The Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts 9781350032583, 9781350032675, 9781350032590

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title
Title
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1: Illusion and Media
1. Aesthetic Illusion(s)?: Toward a Media-Conscious Theory of Media-Elicited Immersion as a Transmedial Phenomenon
2. More than Meets the Eye: Layers of Artistic Representation
3. Mediating Immediacy
4. Neither Here nor There, but Now: Film Experience and the Aesthetic Illusion
Part 2: Illusion and the Mind
5. Reading for the Mind: Aesthetic Illusion, Fictional Characters, and the Role of Interpretation
6. A Puzzle of Fiction and Cognitive Impenetrability
7. Illusion, Distance, and Appropriation
8. Fact, Fiction, and Projection: The Inescapability of Austerlitz’s Impulse
Part 3: Illusive Worlds
9. La Comédie Humaine and the Illusion of Reality
10. Fiction, Illusion, Reality, and Radical Narration
11. A Moral Life of Things: The Making and Breaking of Aesthetic Illusion in Lyric Poetry
12. The Novel and the Aesthetic Illusion
Part 4: Questioning Illusion
13. How Should We Talk About Reading Experiences? Arguments and Empirical Evidence
14. Aesthetic Illusion between the Prague School and Fictional Worlds Theory
15. Skeptical Reflections on the Concept of Aesthetic Illusion
Index of Names
Index of Topics

Citation preview

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The Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts

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Also available from Bloomsbury The Aesthetics and Ethics of Copying, edited by Darren Hudson Hick and Reinold Schmücker The Cognitive Value of Philosophical Fiction, Jukka Mikkonen

The Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and the Arts Edited by Tomáš Koblížek

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 Paperback edition first published 2019 © Tomáš Koblížek and Contributors, 2017 Tomáš Koblížek has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p.xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Irene Martinez Costa Cover image © Eduard Manet All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Koblâiézek, Tomâaés, editor. Title: The aesthetic illusion in literature and the arts / edited by Tomâaés Koblâiézek. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017010088| ISBN 9781350032583 (hb) | ISBN 9781350032606 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Illusion in literature. | Aesthetics, Modern. | Aesthetics in literature. | Arts–Themes, motives. Classification: LCC PN56.I43 A35 2017 | DDC 801/.93–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010088 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-3258-3 PB: 978-1-3501-0520-1 ePDF: 978-1-3500-3259-0 ePub: 978-1-3500-3260-6 Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt Ltd., Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures

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List of Contributors Acknowledgments

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Introduction Tomáš Koblížek Part 1

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Illusion and Media

1 Aesthetic Illusion(s)?: Toward a Media-Conscious Theory of Media-Elicited Immersion as a Transmedial Phenomenon Werner Wolf

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2 More than Meets the Eye: Layers of Artistic Representation Thomas G. Pavel

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3 Mediating Immediacy Göran Rossholm

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4 Neither Here nor There, but Now: Film Experience and the Aesthetic Illusion Enrico Terrone Part 2

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Illusion and the Mind

5 Reading for the Mind: Aesthetic Illusion, Fictional Characters, and the Role of Interpretation Marco Caracciolo

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6 A Puzzle of Fiction and Cognitive Impenetrability Fredrik Stjernberg

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7 Illusion, Distance, and Appropriation Martin Pokorný

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8 Fact, Fiction, and Projection: The Inescapability of Austerlitz’s Impulse Josep E. Corbí

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Part 3 Illusive Worlds 9 La Comédie Humaine and the Illusion of Reality Lubomír Doležel

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10 Fiction, Illusion, Reality, and Radical Narration Petr Koťátko

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11 A Moral Life of Things: The Making and Breaking of Aesthetic Illusion in Lyric Poetry Karel Thein

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Contents

12 The Novel and the Aesthetic Illusion Jiří Koten Part 4

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Questioning Illusion

13 How Should We Talk About Reading Experiences? Arguments and Empirical Evidence Emily T. Troscianko

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14 Aesthetic Illusion between the Prague School and Fictional Worlds Theory Bohumil Fořt

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15 Skeptical Reflections on the Concept of Aesthetic Illusion Anders Pettersson

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Index of Names

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Index of Topics

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Figures 1.1

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5.1 6.1 6.2 6.3

Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara (1857), National Gallery, Washington, DC, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File%3AFrederic_Edwin_Church_-_Niagara_Falls_-_ WGA04867.jpg Edward Hodges Baily, Statue of Lord Nelson atop Nelson’s Column (1843), London, photo: Beata May, from https://commons. wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AAdmiral_Horatio_Nelson%2C_ Nelson’s_Column%2C_ Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus of Rhodos, Laocoön and His Sons (1506), Vatican Museums, Rome, photo: JuanMA, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ALaoco%C3%B6n_ and_His_Sons.jpg Édouard Manet, Olympia (1865), Musée d’Orsay, Paris, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AManet%2C_ Edouard_-_Olympia%2C_1863.jpg Titian, Venus of Urbino (1538), Uffizi Gallery, Florence, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ATitian_Venus_of_ Urbino.jpg Paul Cézanne, A Modern Olympia (1873–4), Musée d’Orsay, Paris, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_Cezanne,_ A_Modern_Olympia,_c._1873-1874.jpg The Kanizsa triangle, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_ contours The Kanizsa triangle, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_ contours The Müller-Lyer illusion The Ebbinghaus illusion

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Contributors Marco Caracciolo is an assistant professor of English and Literary Theory at Ghent University (Belgium). His work focuses on the phenomenology of narrative, or the structure of the experiences afforded by literary fiction and other narrative media. He is the author of The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach (2014). Josep E.  Corbí is a professor at the Department of Metaphysics and Theory of Knowledge at the University of Valencia (Spain). His work concerns epistemology, philosophy of mind and meta-ethics. He is the author of Morality, Self-Knowledge, and Human Suffering. An Essay on the Loss of Confidence in the World (2012). Lubomír Doležel (†) was a professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto (Canada). His main research interest was the theory of literature, with a focus on narrative. His theoretical position was strongly influenced by analytic philosophy, especially by the conceptual framework of possible worlds. He is the author of Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds (1998). Bohumil Fořt is a research fellow at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Czech Republic). His work focuses on the semantics of fictional worlds, the Czech structuralism and narratology. He is the author of An Introduction to the Fictional World Semantics (2005). Tomáš Koblížek is a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Czech Republic). His work concerns philosophical aesthetics, philosophy of literature and general linguistics. He is the author of The Phenomenon of Fiction: A Contribution to the Phenomenology of Literature (2010). Petr Koťátko is a professor at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Czech Republic). His main interests are philosophy of language and philosophy of literature (with a focus on theory of fiction). He is the author of Interpretation and Subjectivity (2006). Jiří Koten is a research fellow at the Institute of Czech Literature of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Czech Republic). He is particularly concerned with the

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speech act theory and theory of fiction (with a focus on the theory of the novel). He is the author of How to Make Fiction with Words (2013). Thomas G.  Pavel is a professor in Romance Languages and Literature at the University of Chicago (USA). His interests are the history of the novel, seventeenth-century French literature, twentieth-century French literature and intellectual life, as well as the interactions between literature and philosophy. He is the author of The Lives of the Novel: A History (2013). Anders Pettersson is a professor emeritus at the Department of Culture and Media Studies at the Umeå University (Sweden). His main research interests concern fundamental literary theory and transcultural literary history. He is the author of Concept of Literary Application : Readers’ Analogies from Text to Life (2012). Martin Pokorný is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at the Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic). He works primarily in phenomenology of language and literature. He is the author of Language: A Contribution to the Situational Phenomenology (2014). Göran Rossholm is a professor of Literature at the Stockholm University (Sweden). His work concerns semiotics, narrative theory, theory of interpretation, textual analysis of literary works (in particular Strindberg) and editorial philology. He is the author of To Be and Not to Be: On Interpretation, Iconicity and Fiction (2004). Fredrik Stjernberg is a professor at the Department of Culture and Communication (IKK) of the Linköping University (Sweden). He works in epistemology, logic and metaphysics. He is the author of The Public Nature of Meaning (1991). Enrico Terrone is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Turin (Italy). He works in philosophical aesthetics and film theory. He is the author of Philosophy of Film (2014). Karel Thein is a professor of Philosophy at the Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic). He works in ancient philosophy and philosophy of art. He is the author of Invention of Things: On Plato’s Hypothesis of Forms (2008). Emily T.  Troscianko is a research associate in the Faculty of Medieval and Modern Languages at the University of Oxford (UK). Emily researches the intersections between mental health and fiction-reading. She is the author of Kafka’s Cognitive Realism (2014).

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Werner Wolf is a professor and chair of English and General Literature at the University of Graz (Austria). His main areas of research are literary theory (aesthetic illusion, narratology, metafiction), functions of literature, eighteenth- to twenty-first-century English fiction, eighteenth- and twentieth-century drama, as well as intermediality studies. He’s the author of The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (1999).

Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to Petr Koťátko, the founder and main organizer of the Prague Interpretation Colloquium. Without his enthusiasm the colloquium would never have reached its tenth year, which brought together the majority of the contributors to this volume. My gratitude goes out to the individual authors for their support during the preparation of the final manuscript. It has been a great pleasure to work with such an exceptional team. I would also like to thank Colleen Coalter, editor at Bloomsbury, who supported the Aesthetic Illusion project from the start, and Vít Gvoždiak, from Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, for his help with the final formatting of the manuscript. Finally, I would like to remember the author of one chapter of this book, Lubomír Doležel, who recently passed away. Professor Doležel was a great inspiration for many literary scholars across the world and he will be greatly missed by his colleagues and pupils.

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Introduction Tomáš Koblížek

A half-century ago, literary critics did not spend much effort to keep up with the layman’s view on the nature, functions, and effects of literary work. The field of literary studies was dominated by structural analysis that diverged considerably from the “naïve experience” of ordinary readers or did not take common reading experience into account at all. Shortly put, the main preoccupation of the critic was to analyze the elementary semantic components of literature and to describe the generative procedures that enable the transition from the semantic core to the concrete work (see Pavel 1988: 593). This abstract approach to literary writing was, nevertheless, marked by an extraordinary clarity regarding both the notions and the methods used to describe the semantic structure of literary texts, and a comparison could have been repeatedly drawn between the procedures and the conceptual apparatus used by structuralist critics and the methods and notions applied in the natural sciences, commonly considered to be rigorous, exact, and objective (see, e.g., Bremond and Cancalon 1980:  2). The rigorousness and exactness attributed to structuralism must not be perceived, however, as a quality based solely on the ability of critics to follow the methodological paths and to clearly define their object of study. The reason was rather in that the structuralists focused on abstract objects and operated with an artificial and highly technical language: in brief, “actants” and “narrative functions,” similarly to numbers or triangles, are entities that only by virtue of their abstract character escape ambiguity and that are readily available for analysis; moreover, the technical terms invented to describe this sort of objects are able to resist the potential risk of polysemy that marks common expressions as constantly passing through various situations or contexts. Contemporary literary criticism, it should be acknowledged, does position itself again in close proximity of the ordinary reader, not only in the sense of

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investigating the common reader’s experience, or with respect to those common expressions that reappear in the scientific discourse, but also and predominantly in the sense of adapting the common reader’s perspective. To sum it up briefly, by discussing the status of fictional characters (e.g., Brock 2002; Schnieder and Von Solodkoff 2009), the emotions incited by the work (Yanal 1999), or the ethical aspects of literary writing (e.g., Carroll 2002; Devereaux 2004), literary criticism once again shares a number of questions with the non-expert public that are no longer considered as immature or naïve. One of the themes that mark the return of theory to common sense, and which relates closely to some of the aforementioned issues, concerns the reader’s illusion of being transported into the world represented by the text and of becoming the eyewitness of the fictional events (see, e.g., Ryan 2001; Burwick and Pape 2012; Wolf, Bernhart, and Mahler 2013). However, when addressing this type of experience—also widely known as immersion or re-centering—the theoreticians must tackle a number of “procedural difficulties” that did not hinder the proponents of structural analysis. First, the illusion of being present in the fictional world, as an experience of its own kind, is marked by an ambiguity that cannot be removed by means of any firsthand solution (e.g., a question arises regarding the difference between the immersive experience and the mere imagining of the fictional world). Second, the debate concerning immersion often makes use of expressions originating in ordinary language, which, as noted earlier, are necessarily exposed to polysemy and which often require extra clarification (e.g., when speaking of “emotions” incited by fiction, does the term also refer to moods and affects?). These and the associated issues represented the core of the 2015 Prague Interpretation Colloquium dedicated to the theory of aesthetic illusion as an influential conception of immersive effect in literature and the arts. Defined by Werner Wolf as “a pleasurable mental state which emerges during the reception of representational texts and artifacts,” the notion refers to the perceiver’s sense of “having entered the represented world while at the same time keeping a distance from it” (2014: 270). As is apparent, in comparison with other theories of immersion, the conception of aesthetic illusion places a particular emphasis on the ambivalent character of the immersive experience, referring to the fact that it consists of the perceiver’s transportation to the fictional world as well as his or her awareness of fictionality. Since the conference was marked by an extraordinary unity regarding both the discussions about the concept of immersion in general and the discussion about the concept of aesthetic illusion in particular, a decision was made to

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encompass the contributions in a single volume. The aim of the present introduction is to outline how the essays included in the book contribute to today’s debates on immersive or illusive effect, and to provide a historical background to modern discussion of immersion. More specifically, the first part focuses on how a great portion of today’s questions regarding immersion was formulated in the eighteenth century together with the formation of modern aesthetics; the second part focuses on the various present-day approaches that follow up on the historical theories and set the tone of the contemporary debate; the final part introduces the essays included in the book.

1. The aesthetic illusion: The beginnings of the modern debate As indicated, the roots of the present debate on immersion are closely related to the foundation of modern aesthetics, which brought about a reform regarding the notions of representation, mimesis, and illusion. To clarify the most significant points of this reform, we will first focus on eighteenth-century German aesthetic theory wherein the aforementioned issues came to the fore as part of a discussion on the principles of pleasure in art. We will then proceed to eighteenth-century French aesthetics wherein various conceptions of mimesis and illusion were elaborated on, mostly in relation to theatrical performance. Finally, we will focus on Henry Home’s notion of “ideal presence,” as it represents the first attempt at a phenomenology of immersion. *** In eighteenth-century German aesthetics, the question of mimesis and illusion played a part in discussions regarding the relationship between the perfection of artistic imitation, which induces pleasure as the perceiver recognizes the represented object and the perfection of the form of representation, which induces a purely aesthetic, noncognitive pleasure. In this regard, four names are of particular interest:  Christian Wolff, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Moses Mendelssohn, and Immanuel Kant. To put it succinctly, while Christian Wolff follows the classical approach to art, claiming that the pleasure incited by an artifact is based chiefly on verisimilitude, Baumgarten and Mendelssohn introduce a new aesthetic conception considering the verisimilitude to be one of artistic perfections, next to the perfection of form. The development of German aesthetics then culminates in the aesthetics of Immanuel Kant, according to whom the pleasure induced by recognition of a represented

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object counteracts the more preferable pleasure incited by the formal arrangement of the thing.1 Concerning Wolff ’s aesthetics, we should focus primarily on his Reflexions regarding God, World and the Human Soul (1719), the author’s central writing that provides a systematic inquiry into the three major objects of metaphysics (as indicated by the title of the work). In this text Wolff touches on the subject of imitation and mimesis when discussing “the pleasures of the soul” and their causes. According to Wolff, the main source of pleasure resides in the “intuition of perfection” where perfection is defined as the capability of the thing to fulfill a certain aim or function. The question regarding imitation then emerges as Wolff points out that it is faithful representation that may serve as an example of perfection: When we are intuiting the perfection, the pleasure is induced in us, for the pleasure is nothing else then intuition of the perfection: as it was already noted by Descartes. I will illustrate it by an example. When I see a painting resembling of the thing which it should represent, I have a pleasure from it. Now, the perfection of the painting resides in the resemblance. For the painting is nothing else than a representation of a certain thing on a board or on a flat surface; all in it comes together, when nothing in it is distinguished which cannot be also perceived in the thing itself. If it is formed in that way, it is perfect, it resembles of something. Since the resemblance is the perfection of the painting and since the pleasure stems from the intuition, it stems from the intuition of the resemblance. (Wolff [1719] 1742: 247)

As is apparent, Wolff ’s argument is a simple deduction from a set of premises. First, the general principle of pleasure is defined as the intuition of what is perfect, that is, of what properly performs its function. Subsequently, Wolff claims that the purpose of the image is to represent an object and that it pleases if one effectively perceives the similarity between the model and its copy or imitation, that is, if the perceiver effectively recognizes the object. Nevertheless, besides the emphasis put on verisimilitude, we should also pay attention to another motif mentioned briefly in the excerpt above, which would subsequently play an important role in the development of German aesthetics. Namely, besides the perfection that resides in a particular function carried out by the artifact, Wolff also considers the fact that in the work, “all [that is, the totality of elements of representation] comes together.” In other words, the perfection of the representation also concerns its arrangement, not only its imitative function; it can be very well perceived in its form. In Wolff ’s consideration, however, the

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“coming together of elements” is guided solely by the principle of recognition so that the form is arranged in such a way that the represented object may be recognized. A different, non-epistemic logic regarding the formal arrangement is not yet taken into account (cf. Hammermeister 2002: 15–16, 29–30). A crucial step is taken by Baumgarten, the author of Aesthetica (1750), in which a new concept of perfection is famously introduced. Briefly put, perfection in the Baumgartenian perspective does not concern only truthful representation of an object but also the sensible form itself. Thus Baumgarten claims that “the object of aesthetics is the perfection of the sensitive cognition as such. By that, however, we mean the beauty” (Baumgarten [1750] 1983: 11). Paul Guyer sums up the novelty of Baumgarten’s definition in a concise formula claiming that the author newly considers “the perfection of sensitive cognition” rather than the mere “sensitive cognition of perfection” (Guyer 2014b:  section 3.1). That is to say, from the Baumgartenian perspective, the pleasure incited by a representation is not induced only by means of recognition of the represented object (the cognition of perfection) but also by virtue of the fact that the sensitive representation displays a perfection in its own right. Thus, as Paul Guyer puts it, “there is potential for beauty in the form of a work as well as in its content because its form can be pleasing to our complex capacity for sensible representation” (ibid.). The major contribution of Baumgarten’s theory thus resides in his distinguishing between two sources of pleasure, namely the pleasure induced by verisimilitude and the pleasure of the sensible form of the representation. Apparently, in the Baumgartenian view, the two sources of pleasure may coexist in one work of art without counteracting each other. The tendency of eighteenth-century German aesthetics to consider the specificity of the aesthetic pleasure is further developed by Moses Mendelssohn, especially in his Morning Lessons (1785), in which he contrasts the faculty of assent to beauty with the faculty of recognition and the faculty of desire. Mendelssohn thus proposes a triple division of the faculties of the soul instead of the more traditional dual division. As he puts it: One usually divides the faculties of the soul into the faculty of cognition and the faculty of desire, and assigns the sentiment of pleasure and displeasure to the faculty of desire. But it seems to me that between knowing and desiring lies the approving, the assent, the satisfaction of the soul, which is actually quite remote from desire. We contemplate the beauty of nature and of art, without the least arousal of desire, with gratification and satisfaction. (Cited in Guyer 2014b: section 4.1)

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Most importantly, for Mendelssohn it is the perfection of the beautiful form, as the object of assent or aesthetic satisfaction that embodies the mind of the artist and, therefore, deserves our preference. Thus, as he puts it in his Main Principles: All works of art are visible imprints of the artist’s abilities which, so to speak, put his entire soul on display and make it known to us. This perfection of spirit arouses an uncommonly greater pleasure than mere similarity, because it is more worthy and far more complex than similarity. (Cited in Guyer 2014b: section 4.1)

This assertion is to be perceived as a crucial step in the modern philosophy of art given that it was the verisimilitude or mimesis that was traditionally conceived as the aim of artistic production and as the main principle of the aesthetic effect (cf. Sörbom 2002; Thein 2012). As indicated earlier, the duality between the pleasure stemming from contemplation of beauty and the pleasure induced by recognition of the represented object culminates in Kant’s third Critique where the judgment of taste (which concerns the formal aspects of representation) and cognitive judgment (which concerns conceptually conceived object) are sharply contrasted. This becomes clear in the section that deals with various kinds of satisfaction: The judgment of taste is merely contemplative, i.e., a judgment that, indifferent with regard to the existence of an object, merely connects its constitution together with the feeling of pleasure and displeasure. But this contemplation itself is also not directed to concepts; for the judgment of taste is not a cognitive judgment (neither a theoretical nor a practical one), and hence it is neither grounded on concepts nor aimed at them. (Kant [1790] 2000: 95)

Kant’s distinction between the two types of judgments apparently matches the aforementioned Mendelssohn’s classification of various psychological faculties: just as for Mandelssohn the faculty of assent differs from desire and recognition, for Kant the judgment of taste must not be reduced to the theoretical and practical judgment (which is also based, in the Kantian view, on concepts and thus falls within the class of cognitive judgments). It must be stressed, however, that Kant not only adopts but also radicalizes the opposition between cognitive judgment and the judgment of taste. The radicalization resides in the fact that, according to Kant, the recognition of the object (i.e., its conceptual identification or the identification of its purpose) excludes the assent to the sensible form of its representation. Thus, as Kant puts it: The satisfaction in beauty is one that presupposes no concept, but is immediately combined with the representation through which the object is given (not

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through which it is thought). Now if the judgment of taste in regard to the latter is made dependent on the purpose in the former, as a judgment of reason, and is thereby restricted, then it is no longer a free and pure judgment of taste. (Kant [1790] 2000: 115)

In other words, for Kant beauty is not only independent of cognition, but cognition is in fact harmful to the contemplation of beauty. As indicated above, the Kantian theory of taste absorbed the development of German aesthetics as it continually shifted toward the privileging of the form of representation. Simply put, the form is no longer considered merely for its ability to expose an object and to induce pleasure by means of verisimilitude; it is also perceived as a source of pleasure in its own right. Most importantly, this shift has had a number of consequences for how the notions of mimesis and immersion have been treated in modern aesthetics and modern theory of art. At least three points must be taken into account. First, since mimesis is no longer perceived as the universal principle of artistic creation, it may serve as a criterion for a classification of arts. Thus, modern critics would distinguish, on the one hand, the mimetic or representational works that refer to an object and, on the other hand, the abstract or formalist artifacts defined as auto-referential (cf., e.g., Walton 1988). Such a division also presents itself in the considerations regarding the immersive and the illusive effects. For instance, lyric poetry, wherein the arrangement of the linguistic form is often salient, would be classified as anti-immersive, while nineteenth-century realistic novels would be judged as highly conducive to immersion (cf., Wolf 1998; see also Matthews, Hühn, and Kiefer 2011). Second, besides their taxonomic use, the two principles are also considered to determine the very being a work of art. In brief, artistic object would be defined in terms of tension or indirect proportion between the principle of form and the principle of illusion or representation. In other words, in this view, a work of art exists as a conflict or a tenuous encounter between the two principles (see, e.g., Mukařovský [1936] 1970; Eldridge 1985). Finally, the aforementioned distinction between the mimetic (or representational) and nonmimetic (or nonrepresentational) art serves in modern debates as a criterion for determining the value of artifacts. Thus, on the one hand, a work that amounts to a mere representation and gives up on refined form would be perceived as flawed (cf., e.g., Barthes [1973] 1975), while, on the other hand, a work of art that accentuates refined form may be designated as “formalistic” (see Belodubrovskaya 2015). The distinction between the two principles is thus not

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only categorical (in order to classify works of art) and ontological (in order to determine the being of a work of art) but also axiological (in order to determine the value of an artefact). *** Let us turn to eighteenth-century French aesthetics that certainly played a specific role in the formation of the modern debate on mimesis and illusion. Above all, we should focus on the pertinent theories of theater, which is seen by the French authors as a medium of its own kind, and on the debate concerning the affects incited by theatrical performance (see Becq 1984 for an overview). First, we should consider the conception of Abbé Dubos, the author of Critical Reflections on Poetry and Painting (1719), perhaps the most influential writing on art in eighteenth-century France. In his treatise Dubos builds on the classicist axiom that the main objective of art is “to imitate the objects which would call in us the real passions” (1719: 23), or, more precisely, “to incite in us the passions which the real object would normally call up” (24–5). The claim is based on the general presupposition regarding the human mind: according to Dubos, “it is one of the biggest needs of man to have his mind occupied” (6), and, in this respect, the pictorial or theatrical imitations are of a great value if they excite passions and thus provide an impulse for our mental activity (25; cf. also Mertens 2009). Concerning the concrete impacts of the work of art on the perceiver, the key affirmations are to be found in chapter III of Dubos’s treatise that deals directly with the affects and emotions incited by the theatrical performance. Here Dubos claims that the imitation of a real object will induce in the perceiver the imitation of real passions, yet “the impressions are not that profound as the impressions incited by the real object”—“they do not reach to the soul,” and thus “they soon fade away” (1719: 48–9). However elementary these claims may appear, already at this point a difference is to be drawn between the approach typical of the French aestheticians as opposed to that of their German counterparts. As we have noted in the preceding section, in the German aesthetic theory two principles of pleasure were distinguished, namely, recognition of the represented object and contemplation of the form of the representation. These principles were considered as competing within a work of art supposing that the more the perceivers are attracted by the formal arrangement of the representation, the less they take into account the imitated object and the less they are cognizing. However, the views of Dubos and those of other aestheticians in eighteenth-century France differs substantially as they consider only one aesthetic principle, namely, the principle of mimesis or

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representation. According to this view, a work of art calls up an aesthetic effect only insofar as it represents or imitates a dramatic action or situation. This sort of single-principle aesthetics does not lead, nevertheless, to the underestimation of the form of representation. Although not considered as an aesthetic principle in its own right, the form is seen as having a specific role: an emphasis is placed on the fact that, when perceiving a representation (a theatrical performance, for instance), its form significantly modifies the perceiver’s experience, be it regarding the image of the represented object or the relationship of the perceiver to what is represented—the theatre, as a medium, has a formative effect. Thus, as we have just noted, according to Dubos, theatrical representation has an impact on the intensity of emotions incited by the work: “the impression called up by the imitation . . . is of a minor force” (Dubos 1719: 25). Now, we may distinguish different ways of how the French aestheticians conceived of the modifications carried out by the form of representation: certainly, the modification was not considered only with regard to the intensity of affects called up by mimesis or illusion. A different view is put forward, for instance, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his On Spectacles (1758), a reaction to d’Alembert’s Encyclopaedia article on Geneva where a comment is made regarding the critical approach of Genevians to theatre. In his answer, Rousseau defends the critical attitude of his fellow citizens and points out various aspects of theatrical representation that are, according to him, harmful to both society and individuals. To begin with, Rousseau, much like Dubos, claims that imitation is the core of theatrical performance. Unlike his predecessor, however, Rousseau points out that theatre not only has impact on the intensity of the emotions called up by the performance but also, and predominantly, modifies their very nature. Thus, when commenting on Dubos’ conception, Rousseau points out: If according to the observation od Diogenes Laertius, the heart is more readily touched by feigned ills than real ones, if theatrical imitations draw forth more tears than would the presence of the objects imitated, it is less because the emotions are feebler and do not reach the level of pain, as the Abbé du Bos believes, than because they are pure and without mixture of anxiety for ourselves. In giving our tears to these fictions, we have satisfied all the rights of humanity without having to give anything more of ourselves; whereas unfortunate people in person would require attention from us, relief consolation, and work. (Rousseau [1758] 1960: 25)

In other words, according to Rousseau, the awareness of being confronted with mere representation makes the feelings incited by the performance artificial,

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no matter what intensity they might reach and what kind of object induces the affection. This point is crucial for Rousseau’s argumentation, as the ability to dissociate oneself from the affects inspired by the performance has nothing to do with their force but rather with their artificial nature. The observer can be purged of the affects incited by the performance simply because they are mere fictions. Another aspect of theatrical representation discussed by Rousseau concerns its utterly affirmative character. According to Rousseau, the spectacle not only represents various characters and situations but also, being a representation, provides a confirmation of that which is being represented. Thus, commenting on the alleged educational aspect of theatre, he claims that, far from choosing . . . the passions which [the author] wants to make us like, he is forced to choose those which we like already. What I have said of the sorts of entertainment ought to be understood even more of the interest which is made dominant in them. At London a drama is interesting when it causes the French to be hated; at Tunis, the noble passion would be piracy; at Messina, a delicious revenge; at Goa, the honor of burning Jews. If an author shocks these maxims, he will write a very fine play to which no one will go. And then this author must be taxed with ignorance, with having failed in the first law of his art, in the one which serves as the basis for all others, which is, to succeed. Thus the theatre purges that one does not have and foments those that one does. ([1758] 1960: 21)

These affirmations clearly manifest the political dimension of Rousseau’s thought regarding theatrical performance:  as the effect of theatre is based on verisimilitude and as any deformation of reality would be perceived as disturbing, the theatre cannot but confirm the present state of things and to maintain the social status quo (see Guénard 2011). However, this consideration has consequences also for the aesthetics of theatre as it touches on the very condition of the immersive effect. As is apparent, for Rousseau it is the resemblance of reality that underlies the perceiver’s identification with fictional characters and actions, thus, the recognition is the very prerequisite of immersion. The third French aesthetic theory we must look at comes from Denis Diderot, an author who discussed the role of theatrical representation and its impact on the perceiver in several of his writings (e.g., On Dramatic Poetry, Observations on Garrick). To get directly to the heart of the matter, we will focus on the much discussed Paradox of the Actor (1773–77), a fictional dialogue concerning the proper techniques and aims of the art of acting.

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The main thesis of Diderot (in the essay represented by the First speaker) is summed up in the claim that the great actor must have a deal of judgment. He must have in himself an unmoved and disinterested onlooker. He must have, consequently, penetration and no sensibility; the art of mimicking everything, or, which comes to the same thing, the same aptitude for every fort of character. ([1773–77] 1883: 7)

Further on, Diderot specifies this point, claiming that “if the actor were full, really full, of feeling, how could he play the same part twice running with the same spirit and success? Full of fire at the first performance, he would be worn out and cold as marble at the third” (ibid.: 8; see also the introduction to Diderot [2011] and Fried [1980]). Up to this point, Diderot’s treaty may be considered as purely technical writing regarding the art of acting: it advocates the idea of unmoved and disinterested performance. However, Diderot also puts forward a general view regarding theatrical representation and its impact on spectators. First, it should be noted that for Diderot actors do not give up on their own individual emotions in order to convincingly portray some other individual, that is, to portray a fictional character. In Diderot’s opinion, actors abandon individuality tout court in order to represent the ideal model that is supposed to have, when intuited, a significant effect on the audience ([1773–77] 1883: 22 and 55). This is, in fact, the point of Diderot’s claim that an attractive scene, when perceived on the street, is incomparable with its theatrical image: Will this show [on the street] compare with one which is the result of a prearranged plan, with the harmony which the artist will put into it when he transfers it from the public way to his stage or canvas? If you say it will, then I shall make you this answer: What is this boasted magic of art if it only consists in spoiling what both nature and chance have done better than art? Do you deny that one can improve on nature? (Ibid.: 24–5)

Most importantly, for Diderot the distinction between reality and fiction does not concern two sets of individuals with a different ontological status (the factual and the fictional), but rather the difference between what is individual (the empirical reality) and what is ideal (the ideal essence). And it is this shift that has certain implications regarding the aesthetics of theatre. First, it should be noted that, whereas Dubos and Rousseau focus on the impact of theatrical representation with regard to the intensity and the nature of emotions incited by the work, for Diderot the representation modifies the very nature of the represented

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object: as indicated, the object undergoes a sort of transubstantiation as it turns from an individual thing to an ideal model. Interestingly enough, this also implies that, unlike Dubos and Rousseau for whom the efficiency of theatrical performance relies on its resemblance of everyday life, Diderot bases the theatrical effect on difference: the force of theatrical performance stems from its ability to significantly transform rather than copy the image of reality (for further discussion, see Yann 2011). To conclude, we may sum up the various principles that appear in Dubos’s, Rousseau’s and Diderot’s aesthetic conceptions in the following way. First, we have pointed out that the French authors do not consider two aesthetic principles (the form of representation and the represented content) but rather only a single principle, that is, the representation itself. Accordingly, recognition of the represented object is perceived as the primal precondition of the aesthetic effect. Secondly, the French authors contemplate various ways of how (theatrical) representation modifies the image of the represented object and its impact on the affectivity of perceivers. As we have noted, the modification may concern the authenticity of emotions or, respectively, it may modify the nature of the represented thing. Thirdly and finally, the French authors raise the question regarding the preconditions of the immersive effect. According to Rousseau’s On Spectacles, affective identification with a performance is based on the resemblance between the represented world and the everyday reality. Diderot on the contrary sees the immersive effect as called up by representation of the ideal model that differs radically from the empirical reality. *** The last part of our historic exposition focuses on a chapter from eighteenthcentury British aesthetics that also contributed to the formation of the modern concept of mimesis and immersion. More specifically, we will undertake a close reading of the relevant passages from Henry Home’s Elements of Criticism (1762), which holds a unique view regarding the immersive effect and the preconditions of immersion. Our main focus will be on section VII of the book entitled, “Emotions caused by Fiction,” which follows up on the preceding chapters dedicated to other types of emotions and their causes. Briefly put, building on the general claim that the main precondition for emotions to be induced resides in “the veracity” of the object, Home tackles the question of what defines a veracious representation and how it is to be distinguished from other forms in which a thing can be presented.

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According to Home, the veracity of an object is to be, first, contrasted with the mere recollection when “the thing is not figured as in our view, nor any image formed: we retain the consciousness of our present situation” ([1762] 2005: 67). Conversely, if the image or performance portrays the object veraciously, the observer conceives of himself or herself as being the eyewitness directly facing the thing. To illustrate his claim, Home uses the following example: I saw yesterday a beautiful woman in tears for the loss of an only child, and was greatly moved with her distress: not satisfied with a slight recollection or bare remembrance, I ponder upon the melancholy scene: conceiving myself to be in the place where I was an eye-witness, every circumstance appears to me as at first: I think I see the woman in tears, and hear her moans. (Ibid.: 67)

Having distinguished the veracity of the present object from its mere recollection, a more intriguing task for the author is to distinguish between the presence of a fictional object and the presence of reality, that is, to use Home’s terminology, one must explain the difference between “ideal” and “real presence.” To resolve the question, Home first points out that the difference between the two modes of presentation does not concern the degree of distinctness of the  idea called up by the object. The way he puts it, an accurate description of the fictional object may induce an idea “no less distinct than if [the perceiver] had been originally an eye witness” ([1762] 2005: 68–9). Moreover, according to Home, the difference is not to be based on the notion of reflection so that the perception of the ideally present (or fictional) object would be accompanied by the awareness of its fictionality, whereas the perception of the real object would not be accompanied by any reflection. Home points out that in the case of ideal presence, likewise, “the reader forgets that he reads”: when reading a novel, we may pay no attention to the fact that we are dealing with fiction. Once the negative definitions are made, Home claims that the difference between ideal and real presence cannot reside but in the fact that, in one case the veracity of senses is connected to an object that does not actually exist, whereas in the other the veracity of senses is connected to the real object ([1762] 2005: 70). However unsatisfactory this claim may seem, there are two points in Home’s analysis that deserve particular attention as they underlie also the present debate on illusion and immersion. First, the veracity, as independent of fictionality or factuality of the object, defines in Home’s account a mode of perception:  it is not an attribute of the thing. In other words, the judgments regarding veracity are not objective judgments about what we see or hear, but rather subjective

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claims regarding our subjective or psychological state (we feel as though facing the thing). In this sense, this type of judgments may also be considered to be psychological or reflective. Secondly, Home’s conception of ideal presence allows one to perceive literary text not as mere representation of fictional or factual objects but rather as a field of their presentation; thus, when we read a text, we may experience the events referred to by the text as “happening here and now” or as being “self-given.” Most importantly, when dealing with the fictional object, the reader does not have to suspend his or her awareness of its fictionality to perceive it as being here; in Home’s view, the fictional object might too be perceived as bodily present (for a further discussion, see the introduction to Home 2005, and Manolescu 2003). *** Throughout the historic exposition we have singled out a set of themes that form the basis of the modern debate regarding mimesis and immersion in literature and the arts. To conclude, let us sum up the most important points. With eighteenth-century German aesthetics, we have focused on the distinction regarding the contemplation of form and the recognition of object as two aesthetic principles. This distinction determines the modern debate in three points: first, work of art is defined in terms of conflict in that an emphasis on the form would be considered to be harmful to the recognition of the represented object while recognition of the represented object might be associated with feeble form; secondly, the duality of form and content is used to classify arts as illusive (when transparently displaying the thing) and anti-illusive (when the stress is put on the formal arrangement of the representation); and finally, the distinction between the two principles allows for axiological judgments regarding art, for example, artefacts would be criticized as being purely imitative or formalistic. Subsequently, concerning French aesthetics, we have singled out the following issues that play an important role in the modern discussion on immersion and mimesis: First, supposing that the work of art is in essence a representation, it is the recognition or identification of the represented object that underlies the aesthetic effect; secondly, artwork, as a medium, is not considered to be a transparent representation directly reflecting reality but rather is supposed to form an image of what is being represented and the way the perceiver relates to the represented object (e.g., the representation modifies the intensity and the very nature of emotions induced by the work). Thirdly, the question was raised regarding the supposed prerequisites of the aesthetic effect, be it the verisimilitude of the representation (Dubos, Rousseau) or its difference from nature or reality (Diderot).

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Finally, we discussed Henry Home’s conception of ideal presence that may be considered as the first attempt at a phenomenology of immersion. In Home’s account we have emphasized two points: First, the veracity of a fictional object is defined as a mode of perception; it does not concern the objective status of the thing. Secondly, a literary text is not conceived as a mere representation but rather as a field of presentation of objects; in Home’s view, texts have the force to induce in the perceiver the impression of being an eyewitness of events. In fact, it is this approach to artistic production that underlies the modern theory of immersion as it builds on the idea that the work of art (in general) or the literary text (in particular) may have us directly engage the fictional object.

2. Today debate Since the eighteenth century a number of movements, authors, and texts have appeared that certainly have had a significant impact on the modern debate regarding mimesis and immersion (for an overview, see, e.g., Burwick and Pape 2012; Sadoski and Pavio 2013:  10–27). Nevertheless, to repeat our thesis, the basic configuration of questions that underlies the modern debate was set up approximately three centuries ago, as the new paradigm in aesthetics was established. Since then, mimesis and immersion are being discussed against the background of themes such as the relationship between the form of representation and the represented content, the medial or representational dimension of a work of art, or the specificity regarding perception of aesthetic artefacts. These questions have always been articulated in various contexts that determined the particular axes and accents of the debate:  be it the medial dimension of art (Benjamin [1936] 2007), the cultural conditions of verisimilitude (Gombrich 1960), or the ontology of fictional objects (Walton 1990). Regarding the present theory of mimesis and immersion, we may single out the following theoretical contexts that shape the discussion: cognitive sciences, the fictional worlds theory, and the reader-response criticism. Regarding the cognitive approach, the decisive step has been made by the second generation of cognitive scientists who began the inquiry in what is now commonly called “the embodied cognition.” In simple terms, these secondgeneration scholars analyze cognition not only regarding the symbolic patterns that was the main object of study for the first generation but also in respect to the bodily patterns as they also ground the interaction between the cognizing subject and its surrounding (Kuzmičová 2013: 16). Accordingly, cognition

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of literary texts and other media is being researched both in respect to the intellectual understanding that takes place on the basis of symbolic codes and with regard to its bodily dimension that predominantly involves the activity of imagining. Interestingly enough, according to Anežka Kuzmičová, a proponent of the contemporary cognitive aesthetics, the “mental imagery” (a term also referring to the immersive and illusive experience), has become the hallmark phenomenon of the cognitive research as it “amounts to the experience of actually containing within one’s body a piece of the outside world” (17). In other words, imagination, commonly accompanying the process of reading, makes it clear that cognition does not only amount to an intellectual understanding of the text but also requires bodily engagement. As Margaret Wilson puts it in her programmatic text on embodied cognition: “[A]n elaborate defence had to be mounted to show that imagery involves analogue representations that functionally preserve spatial and other properties of the external world, rather than consisting of bundles of propositions” (Wilson 2002: 633). Most importantly, recent research regarding mental imagery does not amount to the reduction of the phenomena in question to the well-established principles. On the contrary, a new theoretical framework is being developed in order to capture the complexity and richness of the imaginative experience (cf. Kuzmičová 2013: 17). The other context that significantly determines current discussion regarding mimesis and immersion is the fictional worlds theory as an approach that puts particular emphasis on the referential aspects of texts. Besides others, the work of Thomas G. Pavel and Marie-Laure Ryan are of importance. Since the 1980s, Thomas G.  Pavel has been continually criticizing antireferential approaches in linguistics and literary criticism. His critique was predominantly aimed at the structuralist analysis of language that focuses exclusively on the intentional level of utterance (its meaning) and brackets out its extensional dimension (its reference). Accordingly, in his Fictional Worlds (1986), Pavel points out that literary structuralism takes into account solely the elements of the narrative structure (i.e., the elements of discourse) and pays little attention to the act of telling that refers to the concrete events or states of affaires. As Pavel puts it:  “Since structuralist poetics had adopted the distinction between story and discourse, the story being most often identified with narrative structures, it was quite natural that the only alternative to plot studies were the examination of discursive techniques, an examination that, while producing remarkable accomplishments, helped nevertheless to implement the moratorium on representational topics” (1986: 6). The key point of Pavel’s critique is the claim that from the structuralist perspective the referential—that is,

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the extensional dimension of the text—is perceived as a mere function of the intensional level, hence the proper logic of the fictional world and the mimetic aspects of the text remain neglected. The agenda of the fictional worlds theory is then to analyze the specific features of fictional worlds and the means of their textual representation (9–10; see also Doležel 1998). However, in the framework of the fictional worlds theory the text is analyzed not only regarding its ability to call up an image of a world but also regarding its power to draw the reader into the fictional universe. This phenomenon has been investigated chiefly by Marie Laure-Ryan who has also been focusing on the related questions regarding non-textual media and intermediality. Thus, in her 1994 essay, Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory, Ryan makes use of the notion of immersion in order to describe the significant mode of the reader’s relationship to the fictional world. In this context, she speaks of the reader’s consciousness, which “relocates itself to another world, and recenters the universe around this virtual reality” (1999:  115). Ryan bases her theory on the presupposition that the emphasis on the formal arrangement of the medium inhibits the immersive effect. She claims that “possible-world . . . theories of fiction presupposes a relative transparency of the medium. The reader or spectator looks through the work toward the reference world” (ibid.). Manifestly, she is, in this respect, in accord with the modern thought regarding mimesis and illusion that—as noted previously—considers the salient form of representation to obstruct recognition of the represented object. The third context that significantly shapes the present-day debate on illusion and immersive effect is the reader-response theory. The general presupposition that underlies this approach might be summed up in the claim that both the meaning and the textual structure are co-determined by the reader as he or she processes the text. Following up on the classification made by Lois Tyson (2006:  169–86), we may divide the reader-response research into five branches:  “The transactional reader-response theory,” which claims that a literary work is the result of a cooperation between the reader and the text; “the affective stylistics,” which analyzes the impact of the text on the reader and the textual conditions of the impact; “the subjective reader-response theory,” which identifies the text with the reader’s reception; “the psychological reader-response theory,” which focuses on the personality of the reader as it manifests itself in the process of reading; and “the social reader-response theory,” which investigates the collective strategies that also shape the interpretation of text (see also Tompkins 1980).

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As is apparent from the list, a great portion of the debate in this field involves the question of the degree in which texts are constructed by their readers, of how individuals and the social schemata determine the reading experience, or, respectively, what are the possible impacts of a text on its reader. All of these questions play a role in the immersion-illusion debate, as the illusion of being re-centered to the fictional world and being an eyewitness of the fictional events are conditioned by the activity of the reader (see Voss 2008). To give a concrete example regarding the relevance of the reader-response approach for the theory of immersion, we may point at the notion of the imaginary that has been coined in the early 1990s by Wolfgang Iser, one of the fathers and key proponents of the reader-response approach. Iser’s concept is of particular interest since it complicates the opposition between the real and the fictional world. The imaginary, as defined by the author, does not refer to a fictional or factual object represented by the text, but rather to a reality built up by the reader, or, more precisely, to an unformed reality that is to be construed in the process of reading. In the end, the specificity of Iser’s conception and its relevance for the immersion debate lies in that the condition of the literary effect is not perceived in its ability to simply draw the reader into the represented world but rather in its ability to engage the reader in the very process of the world-making (cf. Iser 1993: 1–4). In other words, from Iser’s perspective, the condition of the literary effect resides in the openness of the text regarding the imagination and interpretative activity of the reader.

3. The present volume Before we introduce the essays included in this volume, let us once again sum up the main points we have singled out regarding the historical background and the context of the present-day debate on mimesis and immersion. We started by pointing out that the main questions of the discussion were articulated back in the eighteenth century, the time when modern aesthetics was formed. Looking at texts of German, French, and British authors, we have focused on issues such as competition between the form of representation and the represented object or immersion as a mode of perception. Subsequently, following up on this historical account, we singled out three theoretical contexts that determine the contemporary research of immersion. First, we pointed out the efforts of the second generation of cognitive scientists who focus on the bodily patterns that determine reception of literary texts.

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Secondly, we summed up the general principles of the fictional worlds theory as an approach that emphasizes the referential aspects of literary texts and the conditions of immersion in fictional worlds. Finally, we focused on the readerresponse criticism that touches on the question of illusion and immersion as these phenomena are seen as resulting from the activity of the reader. The essays in the present volume then discuss all of the aforementioned issues, and we have divided them into four sections. The first section, entitled Illusion and Media, comprises four papers focusing on illusion as induced by different types of representational artefacts. In the opening essay, Werner Wolf focuses on aesthetic illusion regarding both its most general features and specific differences. Comparing literary fiction, feature film, and visual arts, the author attempts to find a middle ground between the unitary approach that treats illusion as a uniform experience reappearing across different media—an approach susceptible to “media blindness”— and the view emphasizing the radical differences of illusive experience as it is induced by various types of representation (“media relativism”). In his essay “More than Meets the Eye:  Layers of Artistic Representation,” Thomas G. Pavel distinguishes various layers that constitute the illusive experience. He discusses the illusive evocation of type, the reference to a represented individual, and the instantiation of an ideal. On this basis, Pavel analyses various artworks as they emphasize different layers of illusion or as they—each in its own way—combine the layers to achieve a rich illusive effect (the author discusses examples from the domain of plastic arts, painting, literary fiction, and theatre). In his “Mediating Immediacy,” Göran Rossholm proposes a different term for immersive experience: he speaks of “i-experience,” which refers to the identification of readers or perceivers with what they read or perceive. Taking this definition as a point of departure, Rossholm compares various illusive experiences as they are elicited by various media (literature, music, painting) or by illusionist objects (“forgeries” or literary “dummies”). The last essay in the section, Enrico Terrone’s “Neither Here Nor There,” focuses on feature film as a specific type of pictorial illusion. The author advocates the idea that the perceivers of film experience the represented events as happening now (i.e., they undergo a temporal illusion), yet without placing them in their egocentric space. Building on this thesis, Terrone argues against the conception of Gregory Currie who—referring to cinematic flashbacks— points out that film may create a rupture between the represented time and the time of perception. Terrone responds by distinguishing between a cognitive and

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perceptual shift and claims that, in the case of flashbacks, only the cognitive shift takes place, whereas the illusion of “now” is maintained. The second section, entitled Illusion and the Mind, is dedicated to cognitive and psychological approaches regarding representational texts an artefacts. In the opening essay, Marco Caracciolo tackles the question of how fictional minds (the minds of fictional characters) are interpreted by the reader. In accord with the general definition of aesthetic illusion, Caracciolo refers to the fact that we usually perceive fictional characters as real; however, simultaneously, we are aware of their fictionality. According to the author, this ambiguity of readers’ experiences is due to the fact that when reading a fictional mind, we invest the interpretation with both the schemata that commonly inform the everyday intersubjectivity and the narrative and semiotic frames as the necessary means of meaning-making. Paradoxically, it is the awareness of the fictionality of the persona that, according to Caracciolo, allows readers to identify with the fictional mind even though such identification would not take place in everyday life. In his essay on “Cognitive Impenetrability,” Fredrik Stjernberg returns to the much discussed “paradox of fiction.” Famously defined by Colin Radford in his 1975 essay, “How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?” the term refers to the fact that readers are commonly moved by literary texts even though they are aware of the fictionality of the represented situations and characters. Recapitulating the main aspects of the phenomenon, Stjernberg argues that the paradox might be explained by virtue of impenetrability of the readers’ perceptions by cognition. Martin Pokorný’s essay, “Illusion, Distance and Appropriation,” is a cognitive study regarding perception of utterances (in general) and literary texts (in particular). The author focuses on illusion as it, according to him, accompanies the understanding of any utterance: utterance always projects a putative fact and thus requires an engagement of the imagination. Subsequently, two types of perception of utterances are distinguished: in the first case, the recipients are interested only in the putative fact itself (such an interest is always non-thematic); in the second case, the recipients have an interest in the fact as well as its background (such an interest is thematic). It is the second type that is, according to the author, typical of literary or imaginative reading. In the final essay of the section, Josep Corbí undertakes a close reading of W. G. Sebald’s 2001 novel, Austerlitz. Analyzing the mind of the main character, Corbí focuses predominantly on the unconscious impulses that determine the behavior of the hero. Most importantly, in Corbí’s reading the cognitive dimension of the literary text comes clearly to the fore. Simply put, if Marco Caracciolo accounted

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for the everyday intersubjectivity as the necessary basis for understanding the fictional minds, in Corbí’s essay it is the literary writing that sheds light on the everyday intersubjectivity as it brings out various psychological schemata. Whereas the first two sections focus on the artistic medium or, respectively, on the psychological questions related to the representational artefacts, the third section, Illusive Worlds, deals with the status of the fictional universe represented by the text. The section opens with Lubomír Doležel’s essay, “La Comédie Humaine and the Illusion of Reality,” which aims at the stratification of Balzac’s novelistic universe. The author distinguishes between factual, fictional, and the superworld and argues that the last type of world contains both fictional and factual elements (which reappear throughout Balzac’s novels) and serves as a mediator between the first two types. Most importantly, the superworld of Balzac’s novels continually undergoes a development that, according to Doležel, puts it into proximity of the actual world and calls up an illusion of reality. In his essay “Fiction, Illusion, Reality and Radical Narration,” Petr Koťátko defines the preconditions of aesthetic illusion in terms of the “as if ” perspective. He argues against the approach of Marie-Laure Ryan and Gregory Currie, who consider fictional utterances to be statements about abstract entities that inhabit a world ontologically different from ours. Koťátko claims that if an illusion of a fictional universe is to emerge, the reader must accept the fictional utterances as referring to reality: when interpreted as statements about a fictional universe, the image of the represented world remains in many aspects undetermined and the text does not fulfill its literary functions. The essay of Karel Thein touches on the question of illusion in the domain of lyric poetry. Using the Kantian conceptual apparatus, the author claims that lyric poems call up the idea of the world as an unattainable whole, and in this sense, they represent the world as an illusion sui generis. Accordingly, the author maintains that, unlike narratives which always tend toward closure and completeness, lyric writing induces only a fragmentary image of reality. In the last essay of the section, Jiří Koten discusses various illusive and antiillusive techniques as they reappear in the history of modern literature. The author focuses predominantly on the illusion-breaking novels of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and the illusion-making texts of nineteenth-century realist novelists. On the basis of his historical inquiry, Koten accentuates the difference between the author and the narrator, claiming that the reader of the novel tends to undergo an illusion or immersion only insofar as the presence of the author remains hidden.

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The last section, Questioning Illusion, consists of three papers that, from different perspectives, criticize the illusionist approach to literature. Emily Troscianko’s essay critically assesses various aspects of Werner Wolf ’s aesthetic illusion theory. The author raises various terminological issues, questioning both the very notion of “illusion” as it may evoke a mere deception of the reader by the text and the predicate “aesthetic” as it does not, in Wolf ’s conception, refer to the sensory aspect of illusion but rather counterintuitively to its representational character. Moreover, Troscianko discusses Wolf ’s distinction between aesthetic illusion and transportation to the fictional world that, in her view, deserves further clarification. In his critical essay on illusive theory of literature, Bohumil Fořt takes as a point of departure a comparison between the aesthetic illusion theory, the Prague school poetics, and the fictional worlds theory. He argues that the illusionists tend to overestimate the world-likeness of the represented world and to overlook the difference between the fictional and the factual discourse. Conversely, according to Fořt, the Prague school poetics and the theory of fictional worlds strictly maintain the distinctions between different worlds and discourses. Additionally, a terminological question is raised concerning the very notion of “aesthetic illusion.” Fořt suggests using the term “realistic illusion” because illusion in literature is the illusion of reality. In the last essay of the volume, Anders Pettersson questions the very attempt to read literary texts illusively or to take them as a means to induce the immersive effect. Critically discussing various conceptions based on the immersive view of literature (Wolf, Kuzmičová), the author proposes a different mode of reading that he calls “the absorbed attention” and that does not rely on visualization or the act of imagining.

Note 1 The present section draws substantially from Guyer (2004, 2014a, 2014b).

References Abbé Dubos (1719), Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, 2 vols., Paris: Jean Mariette. Barthes, R. ([1973] 1975), The Pleasure of the Text, translated by R. Miller, New York: Hill and Wang.

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Baumgarten, A. G. ([1758] 1983), Aesthetica/Ästhetik, edited and translated by H. R. Schweizer, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Becq, A. (1984), Genèse de l’esthétique française moderne. De la Raison classique à l’Imagination créatrice (1680–1814), Pisa: Pacini editore. Belodubrovskaya, M. (2015), “Abram Room, a Strict Young Man, and the 1936 Campaign against Formalism in Soviet Cinema,” Slavic Review, 74 (2): 311–33. Benjamin, W. ([1936] 2007), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, translated by J. A. Underwood, New York: Penguin. Bremond, C. and E. D. Cancalon (1980), “The Logic of Narrative Possibilities,” New Literary History, 11 (3): 387–411. Brock, S. (2002), “Fictionalism about Fictional Characters,” Noûs, 36 (1): 1–21. Burwick, F. and W. Pape, eds. (2012), Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and Historical Approaches, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Carroll, N. (2002), “The Wheel of Virtue: Art, Literature, and Moral Knowledge,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 60 (1): 3–26. Devereaux, M. (2004), “Moral Judgments and Works of Art: The Case of Narrative Literature,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62 (1): 3–11. Diderot, D. ([1773–77] 1883), The Paradox of Acting, translated by W. H. Pollock, London: Chatto & Windus, Piccadilly. Diderot, D. (2011), On Art and Artists: An Anthology of Diderot’s Aesthetic Thought, edited by J. Glaus and J. Seznec, Dodrecht: Springer. Doležel, L. (1988), Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Eldridge, R. (1985), “Form and Content: An Aesthetic Theory of Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 25 (4): 303–16. Fried, M. (1980), Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Berkeley: University of California Press. Gombrich, E. (1960), Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, London: Phaidon. Guénard, F. (2011), “La mésestime de soi: La philosophie sociale de Rousseau dans la Lettre à d’Alembert,” in B. Bachofen and B. Bernardi (eds.), Politique et esthétique: Sur la Lettre à d ‘Alembert, 55–70, Lyon: ENS Éditions. Guyer, P. (2004), “The Origins of Modern Aesthetics: 1711–1735,” in P. Kivy (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, 15–44, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Guyer, P. (2014a), A History of Modern Aesthetics, Volume I: The Eighteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guyer, P. (2014b), “18th Century German Aesthetics,” in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ spr2014/entries/aesthetics-18th-german/. Hammermeister, K. (2002), The German Aesthetic Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Home, H. (Lord Kames) ([1762] 2005), Elements of Criticism, edited by K. Haakonssen, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund.

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Iser, W. (1993), The Fictive and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kant, I. ([1790] 2000), Critique of the Power of Judgement, translated by P. Guyer and E. Matthews, edited by P. Guyer, New York: Cambridge University Press. Kuzmičová, A. (2013), Mental Imagery in the Experience of Literary Narrative: Views from Embodied Cognition, Stockholm: Stockholm University. Manolescu, B. (2003), “Traditions of Rhetoric, Criticism, and Argument in Kames’s ‘Elements of Criticism,’ ” Rhetoric Review, 22 (3): 225–42. Matthews, A., P. Hühn, and J. Kiefer (eds.) (2011), The Narratological Analysis of Lyric Poetry: Studies in English Poetry from the 16th to the 20th Century, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter. Mertens, C. (2009), “Charles du Bos et le problème de l’exaltation,” Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France, 109 (3): 711–17. Mukařovský, J. ([1936] 1970), Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts, translated by M. E. Suino, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Pavel, T. (1986), Fictional Worlds, London and Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pavel, T. (1988), “Formalism in Narrative Semiotics,” Poetics Today, 9 (3): 593–606. Rousseau, J.-J. ([1750] 1960), Politics and the Arts: Letter to D’Alembert on the Theatre, translated by A. Bloom, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ryan, M.-L. (1999), “Immersion vs. Interactivity: Virtual Reality and Literary Theory,” Substance, 28 (2): 110–137. Ryan, M.-L. (2001), Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sadoski, M. and A. Pavio (2013), Imagery and Text: A Dual Coding Theory of Reading and Writing, New York: Routledge. Schnieder, B. and T. Von Solodkoff (2009), “In Defence of Fictional Realism,” Philosophical Quarterly, 59 (234): 138–49. Sörbom, G. (2002), “The Classical Concept of Mimesis,” in P. Smith and C. Wilde (eds.), A Companion to Art Theory, 19–28, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Thein, K. (2012), “The Beginnings: Mimesis and Human Mind in Some Early Theories of Representation,” in G. Currie, P. Koťátko, and M. Pokorný (eds.), Mimesis: Metaphysics, Cognition, Pragmatics, 220–56, London: College Publications. Tompkins, J. P. (ed.) (1980), Reader-response Criticism: From Formalism to Poststructuralism, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Tyson, L. (2006), Critical Theory Today: A User-friendly Guide, New York: Routledge. Voss, Ch. (2008), “Fiktionale Immersion,” Montage AV 17 (February): 69–86. Walton, K. L. (1988), “What Is Abstract about the Art of Music?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 46 (3): 351–64. Walton, K. L. (1990), Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Wilson, M. (2002), “Six Views of Embodied Cognition,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 9 (4): 625–36. Wolf, W. (1998), “Aesthetic Illusion in Lyric Poetry?,” Poetica, 30: 251–89. Wolf, W. (2014), “Illusion (Aesthetic),” in P. Hühn et al. (eds.), Handbook of Narratology, 270–87, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter. Wolf, W., W. Bernhart, and A. Mahler (eds.) (2013), Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media, Studies in Intermediality 6, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wolff, Ch. ([1719] 1742), Vernünfftige Gedancken von Gott, der Welt und der Seele des Menschen, auch allen Dingen überhaupt I, Halle: Renger. Yanal, R. J. (1999), Paradoxes of Emotion and Fiction, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Yann, R. (2011), “De l’absorption et de l’identification chez Diderot: illusion et participation du spectateur au XVIIIe siècle,” in P. Frantz and T. Wynn (eds.), La Scène, la salle et la coulisse dans le théâtre du XVIIIe siècle en France, 263–78, Paris: PUPS.

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Part One

Illusion and Media

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1

Aesthetic Illusion(s)? Toward a Media-Conscious Theory of Media-Elicited Immersion as a Transmedial Phenomenon Werner Wolf

This essay strives to overcome the “media-blindness” of much of the (monomedial) research on aesthetic illusion (Section 1). After a clarification of the concept in focus, which draws on previous research by the author (Section 2), three media are compared by means of one example, respectively, fiction (represented by the beginning of Dickens’s short story “The Signalman”, Section 3), film (exemplified by the opening of Jurassic Park III, Section 4), and painting (illustrated by a landscape painting by F. Church, Niagara, Section 5). In each case the trajectory that the medium requires the recipient to make between the sensory perception afforded by the medium and the mental immersion in the represented world is discussed, as are the media-specific potentials and limits with reference to immersion. As these examples show, the imaginative activities elicited by the various media appear to be sufficiently similar to warrant the concept of one aesthetic illusion across media rather than a plurality of aesthetic illusions. However, it is also argued that a transmedial theory of aesthetic illusion, as yet a task for the future, must take medial differences into account, a perspective that has terminological as well as descriptive reverberations (Section 6).

1. The problem of aesthetic illusion from a transmedial point of view: One phenomenon with variations across media or individual media-specific phenomena? There are many responses to media works1 and works of art, which for all the medial differences between the individual works show noteworthy transmedial similarities, such as admiration for technical or aesthetic craftsmanship, dislike

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for formal or content-related reasons, and various other emotional reactions. Among these transmedial responses there is also one that at first sight and intuitively speaking is similar for a plethora of representations across media such as film, drama, fiction, comics or graphic novels, photographs, paintings, and computer games—namely the impression of being immersed in a represented world, of experiencing what goes on there in a way that resembles real-life experience, although we are aware that we are confronted with a medial artefact and not with real life. This impression has, alas, been designated in research by various terms and shall here be referred to as “aesthetic illusion”2 or, when talking about the most important part of aesthetic illusion, by the metaphor of “immersion” (understood here as a mental phenomenon that may, but need not be, connected to the fact of being physically surrounded by a medium as in a diorama). Yet, on second thought, a question arises: How can it possibly be that media as diverse as fiction and painting can elicit a similar immersive impression and that representations transmitted by clearly dissimilar media should be able to trigger a similar quasi-experience as if we were confronted with life rather than with artefacts? After all, what we have in front of our eyes in fiction are printed words on a page, which are, in essence, symbolic signs, and these ask for a specific process of decoding, one that is quite different, e.g., from the process triggered by the iconic signs that constitute a picture. Does the impression of similarity therefore not simply stem from a disregard of medial specificities and an attempt at creating a unitary theory not unlike recent developments in the partially related field of narratology? In this field, after a period of considering narrative from a mono-medial perspective only (mostly focused on fiction), a transmedial narratology has evolved over the past two decades, which has emphasized the comparability and indeed fundamental similarity of Narrative Across Media (thus the title of a 2004 book edited by Marie-Laure Ryan). Recently, this unitary focus has, however, met with much criticism and was reproached with “media-blindness” (Ryan 2004:  34; cf. Jannidis 2003; Kuhn 2013:  70). As a consequence, some scholars now highlight the divergence of narrativity rather than its similarities across media (e.g., Rajewsky 2015) and engage in what Ryan criticized as a “radical relativism” (2004: 34), sometimes to the extent that the respective research appears no longer as “narratology” in the singular but as “narratologies” in the plural (as a volume edited by David Herman in 1999 already suggested in its title). Research on aesthetic illusion appears to have been undertaken in a largely analogous way. It originated with reference to individual arts, in particular drama (notably in eighteenth-century aesthetics), the visual arts (as discussed by Gombrich

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[1960] 1977), or fiction (as discussed by Wolf 1993a). Subsequently, it was opened up to encompass a plurality of media and was seen as a transmedial phenomenon (e.g., in a volume edited by Walter Bernhart, Andreas Mahler and myself in 2013). In the symposium on which the present volume is based, this transmedial approach was met with some skepticism:  it was doubted whether the immersive or illusionist reception effect caused by many texts of fiction was really similar to the one elicited by other arts and media, a skepticism that is comparable to the reservations having been made in narratology concerning the concept of one and the same narrativity across media. What is the consequence of all of this? Should we abandon the idea of a unitary or at least similar reception effect “aesthetic illusion” across media as a mere, probably terminology-induced, fallacy? Is there no transmedial aesthetic illusion that would warrant the use of the singular but only a plurality of different mediaspecific aesthetic illusions in the plural? The following contribution will not go to such extremes, while acknowledging the importance of media-consciousness not only in narratology but also in all reception research, including research on aesthetic illusion. A middle course will thus be steered between “media blindness” and “radical relativism”, the opposing dangers that Ryan aptly diagnosed for narratology (2004: 34). On the one hand, I will show that there are indeed a sufficient number of similarities across media to justify that we continue to refer to the various immersive effects under discussion with one and the same term. On the other hand, I would also like to point out that within a transmedial theory of aesthetic illusion one must make allowances for medial differences and, last but not least, include media specificities into the theory in the first place. As the plethora of medial candidates for aesthetic illusion cannot be dealt with in the framework of an essay, I will restrict my remarks to fiction as a starting point and then, by way of comparison, expand the scope to encompass film and painting.3

2. Preliminary theoretical remarks: The nature of aesthetic illusion and the six principles informing illusionist works (as derived from fiction), criteria of transmedial comparison, methodology Before we may compare responses to works pertaining to different media that may or may not justly be called aesthetic illusion, some preliminary theoretical issues must be dealt with: the question as to what aesthetic illusion is in the

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first place and what it is that informs illusionist works in at least one medium as a starting point; additionally, reflections on terminology and the criteria that will underlie the ensuing transmedial comparisons, as well as questions of methodology. To start with the first and most important question, what is aesthetic illusion, I will here summarize what I have published elsewhere (cf. Wolf 1993a, 2004, 2008, 2013a) largely in the words of my entry into the Handbook of Narratology (Wolf [2009] 2014).4 The medium in focus is (predominantly) fiction.

2.1 Definition of aesthetic illusion Aesthetic illusion is a basically pleasurable mental state that frequently emerges during the reception of representational texts (and, as will be shown in the following, also non-textual artefacts, or performances). These representations may be fictional or factual, narrative or descriptive. Like all reception effects, aesthetic illusion is elicited by a conjunction of factors that are located (a) in the representations themselves, (b) in the reception process and the recipients, and (c) in framing contexts, for example, cultural-historical, situational, and generic ones. Aesthetic illusion consists primarily of a feeling, with variable intensity, of being imaginatively and emotionally immersed in a represented world and of experiencing this world as a presence (even if it is a narrative of the past) in an as-if mode, that is, in a way similar (but not identical) to real life. At the same time, however, this impression of immersion is counterbalanced by a latent rational distance resulting from a culturally acquired metareferential (media-)awareness of the difference between representation and reality.

2.2 The nature of aesthetic illusion Aesthetic illusion is distinguished from real-life hallucinations and dreams, which do not require the presence of actual objects of perception, in that it is induced by the perception of really existing representations.5 Moreover, it is distinct from delusions in that it is neither a conceptual nor a perceptual error, but a complex phenomenon characterized by an asymmetrical ambivalence. This ambivalence derives from the position of aesthetic illusion on a scale between the two poles of total rational distance (disinterested “observation” of an artefact as such Walton [1990: 273]) and complete immersion in the represented world (“psychological participation” [240–89]), poles which, as a rule, are never fully reached, for then aesthetic illusion would become something else.6 Typically,

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aesthetic illusion maintains a position that is closer to the pole of immersion rather than to the pole of distance and thus “paradoxically” (cf. Liptay 2015) contains both (dominant) immersion and its opposite, distance.7 While aesthetic illusion is not restricted to an effect of works of (verbal) art, the term “aesthetic” is justified by the fact that it etymologically gestures toward a quasi-perceptual quality of the imaginative experience involved and implies an awareness, typical of the reception of art, that “illusion” is triggered by a man-made text (or, as we will see, artefact or performance) rather than (an, e.g., magical) reality. The etymological presence of “playfulness” in Latin in-lusio also contributes to foregrounding this important facet. Aesthetic illusion presupposes the implicit acceptance of a “reception contract,” one of whose stipulations Coleridge ([1817] 1965: 169) described as “the willing suspension of disbelief for the moment”. Aesthetic illusion thus involves several mental/psychic spheres and simultaneously operates within two dimensions (cf. also Walton 1990:  273):  (a)  in the background as a latent, rational awareness “from without,” namely that the illusion-inducing artefact is a mere representation; and (b) in the foreground as a mainly intuitive mental simulation where this awareness is bracketed out in favor of an imagined experience of represented worlds “from within.” This simulation involves emotions as well as sensory impressions and quasi-perceptions (including, but not restricted to, visual imagination), and also corporeal reactions, but equally reason or cognition to the extent that a certain rationality is required to make sense of the represented world. Owing to its dual nature, aesthetic illusion is gradable according to the degrees of immersion or distance present in given reception situations and is thus unstable.8 Immersion, which in many cases seems to be the default option during the reception process of representations and therefore continues to be effective on subsequent receptions of the same text or artefact (cf. Walton 1990:  262–3), can be suspended or undermined at any given moment by the actualization of the latent consciousness of representationality. This “willing construction of disbelief ” (Gerrig 1993: 230) can be triggered not only by the recipient but also by the work itself, due to the use of illusion-breaking devices or because of interference by contextual factors. Since illusionist works provide a simulation of real-life experience, aesthetic illusion always has a quasi-experiential quality about it and sometimes, additionally, a referential dimension: the tendency to credit what is referred to in an illusionist representation with having taken place in the real world. This referential aspect is not always at issue, however, for fantasy or science fiction, which make no pretense of referring to empirical reality, can nevertheless induce a powerful

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aesthetic illusion. In all cases, aesthetic illusion implies the recipient’s subjective impression of being experientially “re-centered” in a represented world, whether factual or fictional, an impression that amounts to a “side-participant stance” (Gerrig 1993:  108, 239)  rather than to the identification with a character, the latter being a special case of feeling re-centered. Functionally, aesthetic illusion constitutes one of the most effective ways of ensuring the reception of representations, since it can cater to various human desires and offers vicarious experience without serious consequences. The general attractiveness of aesthetic illusion also qualifies it as a vehicle of persuasion for didactic, advertising, or propaganda purposes. A  persuasive purpose may also be seen at work in the potential of aesthetic illusion to make the recipient accept more readily the tendency of aesthetic representations to introduce an unrealistic surplus of coherence and meaning, for instance, to present worlds whose closure and meaningfulness, through such devices as the use of coincidence, poetic justice, and so forth, may be regarded as deviating from the contingency of life.

