Noblesse Oblige We have in Plenty, but Precious Little Droit du Seigneur

[steepholm]

Did I mention that I've been dipping my toe into the world of authors and their pesky post-facto thoughts about books?

Comments

[nightspore.livejournal.com]

One base-line philosophical insight about truth is that if a statement is true there is something that makes it true. What makes a statement true in fiction? Only what an authoritative (= omniscient) narrator says, since there is no fact of the matter that can make it true, unlike in the real world. So the question becomes who's authoritative. I do think that's a psychological question -- that is it's about whatever aspects of human psychology make stories absorbing. Which is stuff I am writing about. One important datum is that good stories in all cultures regularly and reliably beat daydreaming. Probably because nothing makes a daydream true, whereas the author or narrator or story-teller makes a story true, relatively independently of our daydreaming wish-fulfillment. The truth of the outcome makes a difference: in happy endings part of the happiness is that something is making that happy ending true, fulfilling our wishes (that is, the omniscient narrator who isn't affected by our wishes or daydreams: e.g. that Little Nell would live or that Tiny Tim would, or that Catherine and Tilney would marry). Whereas if you can pick your own adventure, really you're heading in the direction of daydreaming. So you need some principle, even if it's an arbitrary one, to grant truth-making authority to. Authors are decent first approximations for that principle. (Hence "Franklin W. Dixon" and "Nancy Keene.")