spoke of Dantes, Faria, and the other characters of the novel as if they had really existed. In contrast, the same guides never mentioned that the Chateau d'If had held as prisoners some important historical figures, such as Honore Mirabeau.


This led Dumas to comment, in his memoirs: "It is the privilege of novelists to create characters who kill those of historians. The reason is that historians evoke mere ghosts, while novelists create flesh-and-blood people."


Using Tolstoy's character Anna Karenina to exemplify this point, Eco poses the question asked by a friend, "If we know that Anna Karenina is a fictional character who does not exist in the real world, why do we weep over her plight, or at any rate, why are we deeply moved by her misfortunes?" Eco's answer; "I told my friend firmly that this phenomenon had neither ontological nor logical relevance, and could be of interest only to psychologists. We can identify with fictional characters and with their deeds because, according to narrative agreement, we start living in the possible world of their story as if it were our own real world. " In other words, when we open a book and begin reading, we enter into an unspoken understanding with the author (assuming the author successfully utilizes the tools of his or her trade). We agree, for the duration of the tale, to believe it - to believe in the world (s)he has created and the characters that populate it. As Eco says, "Such phenomena of identification and projection are absolutely normal and (I repeat) are a matter for psychologists. If there are optical illusions, in which we see a given form as bigger than another even though we know they are exactly the same size, why shouldn't there be emotional illusions as well?"


In the debate I referred to the empathy in question as a reflection of true empathy, while Eco refers to it here as an emotional illusion. Either way it is an artificial response based upon the cultural habits and personal backgrounds of each individual reader.