2.3 Factors contributing to aesthetic illusion Aesthetic illusion is produced by several factors, which are described by Gombrich ([1960] 1977: 169) as elements contributing to a “guided projection”. The projection as such takes place in the recipient’s mind. When it is in a state of aesthetic illusion, however, the mind’s activity is not free-floating, but rather guided by the illusionist representation, both recipient and representation being influenced by contexts that in turn also contribute to the illusionist projection. Thus the representation, the recipient, and the context (situational, cultural, etc., including the state of the respective “media landscape”) must all be taken into account as factors in a theory of illusion. The individual representation is the guiding “script” that provides the raw material for what will appear on the mental “screen” and serves to trigger aesthetic illusion. Owing to the quasi-experiential nature of this state of mind, successful illusionist representations furnish formal analogies to the structures and features of real-life experience. Moreover, they offer contents that correspond to the objects and scripts encountered in, or applicable to, real-life experience, at least to a certain extent. Generally, illusionist representations are accessible with relative facility. They offer material to potential recipients to lure them into the represented worlds and create a sense of verisimilitude, an important prerequisite for the emergence of aesthetic illusion in most cases, although generic

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conventions may serve to neutralize a potentially illusion-damaging effect of improbable elements. While the illusionist representation provides the script, the recipients are called on to act as its (mental) “directors” or “producers,” using it along with their own world-knowledge, “media savvy” and empathetic abilities for “projection” onto their minds’ “screens”. This activity, as well as the nature of the mental screen, results in the recipients and the reception process becoming decisive, albeit problematic, factors in the production of aesthetic illusion. For even if it is conceded that the principal precondition of aesthetic illusion (namely the human ability to mentally dissociate oneself from the here-and-now and imagine being somewhere else or someone else, in some other time) is an anthropological constant, a recipient’s illusionist response to an artefact remains heavily dependent on individual factors. These include not only range of experience, age, gender, interests, cultural background, and the ability to “read” medial representations correctly but also the physical and/or (media-)historical situation of reception and, of course, the recipient’s willingness to “participat[e] psychologically in [a] game of make-believe” (Walton 1990: 242).9 As for cultural and historical contexts—the “rooms” in which potentially illusionist scripts are originally located and the locations where guided projections take place—a plurality of such contexts must always be assumed, although to a lesser degree when a text, its author, and its reader are contemporary and belong to the same culture. This context dependence has significant consequences, for it means that aesthetic illusion can be conceived of as the effect of a relative correspondence or analogy between a representation and essential culturally and historically induced concepts of reality and schemata of perception. It is these schemata and epistemic frameworks together with certain experiential contents and the respective state of art of the media that govern verisimilitude as an important default condition of aesthetic illusion (unless overruled, e.g., by generic conventions such as “fantasy,” etc.). Since there is no universally valid perception and experience of reality, let alone a worldview that is generally acknowledged to be natural, any disparities between the contexts of production and those of reception may substantially affect aesthetic illusion. Verisimilitude—and with it aesthetic illusion—is therefore to a large extent a historical and cultural variable.10 A particularly relevant and equally variable contextual factor is the set of frames, including generic conventions, that rule the production and reception of the arts and media in a given period. Most important, however, is the question of the extent to which aesthetic illusion itself and an aesthetic approach to artworks that implies aesthetic distance are practiced or known in a given culture or

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period, or whether, for instance, a worldview that favors magical enchantment prevails, owing to which specific artefacts are regarded as numinous realities. With the two variables of recipient and context in mind, everything that can be said about the core of all text- or artefact-centered approaches to aesthetic illusion, namely illusionist representation itself, becomes problematic. For it is these variables that make it difficult, if not impossible, to decide on the actual illusionist effect of a given work, text, technique, and so forth for all periods and all individuals. However, this does not mean that it is impossible to say anything at all about the factor text (or artefact), for given similar recipients and similar reception contexts, representations will appear as more or less illusionist according to intra-compositional factors. One essential similarity among recipients, contributing to the theoretical construct of an “average” recipient, can in fact be postulated, namely that the recipient is prepared and able to “willingly suspend disbelief ” when confronted with illusionist artefacts, but remains distanced enough not to become enmeshed in experiential or referential delusion. Historically and culturally, the average recipient or reader as a factor in a theory of illusion can be assumed to have existed, in postclassical times,11 at least over the past few centuries of Western culture, during which the evolution of aesthetic verisimilitude and responses to illusionist art are comparatively well documented. In fact, Western cultural history of this period offers an extensive corpus of primary works that continue to be read as illusionist, in contrast to works that obstruct illusionist access such as radically experimental postmodernist fictions. With this illusionist corpus and its features in mind, a number of points regarding the illusionist potential of a given representation can in fact be made. If, in the following argument, terms such as “characteristics” and “principles” are employed, they are not meant to function in the illusionist reception process as essences with fixed effects. Rather, the characteristics and principles of illusionist representation are to be regarded as deriving from prototypes that possess a particularly high degree of illusionist potential according to aesthetic theory and testimonies of reception of the past and/or of personal experience.

2.4 Typical features of illusionist representations and the principles of illusion-making: The case of fiction Aesthetic illusion can be elicited by a broad range of texts and works. There is no restriction as to their being factual or fictional, narrative or descriptive (a fact often overlooked in narratological discussions of immersion, as, e.g., in Schaeffer and Vultur 2005), and they may—as will be shown—occur in a wide variety of

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media and genres. There is only one general proviso, namely that the trigger of aesthetic illusion be a representation (in the sense of presenting concrete [slices] of a “world” rather than abstractions12). In order to provide a starting point for the ensuing transmedial comparison and as my theory of aesthetic illusion has been devised with fiction in mind, the following explanation will continue to focus on certain features and principles at work in illusionist representations with reference to (mostly) narrative fiction.13 One highly influential illusionist prototype in the history of prose fiction is the nineteenth-century realist novel, a genre that has always been credited with a remarkable potential for eliciting illusionist immersion. In fact, realist novels powerfully draw their readers into their worlds by maintaining a feeling of verisimilitude and experientiality while minimizing aesthetic distance. Considering illusionist texts such as these, it is possible to single out illusion-relevant textual features and link them to principles of fictional illusion-making that contribute to producing these features through specific narrative devices. In narratological terms, typically illusionist novels (e.g., George Eliot’s Adam Bede or Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles) display the following four characteristic features (Wolf 1993a: chap. 2.3): (a) their content (or story) level is the central text level providing the “reservoir” for illusionist immersion by means of the representation of possible worlds that are characterized by a certain extension and complexity, are consistent, tend to be lifelike in their inventory, and thus elicit the interest of the (contemporary) reader; (b) their transmission (or discourse) level remains comparatively inconspicuous and “transparent,” serving mainly to depict the represented world and to enhance its tellability, consistency, and lifelikeness; (c) the content and its transmission tend to be serious, since comedy and laughter imply emotional distance, which tendentially runs counter to the strong affinity between emotional involvement and aesthetic illusion (this, however, is not to say that the comic is excluded from illusionism altogether); and (d) illusionist texts are predominantly hetero-referential rather than metareferential (self-reflexive). The basic characteristics of illusionist works can be linked to a number of intra-compositional principles of illusion-making, the cumulative effect of which is to produce the typical features of illusion-making as detailed previously. These principles regulate the predominant immersive facet of illusionist works, while the latent distance also implied in aesthetic illusion is usually regulated by framing devices (e.g., the paratextual or metatextual marking of a novel as such). Owing to the extra-compositional factors involved in the

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emergence of aesthetic illusion, however, these principles can only be regarded as tendencies that enhance the potential of aesthetic illusion but cannot guarantee its realization per se. The following four principles, which shape the material, coherence, and presentation of an illusionist world, plus two additional principles that contribute to the persuasiveness peculiar to the rhetoricity of illusionist texts, must be distinguished (Wolf 1993a, chapter 2.2; 2004). a. The principle of respecting the limitations and potentials of the representational macro-frames, media, and genres employed.14 Representations rely on semiotic macro-frames (typically narrative and descriptive ones), and they also employ specific genres and media. All of these basic frames of individual representations, as will be shown with reference to various media, have particular potentials and limits. The principle under discussion is responsible for keeping illusionist representations within these limits in order to ensure easy accessibility and prevent, for instance, a metareferential foregrounding of the means of transmission. Thus, illusionist narratives show the basic features of narrativity and employ descriptions in a way that is compatible with both the medium and the narrative macroframe. Again, certain deviations may remain illusion compatible, but going too much against the grain of these basic frames of representation (as in the hypertrophy of description in the French nouveau roman, for example) would highlight mediality as such and foreground the conventionality of narrative or of certain narrative genres. As a result, the reader’s focus would shift from the represented world as the center of aesthetic illusion to the conditions and means of its construction and transmission, thereby activating aesthetic distance and undermining immersion. b. The principle of access-facilitating, detailed world-making. The main function of this principle is to provide the concrete building blocks and inventory or repertoire of an illusionist world and to activate concepts, schemata, and scripts stored in the recipients’ minds that stem mostly from their previous real-life experience and their culture. This principle also ensures easy access to the worlds thus constructed and facilitates imaginative immersion by maintaining a certain balance between familiarity and novelty (cf. principle [e]), as well as by providing graphic details about these worlds. c. The principle of the consistency of the represented world. Illusionist works enhance the probability of their worlds by linking their inventory according to abstract “syntactic” concepts (in narratives this includes chronology, causality, etc.) on the basis of fundamental logical and epistemological

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rules that are compatible with, or identical to, the rules that (appear to) govern real life. All of this produces the impression of consistency and invites meaningful interpretations while avoiding contradictions (the “natural” quality of the resulting representations is what renders the level of transmission relatively inconspicuous). The overall tendency of the principle at hand is to ensure a fundamental analogy between the represented world and the perception of the real world. Consistency operates according to Ryan’s (1991: 51) “principle of minimal departure”: it is a default option, although departures are possible and may even remain compatible with illusion, provided they are explained or linked to generic conventions, for example, thus obtaining a secondary kind of plausibility. d. The principle of lifelike perspectivity. The experientiality and probability of illusionist representations, which tend to provide recipients with “deictic centers” as a vantage point from which to experience the represented worlds (Zwaan 1999: 15), are the result of other principles as well. Motivated by the perspectivity of everyday experience—that is, the inevitable limitation of perception according to the point of view and the horizon of the perceiver—one of the noteworthy characteristics in the Western history of illusionism (in both fiction and painting) is the development and perfection of techniques that imitate this perspectivity. In fiction, this development has resulted in the increasing use of internal focalization following the eighteenth-century first-person epistolary novel and later in modernist third-person “figural narration” with its covert narrators and effect of immediacy. On the other hand—and this illustrates the fact that aesthetic illusion is frequently the result of a fine balance between the various principles of illusion—extreme curtailment of overt narrators can also threaten textual coherence. In this way, the principle of perspectivity may come into conflict with the principle of consistency. e. The principle of generating interest, and in particular emotional interest, in the represented world. This is an active rhetorical principle resulting from the use of various devices of persuasio that keep distance at a minimum and render representations attractive (and, etymologically speaking, strongly contribute to our being [esse] “in between” [inter] the elements of the represented world). It imitates real-life perception in that perception is usually motivated by certain interests. The means by which the recipient’s interest is elicited are highly variable. They often include moderate departures from conventions and expectations as mentioned in connection with other illusionist principles, and they may range from catering to

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recipients’ desires by providing certain inventory elements (e.g., sex and crime and otherwise sensationalist representations) to topical references and discursive devices intended to create suspense. In accordance with the importance of feelings for illusionist immersion, one particular area of this principle is the appeal to the recipient’s emotions. This principle is also responsible for the scarcity, in typically illusionist representations, of elements such as carnivalesque comedy, as this tends to reduce emotional involvement. f. The principle of celare artem. The tendency of illusionist fiction to minimize aesthetic distance and the inconspicuousness of its discourse is regulated mainly by a principle that, in accordance with the rhetoric of antiquity and post-medieval aesthetics, may be called the principle of celare artem. Similarly to other illusionist principles, celare artem contributes to forming an analogy with a condition of real-life perception, namely the tendency to disregard the fact that perception is limited owing to its inevitable mediacy. This principle favors immersion by concealing the mediacy and mediality of a given representation. Where applicable, it also conceals fictionality by, for instance, avoiding paradox-creating devices such as (non-naturalizable) metalepsis and generally by abstaining from overly intrusive metareferential elements that would lay bare the constructedness of the representation (although in some cases authenticity-enhancing metareferential devices may be illusion compatible).

2.5 Criteria of transmedial comparison and methodology After the foregoing theoretical explanation of aesthetic illusion, in which mediality has not yet played a major role (except in a general way in illusionist principle [a]), concrete examples from several media and the specific role of these media in triggering aesthetic illusion will now be compared. In this transmedial comparison, the following criteria will be applied: 1. the kind of sensory perception afforded by the medium under scrutiny and the trajectory required of the recipient to transform it into mental experience, 2. the specific potentials and limitations (or even resistance) of a given medium with respect to the aforementioned illusionist principles,15 3. the resulting, potentially transmedial (or media-specific) nature of the mental response and its relationship to aesthetic illusion.

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As far as the method applied is concerned, the following reflections are not based on empirical research (although, e.g., cognitive psychological approaches, in particular Green, Brock, and Kaufman 2004 and Green and Donahue [2009] 2015 will be taken into account) but rather on the description of potentially illusionist works and their probable effect on the recipient as intuited by myself through introspection16 and (in some cases) corroborated by historical reception testimonies. In this, the ensuing discussion follows the methodology applied for the preceding description of aesthetic illusion with reference to fiction, although it should be noted that there is a remarkable degree of congruence with the results noted by Green and Donahue. “Since media present themselves only through individual [works]”, as Ryan aptly remarked (2004, 34), the discussion will in each case focus on a paradigmatic example; a procedure that is beset by a methodological problem also mentioned by Ryan (ibid.), namely of “passing from observations gathered from the [individual work] to principles that describe the medium as a whole”. However, this procedure is inevitable if one wants to give illustrations for abstract phenomena and may appear justified as long as one avoids naive generalizations, while nevertheless assuming that individual media can be characterized by a certain profile.17 In all cases, the discussion will focus on the initial phase of the reception process of an imagined first reception. Generally, it must thus be emphasized that the ensuing discussion does not claim to present empirical results but is destined to offer perspectives for further research, including, where possible, empirical studies.

3. The medial profile of fiction and its relevance to eliciting aesthetic illusion What is the sensory perception afforded by fiction? What are its medial specificities, potentials and limitations in eliciting aesthetic illusion? And what is the resulting nature of the mental response? Let us start with the opening of a text that is very likely to be highly illusionist given that it was written by a nineteenthcentury author noteworthy for his illusionism and belongs to Gothic fiction as a traditionally illusionist genre: Charles Dickens’s short story “The Signalman”: “Halloa! Below there!” When he heard a voice thus calling to him, he was standing at the door of his box, with a flag in his hand, furled round its short pole. One would have thought,

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Werner Wolf considering the nature of the ground, that he could not have doubted from what quarter the voice came; but instead of looking up to where I stood on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he turned himself about and looked down the Line. There was something remarkable in his manner of doing so, though I could not have said for my life what. But I know it was remarkable enough to attract my notice, even though his figure was foreshortened and shadowed, down in the deep trench, and mine was high above him, so steeped in the glow of an angry sunset, that I had shaded my eyes with my hand before I saw him at all. “Halloa! Below!” From looking down the Line, he turned himself about again, and, raising his eyes, saw my figure high above him. “Is there any path by which I can come down and speak to you?” He looked up at me without replying, and I looked down at him without pressing him too soon with a repetition of my idle question. Just then there came a vague vibration in the earth and air, quickly changing into a violent pulsation, and an oncoming rush that caused me to start back, as though it had force to draw me down. When such vapour as rose to my height from this rapid train had passed me, and was skimming away over the landscape, I looked down again, and saw him refurling the flag he had shown while the train went by. ( [1866] 1967: 11)

Clearly, what we actually perceive here is print on a page, or, symbolic signs18 that trigger what analytically can be broken down to a multi-step reception process (as described by Ingarden [1931] 1965 and 1968; and Iser 1972a and 1972b; cf. also Wolf 1993a: 65–6), but in reality may well occur simultaneously. In this process, two steps must first be taken before anything like imaginary experience can come into being. The first step (which is based on our reservoir of concepts) is a perceptual and rational activity, namely the deciphering of the signs on a very basic level (a transformation of the perceived verbal signifiers into understood signifieds). This process involves linguistic as well as cultural knowledge (one must understand English and, e.g., know what a rapid steam train was) and ought to lead to a general comprehension of the text. The second step is the “concretization” of the information thus gathered as a result of processing and integrating the various data pertinent to the representation into a more or less consistent whole. At this stage the imagination is already activated but does not yield more than an adumbration of the represented world

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to which the reader as yet stands in the role of a distanced observer or “spectator” and is not yet a “participant” (to use a distinction made by the psychologist Harding, cf. 1962: 136). In our case this means a visualization of the respective spatial position of the homodiegetic narrator and the signalman, the signalman’s strange reaction to the narrator’s call, and the arrival of a train. If aesthetic illusion occurs, distanced imaginary perception turns into imaginary experience in which the recipient is re-centered or “immersed” in the represented world and thus becomes an emotionally and morally engaged “participant.” This would mean that we are (increasingly) interested in the signalman and, as it were, as intrigued by his reaction as the narrator; we perhaps even begin to perceive the represented world through the eyes of the narrator as the focalizer of this text excerpt. In a final step, the so-called realization (Iser 1972a: 64–5), the recipient, so to speak, detaches himself or herself from the hitherto predominant focus on the story level, emerges from the represented world, and (ideally) grasps the text in its aesthetic complexity, including its aesthetic devices and structure and its thematic concerns and implied norms and worldview, as well as the various text functions.19 In our case this would involve a generic categorization that may as yet be “realistic fiction”, but that may as well already depart from this classification toward Gothic fiction, owing to the incipient feeling of uncanniness and the connotations of the “angry sunset”. In the further unfolding of the text, this step in the reception process would also include the awareness that the story deals with the problem of reading signs properly (a theme already “signaled” by the title and the flag mentioned at the beginning) and suggests a “nonrealistic” and non-materialist worldview in which uncanny mental coincidences happen and where ultimately—and in spite of the modern fascination with technical progress (here present as the railway and the telegraph)—the signalman’s belief in a ghost appearing as a warning of forthcoming catastrophes and thus in the existence of a supernatural sphere beyond empirical, positivistic reality no longer seems to be entirely absurd. The trajectory from medial signs (here, printed verbal text) to an imaginatively experienced scene—in our case involving the meeting of two strangers in a railway setting and the passing of a train—seems to be particularly difficult in fiction. However, if it is true that our thoughts, our memories, and our imaginations depend, to a large extent, on verbal concepts and that “all art [and all representations] are ‘conceptual’ ” (Gombrich [1960] 1977: 76), verbal texts also have an advantage, namely they permit us to directly access our reservoir of concepts in a remarkably economical way. These concepts are, of course, not restricted to

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abstract ideas but include concrete phenomena and all possible sensory perceptions. Verbal texts can in fact create the equivalent of a multimedia show in our minds by the sheer evocative power of words, that is, without the complicated technical means other media would require to produce similar effects. Provided we have the gift of transforming words into mental “images” (which most readers of literature should have), words can make us see “the glow of an angry sunset,” make us feel “a vague vibration in the earth and air”; they may possibly also permit us to smell the stench of railway vapor and exhaust fumes or hear (or overhear) voices and other sounds. Thus, if we are familiar with the fact that railways are sometimes constructed by “cutting” into a hill or mountain (a “trench”) before entering a tunnel and if we remember that, in the past, workmen responsible for railway security along the lines were much more frequent than today, the concretization of the scene should not present difficulties. Although a more detailed (and uncanny) description of the spatial setting follows this excerpt, the adumbration of it in the few lines quoted previously suffices to give us a general spatial orientation and thus enables us to construct a mental representation of the scene. Of course, even if the setting had been described in much more detail, such verbal representations would always have been limited by what Ingarden ([1931] 1965: 261 and passim; 1968: 50) termed “Unbestimmheitsstellen”, that is, unavoidable areas of indeterminacy dependent on the medium (similar to, in analogue photography, the grain that determines the degree of picture resolution). As opposed to real life, where we, at least in principle, could obtain a “higher” resolution of our perception, if we wished to do so, the medial and also general limitations of artefacts and texts prevent us from doing so and, in this, depart from lifelikeness. Yet, as experienced readers, we are trained to fill in the gaps necessarily left by the medium with our world knowledge and cultural expertise. According to Gombrich ([1960] 1977: 174), such “empty or ill-defined area[s]” are even helpful for the recipient allowing them to project mental representations in accordance with his or her respective repertoire of experience. Another quality of the medium of print fiction that also eases the transition from symbolic signifiers to imagined world is its temporal and narrative nature, which is particularly akin to how we experience the real-life world. Although we are, of course, able to interrupt or end the process of reception at will, our entering the “reception-contract” with narrative texts entails our willingness to follow the flow of words at least for a certain time without interruption and allows us to “encounter” new settings, new characters, and new developments at the pace of the text and not our own. This gives the impression (particularly strong on first reading) that our autonomy as reading subjects is reduced, that the text “rules”

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us, and that we are somehow subject to it in a way analogous to our being subject to the vicissitudes of life. All of this amounts to a strong general illusionist potential of print fiction as exemplified by the excerpt to elicit aesthetic illusion. Verbal texts of this kind have their strength in, as it were, “dragging” us along in the development of a story, and they can shortcut our understanding by offering us appropriate conceptual triggers. This also extends to assisting meaning construction by, e.g., furnishing us with chronological information (in our excerpt it is evening) and causal explanations (although withheld for a moment in our extract, concerning the oddity of the signalman’s reactions), and creating teleological structures (in our case the explanation of the signalman’s “remarkable” behavior). On the other hand, verbal narratives have difficulties with really presenting concrete phenomena before our inner eye in any detailed and well-defined manner: although more information will be given, the extract and the entire story do not yield sufficient information to, for instance, allow us to draw a picture of both the narrator and the signalman, let alone the countryside surrounding the “cutting” and tunnel (which is at first characteristically obscured by the locomotive’s smoke and then only evoked by the word “landscape”). In this essential descriptive indeterminacy, if not poverty, verbal texts almost necessarily depart from real-life experience and potentially create either distance or a rich projection space for imaginative readers. A further, inevitable distancing element is the fact that the medial nature of the representation at hand is always and conspicuously present, for we can hardly not feel a book in our hands, turn pages, and see printed text, that is, symbolic signifiers that do not bear any direct relationship to the signifieds. In addition, reading (almost) never starts with the main text but only after a “threshold” of “paratexts” (cf. Genette 1987) has been crossed (of which we become aware even if we skip some of them). In our case these paratexts are the texts on the cover of the short story collection (The Penguin Book of English Short Stories, edited by Christopher Dolley”), the texts on the title page, the table of contents, the editorial foreword, the acknowledgements, and the mention of the author Charles Dickens and the story title. All of this serves a metareferential function (marking, among other things, the genre “short story” and the text type “fiction”) and has also an at least initially distancing effect. And yet this does not prevent aesthetic illusion to emerge from texts such as Dickens’s story. His text is particularly illusionist, as it shows the main typical features of illusionist fiction: it presents a powerful story level as the central text level to which the discourse level appears to be subordinated; it is a serious

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text and clearly hetero-referential. Moreover, the excerpt (as well as the text as a whole) conforms to the six illusionist principles mentioned earlier: (a) The potential of the (narrative) macro-frame, the (verbal print) medium, and the genre (Gothic fiction) are respected and not used “against the grain.” (b) The excerpt also shows a tendency toward access-facilitating, detailed world-making (within the generic restrictions of a short story); within a few paragraphs we get the idea of a specific spatial and temporal setting, are introduced to the main characters, and the plot is set in motion by their first encounter. (c) In addition, the excerpt easily permits a meaningful integration of all of its details and thus follows the principle of consistency. (d) It has a particular strength in imitating life-like perspectivity. Remarkably we here not only follow the narrator’s perceptions (notably in the opening deictic exclamation “Below there!” and in the adumbration of a visual perspectivity in the mention of the signalman’s “figure” being “foreshortened and shadowed, down in the deep trench”) but also—processed through him—the signalman’s. This is the case at the beginning of the second paragraph (“When he heard . . .”) and in the remark that the narrator was “high above him.” (e) Interest is elicited in several respects, most notably in the Leerstelle (sensu Iser, i.e., a gap in the information structure) created by the initially unsolved mystery of the signalman’s “remarkable” behavior (the term “remarkable” is even insisted on, thus triggering and then intensifying suspense). In addition, the, at first, seemingly unmotivated mention of an “angry sunset” (my emphasis) also intensifies the build-up of suspense, for why should a sunset be “angry”? (f) And finally, the principle of celare artem is also respected. There is no distancing metareferentiality, and the beginning medias in res by the narrator’s shouting, “Halloa! Below there!” plunges us quickly into the represented scene without the conventional narrative paraphernalia usually to be expected in realist fiction, in which setting and characters are frequently put forth in an opening paragraph before character speeches occur. All in all, it stands to reason to assume that the text at hand does elicit aesthetic illusion, even a powerful one, one as powerful as verbal print fiction can elicit. If one accepts the example as paradigmatic, one may even say that the medial profile of print narratives is one that can be favorable to the eliciting of aesthetic illusion—in spite of the non-iconic nature of the medium. This notwithstanding, the mental images or imaginary perceptions triggered by a text such as our excerpt will differ from recipient to recipient (as a consequence not only of the incalculable differences among readers but also of the media-specific indeterminacy concerning the representation of concrete objects and persons).

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And it is highly probable that, where a mental representation is elicited by fiction, it will be of a relatively vague and hazy kind and moreover appear perhaps not in a continuous flow but as an intermittent sequence of some “scenes” (depending on the more or less “graphic” nature of the textual representation, which may be interrupted by, e.g., narratorial reflections). The passages that may elicit a comparatively clear and precise mental perception will in all probability be restricted to the few phrases of spoken language, for language is best at representing language (even though the specificity of the voice, its “grain” and pitch, etc. will remain undefined). After all, verbal texts can serve only as a guiding script for a “projection” that exclusively takes place in our minds, which, as it were, makes the readers the directors of their own mental films and thus demands a considerable reception activity.

4. The medial profile of feature film and its relevance to eliciting aesthetic illusion In the contemporary medial landscape, film is among the most powerful illusionist media. This is particularly true of cinema transmitted feature film.20 The medial profile of this kind of film and its relevance to aesthetic illusion as elicited by the initial phase of a film can easily be illustrated with reference to commercial adventure films, since the combination of commercial interest and generic conventions leads to a tendency to create strongly immersive situations within the first few minutes (in this they resemble illusionist short stories, if one disregards aesthetic quality, which for our purpose is not in focus). The genre in question may be aptly illustrated by the beginning of a popular commercial Universal Pictures science fiction adventure film, namely Jurassic Park III (USA, 2001, directed by Joe Johnston, a sequel to Jurassic Park (1993) and The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997), both directed by Steven Spielberg). The growing popularity of what is now a whole Jurassic film series is enhanced by the fact that in 2013 a commercially successful 3-D version of the first film was released and that recently yet another sequel has been issued, Jurassic World (2015), directed by Colin Trevorrow, with a fifth film planned for 2018. Let us imagine a standard cinematic situation at the beginning of the reception of Jurassic Park III.21 It would start with framing phenomena,22 such as entering a cinema, buying a ticket, and settling down in a brightly lit projection room. After the usual advertisements are over (in some cases, depending on the

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cinema, this may still be signaled by the drawing of a curtain that is then opened again), the film proper would start with lights down and paratextual elements appearing on the screen marking, for instance, the producer Universal Pictures and the title Jurassic Park. This title at first emerges from a black background, which is then torn by gigantic claws: three rents are seen, which widen and give the audience their first view of the represented world. On the one hand, all of this serves a framing function, signaling the medium and the adventure film genre and, with its metareferentiality, has a distancing effect similar to the paratexts in our literary example. On the other hand, the way in which the filmic paratexts are here presented, which includes a particularly ominous film score composed by Don Davis, simultaneously also prepares us to be drawn into the diegetic world. Surprisingly (but in harmony with a conventional way of making us enter horror by way of contrast), this world at first appears to be an idyllic island, marked by the written phrase “Isla Sorna 207 miles west of Costa Rica,” followed by the word “restricted” in red capital letters. As we will soon recognize, the filmic perspective imitates the gaze of a boat captain who approaches the island and raises his eyes toward an aircraft sweeping in above the island. The next shot focuses on his preoccupied facial expression (as we will learn later, the island is haunted by dinosaurs so dangerous that the research station has been abandoned and the island has been sealed off from all contact with the outer world), followed by a shot of the boat on which there are three more people: a helmsman and two passengers, a man and a boy, who are preparing for a parasailing adventure. The atmosphere is relaxed, the captain laughs, gives some jovial advice, the two parasailers (coupled to each other) are lifted into the air and seem to have much fun for a considerable time. We are shown the pair of them happily floating along the wooded coast, when fog sets in and their line suddenly gives a jerk, startling the two of them, while they remain suspended in the air. When the fog dissolves to reveal the boat again, both captain and helmsman have disappeared, and only a red smear is visible on the boat. The boy’s question, “What happened to them?,” remains pointedly unanswered, while the boat heads toward a rock and crashes. Just in time the man manages to cut loose the rope, and they both drift into the island’s wilderness, a scene continuously accompanied by “nervous” film music. What kind of mental response is elicited here, and how? Obviously, as opposed to the monomedial signifiers of print fiction, film comes as a multimedial compound of signifiers (moving images in color, sometimes, as in Jurassic Park I, even in 3-D quality, written words, spoken language, sound, and music in stereo or Dolby surround). All of these function as a powerful incentive to feel

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re-centered or immersed in the film world. But what exactly does this mean? In fiction, the re-centering takes place exclusively in our minds, since we are not spatially located in any pertinent relationship to what we mentally perceive. The fact that we may sit on a sofa holding a book in our hands is not relevant here, nor is the reception situation in general. In contrast to this, when watching a film in a cinema, the reception situation, which is a performative one, does play a role: we are confronted with a dynamic show. In this show, movement is not only part of the images as such, which appear to take place both in our presence and in the present, but also of the sequence of scenes and the perspectives used within them (in our example there are repeated shots taken from a moving camera). And yet we are sitting in static seats, which are visibly distanced from the screen, and may feel our bodies curled in these seats and see ourselves surrounded by other spectators. These factors may distract from the impression of immersion, even if our awareness of other spectators is reduced by the darkness of the projection room. However, our skill in “reading” cinema film and aesthetic illusion are strong enough to bridge these distancing elements and draw us into the represented world. If this happens, the space between our bodies and the screen is experienced as a continuum located on the same ontological level (the diegetic world), and the onscreen world is perceived as three-dimensional even when we watch films that are not shown in 3-D—while our awareness of the fact that all of this is actually not the case is kept in latency mode (this relationship of dominant immersion and subdominant distance is typical of all aesthetic illusion). As a consequence of our immersion, we can imagine ourselves following the parasailing characters with the camera movement, feel relaxed with them, and become startled when something unforeseen happens. As in fiction this need not be tantamount to “identification” with characters; for the experiential nature of aesthetic illusion, it is sufficient to feel present in the represented world.23 As in the case of Dickens’s story, the filmic example shows the typical features of illusionist works (with seriousness as a part of the generic conventions of adventure films) and follows the six illusionist principles, although in specific ways. We need not go into all of the details here. Suffice it to say that Jurassic Park III uses almost all possibilities of the medium (except for 3-D) and does nothing to overstretch it and thus acts in conformity with the first (media-related) principle. The combination of opening credits with a first, suspense-creating adumbration of the presence of dangerous dinosaurs, which seem to tear holes in the screen, while being an ingenious and relatively innovative way of handling paratexts, contributes to the immersive effect and the speed of its establishment

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rather than distracting from it. It is also interesting to note that the beginning of the film uses dynamic descriptive rather than narrative shots in order to give us an idea of the island setting, but this is no less efficient in illusion building. Moreover Jurassic Park III has no difficulty in conforming to the principle of detailed world-making even in descriptive parts (and here differs from fiction). It is indeed among the most illusionistically persuasive potentials of sound film that it can represent or create worlds seemingly as detailed as the real word, complete with settings, characters, and actions that are re-presented to us with sound (depth), lifelike shapes, movements, colors, shades of light, sometimes (in 3-D films) even with three-dimensional space depth. In movie series such as the Jurassic films, the world-making is supported by a growing familiarity with a storyworld we seem to know already. This is arguably also an important reason for the increasing popularity and commercial success of the series format for cinema film24 and TV,25 both being also successful as DVD or Blu-ray releases. Concerning the third illusionist principle, the principle of the consistency of the represented world, logical and narrative meaning emerges in Jurassic Park III similar to “The Signalman” on the basis of references to our world knowledge and expertise in the understanding of the medium at hand (which, for instance, help us bridge the gaps between individual filmic shots). Perspectivity is also especially persuasive in this example, as in film in general, as the camera, in particular the moving camera, in many cases strongly suggests a lifelike perspectival perception of the represented world. Concerning the principle of eliciting interest, Jurassic Park III would not have been the successful film it was if it had not fulfilled this sine qua non of an adventure film. As so often, interest is here generated through the building up of suspense. As mentioned earlier, suspense is created by contrast (a fun pastime, which comes to a sudden and surprising end), rapid development toward the occurrence of the first shocking event (the disappearance and violent deaths of the captain and helmsman), and the unresolved reason for this catastrophe (although it is never really explained, one of the numerous weaknesses of the film, we may assume that, of course, carnivorous dinosaurs are the culprits). For the time being we only see the parasail taking course toward the island and are then transferred to quite another story line: a family scene in which a palaeontologist, a friend of the family, is playing with toy dinosaurs (!) with a little boy and teaches him the names and behavior of the represented animals. The relationship between the two sequences (apart from the reduplication of the “harmless” beginning) is a typical Iserian Leerstelle but will be filled in in the course of the film, so that no ambiguities disturb the easy processing of the film’s meaning

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(the scientist will become part of what turns out to be a rescue mission, instigated by the distressed parents of the missing parasailing boy from the opening scene to find their son, a mission, which in harmony with generic conventions will, after a long series of highly suspenseful events and some casualties, eventually be successful). Finally, the principle of celare artem is also observed—as in all illusionist (or illusionistically used) media. In film, too, this is necessary in order not to enhance the manifold media-specific elements of artificiality that in principle could distract us from the represented world. These reminders of the presence of a medium and of staged events rather than of real-life comprise, for instance, the various camera perspectives for which no reasons are given, the cuts between shots, or—as a particularity of the film opening under discussion—the unnaturally long time in which the parasailers remain suspended in the air after the first jerk of the line as if they were shaken by something occurring above them rather than below them. Extradiegetic film music, which accompanies this film as it does most other sound films, is, strictly speaking, also a highly unrealistic element. Yet—owing to our acquired tolerance toward, and knowledge of, generic and medial conventions—it is received as an emotional booster, paradoxically enhances the immersive effect and bridges, for instance, the gaps between different shots by creating a sense of ongoing flow.26 As becomes clear, the medial profile of film differs considerably from fiction even though both share the immersive pull or “flow” of a temporal medium,27 which is best able to transmit the temporality of narrativity (with its effect of being “dragged along” in a mode of reduced subjective autonomy by the story events). In comparison to fiction, the “flow” is even more powerful (at least in the cinema, where the performance, as a rule, cannot be interrupted by the viewer), and the same applies to the impression of being guided by the medium, since the recipients need less mental energy to (re)create the elements of the represented world in their minds but are confronted with (most of) them readymade (as a combination of iconic, pictorial, and symbolic auditory signs in the form of language, sound, and music). This is what is often critically referred to as the passivity of the film spectator—although this criticism overlooks the fact, already emphasized by Gombrich for picture viewing, that the spectator’s share in the process of meaning construction remains copious enough. In film, this is the (acquired) skill of “reading” and moving images in general, which includes, for instance, the bridging of the gaps between different takes (necessary for the “concretization” of the filmic world), as well as the various cultural frames or scripts that are necessary to “decipher” the connotations of what we see (the exotic island motive, the holiday atmosphere of the parasailing activity of two

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privileged passengers who are contrasted with the captain with his foreign accent, and so forth). To a large extent, film does not ask for a guided mental projection but furnishes the audience with the essentials of the represented world thanks to the performative nature of the medium. As a consequence, the mental representations gleaned from a given film’s signifiers will have much more intersubjective similarity than the ones shared by readers of the same work of fiction. In the performative situation of a cinema, this similarity can even enhance the medium’s effect. Film is particularly good at eliciting strong emotions (not only suspense, but also, for instance, pity, fear, anger, and love), mostly through the display of the characters’ bodies and the appeal to our empathy and mirror neurons. In cinema, an additional illusion-enhancing phenomenon is worth mentioning: as many emotions are, so to speak, contagious, the presence of other spectators who are in the grip of similar screen-induced emotions (notably fear or shock) may deepen the immersive effect, something that is impossible for the isolated reader of a novel or short story. Besides the fact that film furnishes lifelike perceptions, the aforementioned multimediality of film is also a strong pro-illusionist element. It intensifies the impression of immersion in a visual and auditory world and is able to override the distancing elements that come along with the performative reception situation and its possible distractions (members of the audience arriving late or coughing, the medial limitations of a two-dimensional screen, etc.). Although film benefits from manifold pro-illusionist medial characteristics, it also has some illusionist limitations. This is the case with (as yet) absent sensory perceptions beyond the visual and the auditory: the medium thus is not (yet) able to give a complete simulation of real-life perceptions, although specialists in the field of virtual realities are working hard to expand and intensify the perceptual impact of the medium.28 In addition, the rendering of thoughts and the entirety of the mental world of characters is not as easily representable as in fiction, and the same applies to flashbacks and flash-forwards. This is not to say that these phenomena cannot be represented at all. However, they do not come as easily as, for instance, in a narratorial remark such as, “Ten years before. . .” or “For a long time he was plunged in thought, reflecting on. . .”. As for the mental world of characters, film can use indexical body language (gestures, pathognomic expression) or “visual and aural correlatives” (Hutcheon 2006:  58; cf. Feldner 2015: 208) to indicate what goes on in a character’s mind, or else it must resort to some hypo-diegetic rendering of thought or dream scene, which then has to be marked as such in order to avoid confusion. Something similar applies to, for instance, flashbacks, for which either a narratorial voice or a caption must

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serve as an indicator (often considered to be clumsy and “unfilmic”) or which must be indicated by certain filmic devices such as the use of black and white rather than color. In spite of these and other limitations, film, as mentioned before, has managed to become the most powerful illusionist medium of our time. In comparison to print fiction, this may, at first glance, be unsurprising, since fiction, as opposed to film, does not present any sensory perception that may directly be translated into a lifelike experience and thus requires what seems to be a stronger imaginative investment on behalf of the recipient, while the performative multimediality and partial iconicity of film is a strong inducement of experiential illusion. On second thought, however, the very fact that film relies so much on sensory perception could also function as a distancing factor, since we cannot but perceive the many differences between what happens on screen and in our bodily reality, in particular in a given reception situation. Thus, an imaginative activity is required here as in the reading of fiction, albeit an activity of a partially different kind: in the reading of fiction, it aims at overcoming the awareness of being physically confronted with a book, and the world in which we may be immersed has to be reconstructed from exclusively symbolic signs and entirely takes place in our mind. In cinema film, if we open ourselves up to immersion, we must bridge the physical and ontological gap between our bodies being seated at a distance from a screen and a (in most cases) two-dimensional world represented onscreen so that the space between our bodies and the film world appears to become a continuum. In addition, our imagination is also active in furnishing elements that are only suggested by the film (from possible reasons for given events to the simple imaginary fact that the represented world temporally and spatially extends beyond what is shown onscreen). It remains to be seen to what extent technical progress toward ever more convincing (interactive) virtual reality will be able to replace—here as in other filmic details—the imaginative activity of the recipients through enhanced technical possibilities. Yet one can be confident that no matter what perfection of illusion may be achieved by media of the future, the medial status of representation will never be totally deleted and with it (and assuming an audience, whose medial expertise increases parallel to technical progress) our, at least, latent awareness that we are confronted with representations rather that with real life. Nor would such a perfect illusion be desirable, not only from a general cultural-critical perspective but also in the interest of the pleasure derived from the medium itself, for one precondition for our enjoyment not only of potentially upsetting representations but generally of aesthetic artistry is precisely our media awareness.

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5. The medial profile of visual art (painting) and its relevance to eliciting aesthetic illusion As a last medium that shall be discussed with reference to the specific nature of the imaginative response it may elicit, let us turn back to visual art, in particular painting, that is, to the medium to which in twentieth-century research one of the most seminal works on (aesthetic) illusion was dedicated, namely Gombrich’s path-breaking book, Art and Illusion ([1960] 1977). In our context, Gombrich is particularly noteworthy owing to his approach to illusion from the perspective of perceptual psychology and cultural history. The strength of his investigation was, among other things, to have emphasized the historical relativity of illusion, its dependence not only on perceptual mechanisms (such as our tendency to complete incomplete representations in line with what Gombrich (184–5) termed the “etc. principle” or the process of trial and error, which is able to produce ever more convincing representations) but also on cultural conventions, expectations, and interpretations based on a repertoire of concepts and expectations—thus abolishing the myth of an “innocent eye” (12 and passim). He also explained important mechanisms and devices concerning how pictures manage to elicit illusion (e.g., by providing “screens” on which the recipients can produce imaginative projections based on their world knowledge [cf. 174]). All of this is not only illuminating with regard to the visual arts but, as my references to Gombrich in the preceding sections showed, can also in part be applied to how aesthetic illusion works in fiction and film. However, Gombrich does not explain what interests us most here in the context of a transmedial perspective, namely the nature of aesthetic illusion elicited by pictures (if at all) as opposed to other media. As in the previous instances we will begin this discussion with an example, a landscape painting by the American nineteenth-century painter Frederic Edwin Church: Niagara (Figure 1.1). In its time, this painting was particularly popular. According to the online National Gallery of Art, “[w]ithin two weeks of its debut, Niagara had lured 100,000 visitors to glimpse what one newspaper critic described as ‘the finest oil picture ever painted on this side of the Atlantic’. ”29 The reason for this enthusiasm was the “heighten[ing]” of “the illusion of reality,” which the same source explains as follows: “Church . . . select[ed] a non-traditional format of canvas . . . [and] pushed the place of the falls nearest the viewer significantly downwards to reveal more of the far side as well as the dramatic rush of water. Most notably he eliminated any suggestion of a foreground, allowing the viewer to experience

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Figure 1.1 Frederic Edwin Church, Niagara (1857), National Gallery, Washington, DC.

the scene as if precariously positioned on the brink of the falls” (online, ibid.). Even if the phrase “illusion of reality” had not been used, the mention of an “as if ” and “experience” in the foregoing excerpt would have sufficed to indicate that we are dealing with a testimony of precisely the effect under discussion in this essay, namely aesthetic illusion as a quasi-experience. A similar testimony can be gleaned from a fictional viewer of this and other paintings by Church in a recent American “ecofiction” by Kim Stanley Robinson, Sixty Days and Counting (2007). Here, two characters, Frank and Diane, visit a Frederic Church exhibit in the National Gallery of Washington, DC. Their reaction is a combination of ekphrastic adumbration and praise: His paintings were superb, far better than Bierstadt or Homer or any other American landscape artist Frank had ever seen. Church had been able to put an almost photorealistic technique in the service of a Transcendentalist eye; it was the visionary, sacred landscape of Emerson and Thoreau, right there on the walls of the National Gallery. “It’s like the IMAX movie of its time,” Diane said. In the rooms beyond they saw Church travel and grow old, and become almost hallucinogenic in his coloring, like Galen Rowell after he discovered Fujichrome. These were the best landscape paintings Frank had ever seen. A giant close-up of the water leaping off the lip of Niagara Falls; the Parthenon at sunset; waves striking the Maine coast; every scene leaped off the wall. (Robinson 2007: 239–40)

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Actually, these documents of an illusionist reception may strike one as strange, for the sensory perception triggered by the medium of painting requires an even longer and more tortuous trajectory to anything like an imaginative experience than film, and much of it does not work in favor of illusion. There is, first, as in a film performance, the inevitable, distance-producing “framing” of the picture, that is, not only the actual picture frame but also all other markers of mediality, such as (if we put ourselves in the shoes of the nineteenth-century visitors of Church exhibitions) the gallery building and exhibition rooms, the requirement of buying a ticket, the written notice underneath the picture, etc. Then there is the relatively poor offer made by the medium itself: it is, after all, only a two-dimensional canvas (even if, in this case, its necessary limitations may be somewhat blurred in a viewer’s close-up gaze by the gigantic format of the painting: 40 by 90.5 inches = 106.5 by 229.5 cm); it is moreover only a canvas covered with forms and color that elicits no sensory perceptions except visual, iconic ones, least of all—which in the case of our example is most remarkable—sound (the online National Gallery of Art comment aptly quotes a contemporary “writer”: “this is Niagara, with the roar left out!”30). What is actually represented is also at odds with what we might expect in real life, namely a static surface of water, which contradicts our knowledge of water rapidly flowing toward the waterfall. And yet, according to the fictional gallery visitors previously quoted, this painting (like others by Church) belongs to those of which the two characters feel that “every scene leaped off the wall”. If a painting is felt to “leap off the wall,” it almost aggressively immerses the viewer, and Robinson, in his novel, chose a good wording for the illusionist effect, which so many paintings (at least since the Renaissance) have elicited. How is this illusionist effect created? This painting, like countless other immersive ones, shows the four qualities of illusionist works enumerated in Section 2 with reference to fiction, albeit with modifications: as this landscape painting is no narrative but a description, we must reformulate and speak of the content (rather than the story level) as being the central level that provides the trigger of illusionist immersion in combination with a comparatively inconspicuous, “transparent” transmission level that also assists the illusionist effect. As the painting is to be seen in the context of the natural sublime (Robinson’s fictional gallery visitors establish a connection with Emerson and Thoreau), and thus clearly represents a “serious subject,” it avoids comic distancing effects, and the same can be said about the absence of metareferentiality.

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These qualities of the painting discussed are again (as in other illusionist works) achieved by respecting the aforementioned illusionist principles. For a start, the principle of respecting and exploiting the potentials of the representational macro-frames, media, and genres (here: landscape painting without the presence of human figures) is fully respected. The extraordinary attention given to the details of the visual aspects of water in motion can be related to the principle of access-facilitating, detailed world-making. The consistency of the represented world is nowhere violated, and the principle of lifelike perspectivity even gets special attention here:  the painting does not only follow the general principle of linear perspective as invented in the Italian Renaissance but also enhances the perspectivity of the representation (as also mentioned in one of the foregoing excerpts) by deleting all framing foreground of land and, as it were, plunging us directly into the represented waterscape (with land only dimly visible in the background, a device that enhances the perspectivity as much as the isolated tree branch tumbling into the water in the foreground and suggesting movement in spite of the static nature of pictorial representation). The entire arrangement permits the viewer’s gaze to sweep in a large arc from the foreground on the bottom left through the “visibly” roaring water in the middle ground (right to left) to the hint of land in the upper left part of the painting, a resting point accentuated by the strip of light in the sky above. The entire scene moreover elicits an emotional sublimity which clearly follows the principle of generating (emotional) interest in the represented world. And finally, the painting also respects the principle of celare artem not least in, as it were, pushing back the visible limits of the representation through the huge format. As a result of this, a typical pictorial illusion is created, yet one to which the viewer must contribute substantially, or supplement, the illusionist experience. This supplementation, which is here as necessary as in other illusionist paintings, comprises the following sensory elements that the medium cannot provide and that therefore must be imagined: the thunderous sound of water and its visible movement (perceptions that film could have furnished us with) and in addition the wetness of the air (a sensation that even film cannot [as yet] elicit). Most important in all of this—and here the viewing of a static image is similar to that of a moving image—is the fact that the recipients must make an imaginative leap that bridges the gap between their position outside the painting and their imaginative relocation within the represented world. Where illusion happens, this leap is made in spite of the distance imposed by the medium and its framings.31 In the case of Church’s painting the static position of the

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viewer, which is unrelieved by simulated motion as opposed to films using dynamic camera perspectives, is perhaps somewhat less unnatural, since it corresponds to the meditative stillness of a viewer of a sublime landscape in real life (in itself a culturally induced attitude). Also in contradistinction to film, viewers of pictures have more freedom in determining their reception time (as well as their position in front of the canvas). This fact may, on the one hand, reduce immersion, since the lack of a temporal “pull” of events or happenings to which we are exposed in film and fiction alike distances pictorial representation from the real-life experience with the limited autonomy it typically offers us; on the other hand, it may also enhance and intensify immersion, since it can be prolonged at will. If, as in the case of fiction and film, one accepts the foregoing brief discussion of one painterly example as paradigmatic and thus shedding light on the medium of painting in general, the following can be said about its illusionist potential: in spite of some general and some media-specific limitations that this medium (also) possesses, limitations that include the impossibility of directly representing the most important means of meaning creation, namely human speech, on which much of the immersive power of both fiction and film are based, static pictures as in the painterly example discussed nevertheless can provide a sufficient number of triggers to allow us to become re-centered in a represented (slice of a) world. This is a fact that has been documented since the classical anecdote of the rivalry between the trompe l’œil painters Zeuxis and Parrhasios, who not only managed to deceive animals but even the human eye.32 The illusionist potential of images such as the alleged products of the two Greek painters as well as Church’s Niagara—provided they follow certain principles— is all the more remarkable as it apparently is independent of the narrativity that both fiction and feature film possess.

6. Results: Aesthetic illusion(s)?—elements of a transmedial theory of aesthetic illusion and perspectives of future research What can be stated as the result of our (limited) intermedial comparisons concerning the question as to whether individual media elicit imaginative responses that permit us to subsume them under one term “aesthetic illusion” or are so different as to render different terms more meaningful and would thus induce us to speak at best of “aesthetic illusions” in the plural?

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What we could see, on the one hand, was that the reception effect in question was linked to different medial materiality and, as a consequence, a difference in the sensory perceptions offered to the recipients. Moreover, this effect could not come into being without a considerable imaginative effort on behalf of the recipient—and these efforts varied considerably, thus testifying to the different illusionist profiles of the media under discussion. In fiction, mere words on a page have to be transposed into an imagined world complete with space, time, characters, and events. In film, projections on a screen and sound coming from amplifiers have also to be translated, at least partially, into lifelike mentally experienced worlds, a process during which the physical gap between the recipients’ real locations and their imagined positions within the represented world must be overcome. The iconicity (similarity) of moving images and represented speech and sound with reference to real-life perceptions is a powerful aid to illusion, but enough elements of medial artificiality still remain both in the framing reality and in the makeup of the representation itself to require an imaginative activity. Something similar can be said of painting, with the additional difficulty that the static and merely visual sensory basis provided by the medium is poorer here than in film as a multimedia show. This is a poverty that, incidentally, is also at the root of the difficulties that beset the medium of the single picture with regard to narrativity (see Wolf 2002 and 2003). One may even question whether the lack of (narrative) dynamism in landscape paintings in particular can elicit illusionist experientiality in the first place. Yet we must remember that experience does not necessarily imply outer events or actions that coalesce into narratives but may also occur in non-narrative contexts, for instance, as a consequence of inner visions or contemplation, or when watching or listening to specific non-eventful phenomena, something that then is best translated into descriptions rather than narrative.33 Thus, our examples have also illustrated the fact that immersion is not restricted to narratives but can extend to descriptive representations. At the same time they also showed that factual representations (Church, after all, depicted a real waterfall) can elicit aesthetic illusion as well as fictional ones (Dickens’s “The Signalman” and Jurassic Park III). On the other hand, the different medial triggers and ensuing differences and difficulties with their perceptual and mental processing notwithstanding, all of the previous examples, which were chosen as representatives of the respective media, were seen to have a capacity for eliciting, in the recipients, an impression of being immersed or relocated in represented worlds and making them experience these worlds and (emotionally) react to them as if they were experiencing reality. This impression may vary in duration and intensity according to

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individual media but does not substantially vary in kind: the impression of being immersed in a represented world as the very nature and essence of aesthetic illusion34. Since aesthetic illusion as a concept is primarily concerned with a mental effect, which appears to be strikingly similar across media, and only in the second place with how it is created, it makes more sense to speak of one aesthetic illusion with reference to different media rather than of a plurality of different illusions. It thus stands to reason to conceive of aesthetic illusion (regardless of possible alternative terms used for this phenomenon) as one specific transmedial effect that is applicable to all representational arts and media. This, of course, does not mean that the theory of aesthetic illusion should be media blind. Rather, mediality, which in the original, mostly fiction-oriented conception of the intracompositional principles of illusion-making was already present in principle (a) (the principle regulating the respect for and adequate use of the medium), must be an integral part of it. A first consequence of this for a more elaborate transmedial theory than was possible in the framework of the present essay should be to adapt the terminology to a transmedial purpose. This would mean in particular to get rid of what may be criticized as the “tyranny” of an exclusive terminological as well as conceptual focus on (fictional) narratives and on (literary) texts—aesthetic illusion is much broader, encompassing, as we have said, also descriptions and factual representations (cf. Wolf 2007 and 2008: 16). A second consequence derives from the fact that media never come as abstracts but always as medial realizations in given artefacts. A detailed transmedial theory of aesthetic illusion will therefore always have to focus on individual works or groups of works and will not choose them from one medium only. The first step in such a transmedial theory, which is as yet to be written, would be a more detailed description of the recipients’ impressions and feelings, in short, simulated experiences with reference to given artefacts, than was possible in this essay. To the extent that these imaginative impressions are similar across media, these findings will form the common ground of a transmedial theory of aesthetic illusion. In the next step, the medium enters as an object not only of necessary choice but also, and in particular, of extended theoretical reflection. This reflection will focus on the description of the media-specific conditions under which a given artefact can elicit aesthetic illusion and will include distancing framing devices as well as immersive shortcomings and potentials of the medium at hand. In this discussion, a description of the (potentially) illusionist (or anti-illusionist) devices of the individual work at hand will be integrated (together with the cultural-historical conditions of its context, depending on the heuristic focus of

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the discussion). In this, a transmedial reformulation of the six illusionist principles of intracompositional illusion-creation as adumbrated previously may be of assistance for a description of the media-specific ways in which they are realized by the artefact in question. Depending again on the heuristic perspective chosen, all of this may then result in an individual appreciation of the given artefact, the functions that aesthetic illusion fulfills in and for it, and in its historical contexts, or it may lead, as is the case here, to a general assessment of the illusionist potential and specific profile of individual media. Transmedial research on aesthetic illusion is as yet in its infancy—as can be seen by the fact that recently Freyermuth (2015:  168)  still felt compelled to emphasize the necessity of a media comparative, “transmedial perspective” in order “to come to terms with” what is indeed particularly important for the present world, namely “digital culture”. Much more should be done in the future than was possible in the present essay, in which only the opening up of a comparative perspective35 and some basic reflections on aesthetic illusion as a transmedial phenomenon were intended. Besides an elaboration of the theory as adumbrated earlier, future research should, for instance, approach the subject “aesthetic illusion” from angles different to the theoretical perspective chosen here, for instance, from an empirical, cognitive, psychological,36 or historical perspective.37 A particularly promising field for a media-conscious theory of aesthetic illusion would be the investigation of the reverse of illusionism, namely the undermining or breaking of illusion, as one of the principal means of doing so would be to lead the distance that is always present, albeit latent, in aesthetic illusion out of its covert state by foregrounding the specific mediality at hand. In addition, as only three different media could be discussed in the limited space of this essay, more should come under scrutiny38 in order to further test the hypothesis underlying the present reflections, namely that there are certain mental responses to representations in different media that are similar enough to warrant the use of one and the same term “aesthetic illusion.”39

Notes 1 In the following, “media” will comprise the arts and the (new) media, as the ensuing discussion is not concerned with art as opposed to non-art from an evaluative point of view (concerning aesthetic quality or lack thereof) but with reception effects. 2 For a discussion of the terminological babel in the field, see Wolf (2013a: 19–22); this confusion often has the unfortunate consequence that researchers do not

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Werner Wolf become aware of parallel or related investigations. Green and Donahue ([2009] 2015), for example, present a highly illuminating perspective on aesthetic illusion from the point of view of cognitive psychology and use the term “transportation,” but they appear to be completely unaware of research in the field outside their own perspective and terminology; the same applies to Bortolussi and Dixon (2015), who not only criticize Green, Brock, and Kaufman’s term “transportation” without caring to enquire into the many alternative terms but also consider “transportation” to be a negligible phenomenon. This is a startling position, if one considers the attractiveness of aesthetic illusion across media. For the disciplinary parochialism in theoretical matters of aesthetic illusion/immersion, see also, for instance, Curtis (2015) and some other contributions to Liptay and Dogramaci (2015), a volume that disappoints in its lack of theoretical depth and breadth while presenting interesting case studies and partial aspects of “immersion.” I have dealt with aesthetic illusion in other genres and media elsewhere: for poetry, see Wolf (1998 and 2013b); for drama, from a historical perspective, see Wolf (1993b) and (2016); and for sculpture, see Wolf (2013c). More precisely, the following is an abbreviated and revised version of chaps. 1 and 2 of Wolf ([2009] 2014: 270–80). In this essay “representation” is used not in a broad semiotic sense (in which all kinds of signs can refer to both abstract and concrete phenomena) but in a narrower medial (and art-historical) sense, in which concrete phenomena as signifieds of medial signs or sign configurations are in focus (notably in the “imitation” of an actual or imaginable reality in a medial work). If the reception effect were total distance, aesthetic illusion would cease to exist, and something similar applies to the pole of immersion, for when it were reached, aesthetic illusion would turn into delusion (with trompe l’œil being a special case, see note 2); it is therefore misleading (as Liptay 2015: 101 justly suspects) to speak of “complete . . . immers[ion]” (Dogramaci and Liptay 2015: 9) when referring to the reception effect under discussion. The “breaking of illusion” occurring, for example, in postmodern literature, is thus not something totally alien to aesthetic illusion but “merely” a result of (over-)emphasizing its constituent “distance.” This gradability renders the term “transportation” (used, e.g., by Green and Donahue [2009] 2015) particularly questionable, for it is difficult to imagine being more or less transported, while it is quite well possible to be more or less immersed or to feel aesthetic illusion more or less intensely. This willingness is also responsible for the aforementioned fact that we can, for instance, read the same story twice (or are aware of the fact that a given film is the adaptation of a well-known novel) and nevertheless become (even suspensefully) immersed in the represented world and the plot, although we know what will happen.

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10 This is true of the medial triggers and also of the conditions permitting aesthetic illusion in the first place. It is, however, misleading to disregard an at least partial transhistorical relevance of aesthetic illusion or immersion, as does Curtis (2015: 48, 51), for immersive effects are not restricted to the recent past, nor to the digital media as is sometimes suggested (cf. Dogramaci and Liptay 2015: 1). 11 This is not to say that aesthetic illusion did not already exist in Greek and Roman antiquity, but this is not of central concern here. 12 Curtis (2015) is misleading here in his claim that abstract artefacts can also induce immersion; the same applies to Kwastek (2015: 75), for the immersion elicited by interactive installations that permit users to “create and manipulate abstract images and sounds” (ibid.) is not the kind of immersion constitutive of aesthetic illusion. One should generally be careful not to overstretch “immersion” to include all kinds of “absorption” (ibid.: 78), for one may be “absorbed,” for example, by a game of chess without feeling aesthetic illusion, and the same applies to certain reactions to nonrepresentational architecture (for the potential of certain architecture to elicit immersion, see, however, note 38). 13 However, as will be seen in some details of the illusionist principle discussed later— in particular no. (d) perspectivity and (a) concerning the respecting of medial potentials and limitations—the possibility of applying my theory of aesthetic illusion in fiction to other media was never excluded (cf. also Wolf 1993a: 18), although I had not originally conceived my theory from a transmedial, mediacomparative perspective. 14 In former conceptualizations of the illusionist principles I counted this principle as fourth; from a trans- or intermedial point of view I am now inclined to put it first, since the medium employed, to a certain extent, has an influence on the application of the other principles. 15 Principle (a) here forms a special case, since it already refers to a due consideration of the potentials and limitations of a given medium of representation. 16 Although Gombrich ([1960] 1977: 5) justly states that “we cannot, strictly speaking, watch ourselves having an illusion”, we can nevertheless remember what it was like having had an (aesthetic) illusion. 17 Here, too, a pernicious relativism ought to be eschewed, since transmedial comparisons presuppose a distinctness of media in the first place. This is no naive “essentialism,” since media are here conceived of as cultural products and hence as “conventionally distinct means of communication” (Wolf 1999: 35), or more precisely and following Ryan (2005: 288–90) as a means of communication that is conventionally perceived as distinct and used as such in cultural practice; it is thus specified by cultural conventions but also by particular technical or institutional channels (or one channel) and the use of one or more semiotic systems in the public transmission of content that includes, but is not restricted to, referential “messages” (cf. Wolf 2009: 13–14). For the problem of media

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Werner Wolf relativism and the necessity of overcoming it at least in intermediality research, see Rajewsky (2010). The partial iconicity of the layout and other marginal iconic features of some texts can be bracketed off here, as can Mitchell’s (1995: 95) claim that texts are always “imagetexts”; this is part of his even broader (and logically self-defeating) claim that “all media are mixed media” (5). The existence of this “step” or dimension in the reception process merits emphasis, since it testifies to the fact that aesthetic illusion is only one possible response to texts (and artefacts) and does not prevent aesthetic appreciation, a fact that critics of aesthetic illusion such as Bortolussi and Dixon (2015), who consider aesthetic illusion (under whatever denomination) as a naive form of reception, tend to overlook. For aesthetic illusion in film (again frequently discussed under other terms) see, e.g., Anderson (1996), Cammack (2007), Hartmann (2009), and the relevant contributions to Liptay and Dogramaci (2015). For a detailed analysis of filmic beginnings, also with reference to incipient immersion, see Hartmann (2009). For framing in film, see Anderson (1996) and Hartmann (2009). Cf. Liptay (2015: 96) who mentions “identification with the camera” as an alternative to “identification with the character”. It must be noted, though, that even “identification with the camera” actually means taking over the camera perspective as if the camera and our gaze were identical, and the point of view thus defined were on the same ontological level as the filmed world. See, e.g., the trilogy Lord of the Rings, which was followed by the trilogy The Hobbit, although the novel on which the latter trilogy is based has scarcely 400 pages as opposed to c. 1,000 pages in the former case. Cf., e.g., the historical fantasy series Game of Thrones or the historical fiction series Downton Abbey and many detective film series such as Midsomer Murders. For the various functions of film music, see the classic Gorbman (1987). For “flow” as “the cognitive and emotional aspects of being immersed in or carried away by . . . the processuality and intensity of experience,” see Kwastek (2015: 69) (it should be noted, though, that “flow” is not restricted to narrativity but can include certain types of descriptivity, provided it is transmitted by a temporal medium). See Huhtamo (2013), Janecke (2013), and, with a special emphasis on the realization of the “holodeck” from Star Trek, Freyermuth (2015: 167). National Gallery of Art (2017), “Church, Frederic Edwin: Niagara. Overview,” https://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/Collection/art-object-page.166436.html bibliography. National Gallery of Art (2017, online). In overstressing the distancing quality of the pictorial “window view,” which has been a characteristic feature of linear perspective pictures since the Renaissance,

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Freyermuth (2015: 180) underrates what is much more important and indeed constitutive of pictorial illusion, namely that the recipient who seems to be positioned behind the window is, in his or her imagination, on the same ontological level as the represented world beyond the window and that thus the space occupied by him or her appears to be a continuation of the space of the represented world. Trompe l’œil representations are special cases of aesthetic illusion since they elicit a trajectory from erroneous perception (illusion tout court) to the admiring and distancing awareness of representational skill in two consecutive phases rather than eliciting both, immersion and distance, at the same moment; but the anecdote serves well as a document of the immersive power of pictures that even precedes the rise of painterly illusion in the Italian Renaissance (for trompe l’œil in general, see Hedinger, 2010). Experience, defined in one of its meanings as “[a] state, condition, or event that consciously affects one” (Shorter Oxford Dictionary, vol. 1, p. 894), is an umbrella term for everything that can consciously happen to a human being and therefore may be of an outer, perceptual, or an inner emotional or intellectual nature, moreover of a static or dynamic kind. It is thus the common denominator and center of both our lived relationship to, perception of, and participation in the real world and aesthetic illusion as a perception of and participation in an imagined (decribed or narrated) world. The emphasis on a special “embodied” quality of “presence” in (fictional) verbal narratives as “motor enactment,” which has recently been made (cf. Kuzmičová 2012; Carraciolo 2014), disregards the transmedial nature of aesthetic illusion and, while shedding light on a facet of media-specific illusionist reactions, is certainly less important than the general feeling of immersion, which can be elicited by both narratives and descriptions. For the beginnings of such a comparative perspective, see (for the new media) Grau (2003) and (with reference to a wider range of media, which, however, some contributors still discuss from a monomedial perspective only) Wolf, Bernhart, and Mahler (2013) and Liptay and Dogramaci (2015). For psychological research, which appears to be a particularly rich mine, see, e.g., Nell (1988), Gerrig (1993), Bortolussi and Dixon (2003), Green and Donahue ([2009] 2015), Starr (2015), and other contributions to Zunshine (2015); for an interesting recent development in a cognitive approach to aesthetic illusion (or “presence”) see, for example, Kuzmičová (2012), who (like Caracciolo 2014) emphasizes sensomotoric triggers in artefacts as conducive to an “embodied” illusionist reaction but does not go beyond the limits of narrative. For the beginnings of aesthetic illusion in literature after the Middle Ages, see Wolf (1993b and 2016); for a general survey with emphasis on the digital media, see Freyermuth (2015) (who, however, is unaware of much of existing research on aesthetic illusion/immersion beyond his own field).

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38 Obvious candidates would be musical theater, graphic novels, sculpture (cf. Wolf 2013c), computer games (Klimek 2012), and “new media” in general (see Ryan 2001; Pasquinelli 2011; Liptay and Dogramaci 2015) including interactive digital media, such as computer games and YouTube adaptations of novels as discussed by Jandl (2015). Interesting candidates could also come from the field of, in the present context, less likely traditional media such as instrumental music (for which Bernhart 2013 is a pioneering study) and architecture, which has been discussed with reference to Las Vegas theme parks (Bieger 2013). Architecture would also merit analysis with respect to the immersive potential of religious buildings such as temples, Gothic cathedrals or baroque multimedia churches, which combine architecture as a (sometimes or partly) representational art (e.g., with reference to the Heavenly Jerusalem or Paradise) with other (representational) arts (sculpture, painting, stained glass) in order to elicit various kinds of spiritual experience in the believers, in particular in ritual contexts. 39 One big advantage of subsuming the various medial, but also cultural-historical shades of what here is termed “aesthetic illusion” (or “immersion”) under one term—besides being in harmony with a basic cognitive and epistemological principle according to which acknowledging similarity is the precondition for becoming aware of difference—is to prevent the parochialism that besets most of current research and to encourage genuine transdisciplinary perspectives.

References Anderson, J. D. (1996), The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory, Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Bernhart, W. (2013), “Aesthetic Illusion in Instrumental Music,” in Wolf et al., Immersion and Distance, 365–80. Bieger, L. (2013), “Architectures of Immersion: The Material Fictions of the ‘New’ Las Vegas,” in Wolf et al., Immersion and Distance, 315–38. Bortolussi, M. and P. Dixon (2003), Psychonarratology: Foundations for the Empirical Study of Literary Response, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bortolussi, M. and P. Dixon (2015), “Transport: Challenges to the Metaphor,” in Zunshine, Cognitive Literary Studies, 525–40. Cammack, J. (2007), “Cinema, Illusionism and Imaginative Perception,” in S. Horstkotte and K. Leonhard (eds.), Seeing Perception, 270–91, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Caracciolo, Marco (2014), The Experientiality of Narrative: An Enactivist Approach, Narratologia 42, Berlin: de Gruyter. Coleridge, S. T. ([1817] 1965), Biographia Literaria, edited by George Watson, London: Everyman.

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Curtis, R. (2015), “Immersion and Abstraction as Measures of Materiality,” in Liptay and Dogramaci, Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media, 41–64. Dickens, C. ([1866] 1967), “The Signalman,” in Ch. Dolley (ed.), The Penguin Book of Short Stories, 11–24, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Dogramaci, B. and F. Liptay (2015), “Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media,” in Liptay and Dogramaci, Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media, 1–17. Feldner, M. (2015), “Bringing Bloom to the Screen: Challenges and Possibilities of Adapting James Joyce’s Ulysses,” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 40 (1–2): 197–217. Freyermuth, G. S. (2015), “From Analog to Digital Image Space: Toward a Historical Theory of Immersion,” in Liptay and Dogramaci, Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media, 165–203. Genette, G. (1987), Seuils, Collection Poétique. Paris: Seuil. Gerrig, R. J. (1993), Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gombrich, E. H. ([1960] 1977), Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Oxford: Phaidon. Gorbman, C. (1987), Unheard Melodies: Narrative Film Music, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Grau, O. (2003), Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion, translated by G. Custance, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Green, M. C., T. Brock, and G. F. Kaufman (2004), “Understanding Media Enjoyment: The Role of Transportation into Narrative Worlds,” Communication Theory, 14 (4): 311–27. Green, M. C. and J. K. Donahue ([2009] 2015), “Simulated Worlds: Transportation into Narratives,” in K. D. Markman, W. M. P. Klein, and J. Suhr (eds.), Handbook of Imagination and Mental Simulation, 241–54, New York: Psychology Press. Harding, D. W. (1962), “Psychological Processes in the Reading of Fiction,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 2: 133–47. Hartmann, B. (2009), Aller Anfang: Zur Initialphase des Spielfilms, Marburg: Schüren. Hedinger, B. (ed.) (2010), Täuschend echt: Illusion und Wirklichkeit in der Kunst, Munich: Hirmer. Herman, D. (ed.) (1999), Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Huhtamo, E. (2013), “Illusion and Its Reverse: About Artistic Explorations of Stereoscopic 3 D,” in B. Kracke and M. Ries (eds.), Expanded Narration. Das Neue Erzählen, 123–33, Bielefeld: Transcript. Hutcheon, L. (2006), A Theory of Adaptation, New York: Routledge. Ingarden, R. ([1931] 1965), Das literarische Kunstwerk. Mit einem Anhang von den Funktionen der Sprache im Theaterschauspiel, Tübingen: Niemeyer. Ingarden, R. (1968), Vom Erkennen des literarischen Kunstwerks, Tübingen: Niemeyer. Iser, W. (1972a), Der implizite Leser. Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett, UTB 131, Munich: Fink.

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Iser, W. (1972b), “The Reading Process. A Phenomenological Approach,” New Literary History, 3: 279–99. Jandl, S. (2015), “The Lizzie Bennet Diaries: Adapting Jane Austen in the Internet Age,” Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 40 (1–2): 167–96. Janecke, Ch. (2013), “Narrativity’s Marginal Utility: Format and Immersion in Panoramic Dome Films,” in B. Kracke and M. Ries (eds.), Expanded Narration. Das neue Erzählen, 109–21, Bielefeld: Transcript. Jannidis, F. (2003), “Narratology and the Narrative,” in T. Kindt and H.-H. Müller (eds.), What Is Narratology?, 35–54, Berlin: de Gruyter. Klimek, S. (2012), “Illusion, Immersion and Identification: Storytelling Role-Playing Games as Interactive Media Practice,” in S. Coelsch-Foisner and S. Herbe (eds.), New Directions in the European Fantastic, Wissenschaft und Kunst 23, 1–13, Heidelberg: Winter. Kuhn, M. (2013), “Narrativität transmedial,” in J. A. Bateman, M. Kepser, and M. Kuhn (eds.), Film, Text, Kultur: Beiträge zur Textualität des Films, 58–87, Marburg: Schüren. Kuzmičová, A. (2012), “Presence in the Reading of Literary Narrative: a Case for Motor Enactment,” Semiotica, 189 (1/4): 23–48. Kwastek, K. (2015), “Immersed in Reflection? The Aesthetic Experience of Interactive Media Art,” in Liptay and Dogramaci, Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media, 67–85. Liptay, F. (2015), “Neither Here nor There: The Paradoxes of Immersion,” in Liptay and Dogramaci, Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media, 87–108. Liptay, F. and B. Dogramaci (eds.) (2015), Immersion in the Visual Arts and Media, Studies in Intermediality 9, Leiden: Brill-Rodopi. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1995), Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, Chicago, IL/London: University of Chicago Press. Nell, V. (1988), Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Pasquinelli, E. (2011), “Multimodal, Interactive Media and the Illusion of Reality,” in F. Bacci and D. Melcher (eds.), Art and the Senses, 599–618, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rajewsky, I. O. (2010), “Border Talks: The Problematic Status of Media Borders in the Current Debate about Intermediality,” in L. Elleström (ed.), Media Borders, Multimodality and Intermediality, 51–68, Houndmills/Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Rajewsky, I. O. (2015), Medialität – Transmedialität – Narration: Perspektiven einer transgenerischen und transmedialen Narratologie, Unpublished postdoctoral thesis (Habilitationsschrift), Freie Universität Berlin. Robinson, K. S. (2007), Sixty Days and Counting, New York: Random. Ryan, M.-L. (1991), Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Ryan, M.-L. (2001), Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ryan, M.-L. (2004), “Introduction,” in Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality, 1–40. Ryan, M.-L. (2005), “Media and Narrative,” in D. Herman, M. Jahn, and M.-L. Ryan (eds.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, 288–92, London: Routledge. Ryan, M.-L. (ed.) (2004), Narrative across Media. The Languages of Storytelling, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Schaeffer, J.-M. and J. Vultur (2005), “Immersion,” in Herman et al., Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, 237–9. Shorter Oxford Dictionary on Historical Principles (2002), 5th ed., Oxford: Oxford University Press. Starr, G. G. (2015), “Theorizing Imagery Aesthetics, and Doubly Directed States,” in Zunshine, Cognitive Literary Studies, 246–68. Walton, K. L. (1990), Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolf, W. (1993a), Ästhetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der Erzählkunst: Theorie und Geschichte mit Schwerpunkt auf englischem illusionsstörenden Erzählen, Buchreihe der Anglia 32, Tübingen: Niemeyer. Wolf, W. (1993b), “Shakespeare und die Entstehung ästhetischer Illusion im englischen Drama,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, new series, 43: 279–301. Wolf, W. (1998), “Aesthetic illusion in lyric poetry?,” Poetica, 30: 251–89. Wolf, W. (1999), The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality, IFAVW Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft 35, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wolf, W. (2002), “Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik: Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie,” in A. Nüning and V. Nünning (eds.), Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär, WVTHandbücher zum literaturwissenschaftlichen Studium 5, 23–104, Trier: WVT. Wolf, W. (2003), “Narrative and Narrativity: A Narratological Reconceptualization and Its Applicability to the Visual Arts,” Word & Image, 19: 180–97. Wolf, W. (2004), “Aesthetic Illusion as an Effect of Fiction,” Style, 48: 325–51. Wolf, W. (2007), “Description as a Transmedial Mode of Representation: General Features and Possibilities of Realization in Painting, Fiction and Music,” in W. Wolf and W. Bernhart (eds.), Description in Literature and Other Media, Studies in Intermediality 2, 1–87, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wolf, W. (2008), “Is Aesthetic Illusion ‘illusion référentielle’? ‘Immersion’ and Its Relationship to Fictionality and Factuality,” Journal of Literary Theory, 2 (1): 99–126, 171–3. Wolf, W. (2009), “Metareference across Media: The Concept, Its Transmedial Potentials and Problems, Main Forms and Functions,” in W. Wolf (ed.) (in collaboration with K. Bantleon and J. Thoss), Metareference across Media: Theory and Case

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More than Meets the Eye Layers of Artistic Representation Thomas G. Pavel

The topic of this paper is the multilayered nature of artistic representation. It argues that the public’s ability to identify the objects and actions presented in a work of art relies on sensitivity to immediately perceptible details as well as to the ability to recognize types, values, and ideals. In his classical work, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, E. M. Gombrich (1960) linked faithful pictorial representation to the method of “trial and error” discovered by Italian Renaissance artists who carefully compared what they saw with what they painted and corrected the latter in the light of the former. Previous painters “knew” how to make ideas and ideals visible; the later ones “saw” the world as it meets the eye. They brought painting close to the actual perception of the world and invited the public to look at the objects presented on a canvas as illusions similar to the genuine targets of the human eye. Flint Schier (1986) examined the same phenomenon but criticized Gombrich’s notion of “illusion,” arguing instead that the iconic artistic image directly refers to the represented objects, allowing the public to recognize them for what they are. In sculpture, the representation of what one actually sees rather than what one knows is already present in classical Greek sculpture and, after being brought back to life by Italian Renaissance artists, it remained for a long time the norm. When, for instance, one looks at the statue that crowns the Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square, London (Figure  2.1), one sees, far up, the stone image of a dignified man standing in front of a coil of nautical rope, his right leg held out and his left hand resting on the pummel of his naked sword. He wears

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Figure 2.1 Edward Hodges Baily, Statue of Lord Nelson atop Nelson’s Column (1843), London, photo: Beata May.

a historical costume, the uniform of a late eighteenth-century admiral, the right sleeve pinned against the jacket being visible empty. Several medals adorn his two-corner hat and his chest. As London Illustrated News noticed at the statue’s inauguration in 1843, Nelson’s face has the sharp, angular features, the expression of great activity of mind, but of little mental grandeur; of quickness of perception and decision; and, withal, that sad

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air, so perceptible in the best portraits of the warrior, of long-continued physical pain and suffering, the consequence of his many wounds, which accompanied him throughout his brightest triumphs, though it never abated his ardour or weakened his energies. The expression is a peculiar one; it is more afflicting to the eye than the expression of deep thought, and though as mournful, it is less abstracted than that of meditation. (London Illustrated News, week ending, November 4: front page)

The statue offers its viewers a detailed, credible image of a naval officer whose physiognomy, as this detailed description points out, reveals intelligence and decision overshadowed by pain. The perceptible presence of physical features revealing moral traits persuades the viewers that such a man existed or at least could have existed. These features evoke the type to which the represented object belongs: a valiant one-armed, highly decorated officer endowed with a strong personality. In Erwin Panofsky’s terms ( [1939] 1972), this level displays the “secondary or conventional” subject matter of the work of art. But perhaps it is not always necessary to identify type and convention, given that many types are natural and, as we’ll see, quite surprising. As for the link between type and individual, whereas an uninformed viewer could well imagine that the statue evokes the glory of any naval commander ready to go to battle even after the loss of an arm, the names of the Trafalgar Square and Nelson’s Column remind us that this officer did exist and help us recognize who he was. Therefore, as an icon, in Flint Schier’s terms, this statue refers not only to a type but also to an actual individual: Nelson, the victor at Trafalgar. The uniform, the sword, and the coil of rope confirm his position as commander of the British fleet, while the expression on his face reminds us that he was a man of action, a leader, and a sufferer. The statue successfully stands for Nelson because the individualized type evoked by its perceptible features taken together with the statue’s name leads the viewers straight to the great admiral. Portraits include by definition a reference to an actual person given that the artist is commissioned to portray a certain individual and is often allowed, within the limits of plausibility, to choose the general type under which this individual would be represented. The uninformed tourist may first become aware that the statue represents a brave naval officer and next, by reading the relevant page in the London tourist guide, realize who this officer was. By contrast, the knowledgeable viewers are able to recognize the admiral perched on the top of the column and, in addition, not unlike the 1843 review previously quoted, appreciate the more general type the artist was able to evoke—a type that the actual Nelson had closely incarnated.

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In this statue we can thus distinguish between two layers of artistic representation. The elements that resemble the actual Nelson, his costume, his missing right arm, and the expression on his face are meant to make the viewers feel that they see him. Or, rather, to make the competent viewers feel as though they saw him, to feel vicariously that they see him, to be, in Gombrich’s terms, under the illusion, an illusion fully known as such, that they see him. For, they know well that they aren’t looking at Nelson himself but at a work of art meant to portray him, and accordingly, they tacitly evaluate its ability to do so. To perform this evaluation, the viewers take into account the forthright signals that this statue is indeed Nelson’s in the same way as they would do when examining a photograph or a portrait of an individual they personally know: they would take into account the close physical resemblance and the appropriate contextual indices—hat and uniform, in this case. The uninformed tourists who grasp the type represented by the statue without necessarily knowing that it refers to Nelson also recognize the image of a brave naval commander and feel as though they saw an individual that belongs to this category. Yet in their case the meaning of as though is somewhat different. When looking at a portrait or a photograph of an individual, you know that a more reliable alternative is available, which consists in looking at the person represented by the portrait or the photograph. Even though most often you don’t have access to this alternative given that the represented person has either, like Nelson, passed away long ago or lives far away, you are aware that other people could look or have looked at him. As though in such cases means as though you were seeing the actual subject of the portrait or photograph. If you contemplate, however, the picture or the statue of an individualized type, as though means “as though it were possible to see this type concretely, fully incarnated in a perceptible human being.” The portrait of an individual has one definite, actual model—the individual in question, the viewers feeling, in this case, as though they saw that person. If the work of art presents an individualized type without being a portrait, one recognizes the fully incarnated type. Notice that the presentation of an individualized type as a nonspecified actual individual seen by the artist and the public, for example, a plausible-looking statue, rather than the portrait of a brave commander, differs from the presentation of the type as just known by the artist and the public. The simplified facial features of an early medieval statue of Saint George (ca. 1375–1420), for instance, help the viewers understand what kind of warrior is presented by the statue—that is, a dragon-killing hero—in spite of the fact that they have never seen and will never see a person lacking, as the statue does, a full, detailed physiognomy. By contrast, a plausible-looking statue of an individualized type would

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immediately look like one. As icons, the two statues would be more or less faithful and the illusion they call for would be more or less effective. Both the older presentation of a type as known (the statue of Saint George) and the plausible presentation of an individualized type (say, a statue of an anonymous commander incarnating naval glory) may include elements that highlight an essential feature of the type, for example, a huge sword in the case of Saint George, or an anchor for a naval commander. A detail of Nelson’s statue illustrates this kind of element:  a coil of rope props up the legs of the statue. The rope doesn’t refer to an actual aspect of Nelson’s features or attire, its primary role being to support the weight of the statue from behind, not unlike the stone altar that sustains the body of Laocoön and one of his sons in the famous ancient sculpture (Figure 2.2). Since Laocoön’s statue captures an episode from

Figure 2.2 Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus of Rhodos, Laocoön and His Sons (1506), Vatican Museums, Rome, photo: JuanMA.

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a narrative—the death of Poseidon’s Trojan priest—rather than being a portrait, the presence of the altar has some plausibility: caught next to it by the two serpents sent by the gods, the priest might have indeed been pushed against the altar. There is no reason, however, to believe that on his ship at Trafalgar, Nelson leaned against a coil of rope: the piece of stone that supports the statue is a general reminder that Nelson made his career in the navy. It suggests, rather than presents, the hero’s naval background, the latter task being explicitly fulfilled by The Battle of Copenhagen by John Ternouth, the relief on the east side of the column’s plinth. Whereas the statue of Nelson’s features, bodily attitude, and attire directly lead the viewer to the actual admiral, the coil of rope does so only indirectly: it brings to mind the hustle and bustle of sailors, their physical strength, the various difficult, sometimes acrobatic tasks they must fulfill, thus helping the viewer remember that Nelson’s glory was won on ships, among sailors. Yet, being linked with Nelson’s life and death, the coil of rope does enhance the referential capability of the statue. The statue’s resembling features establish a rapport with the actual Nelson; the coil of rope’s indirect suggestion of Nelson’s type—a great naval leader—reinforces it. In addition to the perception of a type and the referential link to an individual, works of art can present the viewers plausible images meant to evoke an abstract notion. Whereas, in the case of Baily’s sandstone statue of Lord Nelson, an uninformed viewer would be mistaken in interpreting it as nothing but an allegory of naval heroism, other famous statues are exclusively meant to fulfill an allegorical function, for example, the Statue of Liberty by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, installed in the New York Harbor in 1886, a gift offered to the United States by the French state for the one hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. This statue doesn’t aim at resembling an existing mortal or evoke a type. It represents Libertas, a Roman goddess in whose existence no one believed at that time, its concrete details suggesting abstract notions: the dignity of the goddess reminds the viewer of the attractive, majestic nature of freedom, the torch she carries figures a source of light, the tablet stands for the law, the broken chain under her feet invites the viewer to think of the old colonial status of America as well as of the then still recent abolition of slavery. Not unlike the coil of rope in Nelson’s column, the Statue of Liberty refers indirectly to the actual world:  as a result, its viewers are expected to go through a process of double recognition. Each of the statue’s components resembles tangible beings and objects. The viewers first feel as though they see a tall, beautiful woman carrying a torch and a table of laws and stepping on a broken chain. At the next

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stage, they understand that this woman represents liberty, but the allegorical, ideal, subject doesn’t erase the initial impression. On the contrary, as they realize or are told about the meaning of the statue, the viewers would link the woman’s strength with the energy of freedom, the torch with its ability to enlighten nations, and the table of laws with liberty as the basis of a just order. Could one argue that the Statue of Liberty increases and intensifies what the coil of rope does to the statue of Nelson, that is, the indirect allusion to the type represented by the statue? Not necessarily. The coil of rope provides an abstract addition to the portrait of an existing human being, whereas the Statue of Liberty makes no reference to such a being, each detail serving the allegorical purpose of the whole. Yet the as though element—what Gombrich calls illusion—is present: the viewers feel as though, first, they were seeing a beautiful woman and, second, as though they discovered in this beautiful woman the allegorical features and fervor of liberty. As these examples show, a work of art can offer its viewers a strikingly plausible image of the actual world and indicate whether this image stands for a definite individual, an individualized type, or an abstract notion. In each of these cases, the iconic image would lead, as Flint Schier argued, to a vivid recognition: on the one hand, the viewers acknowledge that it evokes a segment of reality; on the other hand, they figure out what kind of target the as though aims at: a referential, a typological, or an allegorical one. These three kinds of links between the perception of the art work and that of its models—or, put otherwise, these three kinds of as though—are not always fully separated from each other. The statue of Nelson isn’t an allegory nor is the Statue of Liberty a portrait, but some of Manet and Cézanne’s portraits include typological and, perhaps, allegorical features. Manet’s Olympia (Figure 2.3), the portrait of a naked courtesan, calm, dull, and sure of herself, alludes to Titian’s beautiful Venus of Urbino (Figure 2.4), a naked goddess whose gentle gaze promises the viewer fidelity and happiness. Titian’s painting evokes a type—the friendly, loving wife—and it lets the viewer sense that the reason why the painting individualizes the type in an unexpectedly convincing manner is that Titian had an actual model. Conversely, Manet’s Olympia, which is the portrait of an actual person, embodies a striking (and again, unexpected) type of courtesan: looking straight in the eyes of the viewers, the young woman lets them know that her body is for sale. Her cool, composed attitude might be understood as firm rejection of the links between physical pleasure and long-term commitment, as well as an assertion of female autonomy and independence from moral hypocrisy.

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Figure 2.3 Édouard Manet, Olympia (1865), Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

Figure 2.4 Titian, Venus of Urbino (1538), Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

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Cézanne’s A Modern Olympia (Figure 2.5), by contrast, lies crouched on her bed, while her servant lifts a veil, thus making her naked body visible to a sitting, cane-holding man who admires her. Manet’s Olympia bluntly asserts the exchange value of her body, while in Cézanne’s painting the young woman’s mixture of modesty and shamelessness aims at mesmerizing her customer. Less individualized than Manet’s, the waves of her hair, the half-asleep posture of her body, the dancing movement of her servant, the admiring posture of her potential customer offer the viewer a scene of charm and seduction. The artistic effect, in this case, isn’t just based on what the viewer sees—it has something to do with the viewer’s grasping the meaning of the scene (the buyer’s opportunity to examine at leisure the desirable courtesan) in spite of the vagueness of its details. Similarly, in one of Cézanne’s portraits of Victor Chocquet, the touches of color, awkwardly juxtaposed, offer the viewer an imperfect sense of the model’s features. As in A Modern Olympia, the type evoked by the portrait lacks

Figure 2.5 Paul Cézanne, A Modern Olympia (1873–4), Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

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the precision of an individual, yet some details, in this case the uneven eyes and the high forehead, capture the model’s personality. Or at least they let the viewer feel that the painting evokes intelligence and distinction—as present in Victor Chocquet’s features, or even, one might surmise, independently of this person. In these paintings, seeing leads to direct recognition as well as to recognition mediated by understanding. Plot-based genres, literary or musical, are particularly adept to evoke such features—let’s call them “moral,” in a broad sense of the term—either by attaching them to characters whose representation is simplified, a simplification that sometimes borders the implausible, or by fully embedding them in rich, credible representations of characters. The former choice brings to mind the painters and sculptors who painted and sculpted what they “knew,” while the latter is similar to the practice of representing what the artists “see.” If so, the venerable distinction made by Lessing in his Laokoon or the Borders between Painting and Poetry (1766) between, on the one hand, the visual arts that rely on space and simultaneity and, on the other hand, literary narratives that are based on temporal succession, valid as it is at both levels of form and content, should not lead us to neglect the common concerns of these two ways of representing the human condition. Indeed, since both visual art and plot-based literature pay special attention to human action, its rapport with passions, tasks, and interests, the variety of moral and pragmatic maxims it observes, and the virtues, vices, and attitudes it reveals, both mix straightforward visibility/plausibility with more abstract features. Concerning literary plausibility, let’s consider the example of a neoclassical French tragedy. Racine’s Phaedra loves the young, chaste Hippolytus, declares her love, fails to attract him, and is ready to die, believing that his indifference is caused, as in Euripides and Seneca’s old plays on this topic, by his devotion to Artemis, the goddess of chastity. When, however, she finds out that Hippolytus is in love with another woman, she is blinded by jealousy and tells Theseus, his father and her husband, that the young man tried to rape her. Scandalized, Theseus asks the god Poseidon to avenge him. Hippolytus dies, Phaedra repents, swallows a slow poison, and before dying confesses the truth to Theseus. On the stage, one sees legendary characters caught in (barely) plausible situations, one hears them reciting purple passages in verse, and yet, in spite of the distance at which they act, one feels that what happens on the stage points to a compelling, moving truth. Where does this feeling come from? What kind of as though operates here? Direct plausibility in this case comes from the core of the plot—guilty love, jealousy, revenge, and remorse—and from the strength of the types represented,

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as well as from the fact that the story is a well-known myth, a frequent topic of tragedy, quickly recognized by its initial public. Plausibility, it should be emphasized, does not depend on the distance between the public and the work of art or literature. The statue of Nelson is high up on the top of the column in the Trafalgar Square, while the Berlin statue of Konrad Adenauer on Adenauerplatz is right on the street, next to the subway entrance, yet both are plausible representation of their models. One finds the tragedy of Emma Bovary credible because such things unfortunately may happen in our own world; by contrast, the story of Phaedra is plausible in spite of its distance, because it convincingly depicts passions and types and, in addition, is quite familiar to the public. The distance at the same time simplifies and strengthens the impact of the types involved. Relying on myth, the public doesn’t need to process new information, as it does when reading Madame Bovary or looking at Manet’s Olympia. Just as in Titian’s Venus of Urbino in which viewers can grasp the goddess’s offer of celestial and sensual love, they easily see that in Racine’s play Phaedra embodies the passionate, impulsive, guilty lover, and Hippolytus the innocent, faithful one. These types, moreover, are far from schematic: in Titian’s painting, the goddess’s smile has a special nuance of friendliness, while in Racine’s play Phaedra’s transgressions (falling in love with her stepson and falsely denouncing him to his father) are made less terrible by her remorseful confession and slow death in the last scene of the play. But neither Venus’s smile nor the last scene of Racine’s tragedy make the goddess of love and Phaedra’s characters less coherent and their type less convincing. Direct plausibility can certainly include stronger nuances. To take a wellknown example, the young prince Hamlet discovers that his uncle had killed his father—the king of Denmark—thus winning the crown and the hand of the queen. The prince needs to act, yet for a long time he hesitates. Why? What led Shakespeare to delay the denouement of the play? A tragedy, as everyone knows, depicts the struggle of passion against an obstacle, a struggle whose deployment is governed by an ensemble of causes, reasons, intentions, and maxims. The playwright could have depicted Hamlet’s character by linking it to a type who would accomplish his task—revenge—effectively and quickly. A small amount of inner resistance, a few misgivings could have been included in order to make the type plausibly complex. This is how Racine’s Phaedra is conceived, as well as, in visual arts, Nelson’s statue—the undeniable strength of the admiral being slightly nuanced and rendered more interesting by “that sad air . . . of long-continued physical pain and suffering” (London Illustrated News, week ending, November 4, 1843: front page).

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Hamlet’s actions, by contrast, are sometimes sluggish, sometimes imprudent: he quickly and competently tests his uncle’s guilt, yet leaves for England without suspecting that his “mission” is nothing but a trap set by the king; he rushes to reject Ophelia, but he is slow to suspect her brother’s desire for revenge. Moreover, being often alone on stage, he opens his soul to the audience, confessing his despair, doubt, melancholy. His unpredictable behavior and lyrical monologues make his character more complex: he is a sad, distressed young man who, as many of us in his situation, doesn’t fully know how to act. But something else than Hamlet’s personality increases the play’s magnetic effect on the viewer: it is a rule of craft that requires Elizabethan revenge tragedies to wander on, postpone the solution to the very end, and make it stunningly bloody. Suspense and surprise actively contribute to the artistic effect. By putting additional pressure on the viewers’ attention and expectations, the initial surprise— the ghost’s appearance—and the ensuing suspense prevent them from noticing occasional implausibility:  the audience of Hamlet is too worried about the prince’s fate to realize, for instance, how improbable his departure to England is. The fast, unpredicted events support the impression that these actions are plausible. Similarly, the final surprise of Hamlet stabbing the king brings the public a sudden relief, thus giving it the sense that, whatever the price, justice has been done. Suspense and surprise are equally effective in visual arts: Laocoön and His Sons is so powerful because it captures a moment of suspense, while Veronese’s version of the Sacrifice of Isaac is all about the surprise of seeing an angel grab from behind Abraham’s hand that holds the sword, thus preventing the infanticide at the very last moment. (Compare the drama of cruelty and salvation in Veronese’s painting with the closeness between father and son in Philippe de Champaigne’s The Sacrifice of Isaac in which the old man reluctantly holds the knife and looks calmly, gratefully toward the angel, as though he always expected a divine intervention to cancel the sacrifice.) In addition to direct plausibility, based on plot and types, and sometimes enhanced by suspense and surprise, the literary as though relies, just like the visual one, on a more abstract sense of human ideals and norms—on what we know. Racine’s Phaedra (1677) is so persuasive because it evokes the conflict between two moral ideals, later described in Giambattista Vico’s New Science (1725): the old, heroic, brutal ideal and the more recent, civilized one. Theseus wanders about the world killing monsters, ravishing women, cooperating with various gods, Poseidon in particular; by contrast, Hippolytus, a lonely hunter, loves chastity, peacefully aspires to marry the heiress of a rival family, and venerates only one, nameless god. Theseus, after being assisted by Ariadne to kill

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the Minotaur, has abandoned her and, later, married Phaedra, her sister. In search of great feats and erotic adventures, he is rarely home, and in his absence Phaedra feels an irresistible attraction to the young, peaceful Hippolytus, whose demeanor promises domestic fidelity and concord. Torn between the two ideals, Phaedra is, on the one hand, prey to a violent, unlawful love—a feature of the heroic way of life—on the other hand, she feels the remorse and shame caused by her failure to live according to the new, civilized set of ideals. This normative conflict in the background is only occasionally mentioned in the play, but its silent presence orients the action making it intelligible to the public. Its role thus resembles that of spatial perspective in Renaissance painting, for example, in the unforgettable School of Athens by Raphael, a technique that, without being necessarily noticed as such, perfects the represented scene by giving it balance and dignity. In Hamlet, by contrast, where the emphasis falls on suspense and surprise, the normative background is less clear, the play being devoted to the protagonist’s efforts—sometimes coherent, sometimes chaotic—to figure out what he must do, why, and how. Focusing on Hamlet’s wandering path of life, on his being a homo viator through wild, dangerous landscapes rather than someone who faces a clear, simple choice, the play reminds the viewer how difficult it is to reconcile sudden, impossible tasks with the ideal of a good life. Here too, literary representation includes a vivid reference to our human struggles with values and norms. Similarly, the disorienting, revolving space in some of Veronese’s and many of Tintoretto’s paintings, for example, his Last Supper in San Giorgio Maggiore and his Paradise in the Palazzo Ducale (both in Venice), invites the viewer’s gaze to rove for a long time through the winding suspense and surprise of the represented scene before reaching, at last, the resting point—the Madonna and Christ at the apex of Paradise and the almost undetectable Jesus in the middle of the Last Supper. To conclude, when literary works, sculptures, and paintings invite the public to consider them as though they were pointing to the actual world, artistic representation operates at several levels. Direct plausibility presents entities and actions “as they meet the eye,” both concerning their shape and their details. But certainly art involves more than meets the eyes. At a less immediate level, it evokes the type of the presented objects, usually an individualized type whose features are both general and concrete. At this level, a certain amount of implausibility is acceptable as long as the type remains clearly discernable, either thanks to a set of strong, coherent links to the presented entities and actions or, conversely, when the type’s features are

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revealed through suspense and surprise. And to be fully convincing, artworks always includes a sense of the values and ideals that guide the individuals and the actions presented in the artwork. Successful artistic representation thus involves a triple recognition:  we recognize, or at least we find credible, the shapes and details, the types evoked, and, finally, the values and ideals that reign over the represented world.1

Note 1 My gratitude goes to Roger Pouivet and Marion Renaud, who invited me to present this paper at the Université de Lorraine, Nancy in the fall of 2015. During a lively discussion, Sébastien Rehault expressed his strong disagreement with Gombrich’s approach and referred to the work of the late Flint Schier, whose Deeper into Pictures he had recently translated into French. Concerning the iconic theory of pictorial reference, the discussion also mentioned Understanding Pictures by Dominic Lopes (Lopes 2004), translated into French by Laure Blanc-Benon, who published her own book on this topic (Blanc-Benon 2009). Roger Pouivet’s Le réalisme esthétique (Pouivet 2006) has been an invaluable long-term guide of my research. A conversation with Sergio Zatti, Gianni Iotti, and other colleagues at the Università di Pisa in the Spring of 2016 was equally helpful. Many thanks!

References Blanc-Benon, L. (2009), La question du réalisme en peinture: Approches contemporaines, Paris: Vrin. Gombrich, E. M. (1960), Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lopes, D. (2004), Understanding Pictures, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Panofsky, E. ([1939] 1972), Studies in Iconology Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance, New York: Harper & Row. Pouivet, R. (2006), Le réalisme esthétique, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Schier, F. (1986), Deeper into Pictures: An Essay on Pictorial Representation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Mediating Immediacy Göran Rossholm

In Time and the Novel, A.  A. Mendilow writes about the reader’s temporal experience: “the reader if he is engrossed in his reading . . . yields to the illusion that he himself is participating in the action or situation, or at least is witnessing it as happening, not merely as having happened” (1952:  96). This experience is nowadays most often referred to by the term “immersion,” defined by Marie-Laure Ryan as “the experience through which a fictional world acquires the presence of an autonomous, language independent reality populated with human beings” (2001:  14).1 In the present essay I  will discuss several aspects of immersion: how the reader’s immersive responses relate to similar reactions in other contexts, what term is most fit to express the content of “immersion,” and whether Mendilow’s characterization of the phenomenon as an illusion is justified or not. The question of illusion will be placed in the comparative context of both literary (and aesthetic) and nonliterary (and nonaesthetic) kinds of illusions, with a particular focus on narrative immersion, or, as expressed in my preferred terminology, narrative immediacy.2 Finally, I will present a few ideas about the function of immediacy.

1. Terms and cases The term “immersion” has by now the status of a technical term in narrative theory, but it is preceded or paralleled by a number of expressions. In addition to “illusion,” similar reader reactions have been sorted under the labels “absorption,” “directness,” “empathy,” “identification,” “immediacy,” “presence,” and “transportation.”3 These words applied to reader responses are neither synonymous nor clearly distinguished from each other. Rather, they point to a theme that

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characterizes much modern narrative theory in distinction to classical structural narratology. They also relate to experiences outside the realm of narrative reading. I  will address the question of which term to choose later; until then I will use the neutral colorless word “i-experience” for all these cases. The reason for this term is that the word that seems to me most apt, insofar as it covers a wide field of applications, begins with an “i”: it is the Swedish noun inlevelse, and it fits fine with all the examples I will use. Inlevelse is translated “empathy” in my Swedish-English dictionary and Einfühlung in my Swedish-German dictionary. The latter word is the theoretical key word in Theodor Lipps’s influential writings on aesthetics, psychology, and the basis of the humanist disciplines from the turn of century 1800 to 1900. In the English translation of Lipps, the psychologist Titchener introduced the former term in this sense in English. The key term Einfühlung was used in German philosophy and psychology before Lipps, but he gave it a more diversified application: as a relation between a human subject and objects, which we animate when we are perceiving them; as a relation to landscapes, which we “humanize”; as a relation to art works—“mood empathy”; and, finally, as a relation to other human beings. I will not use these four categories, but in the spirit of Lipps, I will widen the field a bit more than usual when discussing narrative immersion. Thus, i-experiences include, in addition to a reader’s i-experience of a narrative world, an actor’s i-experience of the role she is playing or rehearsing; a person’s i-experience of a fictive character, or another real person; a spectator’s i-experience of a football match; a listener’s i-experience of a piece of music; a spectator i-experience of landscape painting; a player’s i-experience of a tricky situation in a game of chess; and a TV watcher’s i-experience of the decapitation of a prisoner executed by a member of the organization IS.4 The nonliterary cases will be examined first. The actor’s relation to the role being played and emphatic relations to fictive and real persons may all be labeled “identification,” a relation that in turn may be analyzed in terms of sharing. Thus, identification in this context implies experiencing oneself as sharing something with someone else, fictive or factual, for instance, field of vision, thoughts, feelings, beliefs, or impulses: in one word, experiencing oneself as sharing experiences with someone else. The choice of the reflexive form—that the subject experiences herself as something—is motivated by the fact that mere sharing of beliefs or anything else does not yield identification. I do not identify with a person X, simply because X believes the same as I do. Sharing experiences are not even the same as knowingly

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having a similar experience. Rather, it often means something like consciously co-experiencing something. The i-experience of the football match may also include elements of “sharing”: the audience may, for instance, share emotions and desires with the favorite team; this identification may go much further and include strong shared experiences of tension and relief visible as muscular reflexes. Such physical elements may also be present in narrative or theatrical i-experiences; it is, however, extra pronounced in connection with sport. When the spectators take a stand for one of the teams, momentarily or for the whole match, they often experience themselves as participating in the game, contributing to the success of the favored team, not only by pure will but also by more physical contributions, indicated by bodily reactions. The narrative reader’s i-experience may, however, also be of a slightly different type. The first example previously mentioned—a reader’s i-experience of a narrative—may include what I  have referred to as “identification” or “empathy.” It may also be a case of directness or immediacy—which is defined as the reader’s experience of herself as being in direct, non-mediated epistemic contact with what happens in the story, something she knows is not the fact—or immersion, presence, or transportation. Transportation, as used by Richard Gerrig, refers to the reader’s experience and feeling of having been transported to the narrative world when reading, whereas presence refers to a reader’s experience of being at the spot, that is, at the time and place of the story events. Identification may be taken as a species of presence. When you experience this, you share the feelings, thoughts, or vision field of a character; you also feel like being there. If you experience that you share the character’s interest (which goes beyond sharing an experience with someone else), you probably do so more strongly at a moment in the story and in the process of reading when something important with respect to this interest is considered at stake—you feel that your experience of a shared interest is particularly acute at a specific time, the same time as it is acute for the character.5 Nevertheless, we may have presence without identification. The reader can, so to speak, be on the spot—she can experience herself as being at some fashionable banquet without identifying with anyone there. Thus, as a preliminary conclusion we can use “presence” to sum up several of the i-experiences on the list. The content of this position may be formulated as follows: the subject experiences herself as being at a certain place and time, an experience that she knows is only imaginary. Like “presence,” the term

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“transportation” is a spatial metaphor, but it has the disadvantage of putting an undue stress on the movement from the real to the imagined situation. The first term of the array of immersive metaphors is “absorption.” It refers to an intensification and redistribution of attention. The redistribution has the consequence not only that the attention which is directed toward what the subject is absorbed by is increased but also that the light on the rest of the attentional spectrum is decreased. Two of the cases mentioned previously may serve as illustrations—playing chess and listening to music. Even if the transportation metaphor is often used concerning music—you are carried away—I believe the most intense musical experience is better described by absorption: you are filled with the music, and the rest of the surrounding world dies away. The absorbed chess player may of course adopt the perspective of the opponent, but he could as well just imagine a variety of moves—his own and his opponents—and the probable outcomes of these different options. The intense absorption in these cases does not necessarily combine with imaginary shifts of identity or location. However, absorption is intimately linked to a sense of “presence” other than the one I intend in my list. When you are absorbed, you may experience a more intense relation to the present moment, the moment you actually and literally occupy, not any fictive, just imagined moment. This concentration on the actual moment does not necessarily mean that cases of absorption differ from identification/empathy, and from presence, immersion, and immediacy, by lacking the imaginative part that is characteristic of the other mentioned kinds of iexperience. As mentioned, the chess player imagines possible moves. Listening to music is often described as containing a sense of metaphorical movement— the music goes up and down, it swings, it approaches and withdraws, that is, the listener entertains in kinesthetic imagination. However, even if my examples involve imaginary processes, absorption does not necessarily combine with imagination. I  subscribe to Ryan’s critical remarks on the use of “immersion”: “The term immersion has become so popular in contemporary culture that people tend to use it to describe any kind of intensely pleasurable artistic experience or any absorbing activity. In this usage, we can be immersed in a crossword puzzle as well as in a novel . . . I would like to single out . . . a specific type of immersion, one that presupposes a textual world” (2001: 14). In other words, there is absorption without immersion. As will be clear in what follows (in the section Immediacy: Functions), there is also immersion without absorption. As defined in the quote from Ryan in the introduction, immersion points to both immediacy (or directness) and presence: the world of the narrative work “acquires the presence of an autonomous, language independent reality.” As

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said, all three examples on identification or shared experiences belong under the heading presence, as do the i-experiences of the football audience, and, of course, the experience of immersion into the world of a narrative. However, their status with respect to immediacy is not as clear. When I identify with Ofelia or Raskolnikov, I experience myself as having direct access to something that is only mediated by an actor or a text, but identifying with Barack Obama or having an i-experience in a football stadium are different—the man and the match are not representations. What about imagining chess configurations and listening to music? The player may have a feeling of being there, at a chessboard with imagined positions of the pieces, and the music lover may likewise experience herself as being in a space where the imaginary movements occur. The rhetoric of immediacy at first seems to fit fine as well: the player sees, metaphorically speaking, the imagined chessboard, and the listener may have the impression of directly experiencing the musical movements. Nevertheless, we should distinguish between immediacy as a semiotic metaphor for experiencing something represented as being directly, not medially, encountered and other senses, for instance, vividly imagined, with no mention of representationality. However, even after such precautions, the music example cannot be so easily dismissed. Even if the music does not represent in the same denotative way as words and representational pictures do, it may express feelings and movements and more, and expression in this aesthetic sense can be construed as a referential relation (as in Goodman 1981). The decisive question is what we should count as instances of semiotic mediation. Words, certainly, and still pictures, moving pictures, representational dance, and many other phenomena are media. Directness (or immediacy), defined along these lines, does not preclude mental operations such as making reflections or drawing inferences or making interpretations. Rather, whether expression, and consequently music, should belong here is a matter of stipulation. Thus, according to this mini investigation, “immediacy” and “directness” point more specifically to experiences of narrative reading and receptions of narrative works in other media than the alternative terms. There is, however, another fundamental criterion that separates music and immersive literature from the rest of the cases. This criterion is functional. The rehearsing actor identifying with her character does so in order to make a good performance. Empathy in real life is usually considered to be the best way to understand your fellow human being, an understanding that is of vital importance for every human. The lack of this capacity is usually considered to be a severe handicap. The support of your football team, which presupposes your

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experiences of immediacy, will increase the chance that they will win, and the chess player’s concentration on different situations on the board will supply him with the counterfactual data necessary for a successful game. In all these cases the experiences of immediacy have obvious functions. On the other side of this borderline, we find narrative and musical experiences of immediacy. I do not claim that these experiences lack function, only that they do not have generally recognized and obvious functions. One line of reasoning could be to argue that the narrative experiences of immediacy are instrumental with respect to some of the functions already mentioned. The emphatic reading of narratives may make us better empathizers in real life; or, encountering many different situations in a story will make us better on counterfactual planning and anticipating. Nevertheless, even if this is true, it is not obviously true, and it does not cover all kinds of narrative experiences of immediacy, and, finally, it says nothing about musical immediacy experiences. This conclusion is negative; it mentions a factor missing in aesthetic contexts, namely an obvious function, but this also means that it points to an exciting field of questions still to reflect on. For example, what is the function of narrative and musical experiences of immediacy, or what is the function of narrative and music? At the end of this article, in the section Triggers of Immediacy, I will come back to the question of function with respect to literature; my reflections will provide one more argument for preferring “immediacy” (or “directness”) when referring to the i-experience of narrative reading.

2. Illusions: Forgeries One of the terms left over in the earlier terminological discussion is “illusion,” the word taken to mean “a false or unreal perception” or “a deceptive appearance or impression” (Concise Oxford Dictionary, 10th ed.) or something possessing the potential to induce inaccurate perceptions, appearances, or impressions in a considerable degree. Werner Wolf has argued for a slightly different concept, “aesthetic illusion,” defined sui generis, but not as a subconcept under the general sense of the word (2004, 2008, 2013; see also Wolf ’s essay in the present volume). However, in most aspects our disagreements are only terminological. For instance, the “double-layered” nature of aesthetic illusion (Wolf 2008:  103)— which implies that we know that we are not deluded—is part of the very definition of Wolf ’s concept (he contrasts his term to “delusion” [2008: 101]). In the

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present article, the very same feature is a strong argument against calling the experience an illusion.6 I will discuss from a comparative perspective the question of whether the experience of immediacy is illusory in the indicated general sense, a perspective containing paradigmatic visual illusions and forgeries (in the present section) and literary dummies (in the next section), and the two basic kinds of illusions—illusions that concern what triggers them and illusions out of the blue, for instance, sleep dreams. However, first I want to mention one basic kind of fictional narrative illusion candidate: the illusion of literary fictionality. When we read a story, we read it as true. If it is a factual story or a factual part of a fictional story, we may take it to be true, but even when we read a fictional story that we know is false, we read it as true. This is reflected by how we, witty narratologists or just ordinary readers, talk about fiction, by what we expect, and how we react. We talk about made up characters as if were they existing persons, we form theories about “truth in fiction,” and we expect logical consistency and become puzzled when we meet contradictions, as if we were expecting statements of fact. This illusion will normally not make us believe that the text is true; on the contrary, we typically know all of the time that the illusion (if we choose calling it so) is nothing but an illusion. As the characterization of fiction reading as taking-as-true is only preliminary, I will soon come back to this issue. Now, to paradigmatic visual illusions. One of the best known examples consists of two equally long parallel straight lines: one with arrow heads pointing in opposing directions, and one with inversed arrow heads. In spite of the fact that the two lines are of equal length, the one with the inversed arrow heads seems definitely longer. If you have not met this figure before, you will probably not only see this line as longer than the other but also will believe that it is. This is also an example of an illusion triggered by its object, the two parallel lines. A few stipulations may be helpful for comparisons: S is the human subject of the illusion; T is what triggers the illusion; I is the illusory predicate. In our example, S takes T as being I, that is, the one who looks at the two lines takes them as being unequally long, and this effect is achieved by the design of the drawing. We may form an “illusion statement” by saying that T is I, in this case, that the two lines are not equally long. The trigger may make us believe that the illusion statement is true, but not necessarily; even after the subject has been informed about the facts, the illusion of the length of the lines remains: S still sees one line as longer than other. The term “illusion” does not entail belief.

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Are there any literary examples similar, at least distantly similar, to the arrow figure? There is forged literature, which is literature that consists of what Umberto Eco calls “forgeries ex nihilo”—that is forgeries, not of existing works, but so to speak, new works by Shakespeare or Goethe (1990). In 1767, fifteenyear-old Thomas Chatterton began his short career (he committed suicide in 1770) as a poet and forger. With much help from a Chaucerian dictionary, he wrote poems purported to be created by the priest Thomas Rowley and other medieval characters. They were written on scraps of old parchment, which Chatterton claimed he had found in the cathedral in his hometown Bristol. For a short while some readers, among them the medieval fan Horace Walpole, were taken in by Chatterton’s writings. There is one obvious difference between the mentioned visual illusion and the Chatterton case, or, for that matter, any literary example of purported illusionism. Though we use our eyes in both cases, this is a superficial feature with regard to the literary examples but not with regard to the two lines. We may also be taken in—or not be taken in, but still be aware of the illusion—when we listen to a Chatterton text read aloud, or when we read it with our fingers—that is, reading Braille. Thus, the literary examples are multimodal, and the figure with parallel lines is distinctively visual, nothing else. Thus, let us take a visual—and only a visual—forgery as an example: Hans van Meegeren’s Vermeer forgeries. After many years as a painter in the tradition of the seventeenth-century Dutch master painters, van Meegeren started a second career at about 1930—he became a successful forger. During the Nazi occupation his claimed Vermeer painting Christ and the Adulteress was sold to a German Nazi banker, who in turn sold it Hermann Göring for a sum corresponding to 7 million Euros today. When the painting was brought back to Amsterdam after the war, van Meegeren was arrested for having sold a highly valuable Dutch artwork to the Nazis. He then preferred to confess a minor crime, that the painting was a forgery. Experts soon confirmed this. This case is a parallel to Chatterton’s parchments: they are both forgeries ex nihilo, and they were both tokens, that is, material, unique objects, which were claimed by Chatterton and van Meegeren to be genuine art works by a medieval monk and a celebrated Dutch seventeenth-century painter. Furthermore, they were both taken as such, for a while, by rather competent contemporaries. Finally, after a short time, they were both revealed as forgeries by expert examination. There is one more difference—in addition to the modal difference—between Chatterton’s literary forgery and van Meegeren’s fake Vermeer painting. What

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makes the poems and other writings pieces of literature are the words used, that is, the type forgery. The printed copies of the parchment original are as much fakes as the original itself, that is, both type and token are forgeries. If van Meegeren’s Christ and the Adulteress creates the illusion of being a genuine Vermeer, this is not only a purely visual illusion. Like the illusion with the two lines, we have only a token illusion, or, better, the distinction does not apply in this case. If we consider the figure with the two parallel lines as a token of a type, then any figure with two long horizontal lines of roughly equal length, one with arrow endings and one with inversed arrow endings, is a token of that type; this token is in the same modus as van Meegeren’s painting but not in the same class with regard to type-token distinction. Chatterton’s poems are like the arrows’ tokens of a type, but they do not belong to the same sensory modus, and the poems and the painting are different both with respect to the type-token distinction and sensory modus. Thus, one criterion puts van Meegeren’s work in the same class as the arrows, and another criterion puts Chatterton’s works in the same class as the arrows. However, with respect to the supposed illusory effect, it seems intuitively more accurate to group the two forgeries mentioned together, both in contrast to the parallel lines drawing. Why? As said, the visual illusion works independently of any preknowledge. We see one of the lines as longer than the other, and we still see it that way after we have been informed that they are of equal length. We might say that the illusion of the arrows is more immune to epistemic varieties or epistemic context. The revelation of the painted forgery will probably affect our perception of the painting more than correct information about the length of the lines. Roughly put: when we believe that the canvas is painted by Vermeer, we are inclined to see similarities to other Vermeer paintings and also to find parts and aspects to admire; when we know it is a fake we are inclined to see dissimilarities and find faults. For us today, it may even be hard to understand that anyone at any time has taken van Meegeren’s Christ and the Adulteress to be a Vermeer (cf. Goodman 1981: 110–11). The same is true of Chatterton’s writings: our belief about the prehistory of the text influences our perception and apprehension of it. The epistemic vulnerability or immunity also comprises what sort of knowledge the experiences depend on. The visual illusion depends less on cultural preknowledge: in order to experience the painting as a Vermeer or the text as written by a medieval monk, you must have some ideas about Vermeer paintings and medieval English. The effect of the parallel lines does not require any cultural knowledge. This difference with respect to epistemic context has a consequence for the methods of verification and falsification. To demonstrate the authenticity or

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inauthenticity of the fakes, many encyclopedic facts are needed. In contrast, to prove whether two parallel lines are equally long or not, anyone can make three tests: the first test that is actually applied, namely to look at the lines, and the second one, a more safe test, is to cut out one of lines and put it close to the other one, and the third test, also very reliable, is to measure the lines with a yardstick. Finally, the illusion of the fakes involves some presumed facts about the history of and the emergence of the stimulus, that is, the painting and the text you are looking at. The illusion of the parallel lines does not.

3. Illusion: Literary dummies and fiction One step away from forgeries we find what I  would like to call literary dummies. One example is Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719. The appearance of the first edition makes clear the illusory potential of the book. The title page does not contain any reference to the real author, Daniel Defoe, and his name does not occur anywhere else on or in the book, a fact that in combination with the realism that permeates the whole novel has made some readers believe that the book is written by Robinson himself.7 This illusionistic device is also found in many novels of the same genre in the eighteenth century, that is, fictional novels taking the appearance of an established factual narrative genre, such as published letter collections, an autobiography, a travelogue, and so forth. For instance, the first edition of Goethe’s novel, Werther, from the end of the century contains no mention of Goethe. The book appears as published letters, edited and commented by Werther’s friend Vilhelm. Literary dummies have the appearance of something that they are not—that is, instances of factual narrative genres. In addition to Defoe and Goethe, many of the most prominent Western eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers, such as Montesquieu, Richardson, Kierkegaard, Swift, and many others, produced dummies, and it is still a popular form of fiction. A dummy looks like a forgery to such an extent that it is sometimes taken for either a factual narrative or a factual narrative fake. The difference is, of course, the claims made: the audience knows, or is supposed to know, that it reads a dummy, not a factual book or a fake. Dummies have more characteristics in common. Here are two: 1. The illusion operates (like Chatterton’s forgery) on two levels: the type level and the token level. The particular copy that I hold in my hand

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is—according to the content of the book—a copy of a text that is same spelled with and generated from an original text, the manuscript written by Robinson himself. 2. A dummy does not represent an instance of the factual genre in question. A copy of Robinson Crusoe does not represent an authentic autobiographical travel account, in the sense a portrait of Robinson represents a man. Representation, fictional and factual, is either self-representational or it points to something that exists (albeit, sometimes only fictionally) independently of the symbol representing it. We make believe that Robinson is a man who exists or has existed somewhere independently of the book we read. Further, he is supposed (or imagined or make-believed) to exist somewhere out there. If the book were true, he would exist, or have existed, somewhere out there. This works fine with descriptions and illustrations of the man Robinson, but not with the relation between the dummy and its hypothetical real counterpart. If we assume that the text in the novel Robinson Crusoe is authentic, it does not represent a factual text, it is that very factual text. Moreover, if we assume that all copies of the text in our hand had never existed, then neither would the authentic text have existed. If our text were true, it would not represent another text because there is only room for one of them. These characteristics are valid for all kinds of dummies. If we regard a doll lullabied by a child as a dummy, a baby dummy, the idea of representation will meet troubles similar to the book Robinson: the supposedly represented baby and the supposed representation of the baby, that is, the doll, would occupy the same space. Thus, dummies are not representations in the standard sense of the word. The book Robinson Crusoe does not represent an authentic travelogue; it presents itself as an authentic travelogue.8 I will not go deeper into this, but instead integrate the literary dummies into the comparative scheme. What are the differences and similarities between the dummies, and the visual illusion and the forgeries described earlier, and the dummies and the forgeries? In addition to this, we can bring into the picture what I initially and provisionally referred to as the illusion of taking a fictional text as true. The comparison between Robinson, literary dummies in general, and forgeries on the one hand, and the visual illusion on the other, shows, not surprisingly, that the expected reception of the novel is much closer to the reception of forgeries than to the experience of the two parallel lines. To experience the

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novel as an autobiographic travelogue requires a certain amount of encyclopedic information, the same kind of information that would be collected to argue for the authenticity of novel, a line of argument that should be balanced by counterarguments against the same thesis. Though the standard interpretations of the novel do not yield the belief that the book is an authentic travelogue, some such readings have occurred, and they are probably sensitive to a convincing refutation, like the forgeries, and in contrast to the illusion of the arrows. To put it briefly, the reception of dummies is not epistemically immune; dummies presuppose much more cognitive labor than the visual illusion with the two straight parallel lines. Finally, like the fake and unlike the parallel lines, the illusion generated by the literary dummy is about its own history, its coming into existence. How does the general preliminary characterization of reading fiction as true fit in here? The characterization S(ubject) takes T(rigger) as I(llusion) works well: the reader takes the text as true. Nevertheless, the illusion statement—“the text is true”—is not, as it should be, necessarily false. As many fictionologists have pointed out, fictionality does not imply falsity. One example is taken from the first paragraph of Hemingway’s short story “Hills Like White Elephants”: On this side [of Ebro] there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. ([1927] 1987: 211)

This text might very well be true, that is, such a situation might very well have occurred. However, we, the skilled readers, do not attend to what we read in such terms, that is, we do not ask ourselves whether we actually have been informed of any facts by reading this text. On the other hand, we relate to the content of the narrative as if it were informative. We talk about it in that way, we expect consistency, and so on. The corresponding illusion statement, “The reader experiences that she is informed that there was a curtain made by bamboo beans” (and so on), is, as it should be, a false statement. Thus, I have changed the characterization of fictionality by exchanging the static property of truth to the dynamic property of being informed, and by moving the emphasis from the text to the reader.9 In this interpretation of what constitutes fictional reading we have left the category hitherto in focus:  illusions about what triggers the illusion. Instead, we have here a case of an illusion about the state of mind of the illuded subject.

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There is, of course, a strong connection between this experience—to be as informed—and the literary dummy-experience. The dummy-experience is a consequence and special application of the being as informed-experience. However, there is also a significant difference: the reader of Defoe’s novel is as informed that the book she is holding in her hands is an autobiographic travelogue, but the reader of Hemingway’s novel is not as informed about anything concerning the text she is looking at. It is no part of the story. The general fictional experience belongs to the field of hallucination, illusions that are not about what triggers them. It can be described as being about the experiencing subject: I experience myself as seeing pink elephants.

4. Triggers of immediacy Immediacy as defined as “the reader experience of herself as being in direct, non-mediated epistemic contact with what happens in the story, something she knows is not the fact,” points to an experience that, like the fictional experience, is not about what triggers it but about the experiencing subject. However, not being about its triggers does not mean it is without identifiable triggers. I will approach the question of whether or not narrative immediacy belongs to the category of illusion by reflecting on three of the relevant triggers: point of view, temporal matching, and suspense, all three often mentioned in this context. The previous quote from Hemingway exemplifies a type of external point of view—that is, the landscape is described as seen by a hypothetical viewer— and the last chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, representing Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness, exemplifies a verbal type of internal point of view. If we take away the last sentence from the Hemingway quote, and let the passage begin with “The American sat at a table in the shade,” then the text would be taken as representing another kind of internal point of view, predominantly perceptual. An internal perceptual point of view may also be in the grammatical first person. The following brief piece by Lydia Davis, entitled “Hand,” may be taken as an example: “Beyond the hand holding this book that I’m reading, I see another hand lying idle and slightly out of focus—my extra hand” (Davis 2009: 530). In all these cases, there is an appeal to the reader to experience herself as being in direct epistemic contact with what is represented in the text.10 Temporal matching means that events and states of affairs described in the text follow the temporal succession of the reading. This does not mean that every new sentence represents something occurring after what is described in the previous sentence.

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A temporally matching discourse may be construed, like the Hemingway quote, as representing simultaneous or overlapping events and states of affairs. The key relation is not “after,” but “after or at the same time as”—that is, a reflection of the order of immediate experience. The third category, suspense, also accommodates well with the cognitive definition of immediacy—when you are in suspense you are looking forward, often with awe or hopefulness, to what will come, and you experience what happens in the actual moment in this perspective. In one word, the three triggers constitute an argument for the chosen definition. This common ground may be put in this way: point of view, temporal matching, and suspense are three independent but combinable ways of suggesting a first-person perspective, ways of making the reader adopt that perspective, figuratively speaking. This common ground makes the diversity of point of view a coherent category.11

5. Literary illusions? It requires little reflection to realize that the question of whether or not literary works are illusive has to give way to more relativized questions:  Does a certain category of literature—forgeries, dummies, or works triggering the feel of immediacy—contain many illusive instances, more or less numerous than the other categories? Is illusion a goal or a function of all or almost all of the members of any of these categories? Does the distinction between illusions about the trigger and the subject play any role in this context? With one exception, I believe that the answer to these questions is no. The exception is immediacy. One reason for this negative answer is the gradual nature of illusiveness. Like the triggers mentioned earlier, the psychological effect of verisimilitude and even illusion concerns more and less. Forgeries are more or less convincing, the recipients are more or less easily taken in, and the same goes for dummies and narrative fiction in general. More readers have taken Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe for a genuine travelogue than Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Orson Welles’s radio version of Invasion from Mars was taken by many listeners to be a catastrophic factual report, but such a reaction is not representative for fictional reception at large. One characteristic of forgeries and dummies mentioned earlier also characterizes narrative fiction in general: the reception is in comparison to the visual illusion of the two lines and also in comparison to many illusions out of the blue more sensitive to the epistemic context. The parallel lines and a mirage in the desert remain illusions after having been exposed. However, we may

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also argue that the visual illusion with the parallel lines may be exposed (albeit, without being destroyed) in a much easier way than forgeries and dummies and fiction in general. We have to bring knowledge from without to demonstrate that literary forgeries are forgeries, that dummies and other works of fiction are just fiction. We cannot expose them by just investigating them, for example, by measuring them. There is no visible difference between a dummy and what it pretends to be, or a fake text and the same spelled text that it is claimed to be. There is not necessarily any textual difference between a fictional and factual biography.12 Historical research is demanded, and the imported knowledge differs a bit between the Chatterton case and Robinson Crusoe. In the former case some general knowledge of medieval English is enough, but in the latter case much more specific historic information must be found. If we argue along these lines—also for fictional literature in general, not just dummies—we have an argument for saying that the novel Robinson Crusoe is a forceful literary illusion. However, the contrast is still there: the illusive effect of the novel, but not of the parallel lines and the mirage, is circumscribed and threatened by the epistemic surroundings. Of these two criteria of illusive effectiveness—epistemic nonsensitivity and difficulty of falsification—neither applies to narrative immediacy. Our mistaken experience of having an authentic first-person experience when we read a novel or look at a representational picture would be swept away if we became clear about our mistake, for example, we mistake a picture of a dog for a real dog, but then discover the correct state of affairs. In addition to being epistemically sensitive, the mistaken experience is also easy to prove false: put a hand on the surface of the dog picture. The conclusion is that neither literary or pictorial forgeries nor literary or pictorial dummies (or fictional narratives in general) can compete with paradigmatic visual illusions or illusory mirages or sleep dreams when it comes to illusive effectiveness. A painter may have the intention to make the spectator believe that he sees a dog, and the maker of a fake, of course, has a similar deceptive purpose, but, even if lifelikeness is often regarded as an artistic merit, the function of art is not to fool its audience. Moreover, nothing can be concluded about the degree of illusiveness regarding the categories of forgeries, dummies, and fictional narratives. The only positive thing to say is that literary immediacy has less deceptive potential as a category, a consequence of being both epistemically sensitive and easy to falsify. To produce examples of what might be illusions of immediacy, we have to turn to pictures (as I  have done earlier) or other clear-cut iconic examples. Nevertheless, the illusory status of such cases may be questioned—maybe Tamar Gendler’s term “belief-discordant

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alief ” is a better characterization of the experience of extreme reality-suggestive movie scenes. Gendler defines aliefs in general as “innate or habitual propensities to respond to (possibly accurate) apparent stimuli in ways that are associate and automatic,” and contrasts them to beliefs that are “evidentially sensitive commitments to content.” Her examples of belief-discordant aliefs resemble some of the i-experiences mentioned previously: When a sports fan watching a televised rerun of a baseball game loudly encourages her favorite player to remain on the second base, or when a cinema-goer watching a horror film shrieks and clutches her chair or when a person walking across a transparent glass balcony trembles as she walks out to the railing. (Gendler 2010: 14)

6. Immediacy: Functions Thus, the function of narrative immediacy is not to evoke illusions. Before we present any positive functional hypothesis, we have to decide the scope of immediacy: shall we restrict ourselves to strong, or even overwhelmingly strong, instances of i-experiences, like the examples of belief-discordant aliefs, or shall we allow for more faint ones? I suggest that the latter course is preferable. If “narrative immediacy,” or “immersion,” refers to reactions representative for most narrative reading experiences, it must be given a wide interpretation. A parallel to pictures may sharpen this point. If we approach the question of what constitutes a representational picture in terms of i-experiences by saying that it is generally true that spectators of dog pictures experience themselves as seeing a dog, we have to use a very elastic yardstick for measuring this experience. The spectator’s disposition to say “that’s a dog” about the picture or “that’s its nose” about a part of the picture will do. Both with regard to pictures and narratives, the wide interpretation invites much more interesting functional speculations. Thus, as was stated, there is immersion without absorption. So, what is the non-obvious function of narrative immediacy? In the preliminary discussion of the functions of i-experiences, I mentioned the idea that the aesthetic versions may be seen in continuity with children’s and animal’s games (Walton 1990), as preparations for cognitive tasks and refinements of cognitive competences, crucial in real life at least at the time of emergence. Several scholars and scientists, such as Steven Pinker (2007) and Michelle Scalise Sugiyama (2005), have presented similar ideas about narrativity at large in a more explicit evolutionary vocabulary. Narratives may have been an adaption to the

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environmental demands that our hunting and gathering ancestors met in the distant past. Representations of human or humanoid characters encountering conflicts, and reaching resolutions, offer problem-solving exempla that can be used to refine the capacities for finding similar solutions in real life—for the most part, social problems. In particular, narratives can provide a training field for what is usually referred to as “theory of mind,” that is, the ability to form ideas about what other people think, want, feel, and intend. Since narratives are usually about intentional beings, they offer useful examples to remember and exploit, and both the acts to narrate and to listen to narrations calibrate the listener’s/teller’s theory of mind. This, it seems, is a possible function for narrative immediacy. However, in order to spell out more clearly why narratives, but not other kinds of representations, so aptly provide a solution to urgent needs, the role of immediacy can be elaborated in two more directions, both essential to non-mediated cognition and both easy to integrate into the adaptive picture.13 I  previously referred to the common denominator of the three immediacy triggers point of view, temporal matching and suspense with the term “first-person perspective.” This phrase and the words “immediacy” and “directness” are metaphors that carry over something from their literal origins, as metaphors do. How does this literally speaking cognitive attitude and activity differ from the other kind, that is, from mediated cognition with no traces of immediacy? The information received through reading and listening to spoken language (the two dominant forms of mediation) is propositional. You become informed that so-and-so is (or is supposed to be) the case. Of course, so functions non-mediated information as well: I look out through the window and see that it rains. However, it often includes much more: I may be unable to spell out how it looks when the rain hits the pavement outside, how the rain sounds, and much more. This kind of information is carried over to narratives, that is, it is still there after the term “immediacy” is transformed into a metaphor. I can learn how it is to be as indolent as Mersault, or as desperate as Anna Karenina, and even how it is to be a bat. In other words, one function of immediacy is to give the reader or listener much richer information than the purely propositional alternative, and consequently much more resourceful information. The first-person perspective also points to another functional aspect of narrative immediacy: its easiness, its low costs. The first-person perspective is always on—we constantly attend more or less to what is around us and what is within us. We and our ancestors have done so for millions of years. It is always at hand; it is the most well-known and deepest habituated cognitive attitude we have.

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A metaphoric transfer carries some of this easiness over to narrative reception (and also to other instances of immediacy and i-experiences in general, in particular pictorial reception). This means that narrative is a cheap tool for other purposes, easy to make, easy to get. This may be the most basic function of narrative immediacy.14

7. A comment on self-awareness and self-oblivion Finally, a post scriptum about something that may seem to be a problem. I have described the reader’s reception of fiction as implying self-awareness— the reader experiences herself as being informed that something is the case against the background of her knowledge that she is not. Similarly, narrative immediacy is described as the reader’s self-experience: the reader experiences herself as being directly, non-medially, informed that something is the case against the background of her knowledge that she is not. This emphasis on the reader’s self-awareness fits well when the reader identifies with a character or when she puts herself in the narrative situation applying the themes, dilemmas, and situations described to herself. This is in accordance with the evolutionary ideas hinted at in the previous section. However, this view seems to conflict with another generally recognized effect, and even function, of experiences of narrative immediacy: the effect and function of letting the reader escape from her real life. The crucial question is how much of the self we should admit in the word “herself.” Some ideas from the philosophy of language may help. In many contexts, a referring expression may not be substituted by another co-referring expression without affecting meaning and truth-value. When we talk about beliefs, the words making up the content of the belief is sensitive in this respect. If I say that I believe that Lydia Davis has written the text “Hand,” this does not mean that I believe that the author of the book Can’t and Won’t has written “Hand,” albeit it is true that Lydia Davis is the author of Can’t and Won’t. The same is also true in contexts about experiences and other mental acts and contexts about someone referred to by the first-person pronoun “I”. Thus, when I say that I experience myself as being tired, this does not imply that I am aware of myself as having been born in Stockholm, as working on this very paper, or as being dressed in jeans and a blue shirt. The philosophical analyses of the proper use of the firstperson pronoun cuts very deep—see in particular Castaneda (1999)—but it suffices to say here that the reader references (“herself ”) to the object of experience

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in the abovementioned definitions of fictional uptake and narrative immediacy are not equivalent with any descriptive phrase denoting the same person. The definitions do not contain any first-person pronoun, but the expression of the experience referred to does:  “I (= the reader) experience myself as . . .” In other words, the experiences mentioned in the definitions presuppose nothing more than an extremely thin self-awareness. The amount of selfhood we admit differs from case to case. Consequently, the definitions accord with both selfapplication and self-oblivion.

Notes 1 Whether or not immersive reactions are confined only to fiction (as in Ryan’s definition) depends on how we define “fiction.” I will not discuss this in the present essay but will only point to the fact that we often respond immersively to autobiographies and works of other genres usually recognized as nonfictional. 2 The word “immediacy” used in a similar sense is a key term in Bolter and Grusin (2000); however, in this work it is not applied to literature. 3 Of course, this list is incomplete; we can add “flow,” “presentness,” “simulation,” and many more. Werner Wolf presents alternative terms and sources (2008: 102). 4 The last case was suggested to me by Greger Andersson as a reminder of the fact that there are repulsive i-experiences. I want to add that this is true even in aesthetic contexts. 5 Chatman discusses the category “interest” under the heading of point of view (1978: 152–8; 1990: 140). It should be noted that his category is not experiential, not even mental. Cf. Rossholm (2012: 190–3). 6 Under the heading “Aesthetic Illusion: Definition,” Wolf writes that aesthetic illusion contains immersion that “is, however, counterbalanced by a latent rational distance, which operates owing the culturally acquired awareness of the difference between representation and reality” (2013: 52). 7 The complete title page runs: “THE LIFE AND STRANGE SURPRISING ADVENTURES OF ROBINSON CRUSOE, Of YORK, MARINER: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an uninhabited Island on the Coast of AMERICA, near the Mouth of the Great River OROONOQUES Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, where-in all the men perished but himself. WITH An Account how he was last as strangely deliver’d by PYRATES. Written by himself. LONDON: Printed for W. TAYLOR at the Ship of Pater- Noster-Row. MDCCXIX.” 8 On literary dummies, see Rossholm (2004: 181–99). 9 More elaborate versions of my ideas about fictionality are to be found in Rossholm (2004 and 2010).

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10 A more elaborate account of this point of view typology is presented in the chapter “Perspective” in Rossholm (2004). 11 Wolf presents six textual principles for aesthetic illusion in narrative fiction (2008: 110–12). One includes what I call point of view. Another one concerning “generating interest in the represented world” could be added to my proposal, and a third—“celare artem”—goes without saying, but I believe the remaining three overstate the role played in this context by what is usually referred to as verisimilitude. 12 But it would go too far to say that there are, in general, no textual differences between fictional and factual discourses, as Searle (1996) does; see Cohn’s (1999) criticism. 13 I want to emphasize that I do not claim that these “urgent needs” mean the same as environmental pressure, or that the solution is genetically coded. 14 Cf. Wolf ’s comments on the functions of aesthetic illusion (2008: 103–4, 2013: 52–3).

References Bolter, J. D. and R. Grusin (2000), Remediation. Understanding New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Castaneda, H.-N. (1999), The Phenomeno-logic. Essays on Self-Consciousness, edited by J. G. Hart and T. Kapitan, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Chatman, S. (1978), Story and Discourse Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Chatman, S. (1990), Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cohn, D. (1999), “Signposts of Fictionality. A Narratological Perspective,” in The Distinction of Fiction, 109–31, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Davis, L. (2009), The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis, London: Penguin Books Ltd. Eco, U. (1990), “Fakes and Forgeries,” in The Limits of Interpretation, 174–202, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gendler, T. S. (2010), Intuition, Imagination and Philosophical Methodology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gerrig, R. (1993), Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading, New Haven, London: Westview Press. Goodman, N. (1981), Languages of Art: An Approaches towards a Theory of Symbols, Sussex: Harvester Press Ltd. Hemingway, E. ([1927] 1987), “Hills Like White Elephants,” in The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway, 211–13, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Mendilow, A. A. (1952), Time and the Novel, London: Nevill.

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Pinker, S. (2007), “Towards a Consilient Study of Literature,” Philosophy and Literature, 31: 161–77. Rossholm, G. (2004), To Be And Not to Be: On Interpretation, Iconicity and Fiction, Bern: Peter Lang. Rossholm, G. (2010), “Fictionality and Information,” in P. Koťátko, M. Pokorný, and M. Sabates (eds.), Fictionality – Possibility – Reality, 19–31, Bratislava: aleph. Rossholm, G. (2012), “Narrative as Story Representation,” in G. Rossholm and C. Johansson (eds.), Disputable Concepts of Narrative Theory, 183–99, Bern: Peter Lang. Ryan, M.-L. (2001), Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Scalise Sugiyama, M. (2005), “Reverse-Engineering Narrative: Evidence of Special Design,” in J. Gottschall and D. S. Wilson (eds.), The Literary Animal. Evolution and the Nature of Narrative, 177–96, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Searle, J. (1996), “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse,” in Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts, 58–75, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walton, K. (1990), Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolf, W. (2004), “Aesthetic Illusion as an Effect of Fiction,” Style, 48 (3): 325–1. Wolf, W. (2008), “Is Aesthetic Illusion ‘illusion référentielle’? ‘Immersion’ in (Narrative) Representation and Its Relationship to Fictionality and Factuality,” Journal of Literary Theory, 2 (1): 99–126. Wolf, W. (2013), “Aesthetic Illusion,” in W. Wolf, W. Bernhart, and A. Mahler (eds.), Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media, 1–63, New York: Rodopi.

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Neither Here nor There, but Now Film Experience and the Aesthetic Illusion Enrico Terrone

1. Introduction: The Zhivago case In a sequence of Nanni Moretti’s film Palombella rossa (1989), the protagonist Michele Apicella and the other characters watch the movie Doctor Zhivago on television. They react as if the vicissitudes of Zhivago were happening now, in their own present.1 When Zhivago tries to get off the tram and reach Lara in the street, they cheer him by shouting, “Turn around!” “Knock!” “Run!” They behave like supporters who are watching a live broadcast of a sport event. Interestingly, they do not try to move in order to help Zhivago. They do not think of themselves as inhabitants of the fictional space. They know that Zhivago’s space is not their space, although they experience Zhivago’s time as if it was their present. They perceptually experience Zhivago’s pursuit of Lara as happening now although they know and feel that this event does not take place in their own space. In this paper, I will argue that Michele Apicella and the other characters of Palombella rossa undergo an aesthetic illusion whose nature is distinctively cinematic.

2. Aesthetic illusion in pictures Following Jonathan Lowe (1996), I conceive of standard perception as a sensory experience whose intentional object matches the real object causing the experience. From this perspective, a perceptual illusion is a sensory experience whose Intentional Object does not match the Real Object causing the experience; our

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perceptual system deceptively signals us that either there is something that actually is not there or something has a feature that it actually lacks. On the other hand, following Werner Wolf (2004), I  conceive of an aesthetic illusion as the spectator’s sense of having entered the represented world while at the same time keeping it at a distance. Still, the notions of “having entered the represented world” and “keeping it at a distance” are to be unpacked. I will try to do so first in the general case of the pictorial experience and secondly in the specific case of the experience of moving pictures. In the pictorial experience, we normally experience the picture’s surface, not the depicted scene, as the Real Object in our environment. In this sense, the pictorial experience remains a case of standard perception rather than a perceptual illusion (except for the limit case of trompe l’oeil). The peculiarity of the pictorial experience is that the primary Intentional Object, which matches the Real Object (the surface), is supplemented by a secondary Intentional Object (the depicted scene), which does not match anything real but does not seem to be here (in front of us, in our environment). Thus, in the pictorial experience there is no deceptive signal, no inclination to believe something wrong. The perception of the picture’s surface as being there neutralizes the possible illusion of the scene as being there. The illusion boils down to an unactualized possibility, an innocuous illusion, which at most could be actualized through monocular vision (for example, by looking to the picture with just one eye through a pipe). In fact in the ordinary pictorial experience, our perceptual system does not signal us either that there is something that actually is not there or that something has a feature that it actually lacks. Nevertheless, the depicted scene is not a mere figment of the imagination. It is not only sensory in format but also publicly experienceable and willindependent just as the real objects of perception. It is the object of a distinctive perceptual experience (which one might call seeming-to-see or innocuous illusion or parasitic perception), which supplements the perception of the picture’s surface. That it is to say, the perceptual experience of the depicted scene interferes with the perception of the surface. Our perceptual system signals us that there is a surface but finds it hard to show us the flatness of this surface (its being a flat patchwork of colors) since the depicted scene interposes between the surface and us. Richard Wollheim (1980) calls this experience “seeing-in” and describes it in terms of “twofoldness,” that is, the experience is constituted by both a “configurational fold” representing the picture’s surface and a “recognitional fold” representing the depicted scene.

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In sum, the viewer of a picture has a perceptual experience (whose distinctive features are sensory format, will-independence, public accessibility) of the depicted scene, and yet she does not perceive that scene as something real taking place in front of her, in her environment. In this sense we can characterize the experience of a picture as a sort of aesthetic illusion. The perceptual experience of the depicted scene that can provide the viewer with the impression of having entered that scene, and yet the perception of the picture’s surface prevents a genuine perceptual illusion by allowing the viewer to keep the depicted scene at a certain distance.

3. Aesthetic illusion in films Films are moving pictures provided with a temporal dimension. They can make us perceptually experience not only a scene but also its movements and changes (and possibly its sounds): not only a scene but also an event. Thus, a film allows us to answer two different questions. First, what is there? Second, what is going on? With respect to the first question, the answer of our perceptual system is the same as in the case of static pictures: in front of us, there is a surface, not a scene. Yet, with respect to the second question, our perceptual system is more sensible to the movements of the depicted things than to the changes of the picture’s surface. As Roman Ingarden puts it, “The spectator ceases to see the screen, and in its place sees in an almost perceptual manner things and people” ([1962] 1989: 326; my emphasis). On the one hand, the spectator continues to see the screen as the main object being here, in her egocentric space. On the other hand, the spectator ceases to see the screen and starts seeing scenes involving depicted things and people as the main event going on now, in her tensed time. Thus, the experience of a film scene involves a sense of (temporal) presentness without a corresponding sense of (spatial) presence (cf. Dokic 2012). In this sense, the pictorial experience of films, unlike that of static pictures, involves a sort of perceptual illusion, which supplements the aesthetic illusion with a temporal component. That is because the perceptual illusion of presentness, unlike that of presence, is not perceptually neutralized by the perception of the picture’s surface, namely the screen. The perceptual illusion of presentness can be only cognitively neutralized. Indeed, if the moving image is a live broadcast of a real event, the sense of presentness does not lead us to a perceptual illusion but rather to a veridical experience. In watching moving pictures

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we undergo a sense of presentness that is ontologically neutral. The depicted events that we see in the screen can either actually happen now, as in the case of live broadcasts, or do not happen now, as in the cases of documentaries and fiction movies. In the latter case the perceptual effect of events happening now contributes to the whole aesthetic illusion provided by fiction films. Remember the two components of the aesthetic illusion: “having entered the represented world” and “keeping it at a distance.” The sense of presentness that gives us the impression of events happening now enhances our sense of “having entered the represented world,” while the lack of a sense of presence, due to the perception of the screen as the Real Object in our environment, gives us a way of “keeping the represented world at a distance.” As Bernard Williams puts it, “[W]hile watching a film, we – in a sense – see what is happening in that world, but not in the same sense as that in which we see [real people], nor as that in which the characters see one another” (1973:  36). The first use of “see,” unlike the second and the third, does not involve a sense of spatial presence, but it still involves a sense of temporal presentness. The comparison between movies and live television is the key point in order to understand the aesthetic experience in film. The spectator of live television experiences events as happening now in an environment that is not hers. She feels a sense of presentness (events happening now) without a sense of presence (events happening here). The sense of presence concerns egocentric space, whereas the sense of presentness concerns tensed time. On the one hand, the spectator does not experience the depicted scene as being located in her egocentric space, that is, within a system of axes converging at her body. She just experiences that scene as being located within a system of axes converging at a certain perspective. She can only estimate relative directions of things and distances between those things, not absolute directions and distances of things with respect to her position in space. On the other hand, the spectator experiences the depicted scene in a tensed way, that is, as belonging to a series centered in a now. In fact, a perceptual experience of events should exhibit the main temporal feature of perception: representing the perceived events as presently unfolding, as happening now. As Le Poidevin puts it, “[W]hat we perceive, we perceive as present – as going on right now. . . . To perceive something as present is simply to perceive it” (2015: 1; see also Le Poidevin 2007 and Kriegel 2015). Perception lacks a temporal distinction corresponding to the spatial distinction between the here and the there. We cannot perceive events situated in different temporal locations of the series centered in the now. We cannot perceptually experience them as past or as future. We can only perceptually experience them in the now.

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4. The claim of presentness Gregory Currie (1995:  200)  calls “Claim of Presentness” the claim according to which the cinematic experience is tensed in such a way that the spectator experiences fictional events as happening now. Currie argues that the Claim of Presentness is wrong since it cannot take “anachronies” such as flashbacks into account. A film exhibits an anachrony when the temporal order of the narration does not comply with the temporal order of the story told. In the case of flashback, for example, a film depicts an event X after another event Y but in the objective order of the story X takes place before Y. Currie argues that if the spectator normally experienced fictional events as happening now, then, when faced with a flashback, she would experience herself shifted in the past, as if she was a time traveler.2 Yet this kind of experience does not show up while watching a film; hence, Currie rejects the Claim of Presentness, thereby stating that “cinema represents events . . . as standing in tenseless relations of priority and occurrence” (1995: 19). Currie’s argument basically is a reductio, which can be outlined in the following way: 1. While watching a film F, the spectator S experiences the depicted events as happening now (i.e., the Claim of Presentness). 2. S experiences a certain event X after having experienced another event Y 3. S acknowledges that X precedes Y in the objective order of the story, namely, X is a flashback. 4. In the shift (because of [2]) from the experience of Y as happening now (because of [1]) to that of X as happening now (because of [1]) but preceding Y (because of [3]), S must experiences herself as a time traveler who has been shifted in the past. 5. Spectators do not normally experience themselves as time travelers shifted in the past when they watch flashbacks. 6. The Claim of Presentness has to be rejected (because it leads to the contradiction between [4] and [5]). Premise (1) is nothing but the claim being investigated, namely the Claim of Presentness. Premises (2) and (3) are unquestionable inasmuch as they simply reflect the standard definition of a flashback. Still, it is debatable whether thesis (4) really follows from (1), (2) and (3); and it is debatable as well whether the further premise (5) really holds, and whether we should accept the conclusion (6). All of that depends on how we interpret the description “being shifted in the

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past” in (4) and (5). I will argue that the proper way of interpreting “being shifted in the past” makes thesis (4) compatible with premise (5), thereby explaining the experience of flashbacks without raising the contradiction that leads to the rejection of the Claim of Presentness. In Currie’s interpretation, “being shifted in the past” means “being shifted in a spatiotemporal location situated in the past.” This interpretation makes the Claim of Presentness incompatible with the normal functioning of the cinematic experience, since spectators who watch a flashback do not have the impression of leaving their seats in the movie theater. Still, as argued, a spectator can experience events as happening now without being forced to experience them as happening here. The case of live television suggests that the sense of presence and the sense of presentness are two distinct feelings, which are to be carefully kept distinct. The spectator of live television may undergo a sense of presentness without the need of a concomitant sense of presence involving a spatial relation between her body and what is perceived. She perceives the depicted events as situated in a temporal series (namely, tensed time) centered in her own now, and as taking place in this very now, but she does not perceive those events as situated in a spatial system (namely, egocentric space) centered in her own here.3 Since fiction films are moving pictures just as those constituting live television, filmmakers can exploit the same perceptual effect in order to provide film spectators with the experience of fictional events as happening now. That being the case, we can address the case of flashbacks that Currie uses in his argument against the Claim of Presentness. Let us consider a flashback that provides a spectator with an experience of an event Y as happening now followed by the experience of another event X as happening now yet preceding Y in the objective order of the story. The spectator switches from the experience of Y as happening now to that of X as happening now as if she switched from a live broadcast of an event to another one (for example, by means of her remote control). She is not forced to experience herself as shifted in another spatiotemporal location. Indeed, she is “shifted in the past” only in the sense that she acknowledges that X precedes Y in the objective temporal order or the story although she perceptually experiences X in the same way as she experienced Y just before, that is, as happening now. The shift is cognitive, not perceptual. This seems to be precisely the kind of experience that a flashback is aimed at producing, namely, a slight contrast between perceiving an event as if it was happening now and knowing that it has already happened. The untenable contradiction between (5) and (6) boils down to an admissible contrast between the spectator’s

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perceptual experience of the depicted events and her knowledge about them. The spectator keeps perceiving the events in the flashback in a tensed way, as happening now, even if she knows that these events stand in a tenseless relation of priority to those events that she perceived before. To sum up, the cinematic experience does not substantially change during flashbacks; it remains a perceptual experience of events as happening now. What changes is only the fictional world’s temporal location in which the spectator cognitively situates an event that she experiences as happening now. Let us call P(K) the experience of a certain event K as happening now. If P(A) follows P(B) in the subjective order of experience, the subject is inclined to infer that A follows B in the objective temporal order of the world represented by that experience. This inference is usually correct, but there can be cases in which it is not. In these cases the perceptual experience reveals to be a deceptive representation of the objective temporal order. This kind of deception can take place also in ordinary perception, for example, when we have an auditory experience P(S) of a sneeze of a person in front of us followed by an auditory experience P(T) of a thunder in the sky and we infer that the sneeze takes place before the thunder, but in fact it is the contrary: the thunder precedes the sneeze in the objective temporal order, and P(T) follows P(S) only because the thunder needs more time than the sneeze to travel from its origin to us. Even if we know that the thunder happened before the sneeze, we however perceive it as happening now, and therefore we undergo an inclination to wrongly locate it after the sneeze— an inclination that we can neutralize only at a higher cognitive level. The case of the flashback functions in a similar way. We know that the event X precedes the event Y but our experience P(Y) precedes our experience P(X); therefore, we may undergo an inclination to wrongly locate Y after X in the objective temporal order—an inclination that we can neutralize only at a higher cognitive level. From this perspective, the experience of a flashback can be treated as a sort of perceptual illusion, since the spectator’s experience of Y as happening now followed by her experience of X as happening now, if not neutralized at a higher cognitive level, leads her to the wrong belief that Y precedes X in the objective temporal order of the story.4 Thus, we can compare the case of the flashback to a paradigmatic case of perceptual illusion, namely, the Müller-Lyer illusion. In experiencing the latter, we see two lines as different in length while we know that they are identical, so in experiencing a flashback we see an event happening now while we know that this event cannot happen now since it happened before another event that we already saw. Currie himself, in a later paper about time and narration,

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seems to suggest that the sense of presentness can function as a sort of perceptual illusion: The Müller-Lyer does not go away when careful measurement shows us that the lines are the same length. Perception represents their lengths as unequal despite our knowing that they are not. Similarly, when I come to realize that a distant star as seen by me now is displaying long past states, my experience of the star does not go from being an experience that represents the star as present to being one that represents it as past, and I do not know of any evidence that the experience can be changed in this respect even by long training. I suggest that we are stuck with the experience of time that we have. (2004: 92; my emphasis)

We are so “stuck with the experience of time that we have” that, although we know that a distant star existed in the past but no longer exists in the present, we keep seeing it as present. The Claim of Presentness goes one step further claiming that we are “stuck with the experience of time that we have” even when we watch a fiction film. We see fictional events as happening now, although we know that they are not taking place in our world. We do so because that is the way in which our perceptual system functions. And we see a fictional event as happening now even when we are faced with a flashback, although we know that, in the objective temporal order of the fictional world, the event that we are seeing cannot happen now since it precedes other events that we have already seen.

5. The imagined observer hypothesis In his criticism of the Claim of Presentness, Currie also states that “[t]he Claim of Presentness is a consequence of the Imagined Observer Hypothesis [IOH]” (1995:  201). According to this hypothesis, a spectator imagines perceiving fictional events thereby being forced to imagine either (IOH.i) that she has been moved into the fictional world or (IOH.ii) that the events occurring in the fictional world are such that they can be seen from her actual world.

According to Currie, the Claim of Presentness is essentially linked to the Imagined Observer Hypothesis. Conversely, I  contend that the Claim of Presentness is independent from the Imagined Observer Hypothesis and from its consequences. More specifically, the commitment of the Claim of Presentness to (IOH.i) can be avoided since we have shown that the Claim of Presentness

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involves only a sense of presentness, not a sense of presence, and the impression of being moved in the fictional world comes from the latter. Still, it remains to show that the Claim of Presentness has no commitment to (IOH.ii). Indeed, I  agree with Currie that “in most films, the possibility that the events of the story could be literally seen from another world is ruled out. Imagining that we see in an extramundane fashion would be more, not less, in conflict with the fiction” (2004: 98). However, as argued previously, a perceptual experience of depicted events as happening now does not involve the attribution of the property of causing this experience to those very events. Thus, a cinematic experience P of an event X is just an experience of X as happening now, not also an experience of X as causing P itself (cf. Rossholm 2004). Causation from events to the cinematic experience only concerns the genesis of that experience, not its phenomenology. The only plausible sense in which a spectator can conceive of herself as experiencing fictional events “in an extramundane fashion” comes from the combination of her perceptual experience of those events as happening now and her knowledge that there is no causal chain that connects her to the perceived events. Instead of foregrounding her further knowledge that the perceived events are nothing but representations (e.g., actors playing characters, or computergenerated images), the spectator can indulge in the imagination that she is undergoing an “extramundane” perceptual experience that does not require a causal transaction between the perceiver and the perceived events. I am not arguing that this is the kind of imagination that spectators normally deploy or that films normally require. I am just claiming that this is a kind of imaginative project that is compatible with the perceptual experience of films (for similar views, see Hopkins 2008 and Wilson 2011). And this is the only acceptable sense in which the Claim of Presentness may—though is not forced to—lead us to endorse the Imagined Observer Hypothesis.5

6. Conclusion: Back to Zhivago Let us go back to the characters of Palombella rossa who react to the movie Doctor Zhivago as if it was a live broadcast of a sport event. On the one hand, there is something exaggerated in their behavior. We do not normally behave like them while watching a fiction movie. On the other hand, this exaggeration, as a successful parody, highlights a relevant component of our behavior of film spectators. We do not outwardly behave like Palombella rossa’s characters, but

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we somehow feel sympathetic with them since our emotional engagement with fictional events is similar to theirs, though we do not externalize it in the way they do. Palombella rossa’s characters are much closer to us than the legendary spectators that ran away while watching Lumière Brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat. That is because films obey to the general rule that governs what Francesco Buonamici calls works of verisimilitude: “The work of verisimilitude in the spectator can never cause him—unless he be an imbecile—to mistake the thing representing for the thing represented” (Discorsi poetici nella Accademia fiorentina in difesa d’Aristotile; cited in Faas 1986: 62). In fact, Palombella rossa’s characters do not seem to be “imbecile” in the sense in which the putative fugitive spectators of L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat would seem to be. The behavioral responses of Palombella rossa’s characters are excessive in degree, but not substantially wrong. Unlike the putative spectators of L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat, Palombella rossa’s characters are not mistaking the thing representing for the thing represented. They are just treating one sort of moving image, namely fiction cinema, as if it was another one, namely live television. In this chapter, I have argued that this attitude elicits a peculiar aesthetic illusion, which significantly enriches our experience of film spectators.

Notes 1 Available online http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzvWp74TD8U. 2 Currie considers another possible line of defense of the Claim of Presentness, that is, the hypothesis according to which flashbacks, unlike normal scenes, exhibit a distinctive phenomenology that does not involve a sense of presentness. Yet he discards this hypothesis since no relevant phenomenological change shows up in the experience of flashbacks. That is why, is his view, the defender of the Claim of Presentness if forced to ascribe the experience of being shifted in the past to the spectator of a flashback. 3 This difference between the pictorial experience of space and that of time seems to depend on the fact that we experience the here as the point in space occupied by our body, whereas the now is simply experienced as the point in time where our experience occurs. That is to say that the experience of the now does not seem to require an awareness of our own body in the way in which the experience of the here does. Since the depicted events are perceived as detached from our body, those events cannot be experienced as related to our here but they can nevertheless be experienced as related to our now.

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4 For example, when we see Vincent and Jules talking about hamburgers in the second scene of Pulp Fiction, after having seen the robbery at the restaurant, we have the impression that the discussion about hamburgers takes place after the robbery, an impression that we will correct only later when we will discover that, in the objective order of the story, the robbery takes place after that discussion. 5 A more technical way of making this point is the following. When the spectator ascribes the vision of fictional events in an extramundane fashion to herself, she does so in a de dicto modality, which concerns the mode in which those events are presented. She does not ascribe this experience to herself in a de re (or, if you prefer, de ficto) modality, that is, she does do not think that fictional events are such as that they cause her extramundane experience of them. Fictional events do not have the property of causing perceptions of them in an extramundane fashion. Indeed, “causing” and “extramundane” are incompatible terms. The extramundane fashion just concerns the way in which the spectator relates to fictional events, not the way in which she conceives of those events causing her experience. It is worth noting that naïve realist accounts of perception make room for a conception of the perceptual experience that is not essentially linked to the notion of causation and that can also take the pictorial experience into account (cf. Martin 2012). The same point can be rephrased by exploiting the content/attitude distinction (cf. Kriegel 2015) and saying that the extramundane fashion does not concern the content of the spectator’s experience but only her attitude.

References Currie, G. (1995), Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Currie, G. (2004), “Can There Be a Literary Philosophy of Time?” in Arts & Minds, 84– 104, Oxford: Clarendon. Dokic, J. (2012), “Pictures in the Flesh: Presence and Appearance in Pictorial Experience,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 52 (4): 391–405. Faas, E. (1986), Shakespeare’s Poetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hopkins, Robert (2008), “What Do We See In Film?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 66 (2): 149–59. Ingarden, R. ([1962] 1989), The Ontology of the Work of Art, translated by J. T. Goldthwait, Athens: Ohio University Press. Kriegel, U. (2015), “Experiencing the Present,” Analysis, 76: 407–13. Le Poidevin, R. (2007), The Images of Time: An Essay on Temporal Representation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Le Poidevin, R. (2015), “The Experience and Perception of Time,” in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2015 Edition). Available online: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-experience/.

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Lowe, E. J. (1996), Subjects of Experience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, M. G. F. (2012), “Sounds and Images,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 52 (4): 331–51. Rossholm, G. (2004), “Now’s the Time: The Fiction Reader’s Temporal Perspective,” in G. Rossholm (ed.), Fiction and Perspective, 199–222, Bern: Peter Lang. Williams, B. (1973), “Imagination and the Self,” in Problems of the Self, 26–45, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, G. M. (2011), Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolf, W. (2004), “Aesthetic Illusion as an Effect of Fiction,” Style, 48 (3): 325–51. Wollheim, R. (1980), Art and Its Objects: An Introduction to Aesthetics, 2nd ed. (revisited), New York: Harper and Row.

Part Two

Illusion and the Mind

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Reading for the Mind Aesthetic Illusion, Fictional Characters, and the Role of Interpretation Marco Caracciolo

My point of departure in this chapter is that aesthetic experience can involve a specific mode of interaction with fictional characters, which I call the “charactercentered illusion.”1 When under a character-centered illusion, we judge the psychological life of characters to be convincingly portrayed; characters seem to think and behave in ways that are, in some relevant ways, lifelike. Engaging with contemporary debates in cognitive literary studies and related fields, I argue that audiences’ understanding of characters’ minds is, first, mediated by the more or less latent awareness of their fictionality; second, it is projected against a background of interests that are not just psychological but metacognitive and thematic. This chapter explores the implications of these ideas by mapping the interpretive strategies through which audiences of fiction may connect the character-centered illusion with broader interests.

1. Introduction The Kanizsa triangle, a well-known optical illusion, draws its name from the Italian psychologist who first called attention to this phenomenon in the 1970s (see Figure 5.1). We see a bright triangle in the foreground of the image; this figure seems to occlude three black circles and a second, black-outlined triangle. Technically, this is known as an “illusory contour.” The phenomenology of this illusion is distinctive: we see a triangle, even though we quickly realize that the color on the inner side of the supposed triangle is exactly the same as the color on the outer side. Even when we are explicitly told that the bright triangle is not

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Figure 5.1 The Kanizsa triangle.

there, that it is a mere illusion triggered by some glitch in our visual cortex, we cannot “unsee” it. The illusion lingers despite our awareness of it. This idea resonates with Werner Wolf ’s (1993; 2004) account of the aesthetic illusion. Wolf argues that—contrary to the common usage of the term—illusion and delusion are different things: “[Aesthetic] illusion, as opposed to delusion, is characterized by a latent rational distance. This distance is a consequence of the culturally acquired awareness of the fictional quality of the artefact . . . and of the illusionary status of the dominant effect induced by it” (Wolf 2004: 331). This chapter seeks to bring this key distinction between illusion and delusion to bear on a theory of character. I will argue that readers’ understanding of the mental life of characters can also be conceptualized along these lines:  when audiences talk about characters’ thoughts, emotions, and motives, they are under an illusion—a character-centered illusion, as I will call it—that bears a striking resemblance to the Kanizsa triangle. On the background of this argument are contemporary discussions in narratology and literary theory on the status of the mental processes we normally attribute to fictional characters. Work by theorists such as Alan Palmer (2004), Lisa Zunshine (2006), Blakey Vermeule (2010), and David Herman (2011) has tended to underscore the continuity between reading characters’ minds in fiction and reading real minds—with the “mind-reading” metaphor, no doubt, offering a suggestive basis for the analogy. This point has been articulated by Uri Margolin as follows: work on fictional minds in cognitive narratology, he argues, presupposes “a basic affinity between actual and fictional minds when it comes to information processing” (2003: 281). Other scholars have been making a case against the equation of real and fictional minds. I am thinking in particular of theorists affiliated with so-called unnatural narratology, such as Stefan Iversen (2013) and

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Maria Mäkelä (2013), but also of Brian McHale (2012) in a recent reappraisal of Dorrit Cohn’s Transparent Minds (Cohn 1978). Fictional characters, these scholars have argued, are constructs, and we cannot assume that readers approach their mental lives as they would approach people in ordinary intersubjectivity. Both arguments for and against the continuity between real and fictional minds have merit. My main proposition is that the tension between these arguments can be defused in two steps, which coincide with this chapter’s two parts. The first step is phenomenological:  it consists in drawing attention to what Richard Wollheim (1987) and, more recently, Murray Smith (2011) have called the “twofoldness” of engaging with representations—including representations of characters’ minds. The idea here is that the structure of consciousness can accommodate both an awareness of characters’ status as artefacts and a recognition of the analogy between their mental processes and those of real individuals. There is no real opposition here; just as we cannot “unsee” the Kanizsa triangle, we cannot stop reading characters through a mentalistic framework, since this is built into the very notion of character. On the other hand, we must allow room for the fact that not all fictional characters are equally conducive to mentalistic talk, and not all readers are equally interested in this talk. To explain these differences, I will introduce the concept of “character-centered illusion”—the counterpart of Wolf ’s aesthetic illusion in the domain of imagining, and relating to, fictional beings. The second step builds on what Liesbeth Korthals Altes (2014) would call a “meta-hermeneutic” approach to character. The assumption is that, just like everything else in a fictional text, characters are implicated in readerly negotiations that are evaluative and interpretive through and through. This means that the character-centered illusion can be understood only against the background of readers’ meaning-making activity. I will thus discuss a number of strategies through which audiences of fiction may assign value to—and interpret—their character-centered illusions in engaging with characters. Finally, this move will lead me to an examination of the idea that reading characters’ minds in fiction can offer a form of “cognitive workout” with potential ramifications for our realworld intersubjectivity.

2. Characters, “twofoldness,” and the character-centered illusion In a 2011 article, film theorist Murray Smith builds on Richard Wollheim’s (1987: 21) concept of the “twofoldness” of representation to make an important

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observation about our engagement with fictional characters. We tend to reason about characters’ experiences, goals, and motives—in short, about their minds— as if they were indeed minded beings. However, when we do so, we do not completely forget that characters are a product of an author’s imagination: they have been created in order to fulfill a certain artistic or at least narrative purpose. This is the twofoldness of representation; as Smith puts it, even as we understand an artefact as a representation of something else, we “retain an ineradicable awareness, if only peripheral, of [its] artifactual status” (2011: 282). Wollheim refers to the two aspects of this experience as “recognitional” (for the mimetic stance) and “configurational” (for the awareness of the representation as an artefact that has been pre-configured by someone else). In this chapter I will use James Phelan’s (1989) terminology instead, because it is widely accepted in narrative theory. I will thus call the recognitional aspect of character “mimetic” and the configurational aspect “synthetic.” I take Wollheim’s and Phelan’s terminologies to be fundamentally interchangeable. Smith (2011: 281) adds that twofoldness is part of our “natural” stance toward characters, and especially characters in realist fiction (broadly conceived). But of course there are exceptions, in terms of both texts that undermine mimetic readings and audience members who, perhaps, will want to resist such readings. Still, Smith’s intuition is fundamentally correct: there is no reason to drive a dualistic wedge between mimetic and synthetic attitudes, for these attitudes can—in most cases—coexist in our experience of characters. Again, the analogy with Kanizsa’s illusory contours can help: we see the triangle even as we realize that the white within the supposed triangle is absolutely identical to the white of the background. Note also that this experience is different from the famous rabbit-duck illusion popularized by Wittgenstein (see Wimmer and Doherty 2011). The core of that illusion is that we cannot see the duck and the rabbit at the same time; moving from one to the other requires a distinct perceptual shift. By contrast, in the experience of the bright triangle we can simultaneously perceive the triangle and its absence. This is also Smith’s argument about our engagement with characters: “[W]e should not conceive of the viewer’s attention or experience in terms of an ‘oscillation’ between the fictional world depicted, and the ‘configurational’ features of the image through which the depiction is achieved” (Smith 2011:  286). On the contrary, mimetic attitude and synthetic awareness are part and parcel of the same experience of characters. To make a case for this, Smith needs what philosophers would call a “rich” account of consciousness (see Schwitzgebel 2007): one in which readers’ or viewers’ consciousness is not limited to a single aspect of the object being

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considered (character-as-person or character-as-artefact), but can embrace both at the same time. Conceptualizing consciousness in these terms destabilizes many binary oppositions in literary theory and related fields, including “absorption” versus “theatricality” (Fried 1980)  and “immersion” versus “metafiction” (Ryan 2001; Dannenberg 2008). A  thoughtful, and empirically grounded, examination of consciousness in reading seems necessary to shed light on these problems. But if the rich account of consciousness turns out to be accurate, as I suspect, it might be necessary to replace these polar oppositions with a more nuanced, scalar model. The twofoldness of our attitude toward characters dovetails with the notion that illusion is not delusion: we can talk about characters in mentalistic ways without mistaking them for real people. This tendency is a key component of the aesthetic illusion as defined by Wolf: the lifelikeness of fictional worlds derives at least in part from the match between characters’ thoughts and actions and our assumptions about how people think and act. These assumptions go under the heading of “folk psychology” in the philosophy of mind; the term refers to a diverse set of skills and concepts that we use in order to interpret other subjects’ (and our own) overt behaviors in terms of mental states and processes (Churchland 1991; Ravenscroft 2010). When we bring these skills and concepts to bear on characters, when we reason about their psychological lives in terms that are—broadly—analogous to those we use in discussing real people’s minds, we are under what I call a “character-centered illusion.” As a subset of the aesthetic illusion, the character-centered illusion is an experience we may undergo both while actively engaging with fiction and when reflecting on or discussing fiction ex post. In broad strokes, it consists in seeing a character as a particularly convincing and effective representation of mind—and in valuing that representation for reasons that I will explore in the next section. Three further aspects of the character-centered illusion are worth remarking on here. First, the character-centered illusion is not an on/off phenomenon: it can be more or less salient, depending on a complex interplay between textual cues and readerly interests and predispositions. Not all characters are equally conducive to this kind of illusion, and readers will concentrate on protagonists or characters whose mental life takes center stage in a narrative; in relating to most minor or stock characters (i.e., literary “types”), we won’t bother with mentalistic explanations for their actions, and we’ll tend to favor a purely synthetic stance. By the same token, not all literary genres and texts reward readings that focus on the character-centered illusion; a degree of textual emphasis on psychological and/or intersubjective dynamics is necessary.

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Second, since the character-centered illusion is based on readers’ folkpsychological familiarity with mind, it may not align with scientific knowledge about the mind. Put otherwise, the ways in which we talk about characters’ psychology are a matter of presuppositions and folk theories, not necessarily of scientific models. In this sense, the character-centered illusion is different from the notion—advanced by Emily Troscianko (2014)—of “cognitive realism,” which implies a match between the textual representation of mental processes and current scientific theories. Third, the character-centered illusion builds on, and reflects, readers’ folk psychology, but it is not completely bound by folk psychology. This stems from the coexistence of mimetic and synthetic attitudes in character engagements. Because we know that characters are fictional entities staged in a humanmade artefact, we are readier to put on hold our folk-psychological assumptions than we would be in dealing with real people. Hence, fictional texts can challenge readers’ familiarity with mental processes while keeping them within the bounds of the character-centered illusion. This happens whenever fiction dramatizes minds that are opaque, deviant, or otherwise out of the ordinary (see Abbott 2008; Caracciolo 2014b). Note that this point addresses one of the objections commonly voiced against cognitive approaches. Maria Mäkelä frames this objection as follows: by “reducing fictional minds into exempla of actual human cognition we miss the essential dynamics between verbal art and real-life experientiality” (Mäkelä 2013: 130). No “reduction” is involved in the twofold account of character that I am proposing, since readers remain aware of characters as a synthetic construct. The character-centered illusion accommodates the two-way traffic between folk psychology and fictional representations posited by Mäkelä. Does this mean that fictional texts can encourage us to revise our folkpsychological tools and assumptions? Possibly. After all, this is how optical illusions have long been used by psychologists: they yield insight into features of visual perception (Wimmer and Doherty 2011). For instance, the Kanizsa triangle can be said to reveal our tendency to group objects into simple, Gestalt-like patterns; it is more efficient to assume that there is a triangle in the foreground occluding four other figures (a triangle, three black circles) than to take in a disjointed assemblage consisting of three Pac-Man-like figures and six line segments. Likewise, we may hypothesize that, by putting pressure on our folk psychology, the character-centered illusions engendered by fiction can also reveal something about the ways in which we make sense of our own—and other people’s—mental processes in everyday experiences. To fully understand this process, however, we need to widen the scope of our investigation and look at

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how readers’ character-centered illusions are projected against a background of interpretive negotiations. That is the task of the next section.

3. Negotiating meaning in character engagements 3.1 Narratology, mind-reading, and interpretation While the theory and practice of interpretation have always been one of the core concerns of literary theory, the same cannot be said about narratology. As Korthals Altes points out, “[interpretation] was, right from the start, narratology’s bone of contention” (Korthals Altes 2014: 91). Korthals Altes then goes on to discuss the troubled history of interpretation in formalist theories of narrative: no matter how much scholars attempted to sweep it under the rug, interpretation kept coming back. The situation has partly changed with the advent of so-called postclassical narratologies, which do not sideline readers’ meaningmaking activities but, on the contrary, tend to gear the theorization of narrative form toward specific hermeneutic interests: ethics and aesthetics in the rhetorical approach, gender in feminist narratologies, and so on. The cognitive approach to narrative, however, remains in a more uneasy relation to interpretation, as several commentators, including Korthals Altes herself, have argued (see also Jackson 2003 and Caracciolo 2016a). The uneasiness runs deep and extends to any cognitively inspired approach to cultural phenomena:  how does one reconcile cultural meaning-making, an intrinsically open-ended and contextually bound activity, with the reductionist and universalizing aims of science? The problem, of course, goes all the way back to nineteenth-century distinctions between humanistic understanding—the mode of meaning-making that characterizes interpretive inquiry in the human sciences—and scientific explanation, with its penchant for generalization and causal reasoning (see Gallagher 2004). It would be far too ambitious to think of tackling such questions in this chapter. Yet their relevance to character engagements seems clear. So far we have been talking about the character-centered illusion as an experience that rewards attention to—and invites speculation about—the mental life of characters. The mind-reading activity that underlies these engagements presupposes a continuity between literary reading and ordinary intersubjectivity. Lisa Zunshine (2006), for instance, appeals to the notion of “theory of mind” to claim that readers infer the mental states of characters on the basis of the same theoretical knowledge they apply to others’ behaviors outside of fiction. Blakey Vermeule (2010), for her part, insists on the evolutionary underpinnings of this process

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and how readers’ interests in characters are driven by the same thirst for social knowledge that inspires real-world gossip. Yet I have argued earlier that in the character-centered illusion mimetic and synthetic attitudes are bound up. One of the corollaries of this idea is that readers are or tend to be aware not just of the artifactual status of fictional characters but also of the contexts and practices in which such characters are embedded. To put the same point another way, reading minds in everyday intersubjectivity and reading characters’ minds are profoundly different activities, even as the folk-psychological skills and knowledge drawn upon are broadly similar. The difference—to quote again Korthals Altes (2014: 31–4)—is a matter of “framing,” and specifically of how the context in which we encounter another subject (real or fictional) guides our meaning-making. In the case of fictional characters, even the naïvest audiences know that film viewing or novel reading are not the same thing as relating to others in the real world. Characters are used in certain ways by their creators in order to shape the audience’s emotions and evaluations; they are meant to embody ideas, questions, concerns that are broader than the novel, film, or play in which they appear. All this brings us back to interpretation in the general sense of constructing meaning within a human practice. A  theory of literary character should not downplay interpretation, because our stance toward characters necessarily reflects the meaning-making activity in which we are engaging, which in turn is a function of the practice in which we are participating. Yet most cognitive approaches to characters tend to do just that; they evacuate the context, and in doing so they forget that audiences’ interactions with characters, despite harnessing our folk psychology, are involved in a very specific kind of meaning-making activity. This activity is interpretation in the strict sense of our evaluative engagement with a semiotic, narrative, fictional, and—in some cases—artistic artefact. I agree with critics of cognitive approaches to character that theorists like Palmer, Zunshine, Herman, and others have tended to sideline this dimension. Fictionality is a first reason for this difference between real-world intersubjectivity and character engagements. As Suzanne Keen puts it, “the perception of fictionality releases novel-readers from the normal state of alert suspicion of others’ motives that often acts as a barrier to empathy” (2007: 169). When we relate to a character whom we know to be fictional, we tend to be freer to “try on” his or her viewpoint because we are aware that we are not personally at stake: fictionality acts as a safety net. As an example, consider Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho (1991). Patrick Bateman, the first-person narrator, is a psychopath and mass murderer. Throughout the novel’s 400 pages, he describes

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in shocking detail a long series of murders and sexual assaults of increasing violence and cruelty. When reading or hearing about one of Bateman’s real-world counterparts, we would have an incredibly hard time getting over our moral condemnation and disgust at these actions. We can’t seriously entertain the viewpoint or worldview from which they stem. This resistance is likely to carry over into our engagement with Patrick as a fictional being—philosophers like Kendall Walton (2006) call it “imaginative resistance.”2 But our awareness of the character’s fictionality may complicate our resistance. It may invite us to consider Patrick’s twisted thought patterns from perspectives that wouldn’t be available, or would seem inappropriate, when confronting—even in the imagination—a real-world serial killer. This opening up of new perspectives on characters’ mental processes reflects the specificity of the context and practices in which we encounter fictional beings. I will have more to say about the nature of the perspectives afforded by fictionality in the next section. For now, let me briefly spell out how I think interpretation should be conceptualized. Interpreters are aware of the fact that texts have been put together by someone—whether it is an individual or a collective of people. This does not imply that the meanings we construct are determined by this authorial figure, as strong versions of intentionalism would have it. But it does imply, less controversially, that the audience’s meaning-making is influenced by the decisions—narrative, stylistic, or otherwise—made by the creator.3 We can see this process as one of “joint” or “participatory sense-making,” to use a term favored by philosophers working within the paradigm of so-called enactive cognition (see De Jaegher and Di Paolo 2007). Interpretation is a process in which we, as readers or viewers, work together with an assumed creator in order to create meanings that are open-ended, but still in some significant ways keyed to the artefact itself—and the agency behind it. This dynamic involves moving from fictional events and existents to a background of shared interests and concerns. In this sense, interpretation is always an attempt at generalizing from fictional particulars: it consists in teasing out— again, by coordinating with the text’s assumed creator—a set of values that go beyond the boundaries of the fictional world.4 To put this point otherwise: interpreting involves extracting the relevance of a fictional situation, the ways in which it concerns us and brings into play our convictions and values.5 Sometimes these values are extremely basic. When we feel suspense for a protagonist in a life-anddeath predicament, we are projecting onto the character the biologically basic value of self-preservation. But in many other cases fiction involves negotiating values and beliefs of a much more sophisticated nature, which can be articulated

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only through conscious reflection. Importantly, the fictionality of a certain practice invites evaluative negotiations of a different kind and—perhaps—broader resonance than would be likely in nonfictional domains. All this may sound, and probably is, quite abstract. I hope to make it more concrete in the next section, where I will apply this conception of interpretation to readers’ engagement with characters.

3.2 Interpretive strategies We know that the character-centered illusion is a “twofold” experience insofar as it fuses mimetic attitude and synthetic awareness. But even that experience, if what I said earlier is correct, is oriented toward a more general goal: interpreting fiction in the sense of extracting its relevance. This means that the charactercentered illusion is not an end in itself, but rather a product, possibly a byproduct, of audiences’ interpretive activities. How can we attribute relevance, or assign value, to the character-centered illusion? How can we connect it to the broader interests we negotiate in engaging with fictional texts? In this section I will attempt to answer such questions by identifying a number of interpretive strategies. The inventory I will offer is not meant to be exhaustive, though the strategies I will point to cover a lot of ground. Whenever possible, I will also attempt to illustrate these strategies through concrete examples, again based on Ellis’s American Psycho. The reviews of the novel posted on Amazon.com will provide these examples.6 I have said that interpretation involves a generalizing gesture, and indeed sometimes we read texts in ways that do not foreground the mental life of characters; such readings bypass the character-centered illusion by directly bringing to bear on fictional events and existents frames of social or political relevance. In this way, the interpreter denies, or at least sidelines, the value of the textual representation of mind. Many allegorical or satirical readings would fall into this category. In American Psycho, one way of interpreting the narrator’s extreme violence—and perhaps of offsetting its emotional power—is to regard it as a metaphor for the decadence of contemporary American society. An example of this reading strategy is the following comment, made by one of the online reviewers of Ellis’s novel: “American Psycho contains some of the most horrifying, repugnant, indeed misogynist scenes of torture and murder ever written . . . but they must be read in [the] satirical context of the book as a whole: after all, the horror does not lie in the novel itself, but in the society it reflects” (Dark Trippers 2000).

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This is, to a large extent, the polar opposite of the character-centered illusion. On the other hand, it is possible to identify a number of reading strategies that use characters themselves as a bridge between fictional particulars and more general meanings or relevance frames. I call the most basic of these strategies “insight into character’s mind.” In short, it consists in valuing a textual representation of mind because of how it satisfies our curiosity about other ways of being in the world. This is the intuition behind Cohn’s (1978) metaphor of “transparent minds,” after all: fiction is the only practice in which we can have the sense of accessing another subjectivity from a first-person (and not from a second- or third-person) perspective. Here is as an example of this reading strategy: “Ellis [chose] to tell this story from the perspective of Bateman himself, complete with his disjointed thought processes and nonchalant descriptions of his bloody exploits. I think even the harshest critics of [American Psycho] would agree that Ellis does employ this technique magnificently to create a detailed, powerful and haunting image of Bateman” (Higher Ed Technologist 2000). Defined in these terms, “insight into character’s mind” seems closely bound up with the character-centered illusion; whenever we are under a charactercentered illusion we implicitly invest value in characters in this way. But other interpretive strategies build on the character-centered illusion to arrive at even more general meanings, which abstract from the specific character we’re engaging with while still being concerned with mental phenomena in the broad sense. One of these strategies is what I  call “reflexive interpretation.” The main idea is that we use fictional characters as probes into our own experiences, potentially shedding light on aspects of our past or present selves. We find a suggestion of this reading strategy in the following online comment: “No matter how his thoughts and behavior disgust you, the sex, drugs, and murder, [Patrick] Bateman reflects a small side of yourself. The narcissistic part driven towards power and status” (Brooks 2012). This dynamic, which has been explored by Kuiken, Miall, and Sikora (2004) under the heading of “self-implication” in literary reading, plays a major role in character engagements. A further strategy is a categorizing one. It consists in taking a character’s mental processes as representative of how a class of real-world individuals think. As one may expect, interpretations of this kind are extremely common in online commentaries on American Psycho. Consider, for example, how the label “serial killer” is used in the following review: “American Psycho is so well written that it truly brings you into the mind of a serial killer and slowly the reader starts to understand the killer” (A Customer 2004). Categorizing interpretations of this kind reflect the two-way traffic between fictional representations

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of mind and our real-world conceptualization of mental disorders. The following strategy is more difficult to exemplify on the basis of the American Psycho corpus—no doubt, because Ellis’s novel does not lend itself to this kind of reading. It is a metacognitive strategy, whereby readers come to see fictional minds as resonating with real-world knowledge about mental processes—as if fictional representations could confirm, illustrate, or in some cases even show how the human mind works. Finally, we have existential readings. This strategy takes a character’s state of mind, mood, or attitudes as symptomatic of the human condition in general. Here is an example from the online reviews: “I treat [American Psycho] as [a] novel about modern day alienation—living in a city that exists on chic-ness or fashion trends or materialism—and how difficult it is for the protagonist to reach out to anyone who will listen. Bent on murders, cannibalism, and also good clothes [Patrick Bateman] . . . lives in a demonic world during the rest of the time; thus, he becomes a solitary figure living in New York City, lonely and perhaps desperate for some humanist [sic] attention” (Lee 2005). In this reader’s interpretation, Patrick Bateman’s violence becomes a probe launched into contemporary American life at a deep, existential level. Clearly, not all these interpretive strategies are equally likely when engaging with a specific character. As everything else in reading, which strategy readers adopt will depend on a complex combination of textual and extratextual factors. Yet, in general terms, these seem to be the main pathways through which audiences ascribe value to their character-centered illusions. In the next, final section I’ll try to tease out some of the implications of the arguments advanced in this chapter.

4. Conclusion: A cognitive workout? In the concluding lines of her Why We Read Fiction, Lisa Zunshine writes: “I can say that I personally read fiction because it offers a pleasurable and intensive workout for my Theory of Mind” (2006: 164). I find this claim difficult to evaluate. On the one hand, it seems wrong to reduce our engagement with fiction to a single function, no matter how central to our psychological makeup (as social cognition undoubtedly is); on the other hand, the emphasis on the writer’s “I” undercuts any attempt at reading into this statement something more than a personal preference or bias. Nevertheless, “cognitive workout” and related metaphors seem fairly popular among researchers affiliated with cognitive

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approaches to narrative and literature.7 What I have tried to do in this chapter is, in this respect, quite simple: I have argued that, if there is such a thing as a “cognitive workout” afforded by reading fictional characters’ minds, it can only be understood as a function of readers’ interpretive negotiations with fiction. Put otherwise, the workout reflects how fictional representations of mind engage our folk-psychological competencies and have the power to restructure them through the interpretive strategies outlined in the previous section. Just as the Kanizsa illusion can point up the biases and strategies of perception, the character-centered illusion can potentially reveal or reshape our understanding of mental phenomena. However, the insights we may gain in this way need not be consistent with scientific knowledge, since they are grounded in folk psychology. If we learn about minds—others’ or our own—at this folk-psychological level, it is only because our encounters with characters are projected against a background of beliefs and expectations. The experience that I have called “charactercentered illusion” is always invested with values drawn from this background. Further, the argument I’ve advanced in this chapter tries to make room for discontinuities as well as continuities between real-world intersubjectivity and the character-centered illusion:  our responses to characters differ from our responses to real individuals because of how our engagements with fiction are externally framed—among other things, by our awareness of fictionality. This stems from the “twofoldness” of the character-centered illusion, which—as we have seen—tends to combine mimetic attitudes and synthetic awareness. While this chapter has focused on the epistemological dimension of the illusion (how do we know characters and connect them to other forms of real-word knowledge?), the ideas discussed here have important ramifications for a theory of our ethical relationship with characters. I argue in Caracciolo (2016b) that psychologically deviant characters potentially raise a challenge that is ethical as well, and that the interpretive strategies examined in the previous pages can be used to address this challenge. The cognitive and the ethical are, in this case, closely bound up, even though I’ve had to concentrate on the former in the context of this article. I believe cognitive-narratological approaches to character would greatly benefit from a more sustained and thoughtful confrontation with how fictional beings enter readers’ lifeworlds—an issue that Rita Felski (2008) has recently referred to under the heading of the “uses” of literature. Part of this investigation should take an empirical dimension, and while I  could only quote from a few online reviews of a single novel here, the model I have presented grows out of a more systematic, qualitative analysis of a large corpus of reviews.8 Even

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this is only a first step, of course; there is much more work to be done. But, as I see it, the lesson to be drawn is clear: the question of the uses of fiction—of the character-centered illusion, in this case—is not logically separate and separable from the question of how we relate to characters; any character-directed response already implies, and is geared toward, an interpretive use.

Notes 1 I would like to thank Tomáš Koblížek and Petr Koťátko for organizing the 10th Prague Interpretation Colloquium, where an early draft of this paper was presented. I’m also grateful to the colloquium participants for their input and engaging questions. 2 The term was introduced by Tamar Szabó Gendler (2000). 3 For another attempt at defending intentionalism from a cognitive perspective, see Herman (2008). 4 See Caracciolo (2012; 2014a) for a fuller account of interpretation along these lines. 5 Building on Sperber and Wilson’s (1995) influential work, Richard Walsh (2007) also grounds his account of fictionality in the notion of “relevance.” 6 Though I believe online reviews and debates can provide interesting perspectives on readers’ interpretations (see Caracciolo 2014b), my use of this material in this chapter is purely illustrative: the same interpretive strategies can be found in other contexts (e.g., oral conversation, group or classroom discussion, professional literary criticism). 7 See Walsh’s notion of fictionality as “exercise” (2007: 50) and Boyd’s “playground” (2009: 192–3). 8 See Caracciolo (2016b), which engages with ten contemporary novels and studies readers’ interpretive responses to them and, in particular, to their first-person narrators. This article expands on the theoretical framework laid out in that book.

References A Customer (2004), “Disturbingly Brilliant,” Amazon.ca Customer Reviews: American Psycho, February 3. Available online: http://www.amazon.ca/gp/aw/cr/ rR2E1SGUBMOBBAE. Abbott, H. P. (2008), “Unreadable Minds and the Captive Reader,” Style, 42 (4): 448–67. Boyd, B. (2009), On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Brooks, S. (2012), “Find Yourself in the Mind of a Serial Killer,” Amazon.com Customer Reviews: American Psycho, May 29. Available online: http://www.amazon.com/ review/R1Y4LGM5PBUN61. Caracciolo, M. (2012), “Narrative, Meaning, Interpretation: An Enactivist Approach,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 11 (3): 367–84. Caracciolo, M. (2014a), “Interpretation for the Bodies: Bridging the Gap,” Style, 48 (3): 385–403. Caracciolo, M. (2014b), “Two Child Narrators: Defamiliarization, Empathy, and Reader-Response in Mark Haddon’s ‘The Curious Incident and Emma Donoghue’s Room,’ ” Semiotica, 202: 183–205. Caracciolo, M. (2016a), “Cognitive Literary Studies and the Status of Interpretation: An Attempt at Conceptual Mapping,” New Literary History, 47 (3): 187–207. Caracciolo, M. (2016b), “Strange” Narrators in Contemporary Fiction: Explorations in Readers’ Engagement with Characters, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Churchland, P. (1991), “Folk Psychology and the Explanation of Human Behavior,” in J. D. Greenwood (ed.), The Future of Folk Psychology: Intentionality and Cognitive Science, 51–69, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohn, D. (1978), Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Dannenberg, H. (2008), Coincidence and Counterfactuality: Plotting Time and Space in Narrative Fiction, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Dark Trippers (2000), “Bateman Mania Justified,” Amazon.com Customer Reviews: American Psycho, May 24. Available online: http://www.amazon.com/ review/R36SDFDKJVYXHW. De Jaegher, H. and A. Di P. Ezequiel (2007), “Participatory Sense-Making: An Enactive Approach to Social Cognition,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6 (4): 485–507. Ellis, B. E. (1991), American Psycho, New York: Random House. Felski, R. (2008), Uses of Literature, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Fried, M. (1980), Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Berkeley: University of California Press. Gallagher, S. (2004), “Hermeneutics and the Cognitive Sciences,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 11 (10–11): 162–74. Gendler, T. S. (2000), “The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance,” Journal of Philosophy, 97 (2): 55–81. Herman, D. (2008), “Narrative Theory and the Intentional Stance,” Partial Answers, 6 (2): 233–60. Herman. D. (2011), “Introduction,” in D. Herman (ed.), The Emergence of Mind: Representations of Consciousness in Narrative Discourse in English, 1–40, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.

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Higher Ed Technologist (2000), “Not for the Faint of Heart,” Amazon.com Customer Reviews: American Psycho, May 24. Available online: http://www.amazon.com/ review/RVUTWIWAM2DS2. Iversen, S. (2013), “Unnatural Minds,” in J. Alber, H. S. Nielsen, and B. Richardson (eds.), A Poetics of Unnatural Narrative, 94–112, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Jackson, T. E. (2003), “ ‘Literary Interpretation’ and Cognitive Literary Studies,” Poetics Today, 24 (2): 191–205. Keen, S. (2007), Empathy and the Novel, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Korthals Altes, L. (2014), Ethos and Narrative Interpretation: The Negotiation of Values in Narrative Fiction, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Kuiken, D., D. S. Miall, and S. Sikora (2004), “Forms of Self-Implication in Literary Reading,” Poetics Today, 25 (2): 171–203. Lee, W. (2005), “[An] Unrecognized American, Modern Existential Novel,” Amazon. com Customer Reviews: American Psycho, January 8. Available online: http://www. amazon.com/gp/review/RKH4FM0SPFPLN/. Mäkelä, M. (2013), “Cycles of Narrative Necessity: Suspect Tellers and the Textuality of Fictional Minds,” in L. Bernaerts, D. Geest, L. Herman, and B. Vervaeck (eds.), Stories and Minds: Cognitive Approaches to Literary Narrative, 129–51, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Margolin, U. (2003), “Cognitive Science, the Thinking Mind, and Literary Narrative,” in D. Herman (ed.), Narrative Theory and the Cognitive Sciences, 271–94, Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. McHale, B. (2012), “Transparent Minds Revisited,” Narrative, 20 (1): 115–24. Palmer, A. (2004), Fictional Minds, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Phelan, J. (1989), Reading People, Reading Plots: Character, Progression, and the Interpretation of Narrative, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Ravenscroft, I. (2010), “Folk Psychology as a Theory,” in N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ folkpsych-theory/. Ryan, M.-L. (2001), Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Schwitzgebel, E. (2007), “Do You Have Constant Tactile Experience of Your Feet in Your Shoes? Or Is Consciousness Limited to What’s in Attention?,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 14 (3): 5–35. Smith, M. (2011), “On the Twofoldness of Character,” New Literary History, 42 (2): 277–94. Sperber, D. and D. Wilson (1995), Relevance: Communication and Cognition, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Troscianko, E. (2014), Kafka’s Cognitive Realism, New York: Routledge. Vermeule, B. (2010), Why Do We Care about Literary Characters?, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Walsh, R. (2007), The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Walton, K. (2006), “On the (So-Called) Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance,” in S. Nichols (ed.), The Architecture of the Imagination: New Essays on Pretence, Possibility, and Fiction, 137–48, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wimmer, M. C. and M. J. Doherty (2011), “I. Ambiguous Figures,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 76 (1): 1–23. Wolf, W. (1993), Ästhetische Illusion Und Illusionsdurchbrechung in Der Erzählkunst: Theorie Und Geschichte Mit Schwerpunkt Auf Englischem Illusionsstörenden Erzählen, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Wolf, W. (2004), “Aesthetic Illusion as an Effect of Fiction,” Style, 38 (3): 325–51. Wollheim, R. (1987), Painting as an Art, London: Thames and Hudson. Zunshine, L. (2006), Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel, Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

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A Puzzle of Fiction and Cognitive Impenetrability Fredrik Stjernberg

1. Introduction We’ve all been there: sitting in the chair at the cinema, hoping that the heroine will survive, fearing the bad guy; reading a book and mourning Anna Karenina’s death. We fear fictions, we feel for them—even though we know they don’t exist! Somehow, we know full well that there is nothing to fear, no one to mourn. But this knowledge doesn’t seem to affect our emotional state, or our level of excitement in general, or at least not affect it enough. It seems that certain aspects of our emotional life are cognitively impenetrable to some types of information— knowing that something just is fiction need not by itself make it less sad.1 This has been called a paradox of fiction (Radford 1975). The label has stuck (see, for instance, Stecker 2011). This is not a paradox in a full sense of the term. Matravers is commendably brusque here: “It is an unfortunate misnomer, as the problem is neither a paradox nor is to do with fiction” (2014: 102).2 But even if we do go along with dismissing the paradox, there is something that remains, and should be examined further. At the very least, some kind of irrationality, however mild, appears to be involved here. One factor that will have to be left aside in this discussion is that some of our reactions to fictions—especially in film—are arational, simply not to be judged in terms of rationality or irrationality. In a horror film, we can become startled by the sudden appearance of the bad guy, or accompanying loud noises. Instrumental music can scare us, or make us feel well. Such reactions can be (usually are) beyond, or beneath, rational control. Such cases are not relevant for the discussion here; there is nothing paradoxical or puzzling about becoming

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startled by loud noises. The issue of interest for the purposes of this paper concerns our considered reactions to things we know full well to be fictional. Given that we know that something doesn’t exist, how can it be that we still have emotions directed toward it, that we are concerned for its well-being? Even if we demote it from the status of a full-fledged paradox, it will serve to tell us something about the makeup of our cognitive architecture. In this paper, I will highlight how the paradox of fiction (as I will persist in calling it) can be used in a way similar to the way illusions are studied when we try to understand perception. The fact that we can be fooled by illusions, or that our knowledge of the true state of things doesn’t affect how a certain configuration of lines appears to us, is usually not in itself seen as any kind of proof that perception is “irrational.” It is instead taken as relevant data for understanding how perception works, and I think the paradox of fiction is worth looking into in a similar spirit. Our engagement in fiction, feeling for the protagonists and so on, will have many things in common with perceptual illusion. We can think of this engagement as a kind of cognitive illusion. Cognitive illusions are a mixed bunch, but in general, a cognitive illusion is a case where we, in some predictable or systematic way, arrive at skewed assessments of the state of things. There are many examples of cognitive illusions, and this paper highlights some of them. A fuller taxonomy of cognitive illusions will have to wait for a later occasion.3

2. The paradox One version of the paradox of fiction is the following (after Radford 1975, who first presented the puzzle in a systematic way): (PF1) We are genuinely moved by fictions. (PF2) We do not believe that fictional entities exist. (PF3) A genuine emotion in response to fictional entities implies that one believes that fictional entities exist. We are only genuinely moved by what we believe is actual. And here is Radford’s reaction to the puzzle: (PF Conclusion) I am left with the conclusion that our being moved in certain ways by works of art, though very “natural” to us and in that way only too intelligible, involves us in inconsistency and so incoherence. (1975: 78)

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“Inconsistency” and “incoherence”—these are strong words. Radford presumably thinks that we are doing something wrong here—perhaps even that we should be able to do better. I  take it that this would mean that we are doing something irrational when being moved by fiction. But already this simple observation should give us pause. In what sense would we be doing better if we managed to put an end to our normal engagement in fiction? Putting an end to this kind of engagement would almost serve to make fiction a pointless venture. We can compare this with other clear cases of irrationality. I am told that it is irrational to bet on an inside straight in poker. If I habitually do place such bets, learning that it is irrational to place them should make me stop placing them. I would not be content with learning that I am doing something irrational, yet go on regularly placing these bets. So it is not clear that the end result really is a case of “inconsistency and so incoherence.” If all Radford is saying is that it can appear a bit silly to be crying over the fate of someone we all know doesn’t exist, then there is no big disagreement here. There are a few ways to block the conclusion, and the need to block the conclusion would depend on how troubling the conclusion really is. What about denying the premises? It doesn’t seem very promising to deny (PF1): I take it as simply obvious that we at times are genuinely moved by fictions. Schroeder and Matheson get this right: “That fiction produces strong feelings in most of us is an undeniable truth” (2006:  19). Walton’s classical work (1978 and 1990) is based on taking for granted that we in some way are moved by fictions. We could of course try to legislate away such examples and build into “being genuinely moved” that the object of our engagement must exist, but that move simply trivializes the reasoning. Denying (PF2) doesn’t seem to help much either. Starting to think that the fictional objects exist will still not make them fit objects for emotional engagement. Fictional objects would on most theories be abstract objects, and there is not much to feel sorry for in the world of abstract objects. I take it to be pretty uncontroversial that even for those who think that by telling stories we create fictional characters, their existence doesn’t provide much reason for emotional engagement. This leaves denying (PF3). This step in any case has a somewhat problematic position in Radford’s reasoning. On the one hand, Radford wants to disallow emotions where we don’t believe that their objects exist. On the other hand, Radford clearly thinks that we do have such objectless emotions. In that case, it is not particularly difficult to find inconsistencies. But why would it be so wrong to have emotions where we don’t think that there is an object of

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the emotions? Clearly, there are cases where such emotions are misplaced. If I were to start weeping over the death of my sister, the realization that I have never had a sister should be sobering. If it weren’t, I would be guilty of farreaching irrationality. Are cases where we engage in fiction of this kind? If this were the case, the simple realization that Sherlock Holmes is fictional and doesn’t exist should make me revise my engagement. Yet it normally doesn’t, or at least not much. Step (PF3) rests on an outdated, overly cognitivist, view of what emotions demand. It seems clear that we can have emotions toward non-existing things, without in any way being irrational. I can feel sorry for people who no longer exist, often precisely because they no longer exist. I can have emotions directed at future people (without such emotions, environmentalist work would often be pointless). I can even have emotions directed at hypothetical people, as when thinking about a child I possibly could have had. Such emotions are not irrational, though they can at times weaken an action-guiding aspect of emotions that we otherwise often stress. There are limits to what I can do to act out my emotions for the fallen at Thermopylae. Laying down a wreath at the place of the battle doesn’t really amount to all that much, though it is probably the most I can do. So (PF3) is at least not quite correct, not as formulated. We can still agree that there is something puzzling about our engagement in fiction, but the exact nature of this “badness” remains to be determined.

3. How bad is the situation? In general, what we have is a kind of splitting of attitudes. We know, or at least believe, something about the world, but this knowledge, or these beliefs, do not penetrate fully into our other attitudes. We know that there is nothing we can do to change Anna Karenina’s fate and that there is no physical person in the dangerous situation, we know that the monsters are not out to get us, we know that no real human being is suffering in the stories. Yet, there remains something that we find unsettling. This phenomenon is not confined to fiction. There are other kinds of case where we find a similar mismatch between, on the one hand, what the subject believes (at least when questioned) and, on the other hand, the subject’s other attitudes, or the subject’s acts. Gendler (2008) presents a few cases that seem to be parallel.

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One is the Skywalk, a Grand Canyon glass walkway, where a glass walk is suspended several hundred feet over a precipice. It is perfectly safe to walk on this pavement (the glass won’t break, even if someone tried to break it), but it does not feel safe. In fact, for most people there is a great deal of resistance that has to be overcome when one takes the first steps on the glass pavement. Still, no one really thinks that there is any danger in taking the steps. If it were objectively dangerous, my guess is that the organizers would have given up long ago, as the result of astronomical insurance costs. As a different kind of case, Gendler refers to the work of the psychologist Paul Rozin and his associates, who in a series of experiments have shown that people are reluctant to lick vomit-shaped pieces of rubber, eat soup from a new bedpan, throw darts on pictures of the faces of people they love (compared with people they hate), and other experiments of that kind.4 The common theme in these experiments is that the subjects know something full well (that the bedpan is clean, the vomit-shaped rubber is just rubber, the friend is not being hurt by the darts), yet this knowledge does not fully influence the subjects’ actions. Gendler also adds a case where she made a slip: First, she forgets her wallet at home, which forces her to borrow some cash from a friend. When the friend gives her the money, she starts looking for her wallet in order to put the cash there (Gendler 2008: 637). I don’t think that that really is an example of the same kind of odd behavior as the other cases described. This is more a slip, and easily settled, once she realizes that the wallet is at home. No feeling I-must-put-themoney-into-the-wallet has to persist after the realization that the wallet has been left at home. I think we can all agree that cases like these abound and that we have all been involved in such cases, of one kind or another. Still, it turns out to be surprisingly difficult to give a characterization of what is going on here. Radford thought that cases involving fiction were examples of irrationality, but I don’t think that really covers the cases. Our reactions may be odd from some perspective (and we are here trying to sort out exactly how the perspective is supposed to be formulated), but I, for one, would be reluctant to call this irrationality. It would be irrational to burn the thriller I am reading to prevent that something bad happens to the protagonist. It would be irrational to get in touch with the author to prevent bad things happening. Believing that I can actually hurt my friend by throwing a dart at a picture of her is arguably irrational. But just feeling a surge of excitement when the heroine confronts the bad guys is not in itself irrational. So how is this kind of feeling to be characterized? If it is not directly irrational, what is it? I  think irrationality would have to entail some stronger mismatch

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between our attitudes and the world, most likely resulting in actions that don’t serve to further the subjects’ perceived interests, or else requiring belief in outright contradictions. If a subject thinks that it really is quite dangerous to take a walk on the glass pavement, yet does this, then she is being irrational. And the other previous cases can be viewed in a similar way. If a subject really thinks that the vomit-shaped rubber mat is made of vomit, then either licking it at all is irrational, or being in a state of mind where you think that something is both made of rubber (since the subjects had been thoroughly informed that this was the case) and of vomit seems to require believing in a contradiction. So Radford’s claim that we are inconsistent or irrational when reacting to fiction is overblown, but there is also clearly something odd going on. The oddity is not best described as a case of inconsistency or irrationality. Gendler thinks of it as arational (2008: 641), but earlier, I used that term for such things as being startled by loud music. The kind of attitude we have here is somehow related to rational and rationality-sensitive attitudes like belief and should not be likened to things like being startled.5 The reactions we display are not irrational, not fully rational, yet quite understandable. We have all experienced mixed feelings like these. This is one case where we can find a gap between understandability and rationality. It will be argued that this mix of attitudes has the same kind of structure as we encounter in various cases of perceptual illusions and that our engagement in fiction is a kind of cognitive illusion.

4. Alief and belief Gendler gives a “tentative characterization,” not a full definition, of “alief,” a term she coined in 2008: A paradigmatic alief is a mental state with associatively linked content that is representational, affective and behavioral, and that is activated—consciously or nonconsciously—by features of the subject’s internal or ambient environment. Aliefs may be either occurent or dispositional. (2008: 642)

Gendler argues that alief is not to be identified with belief, or that it can be explained in terms of a combination of belief and imagination (especially on p.  650). Essential for alief is that it “involves the activation of an associative chain” (ibid.). Such associative chains are responsible for the kinds of example we saw earlier. The fact that the piece of rubber is vomit-like starts an associative

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chain that makes me think of things that make me ill, hence making me reluctant to lick it. I don’t fully believe that the rubber is made of vomit, or that I am being made to lick real vomit; it’s just that I’d rather not do it, since I have been primed in certain ways by the look of the rubber. It would seem that Gendler’s notion of alief would serve to explain a great deal of what is going on when we react to fiction. We are in some kind of cognitive state where we are affected by something that does not amount to a fully belief-inducing process.

5. Illusions and cognitive architecture Given that so many today dismiss Radford’s own diagnosis of the case and that we don’t want to go along with his strong incoherence claims, should we not rest content with leaving the paradox by the side, as a relic of an outdated conception of emotions? Not so fast. Even if we do not have a case of outright irrationality when dealing with our reactions to fiction, these reactions can be used to tell us something about our cognitive architecture.6 Systematic malfunctioning in our cognitive systems will tell us something about how our cognitive system is constructed. Perceptual illusions are often used in this way. Consider the Kanizsa triangle (see Figure 6.1). We all see, or “see,” a white triangle superposed on the other figures. It is believed that early visual cortical regions are working to produce such illusory contours, indicating that the visual system has several different components and that they at times don’t work well together.

Figure 6.1 The Kanizsa triangle.

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Figure 6.2 The Müller-Lyer illusion.

Figure 6.3 The Ebbinghaus illusion.

In the well-known Müller-Lyer illusion, we fail to be impressed by the known equality of the horizontal lines (see Figure 6.2). This illusion points to a certain kind of modular architecture in the interplay between our perceptual and our cognitive systems. We know full well (at least after measuring) that the horizontal lines are of equal length, but they don’t look that way. Our knowledge doesn’t penetrate into how things look.7 The Ebbinghaus illusion presents a different kind of example (see Figure 6.3). In this illusion, the center circles are of the same size, but they don’t look that way. This is a result like the Müller-Lyer illusion and perhaps only shows that context matters when judging size. But that is not the whole story. It turns out that when subjects are instructed to grasp the central circle, they do not size their finger grip to accord with the visual impression of differently sized circles; they size their fingers correctly. This has been taken to show that we have two co-working senses of sight, as it were. One sense, or pathway, is the dorsal, the other the ventral, and they work slightly differently. One is a sense for action, how things are done, the other a sense for storing information, what we have in

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our surroundings, and the Ebbinghaus illusion shows precisely how these two co-working pathways can come apart under certain circumstances.8 Cognitive illusions can serve exactly the same purpose.

6. Cognitive illusions A cognitive illusion would be some way in which our cognitive apparatus manages to (systematically) land us in believing something non-true. I am not sure we can do much better than this—there appears to be too much diversity. There are a few differences between perceptual and cognitive illusions. Perceptual illusions are (usually) unimodal, whereas cognitive illusions are multimodal or perhaps even amodal. Cognitive illusions form a heterogenous group, and it is difficult to distinguish cognitive illusions from sloppy thinking in general.9 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky spent a great deal of energy studying such illusions, and one example is the framing effect. In a study from 1981, they set a task for the subjects to decide on which vaccination program that was to be used (Tversky and Kahneman 1981). More than 150 subjects were presented with the following scenarios: Problem 1:  Imagine that the US is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimate of the consequences of the programs are as follows: If Program A is adopted, 200 people will be saved. If Program B is adopted, there is 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved, and 2/3 probability that no people will be saved.

And to this problem, the subjects preferred Program A (72 percent) before Program B (28 percent). The interpretation of this result is that the majority is risk averse: certainly saving 200 lives is more attractive to most people. Another group (roughly the same size) was given Problem 2, with the same cover story as in Problem 1: Problem 2:  Imagine that the US is preparing for the outbreak of an unusual Asian disease, which is expected to kill 600 people. Two alternative programs to combat the disease have been proposed. Assume that the exact scientific estimate of the consequences of the programs are as follows:

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But differently worded alternative courses of action: If Program C is adopted, 400 will die. If Program D is adopted, there is 1/3 probability that nobody will die, and 2/3 probability that 600 will die.

Here, the responses were more or less reversed: 22 percent preferred Program C and 78 percent preferred Program D. The interpretation of the result is that the majority choice in Problem 2 is risk taking: the certain death of 400 is less acceptable than the two-in-three chance that 600 will die. But the two problems are effectively identical. The only difference between them is that the outcomes are described in Problem 1 by the number of lives saved and in Problem 2 by the number of lives lost; 200 will be saved = 400 will die

and 1/3 probability that nobody will die and 2/3 probability that 600 will die

is the same as 1/3 probability that 600 people will be saved, and 2/3 probability that no people will be saved

Putting the two together seems to force us to attribute irrationality to the subjects. This effect is systematic and predictable. Kahneman and Tversky sum up the effect as a kind of framing effect. If the same problem is framed in different ways, our reactions to the problems will differ. And just as in the Müller-Lyer case, an effect like this lingers on, even if we know that the only difference here is a matter of framing. Cognitive illusions share at least some of the persistence of the perceptual illusions. We should note that, even if cognitive illusions make us get things wrong, they are not necessarily bad for us. Certain illusions can be benign. One example of this is our strong propensity to overestimate the importance of the first impression. It is well known that we overestimate the first impression when we try to arrive at an evaluation of a person, even if we are told that the first impression was skewed in some respect. We can form a lasting view that a person is not very punctual, even if we are told that the person was tricked into being late for the first date. The new information about the relative unreliability of the impressions from the first occasion doesn’t penetrate into the rest of my filed knowledge and beliefs about that person.

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It could be too demanding to fix the system, since it gets things right most of the time. The tyranny of first impressions is probably of this type. Our first impressions are usually pretty accurate, so it is very cheap to construct a cognitive system that makes first impressions matter more. Basing an assessment on a non-biased assortment of the fifty earliest impressions of someone would be much more difficult to construct. It would put greater demands on memory capacity and an added ability to keep adjusting the assessment of the person until one has completed the fifty encounters that serve to make up the evidence for the assessment. First impressions are sufficiently correct and provide for a simpler system, so even if they can get things wrong, it will often take systematic studies to tease out the ways in which they get things wrong.

7. Cognitive impenetrability What we have in these paradoxical emotion cases, and in other cases of cognitive illusion, is an instance of cognitive impenetrability. A given mental state is cognitively impenetrable whenever the subject as it were knows better, or the information is stored somewhere but the information cannot penetrate into the central state. But this appeal to impenetrability can only take us so far. Why are they impenetrable, and so on, remains an issue. Other cognitive examples of cognitive impenetrability are provided by self-deception.10 In order to be selfdeceived, I  must, on the one hand, know something and, on the other hand, keep this knowledge from having the full force it otherwise should have. There would have to be two places to store the information, as it were, and there would have to be very little interaction between the two. Self-deception can at times be positive for the self-deceiver. Thinking that one is cleverer, or more handsome, than average (even if one has no evidence at all pointing in that direction) can be a success factor.

8. And fiction? Let us briefly return to our original focus, our engagement with fiction. What happens when we react to fiction? It is a case of a cognitive illusion—specifically one where cognitive impenetrability takes hold. Knowledge that Anna doesn’t exist, and hence cannot be in any real danger, will only go so far—our reactions

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are changed or mitigated, but not removed. Understanding fiction, and engaging with the fates of fictional characters, is intertwined with a process that in many ways is based on a series of illusions. In this respect, it is perhaps close to selfdeception:  we know something, but for certain purposes, we manage to keep that particular piece of knowledge, or information, at a suitable distance from the rest of our system of beliefs. And just as self-deception actually at times can be beneficent for the self-deceived, removing all the deception that lies behind our engagement with fiction is something that it would not necessarily be good to remove. We would lose out on too many of the pleasures of life if we managed to distance ourselves from fiction so much that it couldn’t move us at all. So a Galileo-inspired response to the question of our engagement in fiction is called for: Eppur mi muove!

Notes 1 At times it actually can do this. A set of lies about someone can make me change my emotional state when I come to learn that the story isn’t true; certain types of highly calculated stories can fail to arouse my emotions simply because the story is so obviously calculated to induce a specific emotion in me. But we can leave such cases aside. The interesting cases are those where we really do have the emotions while knowing that the story is fictional. 2 The title of Stecker (2011) sums up what many think about the suggested paradox: “Should we still care about the paradox of fiction?” 3 A few examples of cognitive illusions are the following: Tye (1999) thinks that the explanatory gap between phenomenal and physical concepts is a cognitive illusion. Fiedler et al. (2009) find pseudocontingencies (unwarranted interference of a relation between pairs of variables, based on something other than observation of instances of the pairs) to be a kind of cognitive illusion. Gebuis and Gevers (2009) examine phenomena related to our assessment of numerosity. Kahneman and Tversky made a good living out of examining aspects of our thinking that often could be described as cognitive illusions, see Kahneman (2012). The section on cognitive illusions discusses a few other examples. 4 See for instance Rozin et al. (1986). 5 I am not suggesting that Gendler thinks otherwise, just noting that her terminology differs from mine. 6 Nichols (2004), Schroeder and Matheson (2006), and Tullman and Buckwalter (2014) do this as well. 7 Though we should perhaps be a bit cautious in interpreting this illusion. Henrich et al. (2010) show that there is a significant cultural aspect to our reactions

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here: people who grew up in non-industrial societies are not as impressed by a Müller-Lyer effect as others. 8 See Milner and Goodale ([1995] 2006). Brain lesions can also serve to show how these two systems can come apart at times. 9 One (not very ambitious) attempt at presenting an overview of cognitive illusions is given by Dubord (2011). 10 See Deweese-Boyd (2012). Every step in assessing the existence and nature of selfdeception is fraught with difficulties, see especially §1.1, “Definitional issues.”

References Deweese-Boyd, I. (2012), “Self-Deception,” in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2012 Edition). Available online: http://plato. stanford.edu/archives/spr2012/entries/self-deception/. Dubord, G. (2011), “Part 8. Cognitive Illusions,” Canadian Family Physician, 57 (7): 799–800. Fiedler, K. et al. (2009), “Pseudocontingencies: An Integrative Account of an Intriguing Cognitive Illusion,” Psychological Review, 116 (1): 187–206. Gebuis, T. and W. Gevers (2009), “Numerosities and Space; Indeed a Cognitive Illusion! A Reply to de Hevia and Spelke,” Cognition, 121 (2): 248–52. Gendler, T. S. (2008), “Alief and Belief,” Journal of Philosophy, 105 (10): 634–63. Henrich, J. et al. (2010), “The Weirdest People in the World?,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33: 61–135. Kahneman, D. (2012), Thinking, Fast and Slow, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Matravers, D. (2014), Fiction and Narrative, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Milner, A. D. and M. A. Goodale ([1995] 2006), The Visual Brain in Action, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nichols, S. (2004), “Imagining and Believing; The Promise of a Single Code,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 62 (2): 129–39. Nichols, S. (ed.) (2006), The Architecture of the Imagination, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Radford, C. (1975), “How Can We be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplement, 49: 67–80. Rozin, P., L. Millman, and C. Nemeroff (1986), “Operation of the Laws of Systematic Magic in Disgust and Other Domains,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 4: 703–12. Schroeder, T. and C. Matheson (2006), “Imagination and Emotion,” in Nichols, The Architecture of the Imagination, 19–40. Stecker, R. (2011), “Should We Still Care about the Paradox of Fiction?,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 51 (3): 295–308.

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Tullman, K. and W. Buckwalter (2014), “Does the Paradox of Fiction Exist?,” Erkenntnis, 79: 779–6. Tversky, A. and D. Kahneman (1981), “The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice,” Science, New Series, 211 (4481): 453–8. Tye, M. (1999), “Phenomenal Consciousness: The Explanatory Gap as a Cognitive Illusion,” Mind, 108 (432): 705–25. Walton, K. (1978), “Fearing Fictions,” Journal of Philosophy, 75: 5–27. Walton, K. (1990), Mimesis as Make-Believe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

7

Illusion, Distance, and Appropriation Martin Pokorný

The overall structure of the following argument is as follows: the full-fledged aesthetic illusion, whether or not it actually occurs (see section 8), is the outlying form of a phenomenon—I will call it “the expressive illusion”—that commonly occurs in all listening and reading. However, even though common, it is not easily understood. My ambition in what follows will be to contribute to its understanding.

1. Preliminaries It is questionable whether, in the case of literary texts, the aesthetic illusion is a genuine illusion.1 The talk of an illusion implies a cognitive mistake of some kind, whereas with literary texts, the aesthetic illusion rather consists in a strong affective impression of one’s direct participation.2 At the most, it seems to be a willingly adopted illusion: an act of imagination, of play, of make-believe. Still, even in such a case of an impression willingly adopted, the term “illusion” can be used, and I will do so, for (partial) convenience. The standard meaning of the term “illusion” is then shifted and stretched so as to cover precisely the processes of imagination and make-believe that may occur when we read or listen to a text. Thus, in what follows, the term “illusion” does not imply falsity as a fact. It does imply potential falsity—insofar as it implies lack of guaranteed veridicity. It implies play, but it may be serious play. It does imply an element of makebelieve, but it does not imply a pure and simple make-believe.

2. Putative facts There is an elementary illusivity at work whenever we accept an utterance,3 be it written or oral, on its own terms—uncorroborated.4

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When I read or hear, “Jane walked down the street,” and I accept the utterance on its own terms—that is, uncorroborated, then that means precisely that I submit myself to the illusion that, as a matter of fact, Jane walked down the street. However, this elementary illusion becomes relevant to us only insofar as it is maintained, and as it remains a focus of our attention. The illusion may be maintained for all kinds of reasons, including the possibility of later corroboration. Here, I will leave those reasons aside and inquire into the mechanism of maintaining the illusion. The illusion, I submit, is being maintained insofar as the projection from the utterance to the putative fact is complemented by a countermovement from the putative fact to the utterance. On the one hand, the text determines the putative fact, but on the other—insofar as the illusion is maintained—the putative fact determines the text. The illusion determines the utterance in its quality, whether it is fitting, complete, true, and so forth. To put it differently: insofar as the illusion is maintained, the utterance that constitutes it is expressive in a double sense. One, it has the potency to express the putative fact:  it evokes the illusion, or it calls it up. Yet, under the stated condition, it is also (experienced as) expressive of the putative fact: the putative fact demands to be expressed, and the utterance fulfills this task—in a certain manner. When I read or hear, “Jane walked down the street,” and I accept the utterance on its own terms—that is, uncorroborated—then that means precisely the following: I subject myself to the illusion that, as a matter of fact, Jane walked down the street. However, insofar as the illusion is maintained, my experience also proceeds the other way. It is, illusively, the case for me that Jane walked down the street; the illusion demands to be expressed, and an utterance such as “Jane walked down the street” fulfills the task—in such and such a manner.

3. Corroboration and interest From this description follow two corollaries. Corollary number one is that the previous description provides two coordinated answers regarding the origin of the expressive illusion. First, the illusion stems from the elementary characteristics of speech that we can talk of objects and facts without these objects and facts being there. Sometimes we corroborate the speech ourselves, sometimes we leave it to others, sometimes we do not attain a clear result, sometimes we are indifferent to the outcome; yet in

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all these cases, the fact remains that we are capable of accepting the speech as meaningful merely on its own terms—uncorroborated. Thus, the capacity to create an illusion is a fundamental potency of speech. Yet, second, whenever the illusion is maintained, this occurs by a special mechanism; the particular utterance, besides being accepted on its own terms, is also allowed to turn on itself or close upon itself precisely in its illusive productivity.5 Instead of the utterance seeking corroboration elsewhere, it is now the putative fact seeking a kind of corroboration in the utterance itself; the putative fact seeks to be corroborated by being expressed—and the utterance is perceived as fulfilling that task in a certain manner. Corollary number two is that given that the interest in the illusion is maintained, it occurs by virtue of a different, an accrued, interest. One’s interest in the expressive illusion is maintained by one’s being interested in the manner in which the utterance fulfills the task of expressing the illusion. One’s illusion that Jane walked down the street is maintained by one’s being interested in the manner in which, say, the utterance, “Jane walked down the street,” fulfills the task of expressing the putative fact that Jane walked down the street. This other interest, however, does not need to be thematic; indeed, if no other interest is in play (on this provision, see section 4), it is non-thematic—it stays in the background.6 When a young child listens to a simple story, the story stays in the center of attention and no other interest is in play. The focus of interest, in such a case, is, first, that the utterance, “Jane walked down the street,” calls up the putative fact that Jane walked down the street and, second, that this putative fact is expressed by the utterance. This focus, however, is constituted against a background. The young child maintains her interest by assuming, for instance, that the utterance, “Jane walked down the street,” expresses the putative fact of Jane’s walking down the street in a true yet incomplete manner. True, since, really,7 Jane walked down the street. Yet incomplete, since there is more to Jane, and more to her walk.8 Thus, even in the most basic form of an interest in the that of the told, there is also a background interest in the how of the telling.

4. Justifiability This background interest can take multiple forms. I may be thematically interested in the putative fact that Jane walked down the street—against the background interest in whatever more there is to Jane and to her walk. I  may be thematically interested in the putative fact that Jane said, “I’m so happy”—against

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the background interest in whatever more there is to her emotion and to her expression of it—and so on. However, even with recipients at the most elementary level (or more precisely, with the most elementary modalities of perception), there will most likely be at least a small measure of thematic interest in Jane “as such”: in her character, her types of motivations, her capacities of action, and so forth. In what follows, I will draw a sharp distinction between these two modes of perception—that is, the one where one is thematically interested only in what Jane is doing, and what is happening to her, and the one where one is, to a degree, thematically interested in her “as such.” However, real modes of perception— real processes of listening, real processes of reading—will be constituted by a complex mixture of the two. Even so, it is legitimate to draw a sharp distinction between them in order to highlight their structure. The distinction will be drawn by means of the concepts of justifiedness and justifiability. In the first case, the recipient has an interest in the justifiedness of the utterances—that is, in their being complete, true, sincere, and so on—yet that interest is all non-thematic: it remains in the background. In the second case, the recipient’s interest in the justifiedness of the utterances becomes thematic:  one is, for instance, thematically interested in the putative fact that the utterance, “Jane walked down the street with a spring to her gait,” is, say, rather detailed in capturing the situation that it conveys, whereas the utterance, “Jane walked down the street,” is rather general in doing so. This thematic interest in the various qualities of the utterances, and the putative states of affairs conveyed by them, is—I claim—pursued against the background of a different, non-thematic interest. This other interest is the interest in the justifiability of the elements presented. Let’s say one pursues a thematic interest in Jane’s character, and in the justification that her actions receive from her character. Then—I claim—this interest is pursued against a non-thematic interest in the modes of appearing of that character, in the possibilities of its change, and in its measuring up against other characters. Let me restate this. I  claim that there are two modes of perceiving textual utterances. The first mode (A)  is two-level. On level one (A1), I  perceive— thematically—the resonance between the phrase, “Jane walked down the street,” and Jane’s putative walk down the street. On level two (A2), I perceive—nonthematically—the manner of fit between the phrase and the putative walk. The second mode (B) is three-level. On level one (B1 = A1), I thematically perceive the resonance between the phrase and the putative fact; for instance, I perceive the simple action of what I’m told. On level two (B2 ~ A2), I thematically perceive

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the manner of fit between the phrase and the putative fact; for instance, I perceive the action as action of characters, by characters, and for characters. On level three (B3), I  perceive—non-thematically—the conditions, limits, and mutual relationships of this or that fit; for instance, I perceive—non-thematically—that one character is quite similar to another, that one character is partially similar to another, or that one character is the complete opposite of another. This three-level perception, I submit, captures all varieties of what anybody would call “literary reading,” “imaginative reading,” and so on.9 It does so without relying on the problematic categories of literature, imagination, art, fiction, and so forth; on the contrary, it is firmly anchored in everyday use of language. And it is highly economical, insofar as it uses only the concept of expressive resonance, the principle that this resonance occurs against the background of a non-thematic interest, and the sequence of shifts from non-thematic to thematic.

5. Characters In the exposition previously provided, the background interest in the justifiability of the putative facts, as presented by the utterance, was directly linked to thematic interest in characters. However, let me add now, these characters need not be full-fledged individuals, such as Jane. I will use the term “character” in a somewhat broader sense, so as to designate any verbally presented subjectivity. It has been stated that the various non-thematic interests are a presupposition for the foregrounding of the thematic interests. However, there is also an opposite relationship. (We are in the realm of illusions, of uncorroborated, putative facts; vicious circles are no danger in this case.) The background interest—that is, by definition, an interest that we are only half-aware of—needs, in order to be maintained and developed, to be pulled forward by an interest that stays at the foreground of our minds. And the varieties of subjectivity are by far the strongest candidate of this foreground, thematic interest.10 I use this locution, “varieties of subjectivity,” merely to stress that the thematic interest serving as (so to say) the engine for the whole experiential complex need not be a full-fledged character. It may be a character that is only hinted at (for instance, in a poem); it may be a character developed in a special manner, such as a narrator; it may be an as-if character, whose existence is accepted only as a possibility. Indeed, the function of the engine may be fulfilled merely by a realm of hidden aspects of things (such as the marvelous, the mysterious, or the innocent), a realm implying a subjectivity capable of perceiving it.

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Each of these forms of subjectivity, if pursued in listening or reading as a thematic interest, carries with itself a non-thematic interest in the justifiability of the various attributions and connections to which this or that subjectivity is submitted. Each serves as a justification for certain particular connections (an inventor, unlike others, can do this; a fool, unlike others, can fail to comprehend that; a realm of mystery, unlike other realms, can include this; a simple, playfully construed realm, unlike other realms, can fail to explain that) by virtue of having a scope of justifiability: there are limits, although not strict ones, to what an inventor or a fool can do, to what a mystery or a play can contain. If—and as long as—a character is perceived as a baby (a voice is heard as babyish, a realm of hidden sides of things is taken to be accessible to babies), there are only certain justifications that that center can provide: it can justify inarticulate sounds, but it cannot justify high-order equations.

6. Two movements This interposition of other subjects between us and the expressive resonance, described at the outset, has a double impact. First, it brings about a distantiation: the expressive resonances occur “in the name of ” somebody else, or more precisely, the ground of justifiability that allows these resonances to arise is focused in somebody else (be it a full-fledged persona, or a mere outline of a personality). Yet, second, it also brings about an appropriation, or to put it better, the distance established by the intermediaries is such that it stimulates a measure of appropriation. The appropriation is anchored in the fact that, ultimately, all the criteria of justifiedness and justifiability employed in the entire expressive resonance are ours, delineated and actively applied by us, the readers. Thus, once again, we can observe that the illusive force of expressive resonance is strengthened by multiplication, now a more complex one than at the outset. For the subjects that mediate it are as illusory as the resonance itself. (And let me repeat: in the course of my argument, illusory does not equal nonexistent or false; it means uncorroborated.) However, the subjects and the resonance do not constitute the same kind of illusion. They differ structurally: one is the illusion that Jane walks down the street; the other is the illusion that she walks down the street since previously she has done this and subsequently she intends to do that; and yet another is the illusion that she is the kind of person who is likely to know this and that, is likely to be motivated by this and that, and is likely to pursue goals such as this and that.

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7. A definition On the basis of the previous description, I can now offer a definition of the aesthetic illusion. The aesthetic illusion, as the feeling of direct perception or direct participation, aroused even though there is (at the given moment) nothing there to be directly perceived or directly participated in, consists—I submit—in an alignment of our own personal focus with the grounds of justifiability, the degrees and manners of justifiedness, and the utterance and situation involved in a given expressive resonance. In other words, the aesthetic illusion is a kind of momentary collapse of the distinctions presented previously. It is a momentary occurrence such that the distinctions collapse, while the content presented by them lingers on.

8. Consequences It follows directly from this definition that the aesthetic illusion is unsustainable. More precisely, it cannot be sustained for any length of time without its structural opposite, the aesthetic distantiation. Only this structural opposite can provide the distinctions that the aesthetic illusion needs in order to collapse them. This also explains why my argument can be developed without any robust commitment regarding the question whether the aesthetic illusion ever really occurs in a full-fledged form. I understand the aesthetic illusion as the outlying case of a dynamics that is involved in all literary, rhetorical, and poetic phenomena, and indeed, arguably, in all speech activity. The outlying case can serve in order to set the direction of the argument—and the direction can then be pursued without any robust commitment regarding the question whether the outlying experience can be attained in actual fact. The outlying case of a full-fledged aesthetic illusion has been employed in this argument as a pointer to the phenomenon of permeating illusivity, or permanent suggestivity, present in all literary, rhetorical, and poetic phenomena, and arguably in all speech activity. My guiding question was, where does this illusivity stem from? And I have offered two interlocking answers. One, the illusivity of speech stems from the fact that, when we accept an utterance on its own terms, it sets off a resonance between the utterance itself and the putative fact conveyed by the utterance. In this way, the speech activity turns on itself and achieves an illusory self-sufficiency. This I have called “expressive resonance” or “expressive illusion.”

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Two, the illusivity of speech stems from the fact that the expressive resonance can be strengthened by attaining higher levels of complexity. These higher levels of complexity are attained by the transformation of a non-thematic interest into a thematic interest. In other words, they are attained by a modification of the activity of understanding, and this modification, far from being based on some completely new element, consists merely in turning one’s attention to an aspect that has already constituted the necessary background of one’s previous attention. The more complex is the experience, the more difficult it is to sustain it. However, all the distantiation involved in it is counterbalanced by the movement of appropriation necessarily co-involved in it, with its promise—constantly proffered, constantly delayed—of a full, unconditional appropriation. It is this movement of appropriation, I submit, that constitutes the effective core of the alleged “aesthetic illusion.”

Notes 1 This, of course, is a standard point. For an introduction to, and survey of, the concept of aesthetic illusion, cf., e.g., Wolf (2011). 2 Arguably, should this impression build up to a full-fledged illusion, it would then not be an aesthetic illusion but rather a cognitive one: instead of reading or listening in a certain way, I would simply forget that I am reading or listening. 3 I will use the term “utterance” as a general term, and as equivalent with “text” (including oral text), for the linguistic entity that we encounter in listening or reading—any manner of listening or reading. 4 I will use the term thus: an utterance is uncorroborated when it is neither confirmed nor refuted. 5 For a parallel idea, although at a different level of analysis, cf. Riffaterre (1990). 6 My approach is inspired by phenomenology of attention; cf. Gurwitsch (1964), Arvidson (2006), and Welton (2002: chapter 15). 7 That is, “really” for the sake of the illusion. 8 Cf. Sternberg (1978). 9 Where it needs to be stressed that the focus on a full-fledged narrative character and event, such as Jane and her walk, does not exhaust the possibilities of the model. The expressive resonance can also be a matter of sound, atmosphere, etc. 10 It is not the only candidate. For instance, in a purely immanentist reading of a philosophical text, one can read, say, the Monadology based exclusively on the putative realities presented by the Monadology. Arguably, an interest in a verbally

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presented subjectivity, and thus a kind of character, is also in play here, but this interest may remain non-thematic.

References Arvidson, S. (2006), The Sphere of Attention: Context and Margin, Dordrecht: Springer. Gurwitsch, A. (1964), The Field of Consciousness: Phenomenology of Theme, Thematic Field, and Marginal Consciousness, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Now also Gurwitsch, A. (2010), The Collected Works, vol. 3, Dordrecht: Springer. Riffaterre, M. (1990), Fictional Truth, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Sternberg, M. (1978), Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Welton, D. (2002), The Other Husserl: The Horizons of Transcendental Phenomenology, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wolf, W. (2011), “Illusion (Aesthetic),” in P. Hühn et al. (eds.), The Living Handbook of Narratology, Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. Available online: http://www.lhn. uni-hamburg.de/article/illusion-aesthetic.

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Fact, Fiction, and Projection The Inescapability of Austerlitz’s Impulse Josep E. Corbí

In Austerlitz, we go through a detailed report of Austerlitz’s life as delivered by him to a narrator about whom we know very little.1 The story dwells on a wealth of events and situations that Austerlitz experienced at the time as strange or episodic (Cuomo 2011:  1159; Williams 2002:  chapter  10). There is however a constant impulse that, in hindsight, Austerlitz regards as unifying all those events and situations (Parks 2011:  265–79; Coetzee 2007:  146; Franklin 2011:  1494; Whitehead 2004:  117–19). For a long time, he was relatively unaware of the existence of this unifying impulse; only in retrospect does he claim to have occasionally sensed the strength and robustness of an impulse whose ultimate direction he could only identify quite late in his life. In this paper, I will approach the story in Austerlitz as the recounting of the process by which Austerlitz becomes aware of the direction of this impulse and engages in a quest for truth in the details of which will reveal (and determine) the ethical nature of the impulse that unifies his life. More specifically, I will account for Austerlitz’s constant impulse in terms of the inescapability of a certain dynamics of projection that connects a particular situation to which his life is anchored to a more universal concern. I will argue that the inescapability of this dynamics derives from our need to feel at home in the world and also that it is constitutive of our ethical bond with others. I will finally examine a number of resources in the novel that invite a second process of projection, namely a projection from fiction onto facts. I will conclude that this transgression of the aesthetic illusion comes to confirm the ethical significance of the novel and, indeed, of Austerlitz’s impulse.2

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The structure of this paper goes as follows. In Section 1, I  will examine Austerlitz’s experience during his visit to Marienbad in 1972 with Marie de Verneuil. The need to feel at home in the world will help us to account for his impulse toward isolation as well as for his resistance to the emergence of his memories of a previous visit with his parents back in 1938. Austerlitz only becomes aware of this process of obliteration much later, in the early nineties, when visiting Liverpool Street Station in one of his nightly walks across London and after a serious episode of psychic disarray from which he had hardly recovered. In Section 2, I will thus focus on how his psychic impairment favored his awareness of that process of obliteration. Austerlitz’s view of his own past was thereby transformed: he can now confess his own “unrelieved despair” as well as his complete isolation. He feels inescapably impelled to investigate his past. In Sections 3 and 4, I will examine the nature of this quest for truth. I will show how Austerlitz’s concern cannot intelligibly be confined to his parent’s fate but must be projected onto those with whom they shared a common, ominous end. In this process of projection, the breach of the aesthetic illusion by means of a number of expressive resources will play a fundamental role. Moreover, I will argue that these transgressions of the boundaries of fiction make a claim on the reader herself, whom, once she has apprehended the nature of Austerlitz’s dynamics, is impelled to enquire about her own process of obliteration and thus to engage in a quest for truth. This process of projection beyond fiction will also serve to shed some light on the experience of being at home in the world whose demands lie, as we shall see, at the heart of Austerlitz’s impulse and his unredeemed isolation. We will thus be invited to regard such demands as constitutive of an ethical bond with others that emerges as inescapable insofar as their denial could reasonably lead to the edge of madness (Williams 1985, chapter 1).

1. Bliss and isolation in Marienbad Austerlitz specializes in the architectural style of the capitalist era (Sebald 2001: 575): railway stations, law courts, penal institutions, lunatic asylums, and so forth. Austerlitz regarded his own concern with the subject as merely academic and, therefore, as unrelated to the details of his personal life. Only in retrospect could he see how his research obeyed an impulse that concerned the details of his personal life. What at the time was approached as an impartial (and, in this specific sense, universal) interest in the study of the railway system,

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later emerged as a distorted manifestation of a more particular concern associated with this own biography: Why he had embarked on such a wide field, said Austerlitz, he did not know; very likely he had been poorly advised when he first began his research work. But then again, it was also true that he was still obeying an impulse which he himself, to this day, did not really understand, but which was somehow linked to his early fascination with the idea of a network such as that of the entire railway system. (Sebald 2001: 580; my emphasis; see Weil 1963: 38–45)

The strength and relevance of this impulse is enhanced by the fact that “he had quite often found himself in the grip of dangerous and entirely incomprehensible currents of emotion in the Parisian railway stations” (Sebald 2001: 580). This emotional turmoil was a mystery to him at the time; he perceived it as both incomprehensible and dangerous. Why was it sensed as dangerous despite its opacity? It could be that any strong emotion, no matter which, would have been thus perceived by a character like his, but this in itself reveals a sense of protection related to the building up of walls or dams that may eventually clumber or yield (371, 393, 426). At the end of August 1972, Austerlitz travels with Marie de Verneuil to Marienbad. Marie had arranged the trip so that Austerlitz could advance his studies on the history of spas in Europe. As they arrived, he was touched by “a slight sense of disquiet” (Sebald 2001: 2463), which was soon dispelled by an unexpected state of happiness—one of the few experiences of bodily closeness reported in the novel. He was listening to Marie’s regular breathing as she was asleep; her breathing meshed nicely with the rain outside and his mind came at last to rest.3 This state of bliss was over, though, the day after when a gloomy distant mood overtook him and settled within him for the rest of their stay in Marienbad. Austerlitz reports to have felt how those decrepit buildings reflected his state of mind: I felt that the decrepit state of these once magnificent buildings, with their broken gutters, walls blackened by rainwater, . . . precisely reflected my own state of mind, which I could not explain either to myself or to Marie. (Sebald 2001: 2523)

In cases like this, we could say that Austerlitz projects his deteriorated state of mind on the poor condition of the building. We could thus assume that the content of Austerlitz’s mental states and emotions were previously determined and then projected on some suitable objects on the basis of some general isomorphic correlations. This is not, though, the notion of projection I will appeal to in my analysis of Austerlitz’s impulse. To sketch this alternative notion, we may turn to

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some other situations in which Austerlitz’s views of the properties of the buildings under examination hardly respond to a general isomorphism but to their connection with some specific biographical circumstances he was at the time unable to remember: And once again I tried to explain to her and to myself what incomprehensible feelings had been weighing on me over the last few days; how I kept thinking, like a madman, that there were mysterious signs and portents all around me here; how it even seemed to me as if the silent façades of the buildings knew something ominous about me, how I had always believed I must be alone, and in spite of my longing for her [Marie] I now felt it more than ever before. (Sebald 2001: 2559; my emphasis; see pp. 371, 2621)

To make sense of this experience, he had first to discover some details of his biography, namely that he had been born in Prague and had been raised there until the age of four, and also that, according to Věra, he had spent “three wonderful, almost blissful weeks” (Sebald 2001: 2439) in Marienbad 1938 with his mother Agáta, his father Maximilian, and Věra herself. In fact, this is one of the few occasions in the novel where an experience of being at ease or at home is explicitly confessed, even though from the viewpoint of its loss (Schwartz 2011: 93; Wachtel 2011: 652–82; Silverblatt 2011: 1044). There must something ominous, though, about this loss that forces him to live alone. What does this ominousness consist of? And why does it invite isolation? I  regard these two questions as crucial to the novel and, in my view, they can be fruitfully addressed on the basis of a notion of projection where there is no previously established content to be projected, but such that the direction and nature of Austerlitz’s impulse is determined (and revealed) by the process itself of projection. To begin with, we may focus on the fact that Austerlitz deeply (but unconsciously) connects his peaceful listening to Marie’s regular breathing with his happy visit to Marienbad in 1938. Agáta, Maximilian, and Věra provided him with a warm atmosphere, with shelter, where he experienced the entire world as a space of trust (Améry 1980:  chapter 2; Weil 1986: 163–5). We could thus say that Austerlitz felt at home in the world during his first visit to Marienbad. The experience of feeling at home in the world (homeliness, hereafter) involves expectations of protection that are necessarily reciprocal. How then could Austerlitz feel at home with Marie if his real family, those who provided him with shelter in the first place, has presumably been abandoned to a horrendous fate? He thus renounces feeling at home with Marie as part of his strategy to honor his parents’ fate and, therefore, to the homely world he once experienced. He feels alienated

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from the world, out of reality. There is no place for him in the world unless there is a place for his parents too. As far back as I can remember, said Austerlitz, I have always felt as if I had no place in reality, as if I were not there at all, and I never had this impression more strongly than on that evening in the Šporkova when the eyes of the Rose Queen’s page looked through me. (Sebald 2001: 2258; my emphasis; see pp. 1585, 1724)

It was in Marienbad 1938 where he felt at ease in the company of his parents and a close friend. We can reasonably assume that his experience involved a secret projection beyond this limited circle of people to vaguely embrace everyone else; otherwise, he could not have felt properly at home, but at most protected behind the thick walls of a fortress, as he will later realize to have lived since his arrival in London. Our experience of homeliness involves then a process of universalization, that is, a projection beyond the particular. The experience of homeliness thus emerges as relying on very demanding expectations insofar as it tends to encompass everyone. It is then clear that these expectations could hardly be sensed as fulfilled except by indulging in some sort of illusion or distortion (Corbí 2010, 2012:  chapters  3 and 4). Austerlitz’s initial strategy was a combination of obliteration, which goes toward illusion, and isolation that points to the idea of faithfulness to the stringent demands of homeliness by means of some sort of self-immolation. From a Humean approach to motivation, we could object that there is nothing of ethical significance to be learned from Austerlitz’s actual processes of projection, since it is merely idiosyncratic, relative to his peculiar character. And, from a Kantian perspective, it could be stressed that only by appealing to some general principles could the ethical significance of Austerlitz’s impulse reasonably be vindicated. Both replies presuppose that the content of Austerlitz’s impulse is previously determined and then projected onto the external world or examined in light of reason. I will argue, however, that it is only within the process of projection of a particular onto a universal concern that the experience of homeliness (and, therefore, the nature of Austerlitz’s impulse) can properly be determined (Corbí 2012:  chapters 2 and 4; Stroud 2011). Moreover, on the basis of this content-determining notion of projection, there is no need to appeal to some general principles, for this dynamics of projection includes some normative constraints—as I will soon highlight—so that the ethical significance of Austerlitz’s experience could be acknowledged regardless of any general principles; on the contrary, the ethical significance of any such principles and their precise content ought to be grounded on our actual practice of projection.

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In the coming sections, I will further elaborate on this idea and show how the dynamics of Austerlitz’s impulse may help us apprehend the nature of our ethical bond with others. I will thus conclude that Austerlitz’s impulse can only be grasped insofar as we regard a certain dynamics of projection from a particular onto a universal concern as constitutive of our ethical bond with others and, in the end, of our humanity. At a later stage, a second process of projection will enter the scene, namely, one that impels the reader to infringe the boundaries of fiction and to reflect on how she herself should respond to the facts under examination.

2. Becoming aware of the process of obliteration In 1972 Austerlitz’s memories were threateningly close to emerging during his visit to Marienbad: The torment inherent in both these images that came into my mind in Marienbad, the mad Schumann and the pigeons immured in that place of horror, made it impossible for me to attain even the lowest step on the way to self-knowledge. (Sebald 2001: 2553; see p. 2599)

He managed to suppress those memories on that particular occasion, but this strategy finally led him to the edge of madness. Austerlitz dates the beginning of his decline to when he got to know that Gerald’s aircraft had crashed in the Savoy Alps: It was a bad day when I heard that he had crashed in the Savoy Alps, and perhaps that was the beginning of my own decline, a withdrawal into myself which became increasingly morbid and intractable with the passage of time. (1484)

Gerald had been assigned to Austerlitz as a fag at Stower Grange. He soon realized that Gerald felt as isolated as himself and this made them close. Adela, Gerald’s mother, provided Austerlitz with a sense of family life. He was often invited to their place. The death of Gerald ruined Austerlitz’s only close connection with the world and induced the collapse of his entire personality. At some point, Austerlitz felt unable to carry on with his studies, his linguistic capabilities crumbled—sentences decomposed into words and sounded hollow (Sebald 2001: 1539, 1562, 1744). No matter how hard he struggled to write properly, the day after, he spotted numerous blunders in what at the time looked like a nice piece of clear and neat writing. The sense of protection that he derived from his studies vanished; he no longer enjoyed sitting at his desk until late at night. The

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academic fortress he had so carefully built to protect himself from the world was falling apart. Its battlements were no longer a vantage point from which to examine the facts. What he once regarded as an enhanced epistemic position is later on perceived as the source and product of a distortion. His immense curiosity for railway stations and the study of fortresses allowed him to approach the particulars of his past without actually facing them.4 He experienced his research as stemming from an impartial concern with history, whereas, in fact, it was anchored to a more particular interest whose existence he tried to obliterate but could occasionally sense. Austerlitz’s deterioration ended up affecting his ability to conduct the simplest tasks, like arranging assorted objects in a drawer. At some point, he felt on the brink of a total collapse or disintegration of his personality that he associated with a constant process of obliteration: It was as if an illness that had been latent in me for a long time were now threatening to erupt, as if some soul-destroying and inexorable force had fastened upon me and would gradually paralyse my entire system. I already felt in my head the dreadful torpor that heralds disintegration of the personality, I sensed that in truth I  had neither memory nor the power of thought, nor even any existence, that all my life had been a constant process of obliteration, a turning away from myself and the world. (Sebald 2001: 1555; my emphasis; see 1556)

At this stage, Austerlitz has not yet found out to what extent his feeling of having succumbed to a process of obliteration will be confirmed by the facts. It is remarkable, nevertheless, that he could sense it and also that the idea of obliteration should be construed as “a turning away from myself and the world” that leads naturally to the idea of isolation, of being “cut off from the outside world” or “out of reality”: As this state of affairs continued I came to realize how isolated I was and always have been, . . . I was as ill at ease among artists and intellectuals as in bourgeois life, and it was a very long time since I had felt able to make personal friendships. No sooner did I become acquainted with someone than I feared I had come too close, no sooner did someone turn towards me than I began to retreat. In the end I was linked to other people only be certain forms of courtesy which I took to extremes and which I know today, said Austerlitz, I observed not so much for the sake of their recipients as because they allowed me to ignore the fact that my life has always, for as far back as I can remember, been clouded by unrelieved despair. (Sebald 2001: 1548; see Whitehead 2004: 118)

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He rejects any intimate relationship because, otherwise, he would be forced to go beyond the normal forms of courtesy and be in touch with his own despair. It seems, then, that his isolation from other human beings is a maneuver to keep his own despair under control. This overall attitude becomes manifest in a striking way during his short visit to Marienbad with Marie. There, as we have seen, Austerlitz was unable to enjoy her company; he felt drawn by a strange impulse to keep himself at a distance and to renounce the sense of easiness he felt during his first night with her. Like in Marienbad, he was still unable to recall any particular memories. He is just invaded by an overall sense of distress. A step in the direction of self-knowledge has already been taken, though. In 1972 he just suspected that the buildings in Marienbad knew something ominous about him, but now he has become aware of the constant process of obliteration that has shaped his life and the link between this process and his own isolation. Intimate relationships have to do with the sort of bliss that Austerlitz experienced when he felt at home in Marienbad 1938. His effort to suppress his memories is meant to deny the demands that this experience impose on him, but on the other hand, it amounts to a confession of its own importance and the subsequent isolation comes up as a sort of self-sacrifice that should compensate his denial and, therefore, be seen as a desperate attempt to be faithful to the demands of homeliness (Wachtel 2011: 539). All this suggests that such demands play a crucial role in the impulse that initially induced Austerlitz to study architectural history and finally led him to the edge of madness. Examining the way Austerlitz responds to his discovery in Liverpool Street Station will help us elucidate the specific nature of those demands in terms of the inescapability of a dynamic of projection, namely the anchorage to a particular demand and its projection onto a more universal concern.5

3. Liverpool Street Station: The quest for truth One day at Liverpool Street Station, London, the memories of Austerlitz’s first arrival as a child emerged. He was sitting in a room where he had been delivered to his fosters parents. The child whose image came back to him carried a rucksack very much like his own and by this means Austerlitz managed to recognize this child as himself at the age of four. He thus realizes that his parents in Wales were his foster parents and, therefore, that he must look for his true parents. He does not know where to start, though. Still, the recognition of his own mistakes increases his self-understanding and suffices to makes sense of his own despair

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and isolation throughout those years. He feels at last alive, as having been born only then: All I do know is that when I saw the boy sitting on the bench I became aware, through my dull bemusement, of the destructive effect on me of my desolation throughout all those past years, and a terrible weariness overcame me at the idea that I had never been alive, or was only born, almost on the eve of death. (Sebald 2001: 1697)

How is it that the discovery of a certain truth may engender the experience of being born, so that one’s previous life is retrospectively perceived as a sort of death (Alexievich 1992: 32; Korsgaard 1996: 102; Parks 2011: 224; Weil 1978: 6– 7; 1986: 165)? We do not read the importance he attaches to the facts he had just unearthed as a further manifestation of his psychic impairment but, on the contrary, as a sign of his humanity and a chance to overcome his isolation. It must then be a fact (or a set of facts) related to a normative notion of importance, that is, a fact whose importance everyone should acknowledge and, consequently, a fact whose significance does not depend on any idiosyncratic trait of Austerlitz’s. The importance that the protagonist attributes to these facts manifests in a few solemn declarations, but most relevantly in the kind of search he undertakes after his discovery. He is determined to undo the process of obliteration he had previously indulged in and, thus, he feels inescapably embarked on a quest for truth (Williams 1981: 130–1). What sort of inescapability is this? What kind of necessity is involved there? Bernard Williams introduced the notion of practical necessity in order to grasp a rather similar experience (1981, 1993: 75–6). This sort of necessity has to do with a kind of motivation that the agent does not experience as coming just from herself, that is, as depending on one or another desire or drive she may eventually have, but as a confrontation with something: The experience is like being confronted with something, a law that is part of the world in which one lives. . . . It is the conclusion of practical necessity, no more and no less, and it seems to come ‘from outside’ in the way that conclusions of practical necessity always seem to come from outside—from deeply inside. Since ethical considerations are in question, the agent’s conclusions will not usually be solitary or unsupported, because they are part of an ethical life that is to an important degree shared with others. (2002: 190–1)6

How is the world that the agent confronts to be conceived of? For, quite paradoxically, Williams claims that practical necessity must come both from outside and from deeply inside. How is this sort of experience at all possible? Williams says very little on the positive side. He tends to insist on a number of dichotomies

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that must be averted, but we are in need of a more positive account if we are to understand what practical necessity consists of. I will try to make some progress in this direction by examining Weil’s distinction between two notions of obedience. Consider my beliefs about a certain subject matter. There is no way in which I could change them at will. For instance, I can’t but believe that the keyboard is on my desk as I type this sentence. I can’t intelligibly decide not to believe it. The same happens with the conclusion of a mathematical proof I understand. I am forced to accept it. But this kind of imposition does not debase me; on the contrary, by understanding a mathematical argument, my life is enriched. This sort of imposition involves, according to Weil, a kind of obedience, namely, obedience to an order that is out there for me to acknowledge. The ability to obey contrasts with the kind of imposition and obedience that is standardly associated with passions as they are construed by Humean and Kantian approaches, namely passions and inclinations come just from within; they are idiosyncratic and yielding to their necessity degrades the self. As Weil puts it: Obedience. There are two kinds. We can obey the force of gravity or we can obey the relationship of things. In the first case we do what we are driven to by the imagination that fills up empty spaces. We can affix a variety of labels to it, often with a show of truth, including righteousness and God. If we suspend the filling up activity of the imagination and fix our attention on the relationship of things, a necessity becomes apparent which we cannot help obeying. Until then we have not any sense of necessity and we have no sense of obedience. (1963: 43; see p. 38)

Human beings seem to be subject to two sorts of order that come with the corresponding notions of necessity and obedience. The order of gravity shapes our lives only insofar as we are prey to a certain epistemic distortion: we take for real what is just a creature of our imagination. This confusion derives from our difficulty to confront a certain fact, namely, the void. Filling up the void with the products of our imagination is an activity we must refrain from if we are to honor the second sort of order, namely, the relations of things. We let ourselves be guided by the actual relations of things only insofar as we are able get rid of the temptation to distort them due to the laws of gravity. There is an obvious epistemic benefit in this attitude, but also a gain in our agency. The order of gravity degrades the self, whereas an agent’s ability to act on the basis of the relations of things, like when accepting the result of a mathematical proof, makes of her the master of her life. For this connection between agency and faithfulness to the relations of things to be at all plausible, Weil must have a rather specific understanding of what is included within the relations of things.

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The relations of things does not simply comprise what the natural sciences may recognize as a fact, but must encompass the moral features of our actions and other evaluative features as well. These features are not in the world in the way particles and their motions are. Evaluative features depend on our response to the world in a more interwoven manner than the identity conditions of particles do. We cannot identify an action as cruel, generous, or shameful except by reference to how we actually respond to them, that is, in virtue of our ability to project our response to a particular situation onto some other situations (Stroud 2000, 2011; Corbí 2012: chapter 4). This process of projection cannot be construed as merely idiosyncratic and, therefore, as unrestrictedly variable from one to another individual or context. It must be subject to a certain discipline. It is true that two individuals may differ in their views as to whether an action is cruel or shameful, but their ability to express a moral view hangs on the fact that such variations are not arbitrary from a moral point of view; in other words, any such variation must be justified by a disparity of assessment as to the relative weight of the morally relevant features involved in the situation. Two people can actually disagree about the legitimacy of the death penalty, but for their views to be at all moral, their disagreement must be grounded on a divergent view about the relative weight of features that are recognizably moral.7 One cannot intelligibly defend the death penalty only for those who wear glasses or had a coin in their pocket when committing their crime, for such a view could not be identified as ethical. This imposes an order on the world but also on the agent’s experience, for only those aspects of our experience that are shaped by this sort of projective discipline can be taken into account in the way the relations of things are individuated.8 Thus we can make sense of Williams’s idea that, regarding the kind of necessity we are dealing with, what comes from outside in our practical deliberations comes from deep inside as well. This is, in my view, the kind of necessity that accounts for the inescapability of Austerlitz’s impulse to engage in a quest for truth after his experience at Liverpool Street Station. We are unable to perceive it as an idiosyncratic aspect of his character or as an aggravation of his psychic impairment; on the contrary, we tend to regard his quest as an inescapable response to the ethical significance of the facts discovered.

4. Fiction, facts, and the normative demands of homeliness In Liverpool Street Station, Austerlitz got to know what his past was not. He had to wait for further cues to proceed. One day he was visiting an antiquarian

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bookshop. Two women were talking on the radio about a special transport to London in 1939 and his memories emerged, once again. He was convinced beyond any shadow of a doubt that he had arrived in England in one of those special transports that had departed from Prague: It was quiet in the shop except for soft voices coming from the little radio . . . and these voices . . . cast such a spell over me that I entirely forgot the engravings lying before me. . . . I was listening to two women talking to each other about the summer 1939, when they were children and had been sent to England on a special transport . . . only then I know beyond any doubt that these fragments of memory were part of my own life as well. (Sebald 2001: 1755)

Since his experience in Liverpool Street Station, he was determined to unearth his past and find out the names and fate of his true parents, but now he has come across a direction to search. He must definitely travel to Prague to pursue the path toward his past. Once in Prague and being a good historian, he first visits the archive in Terezín; but still, he obtained the most fruitful results not so much from this academic research but from his readiness to let his memories emerge. Unlike his experience in Marienbad in 1972, he was now ready to welcome and discern anything that might come out of the shadows of his past (Silverblatt 2011: 1033). This openness led him to Věra. He embraced her twice as they met in an exceptionally intimate gesture. His past was alive in her voice. She told him the details of his mother Agáta and his father Maximilian. He even got a photograph of himself dressed as a pageboy: I examined every detail under a magnifying glass without once finding the slightest clue. And in doing so I always felt the piercing, inquiring gaze of the page boy who had come to demand his dues, who was waiting in the grey light of dawn on the empty field for me to accept the challenge and avert the misfortune lying ahead of him. (Sebald 2001: 2246)

A terrible future lied ahead of this pageboy. Even now, when contemplating him as a grown-up, he relives the terror that he had to go through in his early childhood and, for a long time, had suppressed. There are two aspects of Austerlitz’s relation to this photograph of a five-year-old pageboy that I would like to highlight. On the one hand, there is the sense of coziness and protection that it conveys. One can see in the photograph the care and pride of some middle-class parents that feel comfortable enough in their society to adopt and cultivate some rituals of binding, like dressing a boy with such glamorous attire to accompany his mother to a masked ball and taking a picture of him to be shown and treasured. This is the world that would vanish like a cloud when

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the Nazi troops invaded Prague, whose sequels for his family are described to Austerlitz by Věra. It is the fear of the Nazi invasion that induced Agáta and Maximilian to put their loved four-year-old child on a train to an uncertain destination. Agáta seems to have fallen into a depression after Austerlitz’s departure. The sequence of bans against the Jews issued by the Nazi authorities gradually destroyed a world that she experienced retrospectively (like Austerlitz himself regarding Marienbad) as a lost paradise, as a place of beautiful memories and normality that may no longer return: Nor could she herself appear on stage any more, and access the banks of the Vltava and the parks and gardens she had loved so much was barred to her. All my green places are lost to me, she once said, adding that only now did she truly understand how wonderful it is to stand by the rail of a river steamer without a care in the world. (Sebald 2001: 2105)

This mention of parks and gardens as the places where Agáta enjoyed nature, her “green places,” invite the idea of homeliness. A garden is full of plants that grow gracefully but only because they are sheltered and tended. They are exposed to every change in the weather but can survive and prosper because a gardener protects them. Reports like this suggest that Austerlitz’s feelings of homeliness back in Marienbad 1938 were a reflection of his mother’s own attitude toward the world. A world whose extinction drags down the idea of home, so that only a fortress could provide a sense of protection, but a protection without contact, in isolation. There is, on the other hand, the trivial fact that the photograph of the fiveyear-old pageboy could not have been a portrait of Austerlitz’s himself because the latter is a fictional character and a photograph of a person points to an actual referent (Barthes 1981: 4–7; Wachtel 2011: 457). There is here a reference to facts that must actually have taken place that favors, in more than one way, a projection from a particular onto a universal concern (Angier 2011: 751, 863; Lubow 2011: 1958; Wachtel 2011: 468; Whitehead 2004: 131). Austerlitz is presented as the referent in the photograph but we know he can’t be and, yet, it must be the picture of a certain boy and, by this means, it seems then that our concern for Austerlitz’s fate leaving Prague at the age of four must spread and be projected on all boys of a similar age that had to go through related tribulations. There is, besides, no apparent reason why this process of projection should be kept within the boundaries of fiction. An analogous articulation of a universal and particular concern takes place in Austerlitz’s search of his mother’s face in Theresienstadt concentration

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camp. He does not feel satisfied with the pieces of information he has gathered that confirm her deportation to this camp and her death there. He needs to track her final steps in a more vivid way. At some stage, he examines a film recorded in this camp and he is convinced he has recognized her face. He orders a slow-motion version of a certain fragment of the movie to confirm his guess (Sebald 2001:  2864). Austerlitz concludes that a woman in the movie looks like the way he has imagined his mother. He looks for some other pictures of Agáta in the Prague theatrical archives and there he comes across a photograph of a woman who Věra “immediately and without a shadow of a doubt, as she said, recognized Agáta as she had then been” (Sebald 2001: 2912). Unlike the pageboy photograph, Austerlitz does not come across a photograph of his mother. He had to engage in a rather intricate inquiry to obtain it. This search symbolizes the particularist aspect of Austerlitz’s concern or impulse:  without finding whom his mother was and what she looked like, he felt completely lost. Austerlitz wants to reverse the arrow of time (Améry 1980:  chapter 4; Sebald 2001: 362, 1323, 1387, 1621, 2258, 2964). He wants to meet his mother again and have a chat with her so that the pageboy could be given an account of why he had been put on that transport and how much she missed him as a result. In other words, he wants to sense that his parents had not abandoned him but, on the contrary, that his trip across Europe was in fact an attempt to protect him, that it was a homely gesture even though it led to the exile. But he also would like to tell his mother how isolated he felt away from her and that he has been faithful to her and to his father by keeping himself away from any other intimate relationship. “There could not be a home for me without you” would count in Austerlitz’s mouth both as a fact and as a commitment, as a wound and as an act of faithfulness. Only an encounter with his mother could cure them, heal their wounds, but an alleged photograph of Agáta’s is the closest he can be to such an encounter. He can stare at her face and guess what she would say, how she would look at him, whether she would release him from any demands and invite him to have a life of his own without the weight of the dead, including her and his father Maximilian. The dead would not then be a burden but a source of inspiration. They would not be looking at him with contempt because of his turning away from them. They would not be forgotten and definitely dead; they would be alive by inspiring his life. This way the boundaries between the dead and the living would be infringed and somehow the dead would not vanish and the living would not feel abandoned and isolated.

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Who are the dead, though? Austerlitz is often concerned with the dead in general, any dead person. This overall concern becomes manifest in his studies in architectural history, especially when he focuses on the amount of pain present in some buildings like Breendonk or in the old asylum underneath Liverpool Street Station (Sebald 2001: 822, 1632, 2258, 2372, 2966). And, yet, we know that this merely general concern was finally perceived as a distortion, that is, as part of his process of obliteration. It was a way to explore some troubling truths without actually facing them. At some point, he realizes that a more particular concern permeated his overall preoccupation with the dead, namely, a concern for his own past and, more specifically, for his parents. So we anchor a rather universal, impartial concern to a more particular preoccupation. And, yet, the facts Austerlitz comes across, the facts that his father Maximilian anticipates, affects more than his personal biography. They involve an inescapable shift toward the universal, that is, to everyone whose actual fate was similar to his parents’ under the Nazi regime. A nesting of voices, so recurrent in this prose narrative, emphasizes this shift. The narrator keeps repeating with the constancy of a prayer, “said Austerlitz,” but at the stage when the holocaust is first mentioned, this nesting of voices is taken to the extreme. The narrator tells us that Austerlitz recalls what Věra said his father Maximilian had said: It was in just the same vein, said Věra, that Maximilian later repeatedly described the spectacular film of the Party rally which he had seen in a Munich cinema, and which confirmed his suspicions that, out of the humiliation from which the Germans had never recovered, they were now developing an image of themselves as a people chosen to evangelize the world. (Sebald 2001: 2062)

And, yet, this nesting of voices does not diminish the sense that we are not dealing, for once, with vague memories or somewhat biased views about the world, but with the facts themselves. How this effect is obtained is uncertain. One might think that the impact of the facts reported is so robust that they persist through the transmission from one to another narrator. One could reply, on the contrary, that all that this shows is that the notion of objectivity relies on that of authority—Austerlitz was, after all, listening to his father, the ultimate authority for a child. It could also be that the premonitory character of Maximilian’s words contribute to the aura of objectivity, but this interpretation presupposes a certain complicity with the reader, namely, a shared conviction that those facts did actually take place and also that they are ominous. And those facts, the facts Austerlitz’s feels concerned with through his father’s voice, are not just personal or relative to his family only, but require a projection

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beyond those boundaries in the direction of the universal. Could we have understood that Austerlitz had failed to take this step toward the universal, so that he had only been concerned with the fate of his family? Of course, we could but then we would not regard his endeavor as a manifestation of his humanity, but as a further symptom of his psychic impairment. It follows that we do not interpret this projection from a particular onto a universal concern as the product of a wish or an idiosyncratic desire that Austerlitz might have had, but as derived from a sort of necessity or imposition that everyone must acknowledge. By this means we come to understand the inescapable dynamics of projection that articulate our ethical bond with others and, in the end, our capacity to feel at home in the world. Understanding Austerlitz’s impulse as an attempt to unveil and restore an ethical bond with others helps us understand the expressive significance of a narrator who constantly reminds us of the fact that he is merely reporting what Austerlitz actually told him. Sebald has repeatedly stressed that his writing is partly an attempt to break up the conspiracy of silence carefully woven to hide the Nazi holocaust (Simic 2011). For this purpose, he feels forced to rely on the victim’s voice, on her own account of her experience, with no challenge or questioning on the side of the listener. Austerlitz is one such victim, but not the most extreme one, since the real victims are among the dead and they cannot talk. They are the drowned, in Primo Levi’s terms (1986:  chapter  3). And, as Levi stresses, no one is entitled to talk on their behalf, not even the survivors, the saved, even though the latter may feel the need to talk (Levi confesses his strong impulse to do so) because no one else is in a better position to voice the experience of the drowned. And, yet, the best stance may not be good enough. There is always a gap that cannot be bridged, a blunder that cannot be fixed.9 Sebald’s choice of a narrator as an attentive listener, as someone who never challenges Austerlitz’s views and reconstructions, suggests a recognition of the legitimacy of Levi’s demands, namely that only the victim can really voice her plight. A third party must just make room for that voice. Sebald in this novel has gone beyond that, of course. He has told us the story of a survivor, of one of the saved. Would the victim object to the legitimacy of this gesture? Did the narrator get Austerlitz’s permission to tell his story? Was it necessary? Why did Austerlitz tell his story to the narrator? Does the narrator represent anyone ready to listen to him attentively? Think about this latter respect, on the fact that only a few details concerning the narrator are revealed, some of which are coincidental with the author’s actual circumstances while others bear no such continuity. Here we come across a way of pointing to a

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referent beyond fiction that resembles the use of the photographs of the pageboy and Agáta, for both invite the thought that the narrator must be a particular person, even though he cannot be the author himself, but someone else, anyone perhaps who has been brought up in relevantly similar circumstances. It is, in other words, suggested that the reader herself could be in that position and, therefore, that a similar deferential attitude should be expected from her. Besides, the narrator has got a rucksack like Austerlitz himself and this awakes the thought that he (and, therefore, any interlocutor, any reader) may be in a situation close to Austerlitz’s himself only that, unlike the latter, he (and, therefore, the reader) may not yet be aware of his own process of obliteration. The novel’s appeal to a referent beyond fiction sounds then like an invitation for the reader to initiate her own quest of truth, that is, her own dynamics of projection. Two processes of projection are thus involved in the novel: from the particular onto the universal and also from fiction onto facts. The latter is, however, a consequence of the practical inescapability of the former.

Notes 1 I am indebted to Fernando Broncano, Manuel García-Carpintero, Javier Moscoso, Salvador Rubio, Angela Uribe, and Jesús Vega for a detailed discussion of various aspects of this paper. I have also benefited from numerous comments of my students in the course Art, Literature and Philosophy (2014–15) as well as from some questions raised by the participants in 4th Workshop on the Philosophy of Literature (Valencia, November 14, 2015), The X. Prague Interpretation Colloquium: The Aesthetic Illusion in the Literature and the Arts (Prague, April 20–22, 2015) and IX. Inter-University Workshop on Art, Mind and Morality: Art and Negative Emotions (Murcia, September 30–October 2, 2015). I am finally pleased to acknowledge that research for this paper has been funded by Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity (CSD2009-00056, FFI2013-47948-P, FFI2014-55256-REDT). 2 Austerlitz, and in general Sebald’s prose writings, raise the issue as to whether we are really dealing with a novel or with a different kind of narrative—partly because of the way fact and fiction interrelate in his writings. In fact, Sebald refers to works like Austerlitz as a prose narrative and to some other books of his as documentary fiction. For some further remarks on this issue, see Angier (2011: 751); Franklin (2011: 1495); Schwartz (2011: 122); and Wachtel (2011: 411–20, 468). 3 “The rare sense of happiness that I felt as I listened to my companion talking, said Austerlitz, paradoxically enough gave me the idea that I myself, like the guests

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staying in Marienbad a hundred years ago, had contracted an insidious illness, and together with that idea came the hope that I was now beginning to be cured. Indeed, I had never in my life passed over the threshold into sleep more securely than on that first night I spent with Marie. I listened to her regular breathing, and saw her beautiful face next to me every so often for a split second in the summer lightning that flashed across the sky. Then the rain fell steadily outside, the white curtains blew into the room, and as my mind became gradually submerged I felt, like a slight easing behind my forehead, the belief rise within me that I had found release at last. But nothing came of it” (Sebald 2001: 2504). “The frequent result, said Austerlitz, of resorting to measures of fortification marked in general by a tendency towards paranoid elaboration was that you drew attention to your weakest point, practically inviting the enemy to attack it, not to mention the fact that as architectural plans for fortifications became increasingly complex, the time it took to build them increased as well, and with it the probability that as soon as they were finished, if not before, they would have been overtaken by further developments, both in artillery and in strategic planning, which took account of the growing realization that everything was decided in movement, not in a state of rest” (Sebald 2001: 393; see p. 1724). These demands are certainly related to the notion of the ethical as introduced by Bernard Williams (1981: 130–1; 1985: chapter 1; 2002: 190–1). Morality, insofar as it depends on the voluntariness of one’s actions, is just a peculiar institution within the ethical realm, where an agent may be held responsible for actions or omissions on which he had no control. In a similar way, Williams claims: “The recognition of practical necessity must involve an understanding at once of one’s own moral powers and incapacities, and of what the world permits, and the recognition of a limit which is neither simply external to the self, nor yet a product of the will, is what can lend a special authority or dignity to such decisions—something that can be heard in Luther’s famous saying, for instance, but also, from a world far removed from what Luther, Kant, or we, might call ‘duty’, in the words of Ajax before his suicide: ‘now I am going where my way must go” (Williams 1981: 130–1). Needless to say, any particular moral feature must in turn be individuated by reference to our moral practices of projection, since there is no point of view external to those practices from which they could be individuated (Goodman 1983: 63–4; Rawls 1999: 18; Stroud 2011: chapter 4). For a detailed discussion on the concept of narrative discipline, see Corbí (2012: chapters 4–5). This has some significant implications as to the limits of the third-person perspective regarding practical deliberation; unfortunately, I have no room here to explore this point (Corbí 2012: chapter 1).

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References Alexievich, S. (1992), Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices in a Forgotten War, London: Chatto & Windus. Améry, J. (1980), At the Mind’s Limit, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Angier, C. (2011), “Who is W. G. Sebald?,” in L. S. Schwartz (ed.), The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald, 735–918, Seven Stories Press, Kindle Edition. Barthes, R. (1981), Camera Lucida, translated by R. Howard, New York: Hill and Wang. Coetzee, J. (2007), “W. G. Sebald, After Nature,” in Inner Workings. Literary Essays 2000– 2005, 145–54, London: Penguin Books. Corbí, J. E. (2010), “The Real and the Imaginary in the Soldier’s Experience,” in P. Koťátko, M. Pokorný, and M. Sabatés (eds.), Fictionality—Possibility—Reality, 229– 50, Bratislava: aleph. Corbí, J. E. (2012), Morality, Self-knowledge and Human Suffering: An Essay on the Loss of Confidence in the World, New York: Routledge. Cuomo, J. (2011), “A Conversation with W. G. Sebald,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 1107–446. Franklin, R. (2011), “Rings of Smoke,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 1446–781. Goodman, N. (1983), Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, Harvard, MA: Harvard University Press. Korsgaard, C. (1996), The Sources of Normativity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levi, P. (1986), The Drowned and the Saved, London: Abacus. Lubow, A. (2011), “Crossing Boundaries,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 1956–2151. Parks, T. (2011), “The Hunter,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 209–405. Rawls, J. (1999), A Theory of Justice, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schwartz, L. S. (2011), “Introduction,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 25–208. Sebald, W. G. (2001), Austerlitz, translated by A. Bell, London: Penguin, Kindle Edition, loc. 3413. Silverblatt, M. (2011), “A Poem of an Invisible Subject,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 910–1048. Simic, C. (2011), “Conspiracy of Silence,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 1782–956. Stroud, B. (2000), The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stroud, B. (2011), Estrangement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wachtel, E. (2011), “Ghost Hunter,” in Schwartz, The Emergence of Memory, 405–735.

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Weil, S. (1963), Gravity and Grace, translated by E. Craufurd, London: Routledge. Weil, S. (1978), The Need for Roots, London: Routledge. Weil, S. (1986), “ The Iliad or the Poem of Force,” translated by M. McCarthy, in S. Miles (ed.), Simone Weil: An Anthology, 162–95, New York: Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Whitehead, A. (2004), Trauma Fiction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Williams, B. (1981), “Practical Necessity,” in Moral Luck, 124–31, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, B. (1985), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Williams, B. (1993), Shame and Necessity, Berkeley : University of California Press. Williams, B. (2002), Truth and Truthfulness, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Part Three

Illusive Worlds

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La Comédie Humaine and the Illusion of Reality Lubomír Doležel

I assume that the analysis of the concept of aesthetic illusion requires examining the relationship between the actual world and the worlds of fiction. In order to describe this relationship, I have chosen to look at the work of one of the great fiction makers, Honoré de Balzac. I  readily admit that I  am not a balzacolog and that I  could not undertake the reading of the almost one hundred titles subsumed by Balzac under the title La Comédie humaine. In order to say what I want to about the cycle, I have adopted a methodology practiced in statistical research: choose a few representative samples and on this basis make some general, but necessarily hypothetical, claims. My Balzacian sample comprises three novels of the cycle:  Père Goriot, Illusions perdues, and Scènes de la vie d’une courtesan. My hypothesis will be a tentative answer to three questions:  (1)  Why is it justified to speak about a fictional superworld of the cycle, extending over the individual fictional worlds of the individual works and what are the main structural features of this superworld? (2) What are the relationships between the fictional superworld of the cycle and the individual fictional worlds of the chosen novels? (3) How does the fictional superworld relate to the real (actual) historical world reflected in La Comédie humaine? In a prelude to answering these questions, I will present Balzac’s own view of the cycle. He provided it in the well-own introduction to La Comédie humaine, now printed in volume I of the cycle. Starting with a comparison between animals and humans, Balzac suggests that the principal distinction between them rests in societal organization. Society’s “laws” “modify Man by the conditions in

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which he lives and acts.” Pressing further the distinction between animals and man, Balzac writes: Animals have little property, and neither arts nor sciences; while man, by a law that has yet to be sought, has a tendency to express his culture, his thoughts, and his life in everything he appropriates to his use. (2014a: Author’s introduction) [His] dress, the manners, the speech, the dwelling of a prince, a banker, an artist, a citizen, a priest, and a pauper are absolutely unlike, and change with every phase of civilization. (Ibid.)

And here Balzac finds the main task of the fiction maker: French society would be the real author; I  should only be the secretary. By drawing up an inventory of vices and virtues, by collecting the chief facts of the passions, by depicting characters, by choosing the principal incidents of social life, by composing types out of a combination of homogeneous characteristics, I might perhaps succeed in writing the history which so many historians have neglected: that of Manners. (Ibid.)

In this history “my work has . . . a whole world of its own.” This is a clear suggestion that Balzac’s cycle has a common “world of its own.” Let us note, however, that Balzac the historian is not an impartial, neutral recording “secretary,” as he suggested: “I write,” intones Balzac the rhetorician, under the light of two eternal truths—Religion and Monarchy; two necessities, as they are shown to be by contemporary events, towards which every writer of sound sense ought to try to guide the country back. (2014a: Avant-propos)

So the cycle’s fictional world is shaped jointly by the objective, external social conditions and by the internal, subjective ideology of the writer. Turning to the structure of the superworld, we find that just as any fictional world, it is composed of several constituent domains. It is typical of Balzacian fictional worlds that its prominent constituents are the geographic locations (Paris and the provinces), the social groups (aristocracy, bureaucracy, students, rich and poor commoners, artisans), and the cultural domains (literature, journalism, the police, and justice). From the individual fictional worlds, these domains are introduced successively into the fictional superworld. Let me give as an example Balzac’s introduction of the domain of journalism: Every man who has dabbled, or still dabbles, in journalism is under the painful necessity of bowing to men he despises, of smiling at his dearest foe, of compounding the foulest meanness, of soiling his fingers to pay his aggressors in

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their own coin. He becomes used to seeing evil done, and passing it over; he begins by condoning it, and ends by committing it. In the long run the soul, constantly strained by shameful and perpetual compromise, sinks lower, the spring of noble thoughts grows rusty, the hinges of familiarity wear easy, and turn of their own accord. . . . The man who yearned to be proud of his work wastes himself in rubbishy articles. (2014b: 15)

The character of Balzac’s favorite locale, Paris, is also stable across the worlds, but immensely varied. He constructs “the various worlds that make up Paris— the world of fashion, the financial world, the world of courtesans, the young men’s world, the literary world,” as well as various quarters, ranging from the Fabourg Saint-Germain, the domicile of rich aristocracy, to the dungeons of Rue de Langlade and the adjacent streets. Of course, the primary domain of the superworld is the domain of fictional agents, constituted by the well-known set of recurring characters. To exemplify the structuring of recurring characters and their role in the generation of the fictional superworld, I will focus on two protagonists, Lucien de Rubempré and Eugene de Rastignac. Lucien enters the fictional superworld in the trilogy Illusion perdues and continues to act in Scènes de la vie d’une courtesan where his life ends by suicide. During his short life span, Lucien demonstrates that recurring characters preserve stable features. Being angelically beautiful, polite, and socially trained and playing the role of a poet and writer, he easily charms women. Despite a temporary setback, he has “everything that the elegant life of a dandy demands.” In his heedless ambition, Lucien does not hesitate to commit a dirty swindle and even accept the protection of Carlos Herrera, the man of many names and of a dark past. Eugene Rastignac, whose life was much longer and much more successful than Lucien’s, reappears in twenty-eight novels. He is introduced into the fictional world in Le Père Goriot, and in Illusions perdues and Scènes de la vie d’une courtesan we follow his relationship with Lucien Rubempré. Eugene parts forever with Lucien at his funeral, being one of the few who accompany his coffin to Père Lachaise. In between, they meet haphazardly, never friends, never enemies. I would like to emphasize the role of chance in their relationship because it helps us understand better the relationship between the individual fictional worlds and the superworld and later it will help us detect the relationships between Balzac’s superworld and the actual world. The emergence and reemergence of recurring characters is the strongest argument for my claim that in his cycle Balzac creates a virtual superworld. This

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universe is projected by the particular fictional worlds of the cycle and, conversely, functions as a storage, a source for them, being available to the writer at any time when he chooses. The superworld is not a domain of shadows, but the space of concrete characters whom Balzac himself has created. The mechanism on which this whole process turns, the recurring characters, shows stable features (including proper names), the means for easy and definite cross-world identification. Their changing features (age, relationships, profession, etc.) create the movement from one to the next appearance, in other words, the dynamism of the story. Let me add that for this mechanism to work, the superworld cannot contain contradictions in regard to the recurring characters. The relationship between the superworld and the individual fictional worlds is strengthened by the fact that the superworld represents, as I  already mentioned, the memory of the cycle. Once a fictional entity or event is introduced into the superworld through an individual world, it is preserved there ready to be revived at any future time. Thus Carlos Herrera, who was introduced into the cycle in Père Goriot, reemerges in Scènes in this remembrance: That priest’s robe covered Jacques Collin, a man famous on the hulks, who ten years since had lived under the homely name of Vautrin in the Maison Vauquer, where Rastignac and Bianchon were at that time boarders. (Balzac 2014b: 101)

Martin Sechard who had an important role in Illusions perdues is remembered in Scènes: Monsieur Sechard, though he is very well of, they say he might have made millions if he had not allowed himself to be robbed of an invention in the papermaking of which the brothers Cointet are getting the benefit. (Balzac 2014b: 325)

The strongest glue between the individual fictional worlds is provided by the device of explicit cross-reference. For us this is of major theoretical importance— it is an unequivocal intervention of the author. The cross-references abound in the cycle, I will present only a few examples from the Scènes: Reference to one of the novels: “These are the women,” said Comte Octave, “who are fascinating, irresistible!” And he became melancholic as he thought of his own wife (see Honorine). (Balzac 2014b: 493) The reader may compare in the Scenes of Political Life (for instance, in Une Tenebreuse affaire) the curious differences subsisting between the criminal law of Brumaire in the year IV., and that of the Code Napoleon which has taken its place. (Balzac 2014b: 378)

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Reference to more than one novel: Jacques Collin, the vertebral column, so to speak, which, by its sinister persistency, connects Le Père Goriot with Illusions perdues, and Illusions perdues with this Study (i.e. Scènes). (Balzac 2014b: 574)

Reference to the entire cycle: The women who recognize no bonds but those of propriety, no law but the petty charter which has been more than once alluded to in this Comedie Humaine as the ladies’ Code, laugh at the statutes framed by men. (Balzac 2014a:  The End of Evil Ways)

Having presented evidence for accepting the fictional superworld into the interpretation of La Comédie humaine, I can now turn to answer my last question: the question of the relationship between the fictional superworld and the historical actual world. Balzac’s fiction is undoubtedly representative of the realist fiction that aims at creating the illusion of reality. It provides evidence of a massive use of descriptions of the actual world, including historical names, imperceptibly taken into the construction of the fictional world: At this moment Charles X.’s policy had completed its last evolution. After confiding the helm of State to Ministers of his own choosing, the King was preparing to conquer Algiers, and to utilize the glory that should accrue as a passport to what has been called his Coup d’Etat. There were no more conspiracies at home; Charles X. believed he had no domestic enemies. But in politics, as at sea, a calm may be deceptive. (Balzac 2014a: What Love Costs an Old Man) The colossal fortunes of Jacques Coeur, of the Medici, of the Angos of Dieppe, of the Auffredis of la Rochelle, of the Fuggers, of the Tiepolos, of the Corners, were honestly made long ago by the advantages they had over the ignorance of the people as to the sources of precious products; but nowadays geographical information has reached the masses, and competition has so effectually limited the profits, that every rapidly made fortune is the result of chance, or of a discovery, or of some legalized robbery. (Ibid.) The Government, always alarmed by a new idea, has banished these materials of modern comedy from the stage. The citizen class, less liberal than Louis XIV., dreads the advent of its Mariage de Figaro, forbids the appearance of a political Tartuffe, and certainly would not allow Turcaret to be represented, for Turcaret is king. Consequently, comedy has to be narrated, and a book is now the weapon— less swift, but no more sure – that writers wield. (Ibid.)

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While Balzac has been often called the main representative of nineteenthcentury realism, equally ancient but much less heard is the view that Balzac’s work is not a mere copy, a mere description of the social conditions and of the moeurs of the Restoration. Thus, already Gauthier called Balzac a “visionary” and Baudelaire stated that “all his stories are colored like dreams” (see Fiorentino 1989). G. Picon (1956) characterized Balzac as a writer who “struggles against the unknown” where he hopes to find “a bit of a different reality than that which offers our habitual perception.” I propose that the concept of a fictional superworld allows a more sophisticated view of the relationship between fictional illusion and the actual world. It inserts itself between the two, having certain features of the actual world, and some others it shares with fictional worlds. What are the main features that the superworld shares with individual fictional worlds? A short answer should suffice: first, its ontological status as a possible world; second, its being created by a fiction maker. With the actual world the superworld shares two features that the individual fictional worlds lack: first, it is “open,” expanding, and second, it is Balzac’s special device for strengthening the illusion of reality. It provides an illusory “universe of discourse” for all fictional worlds of the cycle. It is a substitute of the historical actual world, which allows Balzac to represent reality according to his “vision.” Let me now pass to the second part of my paper where I want to discuss some general issues of the concept of aesthetic illusion. In this task I was greatly helped and inspired by the classic work of Ernst Gombrich Art and Illusion (Gombrich 1960). My indebtedness to Gombrich does not mean that I accept all his theses. We have to remember that his book is a “[s]tudy in the psychology of pictorial representation.” By focusing on the psychology of the artist and the viewer, he backgrounds the study of the forms or structures of paintings. He briefly deals with Gestalt psychology but does not allow it to shape his theory. He acknowledges the merits of structuralism, especially of Roman Jakobson, but does not consider its results. His neglect of the structural features of the painting explains his claim that the receiver (viewer) actively cooperates in the creation of a work of art (see especially Gombrich 1960: chapter 3). In the most radical statement of this sort, he quotes an ancient Chinese principle I tao pi pu tao—“if a thought (of the viewer) is present, the action of the brush is unnecessary,” which presupposes an expression, “without brush and Chinese ink” (242). This extreme formulation would make the artist superfluous. In order to avoid such absurd consequences, I adhere to a reception theory that respects the asymmetry of the artist and the receiver. In this respect I follow Umberto Eco who, speaking of the

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reception of literature, coined the concept of “model reader”—a reader whose reading and interpretative activity is guided by the instructions and suggestions given in the work. I want to start my theoretical reflection on aesthetic illusion by emphasizing the difference between aesthetic and perceptual illusion. Perceptual illusion, such as the bending of a stick in water or the apparent movement of the sun, arises in the human observation of nature. Aesthetic illusion is generated by special human-made artefacts that we call objects of art. From Gombrich’s rich research I derive the thesis that the relationship between illusion and aesthetic artefacts is not a constant, but is a historical variable. Consequently, I propose to set up a scale marking this relationship. To fill up this scale will require a collective effort; I will specify just four of its crucial points. The most radical illusion is generated by trompe-l’œil, where the artefact is taken as reality. Gombrich recalls the well-known Plinius’s anecdote about how the Greek painter Zeuxis painted the wine grapes so realistically that the birds were charging to pick them. Whereupon another painter, Parrhasio, invited Zeuxis to his atelier where Zeuxis himself was tricked when he tried to lift a painted drape from a painting (Gombrich 1960: 241). Gombrich himself recalls the most successful trompel’oeil—a painted broken glass in front of a picture. The second significant point on our scale is the type of artefacts that Gombrich, following Leonardo da Vinci, calls sfumata, “veiled forms” (256). The representation achieves this effect by being incomplete, fragmentary. As Gombrich notes, this “lowering of the measure of information . . . stimulates the mechanism of projection.” It is precisely in this case, that the advocates of the active receiver find their most fecund ground. Every uncertainty, every gap has to be “filled” in reception, even though this method runs counter to the strategies of artists who create diverse combinations of empty and filled spaces in their search of stylistic innovation. Probably the most significant point on our scale is the illusion I have dealt with in my discussion of Balzac—the fictional illusion of reality. I  pointed to Balzac’s construction of a fictional superworld as his most important illusion generating device. Recently in 2015, Bohumil Fořt published a book where he specified some of the strategies or devices by which literary fiction generates this illusion. In visual arts the principle “trick” generating the illusion of reality is the perspective, the illusionist representation of the three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional material (see Gombrich 1960: 286–91). The doctrine of mimesis presupposes that all art is of this kind, that the universal function of art is to create the illusion of reality. This doctrine,

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however, is contrary to historical facts. At the very dawn of fiction making emerged mythological worlds, which combined natural worlds conforming to the order of the actual world with supernatural worlds defying this order. In fantastic literature of all times and cultures we find commonly supernatural beings, events, stories. In modern literature a new supernatural fictional world, the hybrid world, was created by Franz Kafka, exemplified by his famous story, “The Metamorphosis” (from 1912). In postmodern fiction, we find bizarre worlds in which events highly improbable in the actual world are common. Gombrich speaks in several places of his book about postmodern antiillusionist visual artefacts such as Escher’s “impossible worlds” (1960: 286). He suggests that the anti-illusionist conception of art is on the rise:  it has become “naïve” to believe that any kind of painting could ever appear as reality” (288). All of these artworks do not provide an illusion of reality, but construct fictional worlds that substantially deviate from the order of the actual, real world. They testify to the fact that there is no poetological or aesthetic norm which would require that artworks produce the illusion of reality. Nonillusionist fictional worlds represent the fourth, zero point on our scale. They are not “imitations” of the actual world, but its possible alternates. The link to the actual world is cut off and the created world begins an independent fictional existence, side by side with the actually existing world. The function of these fictional worlds is not to provide us by analogy with the experience or knowledge of reality, but to enrich our experience by offering us the gift to recreate and contemplate an ever-expanding universe of possible worlds. For this reason, anti-illusionist literature and art will remain as alive as their illusionist counterpart.

References Balzac, H. de (2014a), Collected Works of Honoré de Balzac, Delphi Classics, e-book, nonpaginated. Balzac, H. de (2014b), Scenes from a Courtesan’s Life, Floating Press, e-book. Fiorentino, F. (1989), Introduzione a Balzac, Roma: Laterza. Gombrich, E. H. (1960), Art and Illusion: Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, New York: Pantheon Books. Picon, G. (1956), Balzac par lui-même, Paris: Éditions du Seuil.

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Fiction, Illusion, Reality, and Radical Narration Petr Koťátko

Do the literary functions of a text of narrative fiction depend on generating the illusion that “what is actual is a story-world” (Currie 2003: 147), that is, a fictional world created by the author, or rather on producing the illusion that “the story takes place in the actual world”? And what does the relevant kind of illusion require from the reader—in particular, how is she supposed to approach the text and to interpret, for instance, the occurrences of expressions like “Rouen” or “Emma Bovary” within the Flaubert’s text? Here I  am not approaching the aesthetic illusion as a kind of mental state generated in the reader’s mind by the aesthetic powers of the text. Rather, I take it as a kind of stance or attitude that the reader is supposed to adopt, by making certain interpretative moves, in order to get access to the literary functions of the text. So, I suggest to start with asking the question: What does the reader have to do (to assume, to accept, to imagine) in order to allow the text of narrative fiction to fulfill its literary functions? I believe that this is the right starting point, independently of whether we are primarily interested in the problem of aesthetic illusion or in the closely related issues like the nature of the worlds of narrative fiction, ways of their representation, their completeness or incompleteness, the status and identity conditions of fictional entities, the role of singular terms in literary texts, and so forth. The alternative would be to start with the “text itself,” a sequence of sentences with their linguistic meanings, and to ask what kind of material does the text provide to the interpreter, what does it enable her to identify and determine, and what does it leave principally unidentifiable and underdetermined. Such a choice of the starting point, I  am afraid, blocks access to the text’s literary functions as well as the explanation of the narrative illusion generated by these

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functions. To see this, let us start by applying this approach to a particular piece of narrative fiction: the text of Flaubert’s Madamme Bovary.

1. Right replies to wrong questions1 Question 1: Does the text enable us to identify one particular world—the world in which Emma’s story takes place? Reply: No, the text provides us with a description of situations and events that is satisfied by a set of worlds. All these worlds (in which what is told us in Flaubert’s novel is true) equally deserve the title “the world of Madamme Bovary,” and there is no criterion that would enable us to exclude all but one. Question 2:  Does the text enable us to identify the characters engaged in the story, for example, the person called “Emma Bovary”? Reply: No, like in the preceding case, we get just a complex of descriptions (e.g., the woman who married Charles Bovary, lived with him in Yonville, deceived him with Rodolphe Boulanger, etc.) satisfied by various individuals in various worlds. Even if this list includes definite descriptions that, in the world on which they are applied, pick out precisely one individual or nothing, they do not fix one individual across possible worlds. And since, as we have seen, we have no criterion for selecting one particular world to which they should be applied, we have no way of identifying one person as Emma Bovary. The material provided to us by the text enables us just to specify the “Emma-role,” exemplified in various worlds by various individuals (those who, in those worlds, satisfy all the Emmadescriptions to be found in Flaubert’s text). From the logical point of view, the role behaves as a (partial) function from worlds to individuals. Question 3:  Can we classify the expression “Emma Bovary,” as it appears in Flaubert’s text, as a proper name of a person? Reply:  No, there is no criterion that would enable us to decide which of the individuals satisfying the Emma-role in various worlds should be selected as the referent of the expression “Emma Bovary.” Hence, this expression does not refer to a person: rather it is a name of an individual role, that is, of a function from worlds to individuals. Question 4: Can we interpret the utterance of the sentence, “Emma raised the latch of a door,” as expressing a singular proposition? Reply: No, the sentence does not include any device of singular reference.

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2. Conflict The problem is that the narrative functions of the text require from us precisely the moves that the text does not enable us to make, according to the line of reasoning just presented. Obviously, we are supposed to think about persons rather than about functions—it would be strange to interpret Flaubert’s sentences as used to say that the Emma-role deceived the Charles-role with the Rodolpherole, and so on: the roles do not cheat one another, as far as we know. It does not help to object that we are supposed to imagine that the individual satisfying the role, rather than the role itself, does all those things. Since, as we already know, there is a huge crowd of such individuals. If we admit that we are not supposed to imagine a crowd of women doing such ugly things but just one of them, the question arises which one—and this question cannot be answered. An attempt to construe one person from them (to get somebody who could deceive the husband, waste his money, etc.) would lead to bizarre results. First, we may try to compose that person from all the properties exemplified by all the women satisfying the Emma-role in the worlds in which it is satisfied. Then we get an incoherent being: a person who has all the properties mentioned in Flaubert’s text as Emma-properties and in all other respects (obligatory ways of determinedness belonging to human beings) has sets of incompatible properties: her eyes are at the same time black, blue, brown, and so forth, and the number of her hair is in any moment of her life both odd and even. Alternatively, we may decide to construe Emma as a bearer of those properties that belong to all the women satisfying the Emma-role in various worlds. Then she will have all the properties mentioned in Flaubert’s text, and in all other respects she will remain indeterminate: her eyes will be neither black nor blue nor brown, the number of her hair will be, in any moment of her life, neither even nor odd, and so on. I leave it to your decision which of these monsters is more horrible. Had Flaubert decided to create something like this, or to direct our attention and imagination to something like this, how could he hope that it would gain our empathy and how could he present himself as a realist writer? And if this happened against his will, how could he lose control over his literary enterprise in such an embarrassing way? From the meta-theoretical point of view, our answers to the questions we have previously asked, following Gregory Currie, present a serious challenge for the theory of fictional worlds with its aspiration to provide literary texts with a universe of discourse to which their referential functions could be related (cf., e.g., Doležel 1998: prolog 2.1). My aim is to defend the fictional reference against

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the way of reasoning I  have presented and its destructive outputs, but not in terms of the fictional worlds theory. According to the account I will defend, singular terms adopted from the ordinary discourse preserve their referents in the actual world (if any) and terms like “Emma Bovary,” introduced by the author, are to be interpreted (in the pretense, or as if mode) as having the same kind of referential function, directed to the actual world. Saul Kripke has made an analogical point related to the author, rather than to the reader: When one writes a work of fiction, it is part of the pretense of that fiction that the criteria for naming, whatever they are, are satisfied. I use the name “Harry” in a work of fiction; I generally presuppose as part of that work of fiction, just as I am pretending various other things, that the criteria of naming, whatever they are, Millian or Russellian or what have you, are satisfied. That is part of the pretense of this work of fiction. (2013: 17)

But although this is perfectly compatible with the position I am going to advocate, I would not join Kripke in this issue, since I don’t believe that we should ascribe any kind of pretense to the writer. The author just creates the text with certain aspirations concerning the text’s literary functions. And these functions require that the text is read in a certain way: among other things, they require certain moves in the pretense-mode on the part of the reader, concerning the role of expressions like “Harry” or “Emma Bovary.” I will specify the relevant kind of pretense later.

3. Parallel with nonfictional texts It is worth mentioning that the skeptical reasoning of the kind previously presented, inspired by Gregory Currie, has the same kind of destructive consequences when applied to “serious,” that is, nonfictional texts, like newspaper articles, private letters, police reports, and so forth. If we abstract from the communicative function of these texts—precisely like we have abstracted from the literary functions of the text of Flaubert’s novel, we have to admit that they do not fix the world to which they should be related, but rather sets of worlds (of all those worlds in which the propositions expressed by their indicative sentences are true). Consequently, expressions like “James Joyce” or “Dublin,” as uttered in these texts, cannot be names of individuals but rather of individual roles. Even if we are able to connect such a term with some definite description, we have no criterion for identifying the world to which the description should be applied to

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pick out the referent of the name there. Similarly, the Kripkean scheme of the chain of uses of the name, anchored in an act of initial baptism, will be of no help if we cannot identify the world in which the baptism and the chain based on it should be located. Needless to stress, we never find ourselves in such a bizarre position with respect to “serious” texts, since we do not approach them in a neutral mode, indifferent to their communicative functions: we interpret them, from the very beginning, as a source of information about the actual world, or at least as texts presented to us as having such a function. In both cases, we fix in advance the actual world as that world to which the sentences of these texts and the referential functions of their components should be related. My claim is that in the same way the literary functions of a text of narrative fiction direct our thoughts, imagination, sensitivity, moral evaluations, and so on to the actual world; the only difference lies in the specific mode of this directedness. Let me use the phrase as if as the explicit indicator of this mode—but what I  am going to say can be easily paraphrased in terms of more common expressions, like “pretense” or “make-believe.”

4. Narrative fiction and the actual world So, I suggest to give up the way of reasoning I have ascribed to Gregory Currie and follow the maxim I  have suggested in the introduction:  rather than analyzing the potential of the “text in itself,” we should, from the very beginning, focus on specifying the attitudes and moves required by its literary functions from the interpreter. In other words, we should start by asking what is the reader supposed to do (to assume, to accept, to imagine) in order to allow the text of narrative fiction to fulfill its literary functions. The general reply, which should provide proper framework for more specific ones, and which should not leave any space for the conflicts and discrepancies mentioned earlier, goes, according to my opinion, as follows: Principle /F/: The literary functions of a text of narrative fiction require from the interpreter that she approaches, in the as if mode, its sentences as records of utterances of an inhabitant of the actual world—the narrator, who tells us what happened in this world. The role of the reader further includes the presumption of the narrator’s credibility, which does not require justification, but can be withdrawn if the narrator proves to be (in some respect) unreliable.

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5. Consequence: A modest account of fictional worlds The acceptance of the scheme /F/ leaves us with an ontologically “modest” account of fictional worlds: with respect to any text of narrative fiction, its fictional world is that state of the actual world the interpreter has to accept or imagine (in the as if mode) in order to allow the text to fulfill its literary functions. This is in accordance with Saul Kripke’s suggestion to use the term “possible states of the world” if we want to avoid metaphysical confusions that may be generated or encouraged by the term “possible worlds” (1980: 15, 18).2

6. Preservation of meanings in fictional texts Approaching (in the as if mode) sentences of a text of narrative fiction as records of utterances of a narrator inhabiting the actual world allows the reader to assume quite straightforwardly that the expressions occurring in the text preserve their functions fixed in their use in everyday communication in the actual world. The reader can assume this without transporting our communicative habits and linguistic conventions from the actual world to some other world in order to make them available to that world’s inhabitants (to the narrator and the characters). In this respect, like in others, everything remains in its place. So, the reader can simply assume (without any additional moves) that the narrator speaks the same language as she, for instance, that the narrator uses English as it developed in the actual world from the Anglo-Saxon and Norman roots, rather than some fictional duplicate of English.

7. Fictional names Within this framework, established by the principle /F/, we can do with an equally “down-to-earth” account of singular reference in fiction and—correlatively—of identity conditions of fictional entities. In particular, the occurrence of an expression that syntactically behaves like a proper name in the text of narrative fiction indicates that the interpreter should assume (in the as if mode) that, in this stage of narration, the narrator utters a proper name to refer to that individual who has been assigned that name at the beginning of the chain to which this narrator’s utterance belongs. Needless to stress, the principle /F/ implies that the names used in everyday communication to refer to countries, cities, mountains, statesmen,

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and so on do not change their referential function if they appear in the fictional text: since the universe of discourse remains the same as in everyday conversation.

8. Fictional characters This provides us with quite a straightforward way of identifying fictional characters. In order to identify (in the as if mode) the referent of the narrator’s utterance of the name “Emma Bovary,” I can simply rely (in the as if mode) on the chain of the type just mentioned or transfer it into a complex definite description and identify Emma (in the as if mode) as “the person who has been assigned the name ‘Emma Bovary’ at the beginning of the chain to which this narrator’s utterance belongs.” Such a description, which includes representation of the name itself and reference to its utterance by the narrator, can be classified as “parasitic” or “deferential” or “formal” or “nominal” in that sense that it is based on the general mechanism of the referential functioning of names rather than on factual information regarding the bearer of the name. Hence, as the reader I assume (in the as if mode) that this formal description is satisfied by precisely one person in the actual world, and it is the person identified in this way to whom I assign the informal Emma-descriptions that I collect while reading Flaubert’s text. So, when reading the text I proceed as if the name “Emma Bovary” picked out precisely one person in the actual world—namely that person who uniquely satisfies the descriptions of the kind mentioned in this world. So, I can think in quite a determinate way (in the as if mode) about Emma as a real person who has the properties mentioned in the text and is fully determinate also in all other respects not mentioned in the text—precisely like in our ordinary thoughts about real people, we presuppose that they are fully determinate also in those parameters that are cognitively inaccessible to us. This, obviously, should not lead us to overseeing the essential differences between speaking or thinking about real people and speaking or thinking about fictional characters as about real people. The claim that I am thinking in the as if mode about Emma does not justify existential generalization outside the scope of the as if operator, that is, the claim that there is a person, such that I am thinking about her in the as if mode. In other words, the directedness of my thoughts, acts of imagination, and so forth to Emma does not establish a regular relation between myself and some entity, but only an intentional “relation without converse.”3 So, the claim that the reader who approaches the text in the suggested way, is thereby provided with sufficient devices of identification of fictional

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characters, should be read so, that she has got everything that she needs to be able to think about the characters in a perfectly distinct and determinate way. In this way, the principle /F/ enables us to work with a weak, ontologically modest account of fictional characters:  for any text of fictional narration, the characters spoken about are those persons whose existence in the actual world we have to assume (in the as if mode) in order to allow the text to fulfill its literary functions. In War and Piece we have to assume, in this sense, among others, that Andrej Bolkonski and Napoleon are inhabitants of the actual world. In this respect their status is the same—another thing is that I assume the existence of one of these persons also outside the scope of the as if operator and that this assumption as well as my ability to exploit my (rather limited) knowledge about Napoleon’s career may belong to the capacities required from the reader by the literary functions of the text. Andrej Bolkonski, like Emma Bovary and unlike Napoleon, is not only a character playing some role in the fictional story but a fictional character in that sense that the creation of the story included creation of that character. The question arises, what can “creating a character” mean in the light of the principle / F/? In what sense can we say that Flaubert created Emma B.? He created a text whose literary (narrative) functions require from the reader to believe (in the as if mode) that there exists in the actual world a person called “Emma B.,” who did, experienced, and so forth the things described in the text. This is just an implication of a more complex specification of the requirements imposed by the text’s literary functions on the reader, presented in the principle /F/: the literary functions of Flaubert’s text require from the reader that she interprets (in the as if mode) the text as a record of utterances of a real person (narrator) who uses the name “Emma Bovary” to tell a true story about a person bearing that name. Correlatively, if we ask about the ontological status of Emma, not within the interpretation of Flaubert’s text, but within the theory of fictional entities, the general reply compatible with the principle /F/ goes as follows: it is a certain parameter of the text’s literary functions—or, correlatively, of the requirements imposed by these functions on the interpreter.

9. Singular propositions in literary fiction If we accept the account of fictional names suggested in Section 7, nothing should prevent the sentences of literary fiction from expressing singular propositions— contrary to the outcome of our previous line of reasoning, focusing on the

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potential of the “text in itself,” in abstraction from its literary functions. The reader who accepts the role offered to her by the text of narrative fiction does not have any problem with assigning (in the as if mode) quite determinate singular contents to the narrator’s utterances in which proper names occur. For instance, if the text includes the sentence, “Emma raised the latch of a door,” the reader ascribes (in the as if mode) to the narrator an assertion that is true precisely if the woman who has been assigned the name “Emma” at the beginning of the chain to which the relevant narrator’s utterance belongs raised the latch of a door (in a particular situation—when she first visited Rodolphe’s house, as it is described in Chapter 9 of Madamme Bovary). And it belongs to the role of the reader who wants to get access to the literary functions of the text (and, as a necessary condition of this, to put together Emma’s story) that she assumes, in the as if mode, that there is precisely one such person in the actual world and that this person really did what the narrator says.

10. Modal intuitions, possible worlds, and re-centering (M.-L. Ryan) Let me now confront the account of fiction based on the principle /F/ with the well-known doctrine of re-centering advocated by Marie-Laure Ryan. Both accounts place emphasis on the fact that the text of narrative fiction requires from us (as interpreters) more than to register in a neutral, indifferent mode the propositional contents expressed by its sentences or to imagine the states of affairs specified in these contents. We are supposed to accept these states of affairs, in the as if mode, as actual; or if you wish, we are supposed to pretend to believe that they are actual—or to indulge in the illusion that they are actual (i.e., facts of the actual world). Typically, this requires us to accept or imagine or believe (in the as if mode) that the actual world differs in some respects from what we believe about it outside the scope of the as if operator. This can be, in the widely accepted jargon, put so that we imagine another possible world and accept it (in the as if mode) as actual. This should not do any harm, if we keep in mind that this is just a paraphrase of the previous, philosophically rather unambitious claim. Problems appear if we allow our terminology or the instrumental side of our apparatus to induce in us the idea that we, as readers of narrative fiction, move (in our thought and imagination) to another world, and if we, inspired by this thought-provoking idea, start to ask heavy metaphysical questions concerning the ontological status of that world, its relation to the actual

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world, possibilities of its identification, its completeness or incompleteness, conditions of identity of individuals across the worlds, and so forth. This is a typical situation in which the apparatus engages us in solving problems generated by the apparatus itself—instead of helping us answer questions we find important for understanding the object of our inquiry (in our case the nature of narrative fiction). This is how I understand the warning from the opening paragraphs of Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity: Certainly the philosopher of “possible worlds” must take care that his technical apparatus does not push him to ask questions whose meaningfulness is not supported by our original intuitions of possibility that gave apparatus its points. (1980: 18)

And here is Kripke’s suggestion following the sentence just quoted: a good way of avoiding metaphysical confusions that might be generated by the term “possible worlds,” is to speak about “possible states or histories of the world” instead. The advantage of this modest way of speaking in our particular case is that it does not generate the aporias of the kind we have faced earlier (cf. section 1): it does not encourage the line of reasoning leading to the conclusion that the text does not enable us to make precisely those moves required by its literary functions. At the same time, this restrained terminology does not support the illusion of traveling from world to world, apparently involved in interpreting fiction. On the contrary, it pins the interpretative acts down to earth, that is, to the actual world. In this way, it opens space for another kind of illusion, concerning what happened in the actual world. Let me try to illustrate this contrast by confronting (in a rather schematic way) the account I am advocating here with Marie-Laure Ryan’s theory of fiction based on the concept of re-centering.4 MLR: The intellectual and imaginative acts of the interpreter of fiction are directed to the fictional world created by the author and accepted by the reader (in the pretense-mode) as actual. The facts of this world are states of affairs described in the text plus states of affairs which are facts of the “actual actual world” and are transferred by the reader to the fictional world. The transfer can concern only those states of affairs which are compatible with what is explicitly said, implied or implicated in/by the text.

So, the following moves are involved: 1. re-centering understood as transition to another world in the reader’s imagination and transfer of the label “actual” on this world (in the as if mode);

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2. transport of the material from the original actual world to the new actual world. PK: The actual world remains the object of our intellectual and imaginative acts even in the interpretation of fiction.

The required move: the reader, following the instructions of the text, modifies her picture of the actual world (replaces some facts by other states of affairs accepted—in the as if mode—as facts). This can be summarized in two incompatible instructions for the readers of fiction: MLR: Move (in your imagination) to the world created by the author, take with you the label “actual world” and all the material allowed by the text! PK: Stay (in your imagination) where you are and leave everything as it is, except the modifications (if any) required by the text!

This difference is reflected in two contrasting attitudes to the problem of completeness/incompleteness of fictional worlds: MLR: The position of the interpreter of a text of narrative fiction is in an important respect ambiguous. “The reader knows that fictional worlds are incomplete, but when he ‘plays the game,’ when he submerges in a fiction, he pretends to believe that this world is complete” (Ryan, 2006).5 And wherever it is possible, he fills in the gaps in the fictional world with the material from the actual actual world (following “the principle of minimal departure”).6 PK: There is no reason for such a schizophrenia. The world of the work of narrative fiction is the actual world of our life (rather than a foreign world with the forged label “actual”), modified according to the instructions of the text – and hence it is something essentially complete (in that sense that any possible state of affairs either is or is not a fact of this world).

11. The case of the unreliable narrator Besides relating the act of narration itself as well as the narrated content to the actual world (in the as if mode), the principle /F/ includes the presumption of the narrator’s credibility, which can be withdrawn if the narrator proves to be (in some respect) unreliable. Even here one can say, with some amendments, that the fictional stance does not require a radical shift from the interpretative attitude we are used to adopting in everyday communication. The trust in truthfulness of the assertions we

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are addressed is, according to some authors, anchored in the very nature of linguistic communication. For instance, David Lewis (1983) has famously specified the nature of linguistic convention by calling it a convention of truthfulness and trust. It follows that if in some moment the inhabitants of the United Kingdom cease to believe that the vast majority of assertive utterances of English sentences addressed to them in everyday communication are true, in that very moment English will cease to be conventionally fixed as the language spoken by the inhabitants of the United Kingdom. Similarly, John McDowell (1980) has argued that, in such a case, assertion (as a type of speech act) could not fulfill its basic function adopted from the prelinguistic forms of communication, namely the function of providing the addressee with an “epistemic surrogate” of directly experiencing the relevant state of affairs (specified in the propositional content of assertion). One needs not accept any of these doctrines and still hold that trust is the basic, default attitude that we abandon only under the pressure of evidence that the speaker is not (or may not) be reliable. But even if this happens, we have often a good chance to find out how things really are. For instance, we may conclude that the speaker exaggerates her role in the course of the events she is describing or that she misidentifies the cause of what has happened. Quite often we are able to recognize this without having any independent source of information about the subject matter in question—we simply register something suspicious in what the speaker says or in the way she expresses herself and draw on our general knowledge about how things usually go. And from the same resources we are often able to put together quite a reliable picture of how things really are in the case in question, contrary to what the speaker says. Obviously, the construction of a literary work may include reliance on our ability to exploit precisely these skills acquired in everyday communication. One of the intended effects of a literary text may be a discrepancy between the assertions we are ascribing (in the as if mode) to the narrator on one side and our reconstruction (in the as if mode) of the actual course of events. So, the phenomenon of unreliable narrator does not require from the readers to depart from the practices they are accustomed to in everyday communication in and about the actual world. Hence, it can hardly be presented as a challenge to the principle /F/.

12. Narration in decay and performative representation Until now we have been speaking about unreliability affecting particular aspects of the narrative acts, which are identifiable and separable from the rest. This

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kind of unreliability can be in principle compensated: together with its detection (and by exploiting the same resources) we may be able to determine (in the as if mode) how things really are. I would like to contrast this limited unreliability with a total collapse of narration I find most powerfully exemplified in the novels of Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy. In this kind of narration the world comes out as a place that provides no space for situations and events about which one could make determinate, coherent, and reliable statements. Moreover, the narrator and the arsenal of narrative tools available to him are consistently located within the narrated world. Consequently, there is no space for the reader’s reliance on what she is being told by the narrator. Since the very capability of the narrator’s utterances to express determinate and coherent contents is put in doubts, due to the nature of the world about which an in which he attempts to speak. The utterances of Beckett’s narrator do not even raise claim for the reader’s credence, but systematically paralyze it by permanent revocations, by putting into doubts the very meanings of the words uttered, by destroying the referential function of the first-person pronoun (and hence the literary function of Ich-form) as well as by plain contradictions within and between the sentences uttered. So, we are never allowed to indulge in the illusion that what we are told is true—nor in the illusion that we can reconstruct what actually happened, contrary to what the narrator says. It should be clear that this paralysis of the narrative functions of the text is not a side-product of Beckett’s literary or linguistic experiments: in these parameters of the narrator’s performances, we are supposed to recognize the contours of his situation and of the world in which this situation is anchored. Or better to say, the reader is supposed to experience this situation himself in the collapses of his sustained striving for continuous reading. In other words, this kind of narration is supposed to work as a device of performative demonstrating, rather then describing, the nature of the world in which we live. The starting point is Beckett’s exceptional sensitivity to those aspects of our life that are incompatible with the picture of the world as an ordered whole and as a space for meaningful action. The consequence is a never ending search for a narrative form (and hence also for a way of construing the narrator’s position and his performance) that could serve to expose the universal chaos instead of supporting the illusion of order: “To find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now” (Driver 1961: 23). The resulting texts do not offer an escape from the actual world via construing artificial worlds and inviting the readers to move into them in their imagination. Rather, they aim at presenting the actual world of our life as it is, without

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the tricks and manipulations involved, on Beckett’s view, in traditional narrative techniques, which serve to disguise ore retouch the universal chaos by creating the illusion of order. This is a kind of radical (and indeed highly nonconform) realism: instead of generating the illusion that the world is ordered in such and such way and that such and such things happened in it, the text is supposed to show, rather than to describe, the actual chaotic nature of the world. This shows that even this radically nonconform kind of narration cannot serve as a counterexample to our principle /F/. Beckett’s text can fulfill its basic function—to demonstrate the chaotic nature of our world (and to show what it means to live in this world, to try to follow some purposes in this world, to try to say something determinate about and in this world, etc.)—only if the narrator, his utterances, and their objects are consequently located within the actual world. Only then can the narrator’s obsessive attempts at saying something coherent and determinate and their permanent failures show something about the nature of this world.7

Notes 1 The replies are supposed to summarize (part of) the suggestions presented in Currie (2003). 2 The suggestion that the text of narrative fiction relates us to the actual world is also in full harmony with the claim recently expressed by David Davies, that “all intelligible fictional narratives require a real setting of some kind, since their fictional worlds presuppose that the reader locates what is explicitly narrated in a wider framework. . . . Given such a real setting for a fiction, we are prescribed to imagine something of that setting, but we are not prescribed to imagine that the real setting itself exists—this is something we are assumed to believe, not something we either imagine or are prescribed to imagine” (2012: 80). 3 It holds for “standard” relations that if A is in such a relation to B (e.g., it is on the left side of B), B is in a converse relation to A (it is on the right side of A). The term “relations without converse” is borrowed from Prior (1971: 136). 4 Cf., e.g., “Why do people care about ‘pretending to represent reality’? If fiction matters to us, it is because it evokes a world to the imagination, and the imagination takes pleasure in contemplating this world. But even though fiction represents a foreign world, it represents this world as if it were actual, using in language the indicative rather than the conditional mode. By taking the appearance of factuality, it asks its users to transport themselves in imagination into this foreign world. I call this act of transporting oneself fictional recentering” (Ryan 2010: 14).

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5 Cf. also, “From the point of view of the ‘actual actual world’ the worlds of fiction are discourse-created non-actual possible worlds, populated by incompletely specified individuals; but to the reader immersed in the text the TAW is imaginatively real, and the characters are ontologically complete human beings” (Ryan, 2005). 6 “This analysis entails a principle which has come to be recognized as fundamental to the phenomenology of reading. Variously described as ‘the principle of minimal departure’ (Ryan), the ‘reality principle’ (Walton), and the ‘principle of mutual belief ’ (Walton again), the principle states that when readers construct fictional worlds, they fill in the gaps . . . in the text by assuming the similarity of the fictional world to their own experiential reality” (Ryan, 2005). The relation between the principle of minimal departure and the reader’s attitude to the fictional world as complete is specified (ibid.), for example, in the following words: “The principle of minimal departure presupposes that fictional worlds, like the PWs postulated by philosophers, are ontologically complete entities: every proposition p is either true or false in these worlds. To the reader’s imagination, undecidable propositions are a matter of missing information, not of ontological deficiency.” 7 It is certainly right to say about the world presented in this way in Beckett’s texts that it is incomplete. It does not hold for each possible state of affairs that either it is or is not a fact of this world: on the contrary, each state of affairs we can think of can raise its (dubious) claim for facticity. But it should be equally clear that this statement of incompleteness, concerning the world of Beckett’s Trilogy, should not be confused with the widely shared doctrine of essential incompleteness of fictional worlds we have rejected earlier. This thesis is a result of a certain kind of application of the possible worlds apparatus on literary texts in general (in abstraction from their particular literary functions). On the contrary, our present claim is that one of the specific functions of the destruction of traditional narration in Beckett’s texts is the presentation of our world as essentially incomplete.

References Beckett, S. (1979), The Beckett Trilogy (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable), London: Pan Books Ltd. Currie, G. (1990), The Nature of Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Currie, G. (2003), “Characters and Contingency,” Dialectica, 57 (2): 137–48. Davies, D. (2012), “Fictionality, Fictive Utterance and the Assertive Content,” in G. Currie, P. Koťátko, and M. Pokorný (eds.), Mimesis: Metaphysics, Cognition, Pragmatics, 61–85, London: College Publications. Doležel, L. (1998), Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press.

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Driver, T. F. (1961), “Beckett by the Madeleine,” Columbia University Forum, 4 (3): 21–5. Koťátko, P. (2010), “Who Is Who in the Fictional World,” in P. Koťátko, M. Pokorný, and M. Sabates (eds.), Fictionality, Possibility, Reality, 89–100, Bratislava: aleph. Kripke, S. (1980), Naming and Necessity, Oxford: Blackwell. Kripke, S. (2013), Reference and Existence, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, D. (1983), “Languages and Language,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 1, 163–88, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDowell, J. (1980), “Meaning, Communication and Knowledge,” in Z. Van Straaten (ed.), Philosophical Subjects: Essays Presented to P. F. Strawson, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prior, A. N. (1971), The Objects of Thought, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ryan, M.-L. (2001), Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Digital Media, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ryan, M.-L. (2005), Possible-Worlds Theory Entry for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, London: Routledge 2005. Available online: http://www.log24.com/ log05/saved/050822-PossWorlds.html. Ryan, M.-L. (2006), From Possible Worlds to Parallel Universes. Available online: http:// www.univ-paris-diderot.fr/clam/seminaires/RyanEN.htm. Ryan, M.-L. (2010), “Fiction, Cognition, and Non-Verbal Media,” in M. Grishakova and M.-L. Ryan (eds.), Intermediality and Storytelling, 8–26, Berlin: De Gruyter.

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A Moral Life of Things The Making and Breaking of Aesthetic Illusion in Lyric Poetry Karel Thein

Let me begin by saying a few words about the very term “aesthetic illusion,” more exactly about one rather simple and one rather complex meaning this term seems to have for those versed in philosophy and philosophy of literature. Then I will proceed to my proper subject and discuss what lyric poetry (as opposed to the openly narrative literary modes) might have to do with these two meanings. In this respect, my suggestion is that lyric poetry is especially apt at bringing these meanings together. The first meaning of “aesthetic illusion” seems rather obvious despite the quarrels over its exact definition and its various ramifications. It consists in understanding the aesthetic illusion as the effect of fiction on its viewers, listeners, or readers. According to a core definition offered by Werner Wolf, aesthetic illusion is a mental state triggered by concrete objects or “artefacts” such as texts, performances, artworks, etc. . . . This mental state emerges during a process of reception but is not always limited to it as “after-images” may linger for a while. . . . Since it depends on external illusionist objects, aesthetic illusion differs from hallucination, which emerges without such objects. (2004: 327)

This is only the first part of Werner Wolf ’s effort at characterizing aesthetic illusion, but it is this most general part of his explanation that I will take for my point of departure—and I will especially take my cue from the expression “external illusionist objects.” By contrast, I will not deal with the next two parts of Wolf ’s explanation where he turns to the incomplete nature of aesthetic illusion, which has always an “as if ” character, and to the immersion into some or other imaginative possible world. I need to emphasize that I leave this aside because

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I will not be after “fictionality” and even less the so-called possible worlds of fiction. A lot of important work has been done with the help of these notions, but it is still true that there is no inherent link between such “worlds” and aesthetic illusion: they can, and very often do, but need not go together, and we can even suspect that they are tailor-made for the analysis of narrative fiction, and especially novel. I will thus stick to the previously quoted elementary definition and try to connect it, by way of the emphasis on the “external illusionist object,” to such an object par excellence that does not belong to any possible world of fiction but, instead, to that external object par excellence that is indeed the world itself as a system of all physical objects or, simply speaking, things. It is here that we arrive at another possible meaning of “aesthetic illusion,” which can be derived from the illusion in the Kantian sense of the illusion of reason whereby the latter proceeds to conclusions whose realm, however, lies beyond the reason’s legitimate powers. The important thing is that some of these illusions, which are deeply embedded in the natural working of reason, retain an “aesthetic” dimension that, however, has nothing to do with direct sense experience or its determined imaginative equivalent; this also means that it cannot be directly produced by arts and their visual or literary artefacts. Rather, it would be an expression of the reason’s own preference for wholeness and a certain harmony of meaning. In other words, there are folds of pure reason where beauty keeps lurking no matter what we do. Here the illusion connects to an ideal with no direct sensible correlate, and it still retains a constitutive relation to the physical world of external objects. In fact, this illusion coincides with the world as (to use Kant’s expression) a pseudo-empirical concept: it is how we cannot stop seeing the world of things. Of course this is what Kant calls not “aesthetic” but “transcendental” illusion. Still, it is an illusion with a very strong aesthetic dimension—not in the ancient sense of perception, but in the modern sense of seeing things in the light of beauty, no matter how indirect and so to say non-definitional this light may be. This is certainly not a simple matter of particular taste: transcendental illusion is there—and has its aesthetic dimension—because the reason itself finds satisfaction in it. The marriage between reason and teleological imagination, which gives the intimation of the world as a whole, may be illicit, but it happens nonetheless. Even the critical philosophy admits that the subjective aesthetic idea and the objective rational idea meet in any case (see Kant 2002: 217–19) so that we can only spy, so to speak, on what they are doing together. What is however a matter of taste is how we decide to bring to light this very situation of reason facing the world while being tainted by a naturally

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teleological imagination. My suggestion in this respect is that lyric poetry is one of the ways of such bringing to light of the situation where we cannot but keep reaching after what cannot be grasped by the analysis of any particular object, concept, or story. Seen from this angle, lyric poetry is symbolic in the specific Kantian sense, but I will refrain from using this term that has almost inescapable historical and poetic connotations of a different kind. A small caveat is now in order:  I  am not saying that this is what all lyric poetry does. It is, in my view, the work of only one, although rather significant strain of it—a strain certainly not reducible to the alleged “subjective” character of lyrics.1 Besides, even where lyric poetry can be described as “subjective,” it is mainly because it seems to work under the often implicit spell of yet another of the illusions of pure reason, which amount to the constitution of the rational soul as a pseudo-rational concept. In both cases, poetry’s illusion suggests a closure, which cannot be a causal closure of a story, not in the least because it cannot be based on any number of empirical or quasi-empirical facts. What it is based on is only the innate and incurable tendency of the human mind to search for a meaning in facts by imposing some sort of closure either on the endless causal series of physical events (so as to yield the notion of wholeness that we call “the world,” die Welt) or on the endless series of mental states and arguments about these (so as to yield the notion of wholeness that we call “the rational soul”). In other words, I wish to claim, if only for the sake of the argument, that there is an inherent Kantian streak in lyric poetry, which has of course nothing to do with any specific Kantian doctrine, but follows from what happens when we put the working of reason into words that we organize according to certain precise formal rules that, however, are not the rules of formal logic. Now by claiming this (namely that lyric poetry is able of expressing the constitution of both the self and the world in the Kantian sense and, at the same time, of showing the limits of such a constitution), I intend first and foremost to counter the traditional suspicion that lyric poetry is not capable of provoking the aesthetic illusion in the same sense as other arts, in other words, that, in contrast to drama or narrative prose, it cannot make us “enter a fictional world.” Such a suspicion is discussed by Werner Wolf in his article on “Aesthetic Illusion in Lyric Poetry?” which tries to reach a comprise by allowing that lyric poetry has indeed some generic resistance to the aesthetic illusion produced in and by other kinds of fiction, and yet insisting that this resistance does ultimately not exclude other generic features of the lyrics that “allow the emergence of illusion if only in a modified or restricted form,” which is centered on the “speaker” and

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her or his experience—which is apparently taken for the first and unavoidable subject matter of lyric poetry (1998: 252).2 The problem with this answer is that it not only espouses the apparatus of “possible worlds in fiction,” but also seems to accept a very traditional philosophic mistrust of the lyrics of which Hegel, for instance, is a typical proponent. The charge is that besides being useless to any general theorizing (it yields no interesting results if submitted to one), the lyrics lacks in what makes poetry into a true poetry for Aristotle or Lessing, namely the representation of action whereby the world is so to say focused and condensed into a compact storyline (which Hegel is ready to take for an expression of our need to learn about things that unfold before our mental gaze as belonging to some objective totality irreducible to the particular subject).3 Moreover, in the superior and more generally meaningful epic poetry, the action is supposed to bring in emotions, which are better shared by the listener or the reader than they would be on the more subjective and descriptive basis of the lyrics. In philosophical and literary theoretical mainstream, action is thus understood as the privileged ground of imaginative sharing. From this perspective, lyric poetry may well be labeled subjective, but it does not create, or at least fully develop, the particular, yet generally understandable characters whose precise actions enable the reader to imaginatively recreate and appropriate their situations and emotions.4 Now the narrative fiction’s simultaneous focus on action and emotion goes of course together with a relatively clean-cut causal structure on both levels: on the level of the events we hear or read about, and on the level of the emotions with their bipolar structure of cause and object—the former being responsible for the emergence of an emotion, the latter for its intentionality. The more or less explicit complaint addressed to lyric poetry concerns then the lack of clarity on both these levels. Simply put, where narratives deal with actions, lyric poetry deals with rather undetermined states of affairs; where narratives deal with emotions, lyric poetry deals with moods. But, again, this is far from being a disadvantage; this is what enables lyric poetry to suggest the world as the empirically unattainable totality of things by evoking the indefinite number of its transient states.5 Clearly, much more would need to be said about both the nature of these transient states and the moods. For now, before finally taking a look at particular poems, let me just say that these states are typically different from thoughts but, like them, they are fundamentally expressed in (if not identical to) propositions. More surprisingly, something very similar may well hold true of moods as mental

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states. As you know, after centuries of philosophical neglect, moods have recently started to be discussed with a new seriousness including the issue of their representational character or the lack thereof, which would make them further distinct from emotions. For my part, I  side with those who believe that the phenomenal character of moods is considerably richer than their intentional content (see, e.g., Kind 2014 and Mendelovici 2014). By consequence, moods need not aim at or target a specific object6—in lyric poetry, however, moods only arise by way of description of what are highly particular objects and situations. And it goes almost without saying that the efficiency of this description, which can handle the tension between a general mood and the usually contingent particulars, depends on the formally mastered use of language that is sufficiently precise to ground these objects and situations before they can get too fuzzy. This formal mastery has clearly nothing to do with telling stories and the successive focalizing on the ongoing events under the spell of a promised narrative closure. So if we admit, again with Werner Wolf (but also a number of others), that the invitation to enter the so-called possible world of fiction by means of a narrative is linked with a visualizing imagination (Wolf 1998: 254), it is not very surprising that the latter is often severely challenged by lyric poetry that, while only evoking particular objects, tends to frustrate the visual imagination of particular situations. It is these situations that, on my reading, are supplied if not replaced by the suggestion of neither fictional nor empirical world. And it is this suggestion that is constitutive of the lyric mode—or indeed lyric mood—of aesthetic illusion. What this implies is that this kind of aesthetic illusion carries in its own genes its subtle breaking, which belongs to the poem’s reflective stance. This breaking does not consist in the anti-illusionist operations performed on the smooth transparency of the narrative by a large chunk of modern novel,7 but follows from the (sometimes explicit) recognition of the impossibility to represent the world as such, first and foremost because the idea of the world would be the unavoidable frame of any such representation.8 This, then, is the general framework to which I will only add, in the last section of my essay, one more equally general observation. Before doing so, however, it is time to bring in what matters most, namely some examples. For the sake of both brevity and clarity, I chose a few poems that are suggestive of the non-transient nature of the idea of world as suggested by the poetically reflected transience of particulars (this comes as no surprise since lyric poetry is capable of “the effect of the real” insofar as it suggests the idea of the world as the horizon where the necessary meets the ultimately contingent).

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I will start with Louise Glück and the poem “The Past” from her latest collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014: 7): Small light in the sky appearing suddenly between two pine boughs, their fine needles now etched onto the radiant surface and above this high, feathery heaven— Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine, most intense when the wind blows through it and the sound it makes equally strange, like the sound of the wind in a movie— Shadows moving. The ropes making the sound they make. What you hear now will be the sound of the nightingale, Chordata, the male bird courting the female— The ropes shift. The hammock sways in the wind, tied firmly between two pine trees. Smell the air. That is the smell of the white pine. It is my mother’s voice you hear or is it only the sound the trees make when the air passes through them because what sound would it make, passing through nothing?

Here we could, if we wanted to, reconstruct a lyric persona as a rather vague narrative mask consisting of memories and loss. More intriguing, however, is the structure of the intangible sky and the tangible objects as condition of sound, whose reality is, in any case, independent of what we imagine that we can exactly hear. The particular memory of “my mother’s voice” shifts us from the first to the second person and, jointly, from the so-called field memory to the “observer” memory where things are remembered and visualized from the notional third person and not as an experience proper to a unified subject.9 This new and linguistically construed person could be identified as “the covert lyric persona” emerging from things and material situations. I do not think, however, that this persona brings about a “possible fictional world”; on the contrary, I believe that its emergence is

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accompanied by the emerging idea of the world that is, by definition, beyond visualizing description and independent on the lyric persona’s situation in it.10 This is the lyric effect of the present absence, whose production has a long tradition that includes John Keats’ notion of “negative capability,” a notion perhaps not unrelated to the Kantian, merely formal “purposiveness without purpose.” In this respect, another quotation from Louise Glück’s most recent collection (2014: 18), this time from a poem in prose entitled “Theory of Memory,” may be in order: “Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference? Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the rest is hypothesis and dream.” Further examples could make even clearer this formal world building limited to the world as idea, but never an object. Here is W. S. Merwin’s “Neither Here Nor There” (2015: 70): An airport is nowhere which is not something generally noticed yet some unnamed person in the past deliberately planned it to be there and you have spent time there again and are spending time there again for something you have done which you do not entirely remember like the souls of Purgatory you sit there in the smell of what passes for food breathing what is called air while the timepieces measure their agreement you believe in it while you are there because you are there and sometimes you may even feel happy to be that far on your way to somewhere

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Here we deal with the avoidance of all truly particular memories and a suggestion that, within general coordinates, the memories, much like persons themselves, are simply interchangeable. This is a purely abstract structure that imitates the world and is itself limited by the literally architectural impossibility to do something more. The world as idea guides if not the lyric person then at least the lyric consciousness; once it becomes incarnate, it simply disappears insofar as it loses this fundamental function. Clearly, Merwin’s poem is the most reflective or self-conscious of my examples since it takes into question the conditions of lyric illusion of the world. Normally, we can say that narrative, even in the form of a puzzle, is inherently anti-skeptical yet unconfident in things whose meaning may well change at any moment of the forward-going story (it has to be so in order to go forward), whereas the lyric is inherently skeptical yet confident in things that acquire a truly physical dimension reconstructed, in and by language, with a view to some hypothetical yet unavoidable coordinates. Here, however, these coordinates are suddenly erected in stone and cease to be helpful in this way. Once it becomes concrete (pun intended), the world loses its implication of richness. We are so to speak better off with Louis MacNeice and his poem “Snow” (2001: 18): The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was Spawning snow and pink roses against it Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: World is suddener than we fancy it. World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various. And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes— On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands— There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

In its basic strategy, MacNeice’s poem takes the direction opposite to Merwin’s, and it goes almost too far to meet the rich contents of experience. Nevertheless, it does convey the sense of the world, not a sum of these contents, but an all-pervading frontier that allows the poet, through his lyric persona, to hold things apart and distinguishable. The coordinates of space and time are still here as the Kantian conditions of experience, but they are themselves permeated by

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something else, which tends to be, impossibly, a form and a quality all at once (“there is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses”). In this way, time and space as forms of experience, and hence forms of illusion in the more subjective sense of the term, are referred to the illusion in the other transcendental sense derived from the antinomies of pure reason. Here lyric strategy is synonymous to a way of overcoming the limitations proper to a feeling and speaking subject, lyric or otherwise. No doubt Les Murray’s “Equanimity” (2012: 45–7) counts among the poems that perform this feast magnificently. The poem is long and I  will only quote from its last stanza: From the otherworld of action and media, this interleaved continuing plane is hard to focus: we are looking into the light— it makes some smile, some grimace. More natural to look at the birds about the street, their life that is greedy, pinched, courageous and prudential as any on these bricked tree-mingled miles of settlement, to watch the unceasing on-off grace that attends their nearly every movement, the same grace moveless in the shapes of trees and complex in our selves and fellow walkers: we see it’s indivisible and scarcely willed. That it lights us from the incommensurable we sometimes glimpse, from being trapped in the point (bird minds and ours are so pointedly visual): a field all foreground, and equally all background, like a painting of equality. Of infinite detailed extent like God’s attention. Where nothing is diminished by perspective.

At the heart of this poem lies not a lyric persona but the difference between what we can know and what we can imagine, neither offering a norm that can be applied to the other, and neither being easy to generalize. Its repeated oscillation between the speaking “us” and the world’s own unimaginable perspective sustains the tension with no possible narrative resolution. This may well be what Les Murray himself makes even more explicit, although from a slightly different angle, in another of his poems, “The Meaning of Existence” (2012: 214): Everything except language knows the meaning of existence. Trees, planets, rivers, time

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know nothing else. They express it moment by moment as the universe. Even this fool of a body lives it in part, and would have full dignity within it but for the ignorant freedom of my talking mind.

This poem can be read as a comment on the previously quoted “Equanimity.” However, it also starts to move us closer to the last issue I wish to tackle here, no matter how briefly. It is the peculiar issue of the animation of things, which goes together with the collateral question of whether it can be the same language that animates, at one and the same time, things and the speaking subject. Here again, I am willing to ascribe to lyric poetry a certain privilege, one of directly performing the affirmative answer, which cannot be given outside this performance. Hence my penultimate example, Wisława Szymborska’s “View with a Grain of Sand” (1995: 135–6): We call it a grain of sand, but it calls itself neither grain nor sand. It does just fine, without a name, whether general, particular, permanent, passing, incorrect, or apt. Our glance, our touch means nothing to it. It doesn’t feel itself seen and touched. And that it fell on the windowsill is only our experience, not its. For it, it is not different from falling on anything else with no assurance that it has finished falling or that it is falling still. The window has a wonderful view of a lake, but the view doesn’t view itself. It exists in this world colorless, shapeless, soundless, odorless, and painless. The lake’s floor exists floorlessly, and its shore exists shorelessly.

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The water feels itself neither wet nor dry and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural. They splash deaf to their own noise on pebbles neither large nor small. And all this beheath a sky by nature skyless in which the sun sets without setting at all and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud. The wind ruffles it, its only reason being that it blows. A second passes. A second second. A third. But they’re three seconds only for us. Time has passed like courier with urgent news. But that’s just our simile. The character is invented, his haste is make believe, his news inhuman.

Time, which becomes more and more prominent as the poem proceeds, is why the series of languageless states can be recreated only in and by language. The latter, however, cannot but evoke a life proper to these states independently of time measured and counted. So while it is obvious that we do not deal here with a narrative animation of things as parts of actions, we are still directed toward the fact that even lyric poetry, as a literary form, confirms that, at the heart of the aesthetic illusion, insofar as it is meaningful for us, there always remains a certain form of animation: this holds true of poems, novels, paintings, movies, you name it. Philosophers are of course not ignorant of this fact, and the late Wittgenstein is among those who express it most succinctly. Let me quote, side by side, two paragraphs from Zettel: “A poet’s words go through and through us. And that’s connected causally with the use that they have in our life. And it is also connected with the way in which, conformably to this use, we let our thoughts roam up and down (schweifen) in the familiar surroundings of the words” (Wittgenstein 1967: § 155). “In all cases what one means by ‘thought’ is what is alive (lebende) in the sentence. That without which it is dead, a mere consequence of sounds or written shapes” (§ 143).11 Wittgenstein gives a peculiar linguistic twist to the tradition of Einfühlung, making the latter less a work of some psychological faculty than

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a dimension that implicitly underlies the content of all linguistically articulate thought.12 I cannot determine here with more precision what kind of articulation lyric poetry and the corresponding aesthetic illusion offer from this perspective, but I can offer a taste of how poetry itself expressed this before its modernist, yet not entirely discontinuous, turn. Hence my final example, from which I borrow the title of this essay: “a moral life of things.” It refers to William Wordsworth’s Prelude, Book III (2000: 407–8): As if awakened, summoned, roused, constrained, I looked for universal things; perused The common countenance of earth and sky: Earth, nowhere unembellished by some trace Of that first Paradise whence man was driven; And sky, whose beauty and bounty are expressed By the proud name she bears—the name of Heaven. I called on both to teach me what they might; Or turning the mind in upon herself Pored, watched, expected, listened, spread my thoughts And spread them with a wider creeping; felt Incumbencies more awful, visitings Of the Upholder of the tranquil soul, That tolerates the indignities of Time, And, from the centre of Eternity All finite motions overruling, lives In glory immutable. But peace! enough Here to record that I was mounting now To such community with highest truth— A track pursuing, not untrod before, From strict analogies by thought supplied Or consciousnesses not to be subdued. To every natural form, rock, fruit or flower, Even the loose stones that cover the high-way, I gave a moral life: I saw them feel, Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all That I beheld respired with inward meaning. Add that whate’er of Terror or of Love Or Beauty, Nature’s daily face put on From transitory passion, unto this

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I was as sensitive as waters are To the sky’s influence in a kindred mood Of passion; was obedient as a lute That waits upon the touches of the wind.

Here lyric poetry transforms the “transitory passion” into the face of the world whose Kantian idea recurs precisely through the ever-changing expression of this face. At the same time, if this face expresses an indirect claim to universality, it is also because it captures the moods that differ from the standard, socially determined emotions mostly analyzed by philosophers. These lyric moods are less about people and more about things. As such, they are inherently metaphysical and impossible to exactly translate into a more analytic philosophical idiom. This, I submit, is what gives the aesthetic illusion provoked by lyric poetry its sharp and yet dreamlike edge. Why this edge is humanly indispensable is a matter for future inquiry.

Notes 1 But not as radical as the experimental poetry that aims to get rid of every kind of aesthetic illusion including the one I want to discuss here. 2 Wolf ’s article is thus concerned with lyric “persona” and lyric “I”, not with the background idea of the world (which he would perhaps consider difficult to reconcile with lyric brevity and disjunction). 3 See Hegel (1975: 1113–28) on “general character of lyrics.” On occasion, the lyrics can attain an objectivity of its own; also, by contrast to the national epos, its emergence does not depend on precise historical conditions. 4 Cf. Currie (1995: 153–4), analyzed and criticized in Matravers (2014: 30). 5 It would be quite appealing to label these as “states of affairs,” but one should perhaps not fall into the same trap that I try to evade by avoiding the by and large metaphorical talk about the “possible worlds of fiction.” 6 Cf. Deonna and Teroni (2012) and also Searle (1983), all quoted by Kind (2014: 119). 7 On this strategy, see Wolf (1990). 8 This is the trap that Kant makes us aware of: any unity of action visualized as representative of something objective (let alone of the alleged totality of things) is fundamentally and unavoidably false and, once analyzed, cannot but fall back on the sum of particulars. 9 On the “field” and “observer” memories, see Goldie (2012: 49–53), with further references. And cf. (albeit with a different terminology) Wolf (1998: 281).

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10 On “the covert lyric persona” (with a lesser yet significant emphasis of the implicitly present–absent world), see Wolf (1998: 279–83). 11 On these paragraphs, see Fletcher (1989: 108–9). 12 On empathy and things, see Currie (2011).

References Currie, G. (1995), Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Currie, G. (2011), “Empathy for Objects,” in A. Coplan and P. Goldie (eds.), Empathy. Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives, 82–95, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deonna, J. A. and F. Teroni (2012), The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction, New York: Routledge. Fletcher, A. (1989), “Iconographies of Thought,” Representations, 28: 99–112. Glück, L. (2014), Faithful and Virtuous Night, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Goldie, P. (2012), The Mess Inside. Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1975), Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Arts, translated by T. M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kant, I. (2002), Critique of the Power of Judgment, translated by P. Guyer and E. Matthews, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kind, A. (2014), “The Case against Representationalism about Moods,” in Kriegel (ed.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Mind, 113–34. Kriegel, U. (ed.) (2014), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Mind, New York: Routledge. MacNeice, L. (2001), Selected Poems, edited by M. Longley, London: Faber and Faber. Matravers, D. (2014), Fiction and Narrative, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mendelovici, A. (2014), “Pure Intentionalism about Moods and Emotions,” in Kriegel, Current Controversies in Philosophy of Mind, 135–57. Merwin, W. S. (2015), The Moon Before Morning, Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press. Murray, L. (2012), New Selected Poems, Manchester: Carcanet. Searle, J. R. (1983), Intentionality, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Szymborska, W. (1995), View with a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems, translated by S. Barańczak and C. Cavanagh, New York: Harcourt Brace. Wittgenstein, L. (1967), Zettel, edited by G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, Berkeley : University of California Press. Wolf, W. (1990), “Illusion and Breaking Illusion in Twentieth-Century Fiction,” in F. Burwick and W. Pape (eds.), Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and Historical Approaches, 284–97, Berlin: De Gruyter.

A Moral Life of Things Wolf, W. (1998), “Aesthetic Illusion in Lyric Poetry?,” Poetica, 30: 251–89. Wolf, W. (2004), “Aesthetic Illusion as an Effect of Fiction,” Style, 48 (3): 325–51. Wordsworth, W. (2000), The Major Works (including The Prelude), edited by S. Gill, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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The Novel and the Aesthetic Illusion Jiří Koten

In accordance with contemporary literary theory, I understand aesthetic illusion as an effect possibly concomitant to such communication that has as its object an artistic artefact of representational character (cf. Wolf 2011). This phenomenon can be viewed through each agent in a communicative situation: it can be examined by means of the representational artefact itself or the particular factors that a text or other type of artefact utilizes in order to achieve its appeal. The examination can also focus on the position of the addressee of a piece of art, that is, on means of reception. One can also analyze the conditions of the communicative situation in which the illusive work originated, for example, contemporary aesthetic standards to which the artefact conformed at the time of its conception. My conception will adhere to the communicative approach I have just outlined. I will focus my attention on works of literary fiction, especially on novels and the modes of narrative used in novel writing. I will highlight the particular literary means used in narrative fiction in order for its reader to achieve the state of immersion. Because I  will be considering the developmental aspect of this problem, my presentation will touch on the relationship between literary works and historical context and especially changes in aesthetic standards. My primary aim is to retrace the extent in which narratives of varying aesthetic force have formed theoretical models of fictional communicative situations. I will devote most of my attention to the disjunctive model and its uses in the theory of aesthetic illusion. Nineteenth-century novels are usually considered illusive, due to their use of a covert narrator who does not evaluate or comment on the story (those are, e.g., the novels of Flaubert, Maupassant, Hardy, or Henry James, or, in Czech literature, the novels and short stories by Karel Václav Rais and Tereza Nováková). A heterodiegetic and extradiegetic narrator telling the story in the third person

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and reduced to the basic function, that is, conveying the story, does not, so to speak, distract the reader by emphasizing his own part in the transmission of the narrative. Such narration creates an illusion of a direct recording of events happening in the fictional world. In contrast to the covert impersonal narrator, a narrator who ostentatiously manipulates the narrative supplements the story with extensive commentary and acts as the omnipotent creator of a fictional work. This sort of anti-illusive narration is typical for the pre-realist novel of the eighteenth century. Its influence carries over to the nineteenth century, as is apparent in the work of Thackeray, Trollope, Tolstoy, and others. The conspicuous narrator, who nullifies the aesthetic illusion by pointing out the imaginary character of the narrative, reappears as a typical feature in postmodern metafictions, which lead the reader to pay attention not only to the world depicted but also to the strategies used in its depiction. It is not surprising that the existence of these two modes of narration—an illusive one and one that willfully reveals the illusion—has caused many theoretical dilemmas in the theory of literary fiction. Those can be seen, for example, in models striving to describe and define fictional communication. Most fictional communication models—from the classic ones like Seymour Chatman’s (1978) or Shlommit Rimmon-Kenan’s (1993) to the most recent efforts like the one by Patrick Colm Hogan (2013)—represent the communicating subjects, including, obviously, the author and the reader, whose communicative transaction frames the imaginary communication between the fictional narrator and his or her fictional audience. The two-level model of fictional communication is best explained via examples of homodiegetic narratives. This is because in this case the fictionality of the one who narrates is apparent and indisputable: every reader is able to distinguish David Copperfield from Charles Dickens and understands that Dr. Watson, who narrates the Sherlock Holmes stories, is someone else than Conan Doyle, the creator of both characters. As with the communicating subjects, the two-level model is obvious in the telling of the story: while Dickens and Conan Doyle’s telling is fictive, thus aimed at creating a work of literary fiction, the narrators—David Copperfield and Dr. Watson—are truthfully narrating a story that actually happened in the fictional world they belong to. I  believe that the two-level model becomes especially convincing when the possible-worlds framework is used, which has proven amply useful in literary theory (cf. Pavel 1986; Ryan 1991; Doležel 1998). In the actual world inhabited by Dickens’ readers, the text of David Copperfield constitutes a literary work created by a famous Victorian novelist. At the same time the text invites its readers to enter a fictional narrative in which it constitutes an autobiography

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narrated by David Copperfield. The situation is similar in the case of Doyle, who introduces the reader to a world in which Sherlock Holmes repeatedly proves his brilliance and Dr. Watson truthfully records his detective successes. The disjunction of author and narrator, and the double nature of fictional communicative exchange, is also relatively unproblematic in the case of a covert heterodiegetic narrator, that is, in the narrative mode most apt at achieving aesthetic illusion:  the mode characteristic of nineteenth-century realism. The narrator in realist novels is perceived as a narrative voice that provides information about the world in which the story takes place. When, for instance, the impersonal voice at the beginning of Balzac’s novel, Gobseck, says, “It was one o’clock in the morning, during the winter of 1829–1830, but in the Vicomtesse de Grandlieu’s salon two persons stayed on who did not belong to her family circle,” the reader perceives this declaration as information from a well-informed source. As Lubomír Doležel (cf. 1998) convincingly demonstrates, the narration by an impersonal narrator is taken by the reader to be automatically valid. Even though I think that cognitive scholars are right in saying that in most readers’ minds the impersonal narrator is merged with the author, the disjunction of author and narrator is still apparent at the level of telling. While the author of the fiction, in the case of Gobseck it is Balzac, tells fictively, and by means of the performative force of his narration he constructs a fictional world, the voice of the narrator, which is innate to the fictional world, actually tells the reader that there indeed was a Vicomtesse de Grandlieu who lived in Paris and opened her salon to the members of high society. In the world of the story, the event described at the beginning of the novel is a historical fact, and it happened in the winter of 1829. These examples of homodiegetic and impersonal heterodiegetic narratives prove a significant exemplification potential of the disjunctive model within theory of fiction. However, objections against its use have been raised throughout time: theorists like Käte Hamburger (1957) and Ann Banfield (1982) denied its potential when they stated that, in the case of third-person fiction, it is irrelevant to talk of a narrator. Nevertheless, the model has had numerous influential proponents, such as Marie-Louise Pratt (1977), Félix Martínez-Bonati (1981), Dorrit Cohn (1999), or Gérard Genette (1993), and representatives of the possible-worlds theory—David Lewis (1978) and Marie-Laure Ryan (1991; 2001). According to all the above-mentioned theorists, fictional narrative comprises two voices. The presence of a fictional speaker, who cannot guarantee the truthfulness of what is being told, is, as Genette emphasizes, a distinctive feature of fictionality (cf. Genette [1991] 1993: 70–1). Personally I consider the utility

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of the disjunctive model sufficiently ascertained. I  believe there is no doubt about its usefulness in theory of fiction and narratology. However, its possible uses within the theory of aesthetic illusion have not—apart from Marie-Laure Ryan’s work—been considered. The advantages of the disjunctive model for the description of the illusive and anti-illusive narration spectrum will be my primary focus here. Based on the disjunctive model’s possible characterization as a layered telling of the author and the narrator, illusive reading can be seen as the reader’s temporary relocation to an embedded communicative level, because the discourse the reader will pay attention to is the narrator’s. The reader is temporarily in the position of perceiving the imaginary speaker’s narration as providing real information about a certain reality (be the narration reliable or unreliable). Consequently the reader is able to reconstruct the events that happened in the world of the story. I am therefore of the opinion that every fiction automatically expects a certain measure of illusive reading, as included in the cooperative rules of fictional communication. It has been noted that the narrator is not the only speaking subject in fictional communication. Every fiction includes one more voice, which is perceived as the voice of the author. If the reader does not realize the author’s presence “over the narrator,” it means the reader is subject to aesthetic illusion. This is a case of—in Ryan’s words—immersion in the fictional world (cf. 2001). In an extreme measure this would be a passionate reader who has forgotten that the imaginary world has its origin in a text. Such a reader would treat the narrative as reality, far above and beyond the cooperation that is required of them by the fictional text. It would be a case similar to Don Quixote’s, who ceases to understand that the knight Amadis is not a real person and strives to emulate him. In reality, a long-term Quixote-like illusion is quite implausible. The reader is aware of the author’s voice while reading. Readers tend to aesthetically evaluate the narrative. They notice aspects of fictionality, such as meta-narrative commentary, or an omniscient or telepathic narrator. Readers educated in this area are wont to consider the author’s style, apparent both in the narrator’s discourse and in the way the characters’ discourse is constructed. I therefore conclude that the disjunctive model is suitable for describing not only the character of fictional communication but also the two poles of illusive reading between which the audience move: readers may succumb to the illusion or, at other times, read with an epistemic distance. I will add that I have not reached this conclusion based on observing my own reading experience; as I have tried to demonstrate, it is supported by the very character of fictional communicative situation.

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Speaking about the advantages of the disjunctive model, I should note that I do not consider it an invention of narratologists or fiction theorists. The model was introduced to literary studies by Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. Bakhtin’s work has seen many interpretations, often misguided ones: In the former Eastern bloc, it had to be artificially put into accord with Marxist literary doctrines, and Bakhtin was even attributed books not written by him. Western literary theory of that period, in contrast, tended to interpret Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogue, polyphony, and heteroglossia as criticism of the official Soviet ideology, an attitude that is equally dubious. Despite all this, Bakhtin definitely deserves credit in the area of novel discourse. Bakhtin included literary fictionality into his concepts of polyphony and heteroglossia, even though he did so implicitly, as he avoided the term “fiction” in his work. According to Bakhtin, the author’s speech constitutes inauthentic discourse. Authors of novels do not, in fact, speak, but they represent others’ speech. The disjunctive model is apparent in the theory of novel discourse. In his 1931 study, “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin says: Behind the narrator’s story we read a second story, the author’s story; he is the one who tells us how the narrator tells stories, and also tells us about narrator himself. We acutely sense two levels at each moment in the story; one, the level of the narrator, a belief system filled with his objects, meanings and emotional expressions, and the other, the level of the author, who speaks (albeit in a refracted way) by means of this story and through this story. (1981: 314)

Bakhtin argues that someone who is unable to recognize authorial intention behind the narrator’s words will never understand novel. The figure of the author, which Bakhtin defines in a very similar way as the implied author is defined in more recent theories, is necessary for the interpretation of a novel’s narrative; the reader acknowledges the author as an “organizational intersection of the work”—an entity responsible for the careful orchestration of discourse in the text. I consider Bakhtin to be one of the founders of the disjunctive model, which illuminates the layered character of a fictional communicative exchange, and thus delimits the spectrum of illusive reading. The Russian scholar rightly pointed out that a narrative introduces its reader to a world that is depicted through the ideological view of the narrator, yet it also implies the author’s distance from the world and from the narrator’s worldview. When readers reach an epistemic distance, they are able to appreciate the stylistic qualities of a literary work. Removed from the narrator’s viewpoint, it is possible to recognize, among

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others, skaz, parody, allegory, or carnivalization of languages, and also possible narrative unreliability. The interconnection of the theory of literary discourse and the novel is particularly inspiring. While contemporary theory understands fictionality as a stable and relatively timeless phenomenon, Bakhtin describes the novel as an incomplete genre that changes through time and draws from social heteroglossia. Even though a number of theorists like Scholes-Kellogg (1966) or Gallagher (2006) have observed that fiction research has focused predominantly on the novel, theoretical models of fictionality do not usually consider the developmental or diachronic aspect of the issue. It appears as though their conception depends a great deal on conveniently chosen case studies, which correspond to the respective models. Ultimately, this is true of the disjunctive model as well. In my presentation so far, I  have purposely avoided those types of narrative that the disjunctive model cannot describe. The most prominent of those narrative modes is, obviously, the omniscient authorial narrator. In Genette’s classification, that is a distinct heterodiegetic-extradiegetic narrator with zero focalization. The narrators present themselves as authors: they depict a fictional world, but they also reflect on their strategies of depiction, and by doing that, they subvert the possibility of illusive reading. Apart from referential narration they also engage in metafictional commentary, in which they evaluate the actions of the characters, they emphasize their authority and are ostentatious in reminding the reader of their manipulative powers over the story. This narrative mode was popular in pre-realistic narratives, and is now popular in postmodern fiction. For the disjunctive model of fictional discourse, authorial narration with metafictional commentary presents a substantial challenge. The congruence of the narrator and the author is seemingly non-problematic. For instance, the narrator in Henry Fielding’s novels reflects on the genre of the novel he is writing (in Joseph Andrews) or he ponders the plausibility of the scenes he narrates (in Tom Jones). The authorial narrator in Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and his Master) speculates that the chapter he has just finished narrating could have been written differently. Similar aspects can be found in narrators in postmodern fiction. In Milan Kundera’s novels, for example, narrators often introduce themselves by the author’s name and recount stories that correspond with known events in Kundera’s life. The other characters’ stories are presented as the author’s creation. It seems that when the narrator is perceived as congruent with the author, there is no possibility of a strongly illusive reading. Does this denote failure of the disjunctive model?

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I posit that the failure is only partial. The disjunction of author and narrator is still apparent at the level of telling. The narrators in eighteenth-century fiction made no effort to hide the fictional nature of their communication, and made it into one of the represented objects. Their discourse was twofold: they produced referential narration by which they depicted a fictional world (let us bear in mind that even the interpretation of authorial narration requires the reader to temporarily perceive the narrated content as facts), and they produced a commentary in which they presented themselves as the authors of a work of fiction. Therefore it seems that the narrators contradict themselves. One level of their speech lets the reader know what happened in the story, while the other one simultaneously reminds the reader that the story actually never happened. Despite all this, it is beyond doubt that a measure of aesthetic illusion comparable to that achieved by narratives told by an impersonal narrator is not possible to reach in these narrative modes. I think that, at this point, an important conclusion presents itself. It is becoming apparent that, while thinking about literary categories, it is necessary to take into account their developmental changes. The structuralist approach has always favored the systemic aspects first and foremost. In attempts to make theoretical models universally applicable, the issue of historic development has been, at times, neglected. This is apparent in the disjunctive model of fictional discourse, which, considering heterodiegetic fiction, is best suited for narratives of late realism, that is, narratives in which the narrator does not blend with the author. It is evident that the novel was conceived as a form that did not obscure its fictionality. Only in the nineteenth century did the aesthetic norms start to require narratives to be capable of inducing aesthetic illusion. Based on this requirement, self-reflection was suppressed in narratives, and the author’s voice disappeared behind a fictional narrator. I believe that the gradual covering up of the author’s part in narration is equally apparent in homodiegetic fiction. The earliest homodiegetic fictions often included an extensive preface in which the author’s voice was present. The preface to Defoe’s Moll Flanders, for example, states that the autobiographical story to follow is in fact the work of the author, who rewrote the original story of the narrator. The authorial voice is presented in a similar way in Rousseau’s Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (Julie, or the New Heloise). In the preface Rousseau admits that while he is calling himself the publisher, it was, in fact, him who had created the letters by means of which the novel is narrated. The use of a publisher or editor persona to emphasize distance from the fictional narrative is present as late as Pushkin’s The Belkin Tales or The Captain’s Daughter. By mentioning the diglossia of the author’s voice and the

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fictional narrator, I  am trying to demonstrate that same as heterodiegetic fiction, homodiegetic fiction originally did not obscure the fictionality of the communicative situation and that it belonged to the objects represented. However, the demand for more realistic narratives capable of achieving more profound aesthetic illusion required gradually suppressing the voice of the author or publisher. Similarly to heterodiegetic fiction, in homodiegetic fiction the author’s voice was eliminated in favor of a fictional speaker. Realist novels were not accompanied by extensive prefaces, because they were directly stylized as autobiographies of fictional narrators (David Copperfield), diary entries (Le Horla), or chronicles (Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed). An authorial position reflecting on the fictionality of the narrative became undesirable. Self-reflection and metafictionality then reappeared in increasing measures in modern and, especially, postmodern narratives. The need to disturb aesthetic illusion in these works has arisen from entirely different aesthetic norms, as the issue of the world-creating power of narrative is one of the major themes in postmodern literature. In my essay I have tried to accentuate the advantages of the disjunctive model, which treats fictional communication as a layered communicative exchange. This model, established in literary theory in great part by Mikhail Bakhtin, appears to be an extraordinary tool for describing the spectrum of illusive reading and for establishing that illusive reading is, to a certain degree, a prerequisite to understanding any work of fiction. In conclusion, I would like to emphasize one more finding that has transpired from my deliberations. All theoretical models meet difficulty when considered in connection to narratives from various historical periods. I have exemplified that, accordingly, the disjunctive model of fictional communication does not fit every mode of narration in literary history. Its use in examining anti-illusive novels is debatable. It is vital to always consider the fact that literary fictions are not a complete or final set of interrelated texts, but (as noted by Bakhtin) a living organism that develops and changes through time. Even though the novel began as a self-reflective genre, the efforts to achieve a captivating narrative that would immerse the reader led to its transformations. Quite obviously this is not a radically new idea, as the key role of the ever changeable aesthetic norm was remarked on by, among others, Jan Mukařovský, the most prominent member of the Prague School, in his study on Karel Čapek. He claimed that realistic narration “completed the mechanism of the novel” (Mukařovský 2001: 403). According to Mukařovský, realism aims at the illusion of immediate viewing of reality, which is accomplished by “leaving to the narrator at most the function of the lens in a camera or

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an accurately recording scientific instrument” (ibid.). He, however, noticed not only the means by which realist novels achieved illusive effect but also the changes in modern narratives, which reemphasized the importance of the manner chosen to convey the story, the very feature that was deliberately obscured in realist fiction. In his thoughts as well as in the reflections of Felix Vodička, who demanded that every literary fact be recognized in the historical framework (cf. Vodička [1969] 1998: 24–6), lies a significant challenge for contemporary literary theory. However, papers in this volume have assured me that neither this challenge nor other issues offered in the study of fictionality and aesthetic illusion will remain unanswered.1

Note 1 This study was supported by a grant from the Czech Science Foundation (project no. 13-29985S), “A Dictionary of Structuralist Literary Theory and Criticism.”

References Bakhtin, M. M. (1981), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by M. Holquist, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist, Austin, TX :University of Texas Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1986), Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, translated by V. W. McGee, Austin: University of Texas Press. Balzac, H. (1830), Gobseck, translated by E. Mariage, the Project Gutenberg EBook of Gobseck. Available online: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1389/1389.txt. Banfield, A. (1982), Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Chatman, S. (1978), Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cohn, D. (1999), The Distinction of Fiction, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Doležel, L. (1998), Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gallagher, C. (2006), “The Rise of Fictionality,” in F. Moretti (ed.), The Novel. Volume 1. History, Geography, and Culture, 336–63, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Genette, G. ([1991] 1993), Fiction and Fiction, translated by C. Porter, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hamburger, K. (1957), Die Logik der Dichtung, Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag.

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Hogan, C. (2013), Narrative Discourse: Authors and Narrators in Literature, Film and Art, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Lewis, D. (1978), “Truth in Fiction,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 15: 37–46. Martínez-Bonati, F. (1981), Fictive Discourse and the Structures of Literature, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mukařovský, J. (2001), Studie II, Brno: Host. Pavel, T. (1986), Fictional Worlds, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pratt, M. L. (1977), Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Rimmon-Kenan, S. (1983), Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, London, New York: Routledge. Ryan, M.-L. (1981), “The Pragmatics of Personal and Impersonal Fiction,” Poetics, 10: 517‒39. Ryan, M.-L. (1991), Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence and Narrative Theory, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Ryan, M.-L. (2001), Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Scholes, R. and R. Kellogg (1966), The Nature of Narrative, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vodička, F. ([1969] 1998), Struktura vývoje, Praha: Dauphin. Wolf, W. (2011), “Illusion (Aesthetic),” in P. Hühn et al. (eds.), The Living Handbook of Narratology, Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. Available online: hup.sub.unihamburg.de/lhn/index.php?title=Illusion (Aesthetic)&oldid=1563.

Part Four

Questioning Illusion

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How Should We Talk About Reading Experiences? Arguments and Empirical Evidence Emily T. Troscianko

I love immersing myself in fictional stories and other worlds and my favourite genre is science fiction. After reading sci-fi my mood is raised and I tend to feel more at peace with the Universe, cognitively and imaginatively stimulated and inspired. (a reader) Aesthetic illusion can thus be described as a synthesis of dominant immersion and residual distance—a distance which keeps it from turning altogether into delusion. (Wolf 2013a: v)

1. Introduction In the epigraphic quotations, an “ordinary reader” and a literary scholar are writing about the experience of reading fiction. For one, being immersed in fictional worlds is a profound cognitive, even spiritual experience. For the other, immersion is, when not countered by “residual distance,” a delusion. The size of the gap between the nonexpert and the academic terminology is undeniable. The question is how to respond to it. My response will build both on argumentation and on empirical evidence from nonacademic readers. The experience of engaging with fiction as fiction—being drawn into fictional worlds, or losing oneself in a good story—is one of the primary objects of cognitive literary study: first, because the reading of texts has typically had priority

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over the writing of them in the cognitive literary field, and secondly because this feeling of being drawn in seems to encapsulate something crucial about why we read and care about reading. Thus, even inquiries into other aspects of the reading experience—mental imagery, say, or emotional engagement with characters—are often framed in terms of how they help illuminate that central question: why and how fiction engages us at all. Because the experience in question is so broad and ill-defined, it’s unsurprising that a plethora of terms have long been competing for priority in the critical lexicon. Currently, the main contenders are probably “immersion” (the least technical and most widespread), “aesthetic illusion” (Wolf, e.g., 2013b), and “transportation” (Gerrig 1993; Green and Brock 2000), with others including “storyworld absorption” (Kuijpers et al. 2014), “presence” (which has migrated from virtual-reality research, e.g., Troscianko et al. 2012), and “narrative engagement” (Busselle and Bilandzic 2009). All but aesthetic illusion and narrative engagement are overtly metaphorical, and the thing about metaphor is that—whether or not you sign up to all the specifics of accounts of conceptual metaphor like Lakoff and Johnson’s ([1980] 2003)—it structures our thoughts often without us even being aware of it. If you speak of argument or debate in terms of violent conflict (his claims are hard to defend, their criticisms hit the mark, that claim can be easily demolished), you make it harder for yourself to conceive it as reciprocal give and take, or mutual enrichment, or mental agility training, or performative dance—and you often don’t even realize you’ve shut down these possibilities. Even once you turn an eye to the metaphors themselves, though, it’s hard to describe the engaged fiction-reading experience without favoring one metaphorical field or the other by accident: both parts of my opening description, for example, used metaphors of transportation (being “drawn” away from the real world, “losing” oneself in the fictional one). Even the apparently more neutral bits, like “world,” push us in one direction or another: the idea of fictional worldcreation probably aligns us more closely with immersion or transportation, whereas adding the qualifier “storyworld” might direct our attention more toward plot, and moving all the way to “narrative” makes the textual discourse level more salient. The point is, we start to predefine the experience as soon as we start to talk about it, and although this is always true of the relationship between experience and language, it’s something that, in the academic study of a phenomenon, we need to acknowledge and counter with careful reflective practice. Part of the job of being an academic is to take reasonable measures to ensure that our language

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is a help rather than a hindrance (or at the very least fit for purpose) in our investigation of what it refers to. Before being part of the Prague colloquium on aesthetic illusion last spring, I  hadn’t given this particular terminological competition much thought, and certainly didn’t have strong feelings about any of the rival terms. Immersion was the most familiar to me, and the one I was most likely to use by default, but I wrote about readers being drawn into fictional worlds without much concern for which theoretical framework I might or might not thereby be allying myself with. The meeting was a helpful prod to reflect on the ins and outs of at least some of the main terms, and to ask which might best fit the reality of readers’ experiences. More specifically, it was also a valuable opportunity to get to grips with the presuppositions and implications bound up with “aesthetic illusion,” which are numerous and complex. I don’t think I’d ever really quite understood what was meant by the term—or rather, why it goes by the name it does. By the end of the event I felt I had clarity on the things that make aesthetic illusion both an interesting and a problematic term and concept. In this chapter, I’ll start by outlining what I see as the interest and potential of aesthetic illusion. Then I’ll consider its problems (based largely on Werner Wolf ’s presentation of the concept, at the colloquium and in earlier publications, but also considering others’ uses of it). Then, broadening out, I’ll present some empirical evidence on the terms and metaphors used by one subpopulation of readers when writing about their reading experiences, with the aim of showing how valuable a corrective such data can be to forms of thought that may have started to lose touch with their objects. My broad argument will be that there are both theoretical and empirical reasons to ask whether “aesthetic illusion” is an appropriate term to be using to talk about experiences of reading fiction. Not that I have a perfect alternative to propose—far from it. Maybe, though, there are others—existent or still to be coined—that can deal with this particular set of challenges better than aesthetic illusion can. Before I  begin, I’d like to say a few more words about the relationship between theory and data. As I’ve said, terminology—and especially metaphorical terminology—shapes our thought so effectively that once we have a term or set of terms in place it can be hard to think outside them. This is where empirical data come in. The data I’ll be relying on are qualitative, self-report, survey data: they benefit from no experimental control conditions, no indirect measures or concealment of investigator intentions. That is, they are in essence simply the results of asking people to write about their reading. Those people represent

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a particular population—they are primarily women, primarily with experience of disordered eating and now in their teens, twenties, or thirties—and, as I’ll discuss in more detail later, this specificity has its pros and its cons in serving a useful function in the current inquiry. More broadly speaking, the differences between their statements and what I or any other lone literary scholar might say about literature lie primarily in their type and degree of expertise (none of the respondents reported doing literary studies for a living), and, most notably, in their numbers: 885 people (the total number of survey respondents) are considerably more than one. This is not to say the 885 must be “right,” and the one cannot be; just that relying on more than isolated examples of reflection from experts in a certain style of institutionally encouraged fiction reading can be helpful in the endeavor of remaining self-critical in our disciplinary practices. We claim to talk about “the reading experience,” to be delving into the mysteries of “why people read fiction,” so we need to make sure that our claims are based on more than our own experiences, which are unrepresentative by definition. Especially once debate emerges around a particular technical term, empirical data are an appropriate way of offering an evidence base and moving past theoretical stalemate. Beyond the arguments for aesthetic illusion or any of the alternatives, empirical work is important in giving us the means to repeatedly recalibrate our assumptions and, where necessary, break up entrenched communities of support for inherited terminologies.

2. Aesthetic illusion: Some definitions Aesthetic illusion (AeI) is the current incarnation of a long tradition of thinking about the effects of art in terms of illusion, a tradition formalized by Ernst Gombrich’s ([1960] 2002) book Art and Illusion. The literary critic Werner Wolf gave the term its aesthetic prefix, and has published extensively on its definition, entailments, and manifestations (1993a, 1993b, 1998, 2004, 2006, 2011, 2013a, 2013b, 2013c). In what follows, I’ll draw most heavily on his most recent exposition in which the definition and its implications have been refined beyond their earlier incarnations, but I’ll also refer to earlier discussions by him, and on other researchers’ applications of the term, where they help make a particular point more clearly. Aesthetic illusion is defined by Wolf as “a hybrid consisting of a predominant impression of experiential immersion in, and a latent rational distance

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towards, a represented world” (2008), or “a synthesis of dominant immersion and residual distance” (2013a: v), or, more extensively: Aesthetic illusion consists primarily of a feeling, with variable intensity, of being imaginatively and emotionally immersed in a represented world and of experiencing this world in a way similar (but not identical) to real life. At the same time, however, this impression of immersion is counterbalanced by a latent rational distance resulting from a culturally acquired awareness of the difference between representation and reality. (2011)

3. Aesthetic illusion: Points of interest AeI is the only common critical term at our disposal that makes complexity, duality, and ambivalence central. For this reason alone, it deserves our attention. There are several ways in which these characteristics might helpfully guide our thinking about responses to fiction. First, the idea of responses to aesthetic objects being in some way illusory foregrounds the nature of our engagements with fiction as a capacity for feeling, perceiving, responding, as-if: as if we lived in nineteenth-century Russia, as if we could see the alien lurking in the shadows, as if this man we’re crying for had really lived and died. These cognitively complex layers of mediation and of seeming merit further exploration, and could also be profitably connected with scientific and philosophical debates about whether perception itself is in some way illusory (see, e.g., the book Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion?, edited by Alva Noë [2002]) and whether we can ever be mistaken about the nature of our own experience. The dual quality of immersion and distance on which AeI is founded also encourages us to think beyond easy assumptions about emotional engagement with characters, which can fall unreflectively into strong and undifferentiated claims about “identification” and “empathy.” This aspect of AeI offers points of contact with other theories that focus on the complex, stratified, sometimes ambivalent nature of engagement with fiction, such as models of shared attention (Polvinen 2013) or the side-participant stance (Gerrig 1993). These possibilities have already started to be capitalized on in discussions of the shifting relations between perceptual and conceptual understanding in film (Cammack 2013) and the paradoxical doublings that happen when we have an illusion of watching ourselves having an illusion, or get involved in “tilting games” in which the mimetic and the performative are alternately foregrounded and backgrounded (Mahler

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2013, e.g., p. 176). But in an interesting irony, even though Jocelyn Cammack is exploring why immersion should be exchanged for something more complex and bistable, she seems to treat the term AeI as equivalent to immersion. That is, the complexities are explored despite her understanding of AeI, not thanks to it (see point (f) in the following section). More generally, the dual foundation of AeI has the potential to structure critical reflection on the complexities of responses to multiple forms of text and performance, including how these responses manifest evolved capacities for play, for symbolic interpretation, and for cognitive metarepresentation (Mellmann 2013). It seems likely that awareness of mediality will always play some kind of role in such responses, with varying levels of salience and varying effects on other elements of the reading or viewing or listening experience. This potential is arguably lacking in all other available frameworks for thinking about engagement with fiction, meaning AeI could be an important tool in our critical armory. However, I’ll explain in the following section why this important potential isn’t yet fully realized in AeI, and why we may need to develop an alternative—or overhaul AeI itself—so as to preserve its dual structure but avoid its current pitfalls.

4. Aesthetic illusion: Some problems The definitions previously quoted, even the shortest one, raise quite a few questions. I’ll now address the main ones, first to get to grips with what AeI actually is, and second, to ask whether it’s the most appropriate way of designating what goes on when we engage with fiction. (AeI is presented as a transmedial theory, and as broadly “indifferent to the opposition fictionality/factuality” [Wolf 2013b:  12; original italics], but prose fiction is described as one of the prime elicitors of AeI [4]. So although many of the points I’ll be making are unrelated to the question of medium, (prose) fiction will be my go-to test case.) a. Illusion Let’s start with the kernel of AeI, the idea of illusion. This is for me the first and perhaps the most obdurate sticking point of all: for both my past self, coming to it with nothing but general literary and linguistic instinct, and my present self, after months of thinking on and off about AeI, it just doesn’t seem like the right word. An illusion is something that is not as it seems. What, in the experience of engaging with fiction, is not as it

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seems? Does anyone think they’re actually in the fictional world when they read about it? Probably not. But even if they did, this wouldn’t, in the AeI framework, be the right kind of illusion to qualify: it would be a delusion— in Wolf ’s terms, “a state of erroneous perception” (2013b: 16), and one of the “delusionary states that are . . . nonaesthetic because they are involuntary and nondistanced” (2004: 328). (I’ll come back to the concepts of distance and voluntariness later. In his 2013 book, Wolf no longer explicitly includes the latter, and it is “distance” alone that “keeps it [AeI] from turning altogether into delusion”, 2013a: v.) For Wolf, then, “illusion” is not just distinct from “delusion”; it’s unquestionably preferable to it. Although the reason why is never made clear, Wolf attaches consistently negative value judgments to his notion of delusion: “aesthetic illusion has degenerated to delusion” (2013b: 14), the average recipient “is distanced enough not to become the victim of an experiential or referential delusion” (31); “we remain in fact in our right minds” if we stay in the realm of AeI (15), and so on. This places him in the uncomfortable position of having to call full immersion a (regrettable) delusion, even though (as I’ll discuss later) at other times he is happy to see immersion used as a synonym for AeI itself. Here already we start to see the tangles the term gets us caught in. Meanwhile, the trouble is that “[t]he meaning of ‘illusion’ in ordinary language is not clearly distinguished from that of ‘delusion’ ” (Brinker 1977: 191). Illusion has, in everyday English, weaker connotations of the same thing as delusion, so if we want it to mean something quite different (for example, to denote certain things about distance and/or agency), we’re committing ourselves to a losing battle against natural language use. We can say repeatedly that we take illusion to mean something like immersion, or a willing suspension of disbelief, but in nonspecialized uses of language, it simply doesn’t mean these things. Ordinary usage gently prods us into associating illusion with negative qualities like deception: Cammack (2013), for instance, speaks of “Film’s illusory capacity, that is, its capacity to give rise to a deceptive appearance” (311). But does an immersive film really do anything deceptive? In response to this problem, Wolf has acknowledged that because of the “rational distance” involved, “an ‘aesthetic illusion’ is actually not an ‘illusion’ but an ‘experiential pseudo-illusion’ ” (2004: 328). That is, there is the potential for illusion to arise, but it doesn’t. Pseudo isn’t totally unambiguous either, poised between a false or non-illusion and an apparent illusion, but the meaning is ultimately clear enough: precisely the absence

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of illusion is a defining quality of the engagement with fiction. This seems pretty important: the term’s intellectual proprietor remarks that the experience denoted by the term in fact involves the non-presence of what the term normally means. In discussion in Prague, Wolf noted that he often finds himself fighting against the negative connotations of illusion, like error or the deliberate intention to deceive, and hence has to insist all the more strongly on the “aesthetic” prefix. In his 2013 book, similarly, he says that “[i]f we use ‘illusion’ without a terminological qualification, there is always the danger of reverting to the old negative connotation . . . of ‘illusion’ as a state of perceptual or conceptual error which should best be avoided” (2013b: 20)— a meaning he wishes, as we’ve seen, to reserve for “delusion.” Relying on one half of a term to undo the unwanted connotations of the other half, as well as doing definitional work of its own, doesn’t seem like a strategy one would choose if creating appropriate terminology from scratch. In Prague, we kept being brought back to resigned or impatient agreement that no, the illusion isn’t “literal,” but after a while all those reiterations start to raise the question of why we keep using the term that makes them necessary. b. Aesthetic The word aesthetic is used to show that this is a particular kind of illusion distinct from the general case. This seems unremarkable at first. After all, in the central case we are talking about fiction—that is, about art; that is, not about cognition operating under normal circumstances. However, quickly an ambiguity arises: is the illusion aesthetic because its stimulus is an aesthetic object (e.g., a novel), or because the illusion itself has aesthetic qualities regardless of its stimulus? Wolf ’s answer seems to be the latter: “ ‘illusion’ points to ‘immersion,’ while ‘aesthetic’ does not only mean ‘sensory’ in the original etymological sense, but implies—admittedly in an unetymological way—a certain attitude in the recipient” (2013b: 21). AeI is not limited to responses to works of art, but merely presupposes a disposition that is typical of the reception of art (though it’s found elsewhere too)—what Wolf calls a “reception predisposition” (22). He notes, too, that there’s no particular need to label this predisposition “aesthetic”: a good alternative, if we didn’t mind adding yet another new term to the repertoire of options, might be “medial illusion” (21–2). The trouble is that as soon as you call something aesthetic (or medial), you’re saying that it is qualitatively different from the nonaesthetic (or non-medial): that at some point a dividing line can be drawn. This may

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or may not be the case with the experience AeI denotes; it’s an empirical question. We may or may not be confident that questions about processing and about experience can in general be addressed through observation and experimental manipulation (a question on which the future of empirical literary studies hinges, as well as the future of many areas of psychology). But if we believe that currently available methods of inquiry have at least some purchase on some questions about human experience, then this one should be resolvable: we can study a wide class of responses that are hypothesized to fall within or without the “aesthetic” category, on the range of variables expected to be relevant to the aesthetic/nonaesthetic distinction, and see whether there are any qualitative or quantitative differences justifying it. Given that it seems implausible that we could ever establish a quantitative boundary between the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic (beyond x amount of emotional engagement with a fictional character, a response starts or stops being aesthetic), the differences we would have to find would need to be qualitative (variable x exists or is absent in aesthetic responses only). For Wolf, variable x is apparently “distance.” As we’ve seen, he says that delusion is nonaesthetic because it’s nondistanced (and in some statements also involuntary). So the reasoning runs as follows: delusions are nonaesthetic because they are nondistanced, therefore AeI must involve (partial) distance, therefore an illusion (as thus defined) is necessarily aesthetic. This circularity means that the phenomenon in question must be the way it is because that’s how it has already been defined: there is no scope for the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic to be found to be qualitatively equivalent, because with respect to distance (and possibly voluntariness) they are required to be opposed. Empirical investigation could not impinge on this schema, since if we found “distance” where we weren’t expecting it, or didn’t find it where we were, that would result in a recategorization of the response in question rather than a challenge to the categories themselves. This preclusion of meaningful empirical exploration is all the odder given that one of the planks of the AeI argument is the “analogy thesis”: the idea that there is an analogy or correspondence between aesthetic and other experience, such that “the recipient can perceive or experience [a represented world] as if it were (a) reality, that is, in analogy to everyday experience” (Wolf 2013b: 36, also p. 25). As I’ve mentioned, Wolf also makes clear that no fact/fiction distinction is required by AI: “the quasiexperiential nature of aesthetic illusion renders it to a large extent indifferent

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to the opposition fictionality/factuality” (12)—though a little later he remarks on our “ability to differentiate between reality and fiction, between natural and artificial phenomena” (28). He mentions “news hunger,” or a thirst for information, as one of the anthropological preconditions for AeI, along with our “theory of mind,” our empathic capacities, and our social natures more generally (27–8). So, in sum, AeI is on a continuum with all sorts of other engagements with fictional or factual socially relevant stimuli. But on the other hand, the definition of AeI depends on separating it from experiences (e.g., illusions) that would be labeled nonaesthetic, and, as we’ll see in the next section, even avoids calling it a proper experience at all. There seem to be profoundly conflicting impulses here: on the one hand, to bring aesthetic and other experiences into proximity with each other, on the other hand, to separate them categorically. Rather than provide clear falsifiable hypotheses about this question, the AeI framework hedges its bets in a way that makes it very hard to criticize—except on precisely that basis. And the broader question that rears its head here is whether “aesthetic” can be assumed to be an appropriate way of describing all experiences of reading all kinds of fiction. The leap from calling something fiction to calling it an aesthetic object, or from identifying something as a reading experience to calling it an aesthetic experience, is commonly made without comment. But if a reader reads short stories carelessly or is bored by what she reads, or reads novels by Fontane in order to teach herself about the geography of Berlin, or Harry Potter to improve her chances of getting a job in children’s publishing, is her experience necessarily an aesthetic one? Or, at the other end of the spectrum, is a highly “absorbed” experience in which the boundaries between the reading self and the read-about self are most porous aesthetic? Does whether you conceive of yourself as having a specifically aesthetic experience already change the experience (Mellmann 2013: 82–3)? The data I’ll present in the second half of this chapter seem in many cases to describe experiences that are very absorbed and not very aesthetic at all. So what, in the end, is aesthetic about fiction reading? Is it important that we set this out rather than assuming it? c. Quasi Once we want AeI to be qualitatively distinct from nonaesthetic phenomena, it’s easy to take the next step, as Wolf does, and say that it isn’t actually a normal experience at all: the nondistanced component of AeI “involves emotions and sensory quasi-perceptions (including, but not restricted to, visual imagination)” (2011); “aesthetic illusion is essentially

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and primarily a quasi-experience” (2013b: 33). We’ve already encountered quasi’s sibling, pseudo, in Wolf ’s remark about the illusion really being “experiential pseudo-illusion,” but quasi is just as crucial to the model. In AeI, what we have when we engage with fiction are quasi-experiences, quasi-perceptions, quasi-emotions (Wolf never uses this last term, but he includes emotions in the quasi category, e.g., 2013b: 12). This terminology crops up in other literary-theoretical contexts too, particularly when someone is trying to support the bizarrely popular idea that there is a “paradox of fiction” (that it’s paradoxical to feel emotions for people we know don’t really exist), or otherwise demarcate the aesthetic realm from the nonaesthetic (e.g., Walton 1978). But what is a quasi-perception, or a quasi-experience? Are they quasi because they have different initiating stimuli from other perceptions or experiences? (This brings us back to the subject of the previous section: the meaning of aesthetic.) Or because they involve different physiological (including neural) responses? Or because there’s something different about how they feel? Investigation of the first two domains—the triggers and the objective aspects of response—can tell us only that these cases and others lie on a continuum, or in a constellation: eye movements, visual processing, physical markers of fear or excitement, neural corollaries of motor response, measures of “mindreading” and mental imagery—none of these things shows any categorical difference from its occurrence in other relevant contexts (reading nonfiction, remembering, listening to a news report, getting frightened in dark woods). As we’ve seen, Wolf also doesn’t require there to be anything different about the objects that can and can’t elicit AeI. And although he devotes little attention to physiology, he doesn’t seem to make any claims about categorical differences between the aesthetic and the nonaesthetic. This leaves us with the how it feels—and maybe there is something special about that. This is a matter for introspection, with all the caveats that entails, not least the thorny question of whether or not we can lack full insight into, or be positively mistaken about, our own experience. If I try carefully to attend to my own experience when reading a novel I love, I can pick out, perhaps, a sense of feeling with the protagonist, and a projection of my own experiences on to the protagonist, and a desire to know what happens next mingled with vague memories of when I read it before, interrupted now and then by thoughts of what I have to do later, and awareness of the room around me and having slight stiffness in my shoulders and being slightly

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nervous about a talk I have to give tomorrow, and so on. I can’t identify anything that feels like it needs a different category from experiences I have at other times: when listening to an interesting radio interview, for example, or trying to focus on constructing this argument, or remembering an important conversation from last year. This may not be true for everyone, of course, but I’ve never read any clear description of an experiential phenomenon that makes it sound fundamentally aesthetic, in a sense that warrants a category distinction as opposed to a careful assessment of the always grey zones of many matters of degree. And even if one were to identify such a feature, we ought to ask whether it’s best conveyed with the prefix quasi (from the Latin for “as if ” or “almost”): it seems hard to imagine an experience that would be best captured by being called either only seemingly an experience, or only partially an experience, or a not-quite-real experience. (This is quite different from the notion of as-if experience I discussed earlier; the reality of the experience itself is there not in doubt.) Wolf ’s 2013 exposition offers another possibility: “Aesthetic illusion thus elicits quasi-experiences” (2013b: 11–12; original italics). The idea that AeI results in quasi-experience runs counter to what seems to be the case everywhere else: that AeI is a quasi-experience. But it seems no more plausible than that more prevalent account. The terminology feels all wrong, just as it does when Wolf ends up remarking on the fact that the outward signs of emotional involvement during AeI “are surprisingly similar to real-life reactions” (2013b: 7). Totally unsurprisingly, they look like real-life reactions because they are reallife reactions. The person who is reading is really alive and is reacting to something just as real as my mother telling me a story about her brother’s partner. Some researchers who use the concept of AeI strongly resist the quasi label, insisting on the reality of the experience, however virtual its prompts (Wessely 2013: 358). Others, like Katharina Bantleon and Ulrich Tragatschnig (2013), do take on the quasi label, speaking, for example, of the “quasi-experience allowing the beholder to become immersed in the represented world” (272). Interestingly, though, quasi is here applied to the phenomenon of immersion, not to AeI proper; I’ll return to this in point (f). Beyond that complication, however, the notion of the quasi-experience sits uneasily next to an interest in the personal-level factors such as familiarity and emotional involvement that may help shape viewers’ experiences of visual art, and in the double-layered qualities such experiences can have.

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Calling them quasi can only serve to discourage or complicate serious inquiry into the prerequisites and constituents of such experiences, which requires that we treat them straightforwardly as real-world experiences. d. Aesthetic objects: Artefacts and representations The things that elicit the quasi-experiences of AeI are aesthetic objects, or works of art, or illusionist artefacts, or simply artefacts, which include “non-artistic medial artefacts” (Wolf 2013b: 2). Typically, these triggers are “representations” (11), which include “representational texts, artifacts or performances” (Wolf 2011). Indeed, “aesthetic illusion cannot be triggered by natural phenomena, nor refer to artefacts that are either non-representational or do not create (or suggest) an imaginable world” (Wolf 2013b: 10). It’s easy to see why there’s some slippage among all these lists: artefact is too narrow if we want to allow things like theatrical performance to elicit AeI, but once we broaden out to representation, it’s hard to exclude things like news reports or gossip. These slippery constraints cause problems when one tries to apply the AeI concept to art forms that are less obviously representational, like music. Walter Bernhart (2013) quotes some statements on how only representations can elicit AeI and concludes: “So we may as well close our discussion and accept that there is no aesthetic illusion in instrumental music” (368). Happily, he doesn’t stop there, but the discussion that follows centers on his attempts to tweak and expand Wolf ’s definitions so that they can fit the musical case. The topics of discussion—is music representational or not, is the perceptual really more important than the emotional, or the external more than the internal— are arguably a case of analytical energies having been diverted into questions that were based on mistaken premises from the outset and that distract from the more interesting ones that could be asked about the kinds of experiences music elicits in listeners, freed of this framework. False dichotomies of this kind abound in AeI. Wolf sometimes remarks on the “non-natural character of representation” (2011), but representation is not nonnatural: we would struggle to come up with a definition that included a story but excluded many everyday uses of language, or a schematic cognitive model of the environment, or indeed nonhuman phenomena like some forms of camouflage. Again, a clear cut-off point between the “natural” and the “representational” seems hard to achieve but is posited by AeI theory, just as are those between the aesthetic and nonaesthetic, the experience and the quasi-experience, the emotional and the rational, and all the other pairings on which the idea of AeI relies.

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Nonetheless, again the opposites are partially collapsed as soon as they’re created: despite being defined as “non-natural,” it turns out that “genres and media can also be viewed as being part of reality” (Wolf 2013b: 13)—though how reality relates to nature is unclear. Finally, Wolf also equivocates about the representation issue. There is only one general proviso about the AeI trigger, we learn: “namely . . . that it is (or at least suggests) a representation” (35). Ultimately, representation seems far too broad to be useful, and artefact too narrow, and so we’re left in an ill-defined territory somewhere in between. e. Distance As we’ve learned, what distinguishes AeI from nonaesthetic illusions (or, presumably, other pseudo-illusions) is that it combines immersion in with distance from a represented world. By definition, both total immersion and total distance (however we try to define these poles) are excluded from the state of being subject to the AeI. So what exactly is this distance, and how does it relate to the immersed state? AeI seems to be founded on the assumption that distance has to be rational and immersion emotional: “Aesthetic illusion consists primarily of a feeling, with variable intensity, of being imaginatively and emotionally immersed in a represented world . . . counterbalanced by a latent rational distance resulting from a culturally acquired awareness of the difference between representation and reality” (Wolf 2011); “While rationality is thus not excluded from aesthetic illusion . . . emotional involvement is a more important facet of the state of mind under discussion” (Wolf 2013b: 7). At certain points, Wolf seems ready to hesitate about the emotion-immersion equation: AeI lies somewhere between the poles of “total rational distance” and “complete (and predominantly emotional) imaginative immersion” (16–17; my italics). And on one occasion, the distance is not rational (rationality would be a hindrance to AeI’s existence) but “evaluative, perhaps compassionate” (2013c: 213)—which confuses things further. But the immersion-emotion versus distance-rationality opposition is assumed in almost every statement about AeI’s two poles. Unobjectionable as it might seem at first glance, there’s no reason why we need make this automatic alignment, and there are good reasons not to. Firstly, the rationality-emotion distinction arguably isn’t meaningful in the first place. Emotional response can be persuasively characterized as based on a broadly cognitive appraisal of what this means to me now (e.g., Frijda 2007); the evolutionary purpose of emotion is to flexibly drive goalorientated action, and it does so in close interaction with all the evaluative

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mechanisms we might tend to classify as “rational.” Furthermore, emotions like fear and disgust are arguably more effectively “distancing” than any “rational” response could be. Equally, evaluations we might want to place in the rational camp, like admiration or concentration, can of course be powerfully anti-distancing, and sweeping claims like “comedy and laughter always imply emotional distance” (Wolf 2013b: 41) are belied by any decent romcom, sitcom, or work of tragicomedy. Finally, in the context specifically of fiction reading, there’s similarly no reason to assume that “rational” elements of response can’t contribute to immersion or emotional ones to distance, even if those are the right metaphorical parameters to be using. Wolf grudgingly allows “reason” to contribute to immersion “to the extent that it is required to make sense of the represented world” (2013b: 23), but he states that “[a]esthetic illusion can, for instance, to a certain extent include rational reactions, although this does characteristically not mean a pronounced ‘technical’ interest in or appreciation of . . . the way in which the artefact is made or structured” (7). This again seems reasonable at first glance, but when we see the idea applied to specific examples of engagement with art, we see its limitations. Bantleon and Tragatschnig discuss the case of an oil painting of New York that looks like a photograph, and about the double illusion that may result from looking at it. The notion of illusion/delusion encourages them to claim that the viewer “is actually tricked into temporarily mistaking a representation for what it represents” (2013: 272), which seems unlikely: do we really think we’re looking at Central Park? Beyond this, the process of coming to realize that the painting is not a photograph is described in terms that feel far too black-and-white: starting from “undisturbed immersion,” we “eventually activate the frame of rational distance” and suspicion and work out that it’s a painting (271). Intruding into this schema are indications that the distancing is in fact emotional as much as intellectual: the eerie stillness of the lake and the heightened intensity of color are excellent examples of how inevitable cognitive-perceptual-emotional intertwinings are in the engagement with artistic form and content. The cognitive-literary scholar Merja Polvinen unpicks the closely related assumption that “involvement with narrative can only mean engagement with the events and characters represented, not engagement with the artefact itself,” noting that many of the empirical paradigms used to assess degree of “transportation” or similar provide “no option . . . for respondents to indicate that they may be caught up in a novel’s way of using language,

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in the intricacies of its narrative structures, or, indeed, in its fictionality” (2017). Engagement with metafictional devices or linguistic patterning can be just as important to the “immersed” reading experience as engagement with character or plot, and Polvinen suggests a model of “double vision” as an alternative to AeI and other frameworks that pit awareness of fictionality and engagement with the fictional world against each other on the spatially construed (“from within,” “from without” [Wolf 2013b: 22]) dimension of immersion—distance. AeI could offer a flexible account of as-if duality along just these lines, but entrenched ideas about the reason-emotion dichotomy prevent it from doing so. There’s also ambiguity in the degree and/or status of the distance in the AeI model. On the one hand, “rational distance is a necessary constituent of it [AeI]” (2004: 328). On the other hand, this distance is often described as “latent”—that is, as not fully actualized, or present but not directly observable or measurable: “This constitutive immersion is, however, counterbalanced by a latent rational distance” (2013b: 52). In Wolf ’s 2013 exposition, “residual” offers an optional alternative to “latent”: “we at the same time maintain a residual rational awareness of our true situation” (15). This may mean just “minimal,” but may also have the stronger meaning of something created by a previous reaction—or, in statistical terms, the distance between an observation and a model’s line of best fit. Nowhere is it ever made clear what the latency (or the residue) is, or how exactly the distance would be different if it weren’t latent (or residual). However, the rationale for the qualifier is evident in statements about how AeI is “a complex phenomenon characterized by an asymmetrical ambivalence” (16). It seems that the “distance” mustn’t be allowed to seem too significant, but that there is also resistance to straightforwardly calling it “minimal” or “low-level,” or otherwise conveying a simple quantitative function. Again, it’s almost as if the intention is to defend AeI from empirical investigations that might provide evidence against a clearly articulated claim about a quantifiable degree—or perhaps just to make it seem more “remarkable and complicated, . . . even . . . paradoxical” (4) than it otherwise would. But the danger is that this defense gets carried out by means of terms that create more obscurity than intrigue. f. Related phenomena: Immersion and transportation AeI is explicitly if not unproblematically defined as a complex combination of immersed and distanced responses with all the specific

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characteristics we’ve just explored. It is categorically impossible for it to be the same as, say, “immersion,” which is one of the mutually exclusive poles between which AeI sits. (That is, unless immersion itself is taken to be a gradable phenomenon that, at the low end, includes lots of “distance,” but this would make the whole notion of AeI redundant.) And yet researchers who tend to favor alternative terms with different reference points can be found aligning their research unhesitatingly with AeI: in Wolf ’s 2013 book, Marie-Laure Ryan equates the two—“aesthetic illusion, or immersion” (Ryan 2013: 140)—before moving rapidly on. Other contributors to the same volume do this too: indeed, a striking fact about this book is that of the twelve chapters (one by Wolf himself), only four (Mellmann, Mahler, Wolf, and Bernhart) adopt the definition of AeI as involving two contrasting elements of immersion and distance. One contributor doesn’t even try to work out how participation in make-believe relates to AeI, immersion, or suspension of disbelief, but wryly leaves that pleasure to the reader (Walton 2013: 129). The other seven all conflate AeI with some combination of immersion, transportation, illusionism (i.e., immersion/ deception), lifelikeness, plausibility, and/or imitation of reality. Ryan works her way toward the idea of a lucid aesthetic experience equivalent to AeI, but never seems to realize that precisely this, not immersion or imaginative recentering, is what AeI means (Ryan 2013: 142). It will be interesting to see how often this tacit redefining of AeI happens in the present volume. Wolf in fact does the same thing elsewhere, referring to terms like absorption, re-centering, and immersion as “the various synonyms [for AeI] used in research” (2011), or, more carefully, speaking of “one, albeit dominant, facet of aesthetic illusion, namely immersion” (2013b: 20). A little later in the same discussion, however, he attempts to clarify the situation: because immersion designates “the dominant constituent of aesthetic illusion,” it “may thus be used, like ‘illusion’ as a synonym of “aesthetic illusion” in the way in which “illusion” tout court may be employed by way of abbreviation” (22). So immersion is an acceptable shorthand for AeI, even though we know it omits one of the phenomenon’s two defining elements (distance). And it’s acceptable by analogy with illusion, short for aesthetic illusion, which we’ve learned doesn’t even involve any actual illusion. Thus AeI finds itself in the strange position of having been created as a theoretical alternative to concepts with which it is now quite casually being equated, as well as going by the name of something precluded by it.

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g. Typicality The theory of AeI never quite makes clear how typical the phenomenon is taken to be for experiences whose stimuli meet the criteria in point (e). “[AeI] manifests itself as a pleasurable feeling, of variable intensity, which can be triggered in the recipients by many— though not all—works of art, artefacts or performances” (Wolf 2013a: v). Leaving aside the question of whether “pleasurable” is really the right way to characterize every single instance of AeI, presumably it isn’t inevitable that the stimuli listed lead to AeI, since alternative states like “delusion” (which may or may not be equivalent to immersion) are also possible (when “distance” is lacking). But at some points it seems that any powerful engagement with a relevant artefact does in fact constitute AeI: “[W]hoever, for instance, has felt fear, horror and suspense when reading a novel or playing a computer game, whoever has been moved to tears during emotionally loaded film scenes and whoever has pitied tragic characters such as King Lear on stage testifies to have been in the grip of aesthetic illusion” (2013b: 4). These examples are an odd choice for a claim about AeI as opposed to immersion, since they epitomize responses that lack any obvious element of “distance,” “latent” or otherwise: if you pity Lear, get scared playing Alien Isolation, or cry when Boromir dies in The Fellowship of the Ring, it’s because those people and situations are emotionally real to you. You’ll probably also have some degree of awareness that the aliens aren’t actually in the room, or of the layers of mythology that separate you from Middle Earth, but those “distancing” elements run counter to what is given in Wolf ’s description here. More obviously good examples are given a little later on: for example, “[i]n painting or cinema film, it is the penetration of the canvas or screen which we seem to disregard and yet perceive” (2013b: 15). But maybe sometimes the duality of awareness (of what’s represented and the fact of it being a representation) can be absent and the response still count as AeI: “[AeI] thus harbours a mute ‘observing ego,’ which (in most cases) simultaneously coexists with the experiencing ego” (16; my italics). No indication is given of what is special about the cases where there isn’t such a separation—or rather, of what makes them still qualify as AeI. Wolf notes that the breaking of AeI is always a “latent” possibility within itself (19), leading easily to a game of immersion followed by distancing and again by immersion. And though immersion seems to be viewed as the default option in many cases “during the reception of representations” (23),

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immersion itself is then described as involving the recipient’s half-awareness of a “rational, metareferential security cord permitting him or her to emerge from the illusionist ‘plunge’ at will” (23)—which sounds a lot like what AeI is meant to be. h. Imagination and the mental screen Imaginative response is crucial to AeI: a response doesn’t count as AeI if you’re emotional “without being induced to develop “internal images” or other representational imaginations” (2013b: 7; original italics). “[AeI] is thus first and foremost the inner, mental experiencing of (elements of) an imaginative world which is elicited and shaped by an artefact” (7–8). This raises more questions for film and visual art, which depend largely on visual perception, than for reading, where mental imagery plays an obviously more salient role. But what is most striking here is the theory’s lack of engagement with the qualities and mechanisms of as central a cognitive faculty as the imagination. AeI, Wolf says, is the result of a particular combination of the representational trigger, the context, and the individual recipient. Having listed all the obvious facets of individual variation like experience, age, and gender (29), and set out the defining characteristics of the “average recipient” (ibid.: 31), Wolf then turns to a metaphor to describe the recipient’s role. The recipient is a film director or producer, for whom the “illusionist representation” provides the script (or raw material), which combined with knowledge, empathic abilities, and so forth contributes to creating the “ ‘projection’ on their minds’ ‘screens’ ” (27, also p. 24). In the next sentence, he equates the “mental screen” with “the imagination.” One would think, first off, that the act of projection would be a better candidate for the imagination than the screen on to which the projections are made. But more importantly, there are many reasons why we should resist the intuitive conflation of the visual with the pictorial (see also Wolf 2013c: 222), question the metaphor of “pictures in the head,” and not think of the mind, or (any part of) the brain, as a screen, display, or other 2-D array that requires a metacognitive agent (some kind of homunculus) to decode its content (see, e.g., Troscianko 2013). This facet of the AeI account doesn’t make a huge difference to anything else, except in eliding the already ambiguous causal/constitutive elements of AeI with a mental-screen metaphor that is scientifically and philosophically problematic, and is being applied to the most important element of the cognitive response.

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i. Summary I hope I have said enough to make clear that despite its potential, AeI theory is hard to make sense of as a theory of aesthetic response. I don’t have the space here to review the pros and cons of AeI’s competitors, but to me at least, it’s clear that if we want a critical term that foregrounds a duality of potentially conflicting responses, we need a less problematic one than AeI. We need one that has the clarity to encourage empirical and introspective exploration which will further our explorations of the big questions that arise when we think about engagement with fiction. These include the relations between “aesthetic” and “nonaesthetic,” between “immersion” and “distance,” or between other more helpful categories; the ubiquity and typical elicitors of the experience; and the roles of the various cognitive faculties and factors of personal and contextual variability involved in creating it.

5. Aesthetic illusion in empirical practice The openness of a theory to validation and refinements deriving from evidence may take many forms. The prerequisite of them all is a terminological framework that yields predictions clear enough to be tested and falsified. AeI hovers somewhere between being a concept and being a theory. Every concept, whether explicitly or implicitly, presupposes some kind of theoretical framework, but the more this context remains implicit, the more ambiguity there is as to whether the aim is description or explanation, and the more explanations can come across as claiming the neutrality of descriptions. One of the striking features of AeI is the gap between those who treat it as a relatively self-explanatory stand-alone concept (usually equivalent to immersion) and those who engage with the theoretical framework Wolf has constructed around it. This discrepancy means we need to tread all the more carefully in evaluating AeI’s value. A simple way of evaluating one aspect of the usefulness of our terminological apparatus is to see whether people spontaneously employ its terms of reference (or closely related ones) in their descriptions of engaging with fiction. On its own, this kind of evidence can’t prove or disprove anything, but it can offer one means of assessing the extent of the perceived relevance or appeal of the terms under theoretical evaluation. In this section, I provide a brief outline of what a qualitative dataset gathered for entirely other purposes can and can’t tell us about one set of readers’ ways of

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writing about their reading experiences. In a recent collaboration with the UK eating-disorders charity Beat, I conducted an online survey to gather data on how people think about the connections between their reading habits and their mental health (with a particular focus on eating disorders). Of the 885 respondents who took part in our online survey, 773 had a personal history of disordered eating. Other findings from the data are set out elsewhere (Troscianko submitted), but here I’ll use the qualitative (free-response) data to shed further light on AeI from an empirical perspective. I will use this dataset first to offer a crude way of adjudicating between the main competing terms in the critical lexicon—AeI, immersion, absorption, and transportation—by asking which of their structures, metaphorical or otherwise, arise most often in respondents’ descriptions of their reading experience. Second, I’ll provide illustrations of how the basic dual structure of AeI may be important in understanding reading experiences not just with critical precision but also for therapeutic benefit. Third, I’ll consider other facets of response that arise in the data and that might not be directly predicted by any of the existing terms, but may be useful in further assessing their relative merits. The survey data include 1,524 qualitative responses, mostly to open-ended questions inviting respondents to tell us more about a particular aspect of their reading. These responses come from 443 respondents, of whom 399 report personal experience of an eating disorder; 274 responses are represented in the various categorizations that follow, which are based on my own close reading of the responses, plus searches for keywords like “immers-” and “absor-.” (The 274 include 77 responses that were categorized under more than one heading.) It’s both a weakness and a strength that these data were gathered with completely different questions in mind. It’s a weakness because the focus on the relevance of reading to mental health and illness means the responses may be biased in that direction:  whatever kind of reading experience is more likely among people with past or present experience of disordered eating, or is more likely to be emphasized when people are describing reading experiences with an eye to that context, will crop up more than in a more broadly representative sample asked in general terms about their reading experiences. But it’s a strength because the data aren’t restricted or skewed by experimenter biases—in particular, by hypotheses about what aspects of the AeI or other models may or may not be manifested in these readers’ reports of their responses to texts. Respondents can say anything that occurs to them as relevant. There’s only one question that explicitly asks anything directly related to AeI and its competitors: when asked whether they’ve ever read anything that helped them tackle their eating disorder,

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and then asked how it helped, respondents were given a range of eight options of which one was “offering an escape from the real world into a fictional world”; 178 people selected this option. Having read this question may have had a priming effect on the responses that followed.

5.1 Frequencies of AeI and other concepts A basic count of the frequency with which the competing terms crop up in the free responses yields the following results (I include an example for each category, giving every quotation in full and with typos and other idiosyncrasies intact). Absorption: 6 Example: “For me, it depends if the book is interesting or not, if not then I am likely to become bored, which is a trigger for bingeing; however, if I  like the book, then I will become absorbed in it – not thinking about food.” Immersion (including being “wrapped up in” the book/story): 6 Example: “I live to read and reading is a major passion (I’m a writer, and writers have to read! It’s a compulsive habit!). I’m not happy if I don’t have a book on the go and I love immersing myself in fictional stories and other worlds and my favourite genre is science fiction. After reading sci-fi my mood is raised and I  tend to feel more at peace with the Universe, cognitively and imaginatively stimulated and inspired.” Aesthetic illusion: 15 Example: “I feel less alone—even if the characters are fictional, a real connection can be made. And it’s good to know there is someone out there (i.e. the author) who ‘gets me.’ ” Transportation: 13 Example: “takes you to a different world.” Transportation as escapism (not including cases in which escape-related sentiments are expressed in terms other than “escape”): 68 (26 in elaborations on responses to the question specifically about escape, 42 other) Example: “I often read fiction to escape day-to-day stresses and worries.”

So the two transportation categories together win by a large margin: 81 occurrences versus only 27 for the other three combined. It’s easy to argue that transportation, and especially transportation inflected with escapist elements, is likely to figure prominently in responses from people with experiences of mental

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health problems, in a context in which they are being asked to focus on the connections between those problems and their reading. And 26 mentions of escape came in the question that gave “offering an escape” as one of the multiple-choice options. But the two transportation categories, once explored beyond a simple yes or no head count, show internal richness that prevents us from dismissing them, as professional critics have a tendency to do, as “mere escapism.” The other elements bound up with the experience of being transported and/ or escaping from a present reality include the following:  engaging more fully with the “world” of the eating disorder, or conversely achieving distance from the disorder or from other preoccupations and achieving a temporary “normality”; being entertained or inspired; growing happier or calmer or more relaxed, or more excited or creative; taking time for oneself away from other people without seeming rude; engaging with characters as with other (real) people; becoming someone else temporarily, or catching a glimpse of the breadth of potential human experiences; being disorientated on the return to “normal life”; and sleeping better. The same degree of variation is found in the testimony categorized under “absorption” and “immersion”: absorbed and immersed responses are bound up with the instinct to self-harm (by reading about disordered eating) or to avoid eating or thinking about food; with the desire to escape everyday stresses; with slowing down and finding calm and peace, or with mental stimulation and inspiration to creativity; with forgetting one’s worries, finding inspiration and joy, experiencing hopefulness and openness to new possibilities; with the boost to one’s self-esteem that comes from successfully focusing on something “worthwhile” as well as absorbing; and again with disorientation when returning to “reality.” The variety and richness of these reports provide a robust riposte to the denigration, in the AeI model, of “delusion” as the unfortunate ugly sister of the subtle and fascinating aesthetic illusion. Immersion is not a one-dimensionally trivial facet of readerly motivation or response, and nor is absorption or transportation or escapism. Remarkable complexity comes in many guises.

5.2 The therapeutic relevance of aesthetic illusion These responses also help make the obvious point that feeling transported during a reading experience may or may not also feel like an escape—that is bound to depend primarily on the qualities of the situation in which the reading happens. This situational contingency also applies to the examples of AeI found in

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the survey responses and is directly connected to the therapeutic capacity that AeI clearly manifests. Deciding which responses counted as AeI was tricky, in particular because with amalgamated reports of numerous reading experiences, often a long time after the fact, it’s hard to tell whether the reflective elements were present during the reading itself, or result from a retrospective understanding of the reading. For the sake of transparency, I reproduce all the responses categorized as AeI here, with a brief discussion. In square brackets I note any other categories they also fall under, as discussed in the following section. “I feel less alone—even if the characters are fictional, a real connection can be made. And it’s good to know there is someone out there (i.e. the author) who ‘gets me’ ” [also Fiction as social world]. Here the awareness of fictionality sounds like it might well be inherent to the reading experience. “I often find it difficult and/or scary to express how I feel in words or to others. Books and in particular fiction provide a kind of transitional and creative space for that—I can relate to aspects of myself (both similar and different) in the voices of the characters, their journeys and so on—and offer an opportunity to go beyond my experience and explore different possibilities, ideas, and so on, without completely disconnecting from them. I find reading completely invaluable as a therapeutic experience and means of exploring my feelings and potential.” The idea of going beyond one’s own experiences without entirely disconnecting from them sounds like classic AeI. “Reading makes you still, I  should make up up for the inactivity by exercising more.” This kind of distance isn’t quite the awareness of “the difference between representation and reality” that usually constitutes distance in the AeI model, but the statement does concisely convey an experience poised between the enjoyment of reading and the constant awareness of its price. “When I read a beautifully structured sentence I feel happier, impressed, creative. I long to lose myself in a book again.” This suggests that the appreciation of the aesthetic construct as a construct either coexists with or complements, or at least is in no sense felt to be a contradiction to, the feeling of getting lost in a book. “It depends entirely on what the fiction is—ALL fiction of any interest at all has an effect on my mood, much fiction has characters who have eating disorders in it—there’s one in the first Sidney Chambers book, it’s hardly profound literature and the character’s ED is peripheral to the story (so peripheral that it wasn’t included in the TV adaptation) but whether it improves my mood or worsens it depends on what happens to the character, how accurate the portrayal

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of the ED is, what the author’s intentions in including the character is etc.” What happens to characters is balanced against comparison with other knowledge and inferences about authorial intention. “I wasn’t sure whether to put improves or worsens because I think it is mixed. I often find inspiration in characters (eg in Harry Potter, in Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, in Sugar Rush) but also can feel quite down that I am not like them. Whilst reading I feel good, I get ideas of how I could change my life, get hobbies, get friends, but then I realise that it’s not me. When I read I wish I was the character. I struggle with self harm as well as the ED, so I can be quite hard on myself at times” [also Comparison with explicitly fictional characters]. Here the engaged experience of feeling that the characters’ lives can be inspiration for one’s own is balanced by the difficult awareness that one is not (and can’t be) them; recognition of distance is emulation’s prerequisite. “Girls under pressure—this book was released not too soon before I developed full blown eating disorder and by reading it or listening on audio book to it, it made me feel less lonely but that I could relate to the character and that I could relax and not think of my own problems but still be thinking about eating disorders. So it sort of satisfied my eating disorder obsessions and let me relac from them” [also Comparison with explicitly fictional characters] [also Fiction as social world]. Reading here provides a partial escape from the eating disorder, by allowing the reader to focus on eating disorders in general, but not her own; finding similarities between herself and the character is thus a means of partial distancing from a personal reality.

A significant subset of the AeI responses can also be thought of as having therapeutic benefit when it comes to tackling the eating disorder. “I feel a kind of nostalgia whenever I read about (in a fiction or non-fiction context) an individual with an eating disorder. I feel like I have recovered because I am no longer underweight or restricting but at the same time it reminds me that feeling envious of characters with eating disorders is perhaps a reflection that I  am not 100% better!” [also Comparison with explicitly fictional characters]. Reading returns the respondent to a previous state, but this nostalgic return itself tells her that recovery still needs working on. “I find that the more I read the better I feel about myself, except in the case that the people I read about have idealistic bodies/are flawless in ways that I can’t possibly hope to meet. Girls are often described as lithe, thin, athletic, and these are descriptions I wish I could apply to myself, so it makes me a little sad when I read that and it doesn’t fully meet how I perceive myself. Even though I know these descriptors are of fictional characters, this makes it a bit better but it is still

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something that I think about” [also Comparison with explicitly fictional characters]. Unhealthy responses to characters are counterbalanced by the awareness of their fictionality. “Sometimes it can make you feel like I am a fake anorexic as I don’t have some of the behaviours described or that I’m not really sick. Often fiction is badly informed and events and ideas are exaggerated for effect, but i have to remind myself of that.” Similarly, active self-reminders of fictionality as involving inaccuracy or exaggeration help counter the unhealthy comparisons. “Fiction about eating disorders makes me uncomfortable. I avoid it because I feel like it mocks the non-fiction memoirs (which personally I find extremely harmful.) The little fiction about eating disorders I  have come across have affected me too, but not to the great extent of non-fiction because it’s easier to avoid comparison to something that isn’t true. If the eating disorder was only part of the plot, it might not be so bad. However, on the TV show skins (which is a teen drama), Cassie had anorexia. I liked her character and watched it often, but it did effect my ED and I found myself desperate to spiral. I felt guilty for eating and idolised her, because she could cope better with lack of eating that me. I feel this would be the same if it were in a book. I think it’s hard to find the right balance with fiction between mocking and glorifying, but maybe it would be different for a younger audience” [also Comparison with explicitly fictional character]. Again, unhealthy comparisons with characters are easier to resist if one remembers they’re fictional. “Reading can be a distraction after a meal. Inspiring characters can suggest other ways of living a life rather than one with an over emphasis on eating. A well written character can invite one to imagine and try to identify with the experience of being that person and experiment with different ways of being. It can open up possibilities and ease the rigidity of anorexic thought patterns and behaviours” [also Distraction] [also Comparison with explicitly fictional characters]. Identification and a broadening of possibilities is described as prompted by characters with the aesthetic trait of being “well written”: awareness of the stylistic qualities of the text feeds into, rather than running counter to, emotional and emulatory engagement with what the text evokes. “I am thinking of Good Morning Midnight mostly—this immediately made me feel sad for the central character and identify with her. At the same time, it made me aware of my vulnerabilities and motivated me to pursue a different life course and remain hopeful—I could identify with an earlier time when I had felt quite hopeless and self-destructive and I am very motivated to do all I can never to get that unwell again.” Negatively valenced identification with the character is countered by more positive self-awareness.

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But the dual structures of AeI can also have damaging effects. “It usually makes me feel like ‘a failed anorexic’ since real-life eating disorders present very differently to the stereotype presented in such books.”—Here awareness of textuality makes it even harder to live up to the textually evoked standards, without lessening the desire to.

Or the AeI duality can simply fail to undo the negative effects of other facets of response. “Some books describe the eating and exercise habits of their protagonists to a T, so obviously in order to be a ‘real’ eating disordered person, I  must eat at least as little as them and burn at least as many calories through exercise” [also Comparison with explicitly fictional characters]. Awareness of the layer of textual/descriptive mediation doesn’t exacerbate, but also doesn’t help counter, the desire to have a “real” eating disorder by copying what is described.

In these responses, then, we see evidence for the therapeutic relevance of AeI, as well as evidence against simplistic components of the model like the idea that the “immersed” element is always emotional and the “distanced” element rational, or bizarre elements of the model like the idea that these experiences aren’t real experiences. The dual structures that AeI helps us think about are important to reading, perhaps especially when we inquire into its possible mental health benefits, but beyond that, its constituents don’t live up to theoretical or empirical scrutiny.

6. Thinking beyond the existing competition The last thing I’ll use these data to do is to present a few other categories of response that are relevant to expanding our thinking on AeI and its alternatives. These are 



  

the comparison with textually evoked people, with (63) or without (34) an emphasis on the fictionality of these people; the extension of an emotional response to textually evoked people long after reading has ended (2); the direct effects of reading on embodied action or sensation (4); the deliberate use of reading as distraction (19); the experience of an identity between the reader and the fictional world (4) or a fictional character (2);

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the appreciation of the fictional world as a social world (34); and the use of reading as a means to loss of self or a movement outside the self (13).

A large number of respondents talk about comparing themselves—whether their bodies, their eating habits, or other less specified aspects of themselves—to the people they read about in books. Some respondents are referring obviously to either fiction or nonfiction, while with others it’s unclear. An interesting question to be asked with the AeI model in mind, though, is to what extent these comparisons are altered or forestalled by an awareness of the characters’ textually mediated nature—as well as the extent to which this awareness seems part of the reading experience to begin with. In many cases (34), textuality just doesn’t seem to come into it: the comparators are simply “people,” “sufferers,” “individuals,” “them” (or a singular “someone” or “person”), for example, “It’s usually along the lines of, well, if this person can get over it, why can’t i? Etc etc etc.”

This can be therapeutically problematic: “I feel more incline to reduce my calorie intake to compare to the book i have just read, to try and beat the person i have read about.”

Occasionally it can be helpful: “Offering insight into unhelpful thinking patterns, which helped me spot them and challenge them. Teaching me problem-solving skills, which made me feel less hopeless. Showing me that a desire to binge is a natural result of starvation and not a sign that I was developing another disorder . . . this realization that I was experiencing a common phenomenon also dispelled some of the guilt I felt. Showing me how other people deal with painful emotions gives ne alternative ways of responding.”

It may also involve a blurring of boundaries between author and character: “I may compare myself with the author, person in the story and try to copy, or feel inadequate if I don’t.”

Presumably all these cases would, in the AeI schema, come under the devalued heading of “delusion”: if you make no distinction between responses that apply in “reality” and in the “represented” world, because the category of “representation” doesn’t exist, or seem relevant, you are an unfortunate victim of delusion.

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What about the alternative: engaging in comparisons of self with other even when that other is thought of as a representation (e.g., as fictional)? Again, I don’t want to make any strong claims about the distinction as manifested in these data, since all we have are these short reports, but under this heading, there are a total of 63 responses that use words like “(main) character,” “heroine,” “protagonist,” or “people depicted,” for instance: “If I read ‘chick lit’ comparison of my heavier body with the perfect heroines can make me feel inferior. I can also feel inferior—and annoyed, which causes me to eat—reading about people in happy relationships who have perfect children.”

From the size of this category, and bearing in mind the previous caveats, it seems clear that awareness of mediation in no sense precludes the drawing of comparisons with textual others. Again, the comparisons can be healthy: “By having insight into the main character’s life and daily routines, it makes me feel like I  can do these things. I  can live normally and eat normally and stop when I’m full, just like the character does. They also taught me how to feel the ‘right’ emotions because I used to be unable to put labels on how I felt.”

Or they can be unhealthy: “I remember one particular book that I read which stated that the main female character was 110 pounds, and she expresses moderate surprise that the main male character could carry her, and that upset me greatly as I  was over 110 pounds and thought that I must be very, very heavy.”

One of Wolf ’s claims about why AeI is a quasi-experience rather than a real one is that we may feel suspense and fear for a protagonist, but have no desire to actually come to her rescue; more generally, “Nor do we feel inclined to actually interact with the represented world, its objects and inhabitants” (Wolf 2013b:  14). All the 97 responses that talk about comparisons with characters are examples of interaction:  for someone with an eating disorder, it’s hard to conceive of any social interaction more significant than comparison and imitation. The responses also indicate how directly the reported textual engagement connects with, and indeed directly affects, “real-life” actions and emotions and sensations. The interaction may typically begin with a perception of similarity plus difference, which has cognitive-emotional effects, which lead in many cases to embodied actions (eating less, exercising more, engaging in more mirroror touch-based body checking, learning how to make oneself vomit, etc.). We can imagine variations on the same process happening if the comparator were

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someone heard about on the news, seen in a photograph, or seen on the street. Further evidence of this continuity crops up with mediators other than interpersonal comparison, for instance in one respondent’s mention of how reading makes her feel more connected to her own body. And remember that 63 of these responses manifest the dual structure of AeI, not the regrettable state of “delusion.” People are perfectly well aware that they’re engaging with textually mediated entities. (As I said, it’s possible that in some cases either the comparison or the awareness of mediation came after the reading had finished, but it doesn’t really sound like it in any of them. Probably the awareness of textuality or fictionality is present while reading in the other 34 too.) But they feel it’s appropriate to interact with them in some of the most important ways they interact with anyone else they might meet, and to alter other actions accordingly. Other responses provide glimpses of motivations for reading and experiences of reading that make it harder still to maintain the notion that anything other than AeI is anomalous and delusionary. Nineteen responses make clear that reading is an experience that serves the purpose of distraction. Similar to the idea of escape, but with a more explicitly cognitive quality (“Takes my mind of my last/next meal”), the value of reading as distraction contradicts the notion that a combined AeI-like state is typical: distraction only works if you’re engrossed enough to actually forget the other stuff. A similar conclusion is suggested by other manifestations of respondents’ engagement with characters in books. There are two examples of strong emotional responses that last long beyond the reading itself: “Occasionally worsens mood as I worry about what will happen to certain characters, and if I read straight before bed sometimes I have nightmares about characters, which doesn’t put me in a great mood in the morning!” “I feel invalidated and often angry, especially if the subject has passed away, I feel jealous. I resent them for an abnormal period.”

Worrying about what happens to characters so much that it infiltrates your dream life and remaining jealous of a character’s death long after reading about it are clear indicators that the reality/representation border is not just profoundly porous but also, in some moments of heightened emotion, simply doesn’t exist. In many responses we see either direct identification with characters (“I feel I’ve been able to escape into another world and for that moment be someone else without any difficulties” [also Transportation as escapism]) (2 responses) or other kinds of testimony to how easily a fictional world can become a social

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world equivalent to the extratextual one (34). Textually evoked people can provide company (“It makes me feel less alone”) or role models (“Cheers me up (if it is good!) or it may inspire me. Sometimes it makes me want to grab life and live for now! Especially if I like the main character and look up to them. It can also relax me and take my mind of the daily stresses”). They can even offer the comfort of friendship (“I think my own low self-esteem comes from a place of insecurity, but after reading science fiction I feel that I have ideas and a sort of friend to hold on to and find comfort in”). The psychological potency of reading that has no obvious “distanced” element is equally clear in the last two categories I’ll mention. Both involve a change or loss in sense of self. In the first (4 responses), respondents talk about an experience of identity with the book or the fictional world: “I feel happier that I’ve done something I  like to do, and become part of the book. However my mood rarely interests me to read a book as I’m lazy and depressed.” “I love historical novels, there is often intrigue and I enjoy being part of a whole other world. My mind drifts and I am not thinking about me only the characters and their stories. If the book is light it can make me laugh, lighten my mood, relax me. If the book is dark or melancholy it will intensify my thoughts and emotions, I might weep. I  experience a oneness and sense of identity with the book. Reading a book is an intensely intimate experience for me, with a sense of sharing something insightful/profound. A recognition, a yes that-is-what-it-is-like.”

More strongly still, respondents describe losing themselves, or being taken outside themselves or their bodies (13 responses), for example: “Feeling of loss of self and life and being able to take on the character and experience their life for a short while” [also Fiction as social world]. “Because it has taken me outside of my body—the cerebral ‘work’ of reading and reflecting helps me to forget body dissatisfaction and reminds me that there are far more important things.”

7. Conclusion Recalling the AeI condemnation of anything that looks like undistanced engagement, it’s hard not to feel that there are enormous gaps in our critical grasp of reading experiences in the real world. Quite apart from the many theoretical

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problems with the concept of aesthetic illusion, it seems inadequate to illuminating an important range of experiences that are interesting and complex without manifesting the qualities of emotional engagement versus rational distance that the AeI model so unquestioningly prizes. If we care about having terminology at our disposal that not only describes particular kinds of experience precisely but also avoids imposing arbitrary value judgments that privilege a small class of experiences and thrust all the rest into the shade, it seems clear—to me at least—that we should reject AeI and find a better alternative. On the limited evidence presented here, transportation seems the likeliest candidate, featuring in far more responses than any of the other terms and allowing us to capture the sense of moving between worlds and the motivations of escapism and loss of self. Proponents of AeI would say it’s less well suited to dealing with the in-between cases and the cases where no distinction is made between “fictional” and “real” worlds at all, but the basic metaphor allows perfectly well for both: moving between worlds or feeling like you have a foot in both, say, or letting the world of the book come to you. In paragraphs like the last one, it may start to seem that what we’re talking about is really the words not the experiences. I’m not going to tackle the vast question of how far linguistic factors can be said to influence “experience itself,” beyond saying that our ways of conceptualizing and processing experience, which are at least partly linguistically informed, can’t easily be separated from that experiential “essence,” and that when we’re talking about reading experiences, we can expect the linguistic element to be particularly pronounced. The methodological question also arises of whether asking people to talk or write about their experiences is the best way of finding out about those experiences: do linguistic skill, education level, and so on end up being more prominently expressed than “experience itself ”? Ultimately, that experiential essence is so elusive that we probably need to triangulate numerous forms of inquiry to feel confident that we have found out anything about it at all. The other point to make is that linguistic choices—including the ones that feed into our more or less automatic processing of our own experiences—are of course not determined solely by their strict applicability to the phenomenon in question. They are influenced by fashion, or more specifically by the many forms that memetic competition can take. Meme theory is a controversial but powerful way of understanding how human culture developed and continues to evolve: it proposes that everything that humans transmit between each other through imitation, including language, follows the same evolutionary principles as the genetic code (Blackmore 2010). Darwin’s staggeringly powerful observation was that

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when you have replication with variation and selection, you must get evolution. Stuff gets copied not primarily because clever humans choose it, but more importantly because it has features that make it succeed in the memetic selection war. In language, those features may be anything from the number of links between a given word (say, “transport”) and other words and concepts at different removes, to how clever it makes its users sound, to how flexible its morphology is. Factors like this affect academic terminological competition just as much (though probably in different proportions) as they do more colloquial uses of language. This may be the start of an explanation of why AeI has (if often through misunderstanding) clung to some territories in academia’s corner of the memetic battlefield, but never even made it out into the wider world at all. But even though we meme machines have much less power than we like to think, we still have some, and we can (and should) do what we can to guide the memetic replication in directions where it can do least harm and most good.

Acknowledgments I’m grateful for the invitation to the Prague colloquium, which was a timely prompt for me to think through the theoretical questions and connect them with the survey data presented here. The design and running of the survey could not have happened without the tireless collaboration of Jonathan Kelly at Beat, and the project of which it formed part was supported by a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities, with ethical approval granted by the Central University Research Ethics Committee at the University of Oxford (MSD-IDREC-C1-2014–219). An early draft was much improved by the generosity and insight of the Humanities Division’s Early Career Writers’ Workshoppers:  Hannah-Louise Clark, Michael Subialka, Kei Hiruta, Adriana Jacobs, Amy Li, Lynn McAlpine, and Laura Tisdall. And finally, to everyone who took part in the survey and shared their experiences so openly—thank you.

References Bantleon, K. and U. Tragatschnig (2013), “Wilful Deceptions: Aesthetic Illusion at the Interface of Painting, Photography and Digital Images,” in W. Wolf, W. Bernhard, and A. Mahler (eds.), Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and other Media, 263–92, Amsterdam: Rodopi.

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Bernhart, W. (2013), “Aesthetic Illusion in Instrumental Music?,” in Wolf et al., Immersion and Distance, 365–80. Blackmore, S. (2010), “Memetics Does Provide a Useful Way of Understanding Cultural Evolution,” in F. Ayala and R. Arp (eds.), Contemporary Debates in Philosophy of Biology, 255–72, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Available online: http://www. susanblackmore.co.uk/Chapters/CDPB.htm. Brinker, M. (1977), “Aesthetic Illusion,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 36: 191–6. Busselle, R. and H. Bilandzic (2009), “Measuring Narrative Engagement,” Media Psychology, 12: 321–47. Cammack, J. (2013), “Aesthetic Illusion and the Breaking of Illusion in Ambiguous Film Sequences,” in Wolf et al, Immersion and Distance, 295–313. Frijda, N. H. (2007), The Laws of Emotion, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Gerrig, R. J. (1993), Experiencing Narrative Worlds, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gombrich, E. H. ([1960] 2002), Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation, 6th ed., London: Phaidon. Green, M. C., and T. C. Brock (2000), “The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79: 701–21. Kuijpers, M. M., F. Hakemulder, E. S. Tan, and M. M. Doicaru (2014), “Exploring Absorbing Reading Experiences: Developing and Validating a Self-report Scale to Measure Story World Absorption,” Scientific Study of Literature, 4: 89–122. Lakoff, G. and M. Johnson (2003), Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mahler, A. (2013), “Aesthetic Illusion in Theatre and Drama: An Attempt at Application,” in Wolf et al., Immersion and Distance, 151–81. Mellmann, K. (2013), “On the Emergence of Aesthetic Illusion: An Evolutionary Perspective,” in Wolf et al., Immersion and Distance, 67–88. Noë, A. (ed.) (2002), Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion?, Thorverton: Imprint Academic. Polvinen, M. (2013), “Affect and Artifice in Cognitive Literary Theory,” Journal of Literary Semantics, 42: 165–80. Polvinen, M. (2017), “Cognitive Science and the Double Vision of Fiction,” in M. Burke and E. T. Troscianko (eds.), Cognitive Literary Science: Dialogues between Literature and Cognition, 135–50, New York: Oxford University Press. Ryan, M.-L. (2013), “Impossible Worlds and Aesthetic Illusion, in Wolf et al., Immersion and Distance, 131–48. Troscianko, E. T. (2013), “Reading Imaginatively: The Imagination in Cognitive Science and Cognitive Literary Studies,” Journal of Literary Semantics, 42: 181–98. Troscianko, E. T. (submitted), “Fiction-Reading Can Be Therapeutically Helpful or Harmful for People With or Without Experience of an Eating Disorder.

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Troscianko, T., T. S. Meese, and S. Hinde (2012), “Perception while Watching Movies: Effects of Physical Screen Size and Scene Type,” i-Perception, 3: 414–25. Walton, K. L. (1978), “Fearing Fictions,” The Journal of Philosophy, 75: 5–27. Walton, K. L. (2013), “Pictures and Hobby-Horses: Make-Believe Beyond Childhood,” in Wolf et al., Immersion and Distance, 113–30. Wessely, C. (2013), “Columns of Figures as Sources of Aesthetic Illusion: Browser-based Multiplayer Online Games,” in Wolf et al., Immersion and Distance, 339–64. Wolf, W. (1993a), Ästhetische Illusion und Illusionsdurchbrechung in der Erzählkunst. Theorie und Geschichte mit Schwerpunkt auf englischem illusionsstörenden Erzählen, Tübingen: Niemeyer. Wolf, W. (1993b), “Shakespeare und die Entstehung ästhetischer Illusion im englischen Drama,” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, 43: 279–301. Wolf, W. (1998), “Aesthetic Illusion in Lyric Poetry?,” Poetica, 30: 251–89. Wolf, W. (2004), “Aesthetic Illusion As an Effect of Fiction,” Style, 38: 325–51. Wolf, W. (2006), “Introduction: Frames, Framings and Framing Borders in Literature and other Media,” in W. Wolf and W. Bernhart (eds.), Framing Borders in Literature and other Media, 1–40, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wolf, W. (2008), Abstract of “Is Aesthetic Illusion ‘Illusion Referentielle’? ‘Immersion’ in (Narrative) Representations and its Relationship to Fictionality and Facuality,” JLT, 2: 101–28. Available online: http://www.jltonline.de/index.php/articles/article/view/ 19/198. Wolf, W. (2011), “Illusion (Aesthetic),” in P. Hühn et al. (eds.), The Living Handbook of Narratology, Hamburg: Hamburg University Press. Available online: hup.sub.unihamburg.de/lhn/index.php?title=Illusion (Aesthetic) &oldid=1563. Wolf, W. (2013a), “Preface,” in Wolf et al., Immersion and Distance, v–vi. Wolf, W. (2013b), “Aesthetic Illusion,” in Wolf et al., Immersion and Distance, 1–63. Wolf, W. (2013c), “Aesthetic Illusion as an Effect of Lyric Poetry?,” in Wolf et al., Immersion and Distance, 183–233.

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Aesthetic Illusion between the Prague School and Fictional Worlds Theory (with Two Detours: via Realist Fictional Narratives and via Lyric Poetry) Bohumil Fořt

1. Aesthetic illusion In order to get in media res with the notion of aesthetic illusion let me start with an extensive quotation from Werner Wolf: Aesthetic illusion is a basically pleasurable mental state that emerges during the reception of many representational texts, artifacts or performances. These representations may be fictional or factual, and in particular include narratives. Like all reception effects, aesthetic illusion is elicited by a conjunction of factors that are located (a) in the representations themselves, (b) in the reception process and the recipients, and (c) in cultural and historical contexts. Aesthetic illusion consists primarily of a feeling, with variable intensity, of being imaginatively and emotionally immersed in a represented world and of experiencing this world in a way similar (but not identical) to real life. At the same time, however, this impression of immersion is counterbalanced by a latent rational distance resulting from a culturally acquired awareness of the difference between representation and reality. (Wolf 2014: 270)

This quotation offers us, I believe, the commonly shared view of the notion of aesthetic illusion. And now, we can emphasize the most important features of the term itself. First, as it has been defined, aesthetic illusion is a mental state— a mental reaction to the act of perception of various forms of texts or other artefacts or performances designed for the purpose of specific communication

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between the producer and the receiver. Second, the carriers (or mediators) of the potential of aesthetic illusion can either be fictional or factual; nevertheless, the quality of narrativity substantially enhances, if not establishes, their potential to cause aesthetic illusion. Third, this illusion primarily consists of a feeling of being immersed in the represented world; however, at the same time the recipients keep their distance from this world, being aware of its representational essence. Despite this fact, the readers experience and conceptualize the represented world in ways similar to the ways in which they experience and conceptualize the actual world. From all the aforementioned, it seems that the key concept encompassing the qualities and circumstances of aesthetic illusion is its “world-likeness”: the represented world is the ultimate guarantee of the possible re-centering of the  recipients from their actual world to the represented one. Unsurprisingly, the idea of the on-narrative-based entities that resemble our world has been fashionable in the theoretical framework for several decades and comes from the conviction that stories are the background for human conceptualization of the world, communication, and even reasoning. What is important here is the dual base of the “world-likeness”:  fictional and factual. It means that the essence of a text with regard to the production of aesthetic illusion is its ability to found worlds. The question is then, whether emphasizing the quality of “world-likeness” over the distance between fictional and factual does not lead us, in a way, to the classical Barthesian trap of not accepting the difference between fictional and factual discourse. And if the main enhancer of the ability to found worlds is the narrativity of a text, what exactly does it mean that we “experience the world in a way similar to real life”? If this suggestion refers to experiencing narratives in real life, we are trapped again: obviously, there is no difference between fictional and factual “texts, artefacts or performances” on the one hand and of “narratives in real life”—those two domains are simply intertwined; again, this way of reasoning leads us to the inability to differentiate between fictional and factual, real and mediated. Nevertheless, if the statement about “experiencing the world in a way similar to real life” refers to our sensual experience, then, of which kind is the relationship between sensual perception and narrative mediation? Nevertheless, in spite of the possibility to challenge some moments of the notion of aesthetic illusion, the concept itself, undoubtedly, leads to essential questions regarding the phenomenon of fictional literature and its identity. In this light, the notion of aesthetic illusion fully fits crucial conceptions of modern theory.

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2. The Prague School: Aesthetic function Let me now pay attention to a different conception developed in the 1920s and 1930s in the framework of Prague structuralist thought. The key concept of the Prague school aesthetics is embodied in the notion of the aesthetic function. Jan Mukařovský, when introducing his systems of language functions, borrows from Karl Bühler’s system of language functions and completes his own system by adding the aesthetic function. In his famous study of 1936, Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts, Jan Mukařovský stipulates that “the aim of the aesthetic function is the evocation of aesthetic pleasure.” And he continues in his reasoning by introducing the term aesthetic object: according to his view, every object “could acquire an aesthetic function”—nevertheless, there are certain pre-conditions in the objective arrangement of an object (which bear the aesthetic function) which facilitate the rise of aesthetic pleasure. Aesthetic potential is not inherent in an object: In order for the objective pre-conditions to be effective, something in the arrangement of the subject of aesthetic pleasure must correspond to them. Subjective presuppositions can be motivated by the individual, or society, or, finally, anthropologically, that is, by the very nature of man as a species. (1970: 28–9)

Jan Mukařovský further states that the aesthetic objects are actually dominated by the aesthetic function: the aesthetic function suppresses all the other functions present in the object. The main effect of the dominance of the aesthetic function is that it aims the subject’s attention to the object as to a selfreferential sign. This fact has serious consequences for the purpose of the subject’s reception of the object: the aesthetic function “significantly affects the lives of individuals and society, shares in the organization of contacts— active as well as passive—of individuals with that reality in which they find themselves” (23). As a self-referential sign, the aesthetic object does not refer to the reality as such but the sign essence of the object finds special, double reference: “An artwork as a sign . . . is designed on a dialectical tension by its double relationship to reality: by its relationship to the reality, which it means, and by its relationship to reality as such” (1948: 35–6).1 This double reference enables Mukařovský to avoid walking on the thin ice of the combination of self-reference and reference. In general, his offer does not lead us to a substantial way of sufficiently grasping the idea of fictional reference, however, it allows him to keep the specificity of an aesthetic experience of the recipient of an aesthetic object as a self-referential sign: aesthetic function serves, thus, as

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an important “co-determinant of human reaction to reality” by “shaping the total attitude of man to the world” (1970: 95–6). To sum up, as it can be seen from all previously mentioned about the Prague School, its crucial concerns do not limit themselves to narratives and encompass the whole area of artistic production—simply put, it chooses fictionality over narrativity.

3. Fictional worlds The last conception that I want to mention in this article is the fictional worlds theory. During its history, the theory has developed various means that can be used for the examination of fictional texts (in the wide sense) and the worlds they found. For a theoretician, the most alluring quality of fictional worlds theory may be its systematic shape: the theory offers a well-built global system of categories and their relationships that can be used for the purpose of an analysis of fiction—especially when approached as a means of specific communication. Fictional worlds are, by definition, mental entities based on a specific contract between the author and the reader, which are encoded in fictional texts and are “brought to life” by the decoding activity of the reader during the act of reading: “Fictional worlds . . . are aesthetic artifacts constructed, preserved, and circulating in the medium of fictional texts” (Doležel 1998: 15–16). Obviously, fictional worlds, being essentially semiotic entities, must be accessible in ways of the same essence: “Fictional Worlds are accessed through semiotic channels” (20). At this very point, I  have to admit that with regards to the accessibility of fictional worlds the approaches of particular theoreticians vary:  whereas Lubomír Doležel does not speculate on the concrete ways in which the readers enter fictional worlds, others, for example Marie-Laure Ryan, do not avoid this question and suggest that “the indexical theory of David Lewis’s offers a much more accurate explanation of the way we relate to these worlds. Once we become immersed in a fiction, the characters become real for us, and the world they live in momentarily takes the place of the actual world” (Ryan 1991: 21). Thomas Pavel goes even further when he, in a somehow metaphorical way, suggests that the recipients actually became part of the fictional worlds:  “We, too, visit fictional lands, inhabit them for a while, intermingle with the heroes” (1986: 85). Let me now, at this point, summarize the essential features of the fictional worlds theory. First, fictional worlds are firmly connected to narratives and narrativity as such: narrative patterns are crucial for creating and transferring

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fictional worlds. It is, in particular, Lubomír Doležel’s approach to fictional worlds and his systematic tools for their analysis that are based on modern narrative theory. His concept of narrative modalities, with regard to the extensional structures of fictional worlds, as well as the concept of intentional functions, with regard to their intentional structures, express strong signs of various theoretical approaches to narrative:  in terms of narrative modalities, Doležel explicitly stipulates that narrative modalities as formative operations that shape “narrative worlds into orders that have the potential to produce (generate) stories” (1998: 113); in terms of intentional functions, he employs tools and strategies used for the analyses of narrative discourse—this is especially obvious when dealing with the types and forms of intentional functions. The second most important quality of fictional worlds is their specific connection with the actual world—on the one hand, fictional worlds “are concrete constellations of states of affairs which, like possible worlds, are non-actualized in the world” (Ronen 1994: 51) and “fictional discourse can create or construct the objects to which it refers” (87), but at the same time, their relationship to the actual world is crucial: they are (structural) “parasites” of the actual world: “Yet the fictional world is constructed as a world having its own distinct ontological position, and as a world presenting a self-sufficient system of structures and relations” (8). This declaration successfully fulfills our idea of a structure that can in its totality be viewed as a world—a world that is not a mimetic copy of the actual world, though it is strongly influenced by our concept of the actual world: “A fictional world, like any possible world, is analogous to the actual world in that it has its own set of facts and its own sub-worlds and counter-worlds. As a world it contains ‘an actual world’ and a set of possibilities, alternatives, predictions and forecasts non-actualized in the fictional world” (29). Nevertheless, it has to be stated that fictional worlds theoreticians are fully aware of the ontological incongruence of fictional worlds and the actual world: “[A]ctual worlds appear to be undoubtedly real, complete and consistent, while fictional worlds are intrinsically incomplete and inconsistent” (Pavel 1986: 74). However, this essential difference between both types of worlds does not mean that the actual world does not have any importance for fictional worlds: the actual world plays a crucial role in the reader’s conceptualization of fictional worlds. As we have seen, some of the theoreticians describe the act of creating fictional worlds by the reader as “immersion” that turns the reader into an “inhabitant” of a fictional world. For example, Ryan elaborates on this conceptualization in which the “principle of minimal departure” plays a significant role: “This law—to which I shall refer as the principle of minimal departure—states that we reconstruct the central world

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of a textual universe in the same way that we reconstruct the alternate possible worlds of nonfactual statements: as conforming as far as possible to our representation of AW.2 We will project upon these worlds everything we know about reality, and we will make only the adjustments dictated by the text” (Ryan 1991: 51). Ryan continues with the claim that “[t]he point of the text is to call to mind the principle of minimal departure—only to block its operation” (58). Nevertheless, the emphasis put on the mimetic aspect of the cognitive process is not shared by all fictional worlds theoreticians; for example, Thomas Pavel seems to be considerably more cautious when negotiating the issue of the reader’s reconstruction of a fictional world: “This convention [of fiction] regulates the behavior of the readers by requiring from them a maximal participation oriented toward the optimal exploitation of textual recourses” (1986: 123). Pavel here not only points out the difference between the perception of fictional and actual worlds but also emphasizes the semantic independence and self-sufficiency of fictional discourse.3 On top of that, Thomas Pavel also expresses a commonly shared opinion connecting fictional worlds to other types of reported worlds—all the worlds that are communicated, conceptualized, and stored by human minds: “To argue that we easily forget textual beauties while we remember facts and events derives from a natural propensity to register essential elements and to disregard circumstantial information” (74). Nevertheless, some of the fictional worlds theoreticians, instead of examining the actual act of conceptualization of fictional worlds by the reader, view the relationship between fictional worlds and the actual one connected with the concept of encyclopedia:  “storage of knowledge about a world.” The term encyclopedia was introduced by Umberto Eco, who defines the actual-world encyclopedia, and elaborated on by Lubomír Doležel, who differentiates between actual and fictional worlds encyclopedias.4 It should be emphasized that the actual world’s encyclopedia is never fully sufficient for uncovering a fictional world, but always somehow stays in the background of the fictional encyclopedia. This can be observed in narratives where fictional worlds are seriously detached from the actual one—for example, due to the existence of different natural laws, completely new objects and relationships—the actual world’s encyclopedia is not fully sufficient:  “In other words, knowledge of the fictional encyclopedia is absolutely necessary for the reader to comprehend a fictional world. The actual-world encyclopedia might be useful, but it is by no means universally sufficient” (Doležel 1998: 181). Since Umberto Eco called fictional worlds “parasites” of the actual one, we can consequently view the fictional encyclopedia as a parasite on the actual encyclopedia— they overlap, to an extent, but they also substantially differ.

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4. Detour 1: Realist novel (narrative) Why realist narrative? Simply because the realist novel seems to be a genre of a special importance for the aesthetic illusionists: realist narratives, according to them, display in particular two qualities crucial for the reader’s immersion into their worlds, “life-likeness” (or “probability”) and “consistency,” and therefore “usually keep distancing elements to a minimum” (Wolf 2014: 277). These are qualities that allow aesthetic illusionists, when pondering the development of literary genres and their aesthetic illusionist potential, to credit the realist novel highly: “Realist novels draw their readers into their worlds by maintaining a feeling of verisimilitude and experientiality while minimizing aesthetic distance” (275–6). Viewing the idea of aesthetic illusion as a historically variable phenomenon, aesthetic illusionists with regard to literary development point out two main clashing qualities, “mimeticism” and “defamiliarization” (as they call them): according to them, the former peaks in the nineteenth-century realist novel, whereas the latter in modernism (it is also present in Romanticism and experimental postmodernism). Nevertheless, when the theoreticians approach the genre of realist novel in its most general terms, they, understandably, rely on the crucial concept of reference and use the term hetero-reference: The predominant hetero-referentiality of realist fiction . . . is a consequence of the general fact that all illusionist artifacts, even those that ultimately play with illusion, are representational: they evoke or “re-present” a world that seems to exist outside the artifact, and they appear to refer to something other than the works in question. (Wolf 2014: 277)

As we can see here, the idea of hetero-reference seems to be throwing light on the concept of realist fiction with regard to aesthetic illusion. As we have already seen, the idea of hetero-referentiality is hardly new: Jan Mukařovský, in his reasoning, used the idea of double reference in order to explain the specificity of an artwork as a self-referential sign in connection with the work’s reference to the represented world. Let us now try to see whether what the illusionists offer can lead us beyond the vagueness of Mukařovský’s suggestion. Werner Wolf continues with a closer description of the phenomenon of the realist novel in connection with the (ancient) concept of mimesis: As a special, historical kind of mimesis, the realistic novel is in fact strongly hetero-referential. This does not mean, however, that mimesis alone guarantees the emergence of aesthetic illusion, nor that all illusionist texts must be either

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realistic (they may also be modernist) or mimetic in the sense of imitating a slice of life (science fiction, in defiance of such imitation, can also be illusionist). (277)

To sum up, the realist (realistic) novel, the flag carrier of aesthetic illusion, thanks to its mimetic background, posses the quality of hetero-reference. Now, what is the connection between the hetero-referentiality of the realist novel and the aesthetic illusion? A  minute ago we learned that “mimesis guarantees the emergence of aesthetic illusion” and also that not all “illusionist texts must be realistic or mimetic.” I am afraid that this negative demarcation of the connections of the terms in question does not actually explain the connection between reference and aesthetic illusion. At this point, I  think that one gets (at least partly) caught in the old trap of fictional reference, though this time approached from a different direction. In addition, the strongly mimetic background of aesthetic illusion makes one think whether the illusion in question should not actually be called “realist” instead of “aesthetic”?

5. Detour 2: Lyric poetry From all that has been said about the conception of aesthetic illusion until now, it is obvious that the central concept for this way of reasoning is narrrativity and world-likeness. Nevertheless, what has to be appreciated is the fact that the illusionists both widen and demarcate their conception with regard to its possible application. Indeed, in many suggestions we witness several attempts to examine aesthetic function in connection with impossible narrative worlds, narrative framing, and lyric poetry. And it is the last mentioned genre in particular to which I would like to pay closer attention. Werner Wolf, in his study Aesthetic Illusion as an Effect of Lyric Poetry? (Wolf 2013), mentions that lyric poetry, as opposed to fiction and drama, appears to be least affiliated with aesthetic illusion (183). In his own words, he states that “lyric poetry is restricted in its creation of a possible world . . . and thus is characterized by a major generic resistance to the building up of illusion” (197). The main difference between fictional and factual narratives (which are considered the primary sources of the aesthetic illusion) and lyric poetry lies in their essence: whereas narratives are centered around stories that have the potential to carry on, worlds lyric poetry is centered around the lyric personae. Nevertheless, even if this is the case, it, according to Wolf, does not necessarily mean that lyric poetry absolutely lacks the ability to found any kind of artistic illusion— Werner Wolf calls this specific kind lyric illusion (183). Lyric illusion is thus

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firmly connected with lyric persona that “by throwing lights on world-elements . . . broadens the basis for aesthetic illusion” (219). The main connecting point between the lyric illusion and lyric persona is the reported experience of the persona that enables the reader to participate in this illusion: the experience of the lyric persona can be shared by the reader (or listener), and this re-centering within the represented world triggers aesthetic illusion (211). It seems that in terms of lyric poetry, the most important means of re-centering consists in a communication of two subjects, the reader or listener and the lyric persona, and in sharing subjective experience—this specific kind of communication then “mostly derives from the impression of immediacy” (221) ,which is crucial for setting the aesthetical illusionist environment. In his book, Fictional Worlds of Lyric Poetry (2003), Miroslav Červenka, a prominent member of the Prague School, significantly redesigned standard fictional worlds semantics with regard to the crucial topics of traditional Prague School investigation. In short, he suggests that the meaning constructed by a literary artwork cannot be reduced to a fictional world and that fictional worlds are only parts of a meaningful game between the writer and the reader: to these game worlds, metaphorically speaking, “the originator of the work, its implied subject, invites the perceiver”5 (2005: 750). The subject, or hypothetical originator, of an artwork is, according to this approach, superior to a fictional world, which is just an object of their game: “The fictional world of a lyric poem is represented by its subjects” (728). Coming from the Prague School’s investigation of the role of the subject in the process of literary communication, Červenka expresses his reservations toward the ultimate meaningfulness of fictional worlds, using lyric poetry as a counter-example: It seems that for demarcation of the work’s subject it is necessary to argue with contemporary narratology and also to a lesser extent with fictional world semantics. Even Doležel, who approaches the meaningful activity of literary elements in a very sensitive way . . . comes from the assumption that a fictional world is identical with the meaningful wholeness constituted by an artwork . . . Nevertheless, regarding lyric poetry . . . the semantics of the work refers to the subject who created the work and therefore cannot be a part of its fictional world. (749–50)

Červenka uses Kendal Walton’s suggestion in order to formulate the accessibility relation between a fictional world and the actual one: A fictional world consists of certain levels, and so does the actual world. Each of them pushes out some of its domain towards the other and the worlds are

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mutually accessible thanks to these border transitional regions. On the side of the actual world this domain is a demarcated domain of game; on the side of the fictional world this domain is embodied in the subject and determined by the way in which the fictional is treated during the game. In the world of game, not only do the real speaker and receiver meet, but also their fictional counterparts. (Červenka 2005: 716)

As we can see, Červenka comes from the poetological tradition of the Prague School, which understands a literary artwork as a specific aesthetic object whose constructed meaning refers to the work’s subject. Consequently, he rejects the reduction of the aesthetic object to a fictional world and refuses to submit the work’s subject (which is, according to his conception, the ultimate work’s meaning base) to the fictional work: Here especially, in this uncertain domain—not of a fictional world of the work, but of the way in which this world is treated—the work’s subject is placed as a hypothetical carrier of creative acts that have led to the origin of the work. (750)

As we have just witnessed, both Wolf and Červenka, undertook a risky move toward widening the scope of both respective theoretical approaches that are, originally, explicitly centered around the domain of narrativity. Therefore, it seems that the similarity of moves of emancipation are above all theories.

6. Conclusions In my study, I  have focused on three literary theoretical approaches—aesthetic illusionism, Prague structuralism, and possible worlds theory—and analyzed and compared them with regards to a set of general semiotic and literary theoretical concepts. At this point, I want to summarize and systemize my findings. Let us start with one of the most important categories of literary theoretical investigation: the quality of fictionality (as opposed to actuality), crucial especially for early stages of literary theoretical investigation, plays an essential role for the Prague School structuralists (the predominance of the aesthetic function is defined on the set of literary fictional texts) and for the fictional worlds theory (fictional worlds are inseparable from fictional texts ex definitione). In terms of aesthetic illusionism, the quality of fictionality does not play any significant role—aesthetic illusion builds on both fictional and nonfictional “texts, artefacts or performances.”

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The situation becomes slightly more complex when we compare the respective theoretical approaches at the level of narrativity, another quality that became crucial for a literary theoretical investigation:  whereas aesthetic functionalists do not take the notion of narrativity into consideration at all (the Prague School thoughts were formed prior to the narrative turn), both aesthetic illusion and fictional worlds theory are primarily defined within the framework of narratives—nevertheless, in the process of their emancipation, as seen from Detour 2, they both widened their realms by implementing the genre of lyric poetry. World-likeness is based on mimetic and cognitive preferences of aesthetic illusionists (world-likeness is the most important precondition of aesthetic illusion) and also emphasized by the followers of fictional worlds theory (worldlikeness is an essential part of the idea of fictional worlds); the Prague School structuralists stay completely outside this particular quality. Reference, the quality strongly connected with the literary ontological investigation and inseparably bound to the concept of a (linguistic) sign in the structuralist tradition seems to be the only notion with which all three theories deal thoroughly. The Prague School structuralism not only elaborates in detail on the idea of self-reference (an artwork, as a specific sign dominated by aesthetic function, is proclaimed a self-referential sign) but also offers the idea of a double reference (an artwork, as a self-referential sign, also refers to reality as such). Aesthetic illusionism introduces the idea of hetero-referentiality when dealing with the genre of realist narratives (novels). Unlike the two previous theories, fictional worlds theory connects the notion of reference with the identity of literature and introduces a significant solution of the question of fictional reference:  fictional texts refer to fictional worlds as to the ultimate frameworks of narrative meaning. The quality of cognitivity (or cognitive impulse) strongly interconnects the aesthetic illusionist approach with the fictional worlds theory:  the ideas of reconstructing fictional worlds by the readers of fictional texts and of immersion in or re-centering to a represented world by the recipients connected with the principle of minimal departure (fictional worlds) and with the idea of experiencing the represented world in a way similar to real life (aesthetic illusion). Both procedures are based on the belief that the ways in which we conceptualize fictional and nonfictional are identical (or at least strongly similar) to the real world. The Prague School structuralists developed their ideas far before the cognitive impulse was introduced. The penultimate quality I want to mention with regards to the three theoretical approaches is the pragmatic dimension. It can be seen that fictional worlds

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theory, strictly bound to the quality of fictionality (as discussed previously), involves a very strong pragmatic impulse:  fictional worlds, mental entities encoded by the poietic (writing) activity of their authors and decoded by the reception (reading) activity of the recipient, are based on the author-recipient contract that allows them to produce and perceive/receive fictional worlds as fictional worlds. This pragmatic contract is to a large extent present also in the reasoning of aesthetic illusionists who, nevertheless, allow “many” fictional and nonfictional texts, artefacts, and performances to the realm of the aesthetic illusion; however, the general and undefined “many” actually prevents us from clearly seeing the pragmatic contract in vivid systemic colors. The final quality I want to mention in my brief comparison is the aesthetics of an (literary) artwork. Fictional worlds theory, as the only one from the three theories in question, does not offer any conception of the aesthetics (or purposeness) of literary artworks—in other words, it does not elaborate on the relationship between fictional worlds and their role in human lives: the theory just stipulates the existence of fictional worlds that serve as the ultimate frameworks for textual meaning. Aesthetic illusionists take a step further by stating that aesthetic illusion is “a basically pleasurable mental state that emerges during the reception of many representational texts, artefacts or performances”—the notion of a pleasurable mental state insinuates the potential importance of the whole process: the result of the process brings the participants further unspecified pleasure. Finally, the Prague School structuralists elaborated on the idea of an aesthetic value to the very end—as we have heard, according to them, aesthetic function serves as an important “co-determinant of human reaction to reality” by “shaping the total attitude of man to the world.”6

Notes 1 Similarly, another famous representative of Czech (and also worldly) structuralist thought, Roman O. Jakobson, speaks about the relationship between the poetic and referential functions: “The supremacy of the poetic function over the referential function does not obliterate the reference but makes it ambiguous” (1960: 371). 2 The actual world. 3 Marie-Laure Ryan’s mimetic position can be detected in her other suggestion that: “The gaps in the representation of the textual universe are regarded as withdrawn information, and not as ontological deficiencies of this universe itself ” (Ryan 1991: 53).

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4 See especially Eco (1994) and Doležel (1998). 5 Here, Červenka borrows the term world of game from Kendall Walton—see Walton (1990). 6 This study is a result of the project, “A Dictionary of Structuralist Literary Theory and Criticism” (project no. GAČR 13-29985S), supported by Czech Science Foundation (GAČR).

References Červenka, M. (2005), “Fikční světy lyriky,” in D. Hodrová, Z. Hrbata, and M. Vojtková (eds.), Na cestě ke smyslu. Poetika literárního díla 20. Století, 711–83, Praha: Torst. Doležel, L. (1998), Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Eco, U. (1994), Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Jakobson, R. (1960), “Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics,” in T. A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language, 351–77, Cambridge: MIT Press. Mukařovský, J. (1948), “K pojmosloví československé teorie umění,” in Kapitoly z české poetiky, vol. 1, 29–40, Praha: Nakladatelství Svoboda. Mukařovský, J. (1970), Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as Social Facts, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Pavel, T. (1986), Fictional Worlds, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ronen, R. (1994), Possible Worlds in Literary Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ryan, M.-L. (1991), Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Walton, K. (1990), Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wolf, W. (2013), “Aesthetic Illusion as an Effect of Lyric Poetry?,” in W. Wolf, W. Bernhart, and A. Mahler (eds.), Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media, 183–236, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wolf, W. (2014), “Illusion (Aesthetic),” in P. Hühn et al. (eds.), Handbook of Narratology, vol. 1, 270–87, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter GmbH.

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Skeptical Reflections on the Concept of Aesthetic Illusion Anders Pettersson

Interest in readers’ psychological responses to literature has been on the rise over the last few decades. Looking back, the formalist movements dominating much of the mid-twentieth century, notably New Criticism and Structuralism, can begin to seem like a parenthesis between the psychologically oriented aesthetics and criticism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and today’s keen interest in the reader. Reader response is a highly complex matter and has been approached from many different angles with the use of very different methods—introspection, speculative reasoning, interviews, experiments. Concepts old and new have been applied to aspects of what readers do or experience—empathy, identification, make-believe, simulation, transportation, and many more. All these terms have been used differently by researchers carving out their own favored segments from the vast sphere of reader response. While everybody designates the same heavenly body as “Mars,” so that in practice Mars is a pre-given entity and a well-defined object of research, empathy, identification, and the rest are not there as formations with a commonly agreed identity. In a sense we all know what empathy is and what “identification” stands for when used about literature: the terms do have their dictionary meanings. But those dictionary meanings are too loose and general to be built on in serious research. Each theorist or experimenter going deeper into the problems will have to formulate his or her own definition of the phenomenon, in reality redefining it and fashioning his or her own object of research. That is a problem with the terminology of literary studies overall—for the same could be said about the concept of literature itself as well as the concepts of literary meaning, form, style, and so forth. But the theme of this collection of articles is aesthetic response, more precisely, aesthetic illusion.

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Werner Strube, who has studied the history of conceptions of aesthetic illusion in considerable depth, tells us that the expression “aesthetic illusion” first began to play a role in the discussion of the arts in the eighteenth century and has had a shifting history since then (see 1976: 204–15). According to Strube, writing in 1976, “aesthetic illusion” has always been used about “a state marked by a particular kind of pleasure and an awareness of the unreality of the object occupying the centre of the field of attention” (210).1 Strube finds that the interest in aesthetic illusion has disappeared after psychological aesthetics lost most of its influence in the early twentieth century (ibid.). In 1977, Menachem Brinker reaches a similar conclusion: “After two hundred years of an extraordinary history, it appears that everyone is ready to eliminate the concept of aesthetic illusion from aesthetic theory” (Brinker 1977: 191). Since then, however, the concept of aesthetic illusion has been resurrected to some extent, even though the term very seldom appears in major contemporary encyclopedias or dictionaries of philosophy, aesthetics, or literature. A large collection of articles from 1990, Burwick and Pape’s Aesthetic Illusion, was a sign of renewed interest, and there are other, scattered examples, but as far as I can see the work of Werner Wolf represents, at present, the main effort to reintroduce the idea of aesthetic illusion as an important tool in literary studies and the aesthetic disciplines at large. His co-edited collection from 2013, Immersion and Distance, may be the most visible testimony of this (Wolf, Bernhart, and Mahler 2013). In my paper, I will mainly be occupied with Wolf ’s understanding of aesthetic illusion, but my remarks are meant to have wider relevance. The skepticism toward the concept of aesthetic illusion advertised in my title regards, precisely, the concept as such. I do not doubt for a moment that artistic representations can seem, in some sense, lifelike to recipients, nor that such effects can make an aesthetically relevant difference. What I am questioning is the conceptualization of those circumstances. Terminological considerations form part of my skepticism—“aesthetic illusion” does not seem to me to be a really good name for the concept or concepts in question—but I also believe that the term tends to cover a number of phenomena that deserve to be kept apart. My reservations will be explained in what follows. Literature will be the center of attention throughout my paper, but I believe my remarks will have wider application in that respect too.

1. Terminological questions In the handbook article on which I will draw, Wolf defines aesthetic illusion as “a basically pleasurable mental state that frequently emerges during the reception

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of many representational texts, artifacts or performances.” According to him, a state of aesthetic illusion is marked by psychological immersion in a represented world, but also by an awareness of distance from that world: aesthetic illusion consists “primarily of a feeling, with variable intensity, of being imaginatively and emotionally immersed in a represented world and of experiencing this world in a way similar (but not identical) to real life. At the same time, however, this impression of immersion is counterbalanced by a latent rational distance resulting from a culturally acquired awareness of the difference between representation and reality” (Wolf 2011:  par. 1; see also Wolf 2013). For Wolf, aesthetic illusion can occur in connection with both fact and fiction; “aesthetic” is meant to indicate that the experience is being triggered by a human-made representation (Wolf 2011: par. 2). From a purely terminological point of view, I  find it problematic that an aesthetic illusion is not an illusion. Linguistically, the word “illusion” implies delusion: “a false idea or belief,” “a deceptive appearance or impression,” “a false or unreal perception” (Concise Oxford English Dictionary 2006:  710).2 Strube underlines that “aesthetic illusion” was always meant to designate something sui generis, not a special kind of illusion (cf. Strube 1976: cols. 208–9), but to my mind that information does not remove the slight awkwardness of the term. Despite its long historical tradition, the expression “aesthetic illusion” is bound to be confusing. In standard usage, calling something “aesthetic” marks it as being related to aesthetics, or to the perception of beauty or the artistic, or to good taste.3 Therefore, Wolf introduces an extra complication when he opens the possibility of speaking of aesthetic illusion in connection with representations intended to be factual. He defends the designation “aesthetic” by referring to “the fact that it etymologically gestures towards a quasi-perceptual quality of the imaginative experience involved and implies an awareness, typical of the reception of art, that ‘illusion’ is triggered by an artifact rather than (an, e.g., magic) reality” (Wolf 2011: par. 2). To me, that is a strained explanation. Anyway, it remains a fact that, in Wolf ’s version of aesthetic illusion, neither “aesthetic” nor “illusion” carries any of its dictionary meanings. I cannot help thinking that if one wants to employ Wolf ’s concept of aesthetic illusion, one ought to find a better designation. Wolf points to a number of what he calls synonyms of “aesthetic illusion” that are being used in research—“absorption,” “recentering,” “immersion,” “involvement,” “psychological participation,” “transportation,” “effet de réel”—and declares that “aesthetic illusion” is arguably a more satisfactory term (ibid.). That can be disputed, and it is also a bit surprising to be told that “aesthetic illusion” is

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synonymous with those other expressions that, to me, seem to point to an array of not wholly identical aspects of aesthetic response. At this point we touch on a problem that is more than just terminological. “Aesthetic illusion” is a term that, in earlier centuries, has been used very broadly about phenomena that are now receiving more and more specialized attention. Where recipient reactions to the arts are concerned, “aesthetic illusion” now has to coexist with a large number of other concepts—not only old and well-entrenched ones like “empathy” or “identification” but also influential newcomers like “makebelieve,” “simulation,” and “transportation.” Also, the study of how recipients interact with art is becoming more and more differentiated and fine-grained. One may fear that aesthetic illusion is too broad a category to function well in this new theoretical milieu. I will pursue that problem in the next three sections and then, at the end of my paper, attempt a kind of evaluation of the situation.

2. Absorbed attention to a representation As already indicated, I believe that the concept of aesthetic illusion, as defined by Wolf, covers a number of phenomena that deserve to be kept apart. I will use a literary example to make my observations more concrete: the very opening of Selma Lagerlöf ’s first novel, The Saga of Gösta Berling (Gösta Berlings saga) (Lagerlöf [1891] 2009: 1).4 Lagerlöf takes us to a rural Swedish church where people are waiting for a religious service to begin. Gösta Berling, the young priest, risks being defrocked after his all too frequent drinking bouts. He is now about to address a vitally important sermon to his congregation and also to his bishop, who has come to call him to account. At long last the minister stood in the pulpit. The congregation raised their heads. So, there he was after all. The service would not be cancelled this Sunday, as it had been the previous Sunday and many Sundays before that. The minister was young, tall, slender, and radiantly handsome. If you had set a helmet on his head and hung a sword and breastplate on him, you could have chiseled him in marble and named the image after the most beautiful of the Athenians. The minister had the deep eyes of a poet and the firm, rounded chin of a general; everything about him was lovely, fine, expressive, glowing through and through with genius and spiritual life.

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When I read a passage like this, I am certainly aware of reading a piece of fiction. Yet my attention is focused on what I am reading. Conscious attention is known to have a limited capacity, and I believe that when I read attentively, the content of what I am reading monopolizes that limited mental space: I am wholly concentrated on taking in all aspects of the content conveyed. In this case, the communicated representations are fictional ones, and I am implicitly conscious of their fictionality, but that feature is not at the forefront of my mind. That is how I would like to describe my usual mental state when I am reading fiction—or, mutatis mutandis, when I am viewing a play or listening to a novel read aloud. My psychological state is probably not unique. Actually, I am convinced that this is a state in which most experienced readers find themselves when reading fiction, and I believe that being in that state is what is traditionally described as being subject to aesthetic illusion: remember Strube’s statement that “aesthetic illusion” has consistently been used to refer to “a state marked by a particular kind of pleasure and an awareness of the unreality of the object occupying the centre of the field of attention.” In my suggested analysis of this kind of state there is a fictional representation occupying the center of the field of attention and an often just implicit awareness of the fictionality of that representation. I am not so sure that “a particular kind of pleasure” should be retained as a defining property; the relevant kind of pleasure will prove difficult to circumscribe, and the absorbed attention to which I refer can conceivably also be combined with uneasiness or displeasure. Wolf ’s definition, reviewed earlier, also mentions pleasure, speaking of aesthetic illusion as a “basically pleasurable” state. However, as we saw, Wolf differs from Strube by including nonfictional representations as possible objects of aesthetic illusion. I think Wolf has a point: absorbed attention to representations appears to me to be a plausible psychological phenomenon in its own right, and the nature of the representation can be viewed as a subordinate issue. I wonder, though, whether it is justified to attach so much theoretical weight to the degree of pleasure or displeasure associated with the experience: it is certainly possible to watch, for example, very troubling scenes in televised news with rapt attention.

3. Visualization of representational content Wolf ’s definition of aesthetic illusion speaks of a kind of partial immersion in a represented world and of “experiencing this world in a way similar (but

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not identical) to real life.” That formulation can be taken to cover more than absorbed attention. Indeed, many people apparently tend to visualize quite vividly the scenes they read about. Many readers of the opening paragraphs of Lagerlöf ’s novel will have “seen” Gösta Berling more or less clearly and glimpsed his congregation and the interior of his church. Such visualization is something different from just absorbed attention. For example, while I  myself am an attentive reader, I am not a visualizer. The passage from The Saga of Gösta Berling only gives rise to a very dim picture in my mind: I imagine, with a kind of sparse, semi-visual imagination, the space inside a church, a pulpit on the far left, and an indefinite row of small human backs. The impression plays a very minor role in my reading. When reading fiction, I typically take in the verbal meaning without much sensual imagining of any sort (although my reading is no doubt accompanied by implicit thinking and feeling, an ongoing assimilation and evaluation of the things told). I am not familiar with empirical studies of the extent to which readers of fiction visualize the fictional content, but I know from anecdotal evidence—talks with colleagues—that there do seem to be both visualizers and non-visualizers and that visualizers and non-visualizers tend to find the reading habits of the opposite party difficult to understand, almost perverse. For visualizers, the vivid images called forth by the text may seem a precious part of the very act of reading. For non-visualizers, such images may appear more or less irrelevant, an almost shocking addition to the real content of the text. Anežka Kuzmičová has recently presented a book-length analysis of mental imagery in the reading of literary narrative (Kuzmičová 2013). Kuzmičová works on an introspective basis but in close dialogue with cognitive psychology. She would no doubt understand my visual experience of the opening of The Saga of Gösta Berling as a bleak case of what she calls “description-imagery”: I place myself outside the fictional scene and my mental imagery is solely visual (cf. ibid.: 32). The kind of imagery that can be said to interest Kuzmičová most is the more vivid variety she terms “enactment-imagery.” In enactment-imagery, readers place themselves, so to speak, “inside” the narrative, experiencing a scene in a quasi-real fashion amounting to vicarious experiencing (31). Enactment-imagery is said to have the capacity to give a reader “the subjective sense of having physically entered the tangible environment of a storyworld, of ‘being there,’ ” something Kuzmičová calls “presence” (56). Such imagining would make the reader of the Lagerlöf passage feel as if she were actually inside Gösta Berling’s church. While balanced and analytical, Kuzmičová’s book reflects a high valuation of mental imagery in reading. Indeed, she views the creation of mental images

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as “one of the things that elevate one’s reading experience to the realm of the aesthetic” (45), and she says of one variety of mental imagery (verbal imagery, which includes the feeling of “receiving the text as if it were spoken out loud by an extraneous speaker”) that she believes it to be “vital to any experience of literary reading worth the name” (34 and 123 respectively). For my own part, I cannot say that I create any of the kinds of more developed mental imagery described by Kuzmičová, and I am reluctant to view them as being required for literary experiences worth the name. After a long career as a literary specialist, I am naturally not inclined to accept that I do not really know how to read literature. In my view, one has to accept that different readers of literature behave differently.5 Some read rather fast, some rather slowly. Some visualize and hear a voice speaking the text, some not. Some need a peaceful surrounding when reading, some do not. It would be difficult to argue that any of the modes of operation just referred to violates accepted practices for reading literature, and if it did, the limits set by accepted practices could of course be put in question. The reading of literature follows no official rules. However, like all human acts, acts of reading literature can be passed judgment on. One can always argue, based on the value premises that one is prepared to defend, that a specific way of reading literature is not good enough. A novel like The Saga of Gösta Berling is written to be read and experienced, and the author has composed a story meant to have the capacity to give rise to experiences worth having. That makes it possible to argue, for example, that a very fast reading of the novel will not make it possible to take in the content adequately and realize the novel’s potential, and that a very fast reading cannot, therefore, be adequate. With respect to mental imagery, Kuzmičová might argue that the experiences arising through mental imagery are certainly worth having, so that readers not visualizing or receiving the text as if spoken out loud miss important literary values. I might argue, on the other hand, that experiences arising through mental imagery amount to the introduction of the reader’s own fantasies. If one views the interior of the church more or less clearly, one views things that are not part of the text but one’s own subjective additions to the story. It is possible to argue that readers should recreate the content actually described without adding elements of their own making. My real thoughts on this point are somewhat more complex. The reader of a narrative will have to make the situations described clear to himself or herself. The reader will have to create a mental representation of the situation, what is sometimes called a “situation model” (see, e.g., van Dijk and Kintsch

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1983: 11–12; and Tapiero 2007, esp. chapter 2). Visual imagining can be of help; even I  support my understanding of the opening scene in The Saga of Gösta Berling with rudimentary visual imagery. I do believe that many other people visualize more and that they find their visualizing both necessary and rewarding, and I can see no reason to object to that. Yet I find it important to realize that the mental images created do not form part of the novel. In the Lagerlöf case I do not really believe that the pulpit in the opening scene is on my left hand side or that the vague place from which I mentally view the church interior is the one that the reader should mentally occupy. I would say that if I had believed that, I would have crossed the fine line between the entertaining of supportive mental imagery and the entertaining of mistaken ideas about the content of the novel. In what way is this discussion important for my theme? I want to distinguish between the absorbed attention to a representation, which was commented on in the previous section, and the vivid imagining of representational content: there can be absorbed attention without such imagery. If both phenomena are thought to fall under the concept of aesthetic illusion, the concept of aesthetic illusion begins to split up: it begins to cover importantly different phenomena. There are ways of avoiding such a split. One can limit aesthetic illusion to absorbed attention, or one can stipulate that aesthetic illusion is a mental state in which there is not only absorbed attention but also vivid mental imagery.6 In that case, a reader like I does not experience aesthetic illusion while a reader like Kuzmičová does. That is a possible move; its only theoretical cost is that aesthetic illusion is becoming something more rarefied. According to Wolf ’s definition, aesthetic illusion “frequently emerges during the reception of many representational texts”; one would have to add “in certain readers” or “in many readers.”

4. Make-believe and simulation Some theorists have maintained that readers of narrative fiction are actually required to place themselves, mentally, inside the fiction. In his Mimesis as Make-Believe (1990), Kendall Walton argues that representations have to do with imagining and that imaginings are partly about ourselves (1990: 28–9). On Walton’s theory, readers of a novel like The Saga of Gösta Berling participate in games of make-believe in which they imagine, of themselves, such things as forming part of the world to which Gösta Berling and the initiated person telling us about his life belong (cf. ibid.: e.g., 11–13, 209, 213, and 353). According to

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the theory of make-believe presented by Gregory Currie at the same time, readers of the novel would believe that they were being told about the events by a reliable narrator with actual knowledge of the events. “In our game,” Currie writes, “we make believe there is a teller who does believe these things and whose beliefs are reliable” (1990: 73). Currie soon moved on to a theory centered on so-called simulation: according to his simulation theory, imagining such things as the opening scene of The Saga of Gösta Berling would be to place oneself in a mental state such that one entertains the belief that the things told are true but also such that the ordinary connections between belief and the consequences of belief are severed (1995, esp. 147–8).7 The idea that readers of fiction somehow enter a fictional world mentally, not just visualize the fictional representations vividly, as if they were present, takes us one step further from the mere understanding of what we are being told in the story. I do not recognize any such strategies from my own way of reading and I find it doubtful that readers typically do anything of the kind. Nor am I aware of any empirical evidence supporting the idea that adult, competent readers engage in such behavior. The arguments for make-believe and simulation theories are, as far as I know, purely theoretical and, to my mind, unconvincing (see Pettersson 1993 and 2012, esp. 106–13). It is true that so-called transportation theory, another contemporary approach, understands readers to be, metaphorically, transported into the world of the narrative,8 and transportation theory is grounded in actual empirical studies. Yet transportation theory is not quite what it can sound to be. The key finding of transportation theory is that many readers tend to believe general ideas conveyed to them—even strange conceptions like the idea that mental illness is contagious—when they encounter those ideas in stories, even fictional stories. Aided by a questionnaire for measuring transportation, Melanie Green and Timothy Brock have argued very plausibly that readers are more prone to the relevant kind of belief the more transported they are. But Green and Brock define transportation rather widely as “absorption into a story,” saying that transportation entails “imagery, affect, and attentional focus.” Of the fifteen statements in the questionnaire to which their subjects were asked to respond, only one goes beyond vivid imagining to what Kuzmičová would call “presence.” Five more statements concern the formation of images, while the remaining nine could be said to relate to overall engagement in the story rather than to the experiencing of any kind of illusion. (For example, “I wanted to know how the narrative ended” or “The events in the narrative are relevant to my everyday life”

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[Green and Brock 2000: 701–21, 701 (definition) and 704 (questionnaire)].) No games or simulations get mentioned. There is credible evidence that readers may imagine of themselves that they form part of a fictional world, but as far as I know such evidence only comes from readers’ reports about how they used to read at an early age. Erich Schön has provided many examples, drawn from his own research in the 1980s and 1990s, of what he calls “substitution,” a kind of literary response in which “one experiences the participation in the fictive events as ‘oneself ’ ” (1995:  105).9 According to Schön, substitution is mostly associated with the time before puberty (107). One of Schön’s subjects, a twenty-six-year-old male , reports in a reading autobiography: At ca. 7–8 years my art of reading was advanced enough for more sizeable books and journals. My favourites then were Enid Blyton’s books, I spent whole afternoons in front of the fireplace in the sitting-room reading The Five etc. Yet for me they were not five but six friends, for one of them was I. I took part in their expeditions vividly (in my thoughts), always supported my secret love George (Georgina) in the discussions that sometimes occurred, and many times strengthened my position in the group by offering new information, having turned pages forward in the book. (105–6)

To return, now, to my main theme: absorbed attention is not the same as vivid imagery, and make-believe and simulation is something different still, so further splits, or possible splits, in the concept of aesthetic illusion have appeared. Aesthetic illusion can be, at least, absorbed attention, or vivid imagery, or makebelieve and simulation, or some combination of these.

5. Aesthetic illusion: Concluding remarks Wolf ’s conception of aesthetic illusion comprises at least all the three phenomena I  pointed out. According to his formulations, simulation obviously falls under his concept of aesthetic illusion,10 and so do make-believe in Walton’s sense11 and vivid imagining.12 I  take it for granted that the more inconspicuous phenomenon that I call absorbed attention must also be included. (There is certainly no indication that Wolf would regard cases of what Schön calls substitution as acceptable examples of aesthetic illusion; on the other hand, there is no real indication of what he takes simulation and Walton-like participation to imply more concretely.)

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Wolf does not comment explicitly on the heterogeneity that I perceive. He does remark that aesthetic illusion comes in degrees: “Owing to its dual nature [both imaginary experience and rational awareness of the imaginary character of the experience], aesthetic illusion is gradable according to the degrees of immersion or distance present in given reception situations and is thus unstable” (Wolff 2011: par. 3). But that observation seems to me to address a different circumstance: I find it difficult to conceive of absorbed attention, and vivid imagining, and simulation and make-believe as degrees on one and the same bipolar scale. At this point, it might feel natural to ask whether aesthetic illusion as characterized by Wolf is really one thing or many things. In my view, however, that is not a good question. As I remarked initially, an entity like Mars can be regarded as unproblematically preexisting since we all agree on its delimitation, while nothing similar can be said of formations like identification, or simulation, or, as here, aesthetic illusion. In the latter cases, the individual researchers’ definitions inevitably delimit and shape the object of their research. Readers’ mental states and inner processes are certainly objective elements of the outer world. But it is not given what, if anything, in that mass should be viewed as aesthetic illusion, not before a researcher steps in and decides on the matter for the benefits of his or her own investigation, thus introducing a specific conceptualization of the phenomena. The question, then, is not what aesthetic illusion really is: a definition of aesthetic illusion is not like a true or false description of something already there. Instead, the definition constructs an object, and the relevant question is whether that construction is productive or not. In Wolf ’s case, one will have to accept that absorbed attention, vivid imagining, and make-believe and simulation (and more) are being regarded as aspects of one and the same thing: aesthetic illusion. The question whether or not that is a productive thing to do cannot be answered in abstracto: productive moves are productive with respect to a specific purpose. Wolf does not argue for his conception by offering a motive for defining aesthetic illusion in the way he does. (His handbook article on aesthetic illusion reads more like a series of observations on an object that is simply there and enjoys its own indisputable and independent existence.) I would say that, in reality, Wolf uses the concept of aesthetic illusion to discuss what factors in texts, readers, and situations tend to call forth aesthetic illusion in his sense, and also to sketch the history of such aesthetic illusion in Western culture.13 Thus he uses the concept to help produce a special (consciously limited) perspective on Western literature and literary response and their history. The merits and problems of

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that perspective cannot really be discussed here, but the distinctions between absorbed attention, vivid imagining, and make-believe and simulation will naturally be relevant both for the historical picture and for the reasoning about factors giving rise to aesthetic illusion. It is an open question whether or not it makes sense to nevertheless ignore those distinctions and regard the phenomena as aspects of the same unified phenomenon (as Wolf clearly does when he writes of aesthetic illusion as “a basically pleasurable mental state that frequently emerges during the reception of many representational texts, artifacts or performances”). I will let those comments on Wolf ’s conception conclude my discussion of the concepts of aesthetic illusion and round off with my personal evaluation of the matter. I believe that the traditional idea of aesthetic illusion described by Strube can be explicated as absorbed attention to representations (or to representations in the arts). That seems like a prima facie useful concept to me, demarcating a possibly interesting area of research, but in my view “absorbed attention to representations” would be a better designation of the concept than the somewhat misleading “aesthetic illusion.” With regard to Wolf ’s conception of aesthetic illusion, my terminological unease is a bit stronger yet. I also believe that the phenomena to which his concept applies are so mutually different that, in most contexts, it becomes confusing rather than enlightening to classify them as different aspects of the same thing. But that is a personal statement, not the proclamation of a truth. Everybody will have to make up his or her own mind concerning the usefulness of the various concepts associated with the term “aesthetic illusion.” And the expression as such will of course always be with us, with layer upon layer of historically acquired meanings.

Notes 1 “ein Zustand . . . dem eine eigentümliche Lust und das Bewusstsein von der Irrealität des im Zentrum des Zuwendungsfeldes vorstelligen Gegenstands zugehören” (my translation). 2 The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (2000: 874) lists “Illusionism in art” as one of the meanings of “illusion,” but explains illusionism in art as “[t]he use of illusionary techniques and devices in art or decoration.” 3 The American Heritage Dictionary (2000: 28) associates “aesthetic” with “the philosophy or theories of aesthetics” or “the appreciation of beauty or good taste,” or “a heightened sensitivity to beauty,” or the concept of the artistic, or conformity to “accepted notions of good taste.” Cf. also Concise Oxford English Dictionary (2006: 21).

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4 Selma Lagerlöf (1858–1940), a major figure in Swedish literature, was the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature (1909). The publication of The Saga of Gösta Berling represented her instant breakthrough as a writer. 5 Corinna Petter has offered a detailed and instructive study of the practices of six novel readers in her book, Psychologie des Romanlesens: Lesestrategien zur subjektiven Aneignung eines literarischen Textes (2001). 6 If there can be vivid mental imagery without absorbed attention, there will be a third alternative definition of aesthetic illusion. I presuppose here that vivid mental imagery is not possible without absorbed attention. 7 In his later writings, Currie has moved on again; the concept of simulation only plays a negligible role in Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (2010). 8 See Gerrig’s foundational description of transportation (1993: 10–11). 9 Translations from Schön are mine. 10 Wolf speaks (2011: par. 3) of aesthetic illusion as a “simulation” that “involves emotions and sensory quasi-perceptions (including, but not restricted to, visual imagination).” 11 Psychological participation as understood by Walton is one of the synonyms of aesthetic illusion mentioned by Wolf (2011: par. 2). 12 Wolf understands aesthetic illusion as involving “an imaginary experience of represented worlds ‘from within’ ” (2011: par. 3). 13 Factors contributing to aesthetic illusion are analyzed by Wolf (2011: pars. 6–26, the history of aesthetic illusion in pars. 28–9).

References American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (2000), 4th ed., Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. Brinker, M. (1977), “Aesthetic Illusion,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 36: 191–6. Burwick, F. and W. Pape (1990), Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and Historical Approaches, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Concise Oxford English Dictionary (2006), 11th ed., revised, edited by Catherine Soanes and Angus Stevenson, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Currie, G. (1990), The Nature of Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Currie, G. (1995), Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Currie, G. (2010), Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories, Oxford: Oxford University Press. van Dijk, T. A. and W. Kintsch (1983), Strategies of Discourse Comprehension, San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

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Gerrig, R. (1993), Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Green, M. C. and T. C. Brock (2000), “The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79: 701–21. Kuzmičová, A. (2013), Mental Imagery in the Experience of Literary Narrative: Views from Embodied Cognition, Stockholm: Department of Literature and History of Ideas. Lagerlöf, S. ([1891] 2009), The Saga of Gösta Berling, translated by P. Norlen, New York: Penguin Books. Pette, C. (2001), Psychologie des Romanlesens: Lesestrategien zur subjektiven Aneignung eines literarischen Textes, Weinheim and Munich: Juventa Verlag. Pettersson, A. (1993), “On Walton’s and Currie’s Analyses of Literary Fiction,” Philosophy and Literature, 17: 84–97. Pettersson, A. (2012), The Concept of Literary Application: Readers’ Analogies from Text to Life, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schön, E. (1995), “Veränderungen der literarischen Rezeptionskompetenz Jugendlicher im aktuellen Medienverbund,” in G. Lange and W. Steffens (eds.), Moderne Formen des Erzählens der Kinder- und Jugendliteratur der Gegenwart unter literarischen und didaktischen Aspekten, 99–127, Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann. Strube W. (1976), “Illusion,” in J. Ritter et al., Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, 11 vols., vol. 4, cols. 204–15, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Tapiero, I. (2007), Situation Models and Levels of Coherence: Toward a Definition of Comprehension, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Walton, K. L. (1990), Mimesis as Make-Believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolf, W. (2011), “Illusion (Aesthetic),” in P. Hühn et al., The Living Handbook of Narratology, Hamburg: Hamburg University. Available online: http://www.lhn.unihamburg.de/article/illusion-aesthetic. Wolf, W. (2013), “Aesthetic Illusion,” in W. Wolf, W. Bernhart, and A. Mahler, Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media, 1–63, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Wolf, W., W. Bernhart, and A. Mahler (2013), Immersion and Distance: Aesthetic Illusion in Literature and Other Media, Amsterdam: Rodopi. 300 300 300 300 300

Index of Names Abbé Dubos 8–9, 11–12, 14 d’Alembert, Jean-Baptiste 9 Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich 229–30, 232 Balzac, Honoré de 185–92, 227 Bartholdi, Frédéric Auguste 76 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 3, 5 Beckett, Samuel 205–6, 207 n.7 Blanc-Benon, Laure 84 n.1 Brinker, Menachem 243, 288 Brock, Timothy 295 Bühler, Karl 275 Castaneda, Hector-Neri 102 Cézanne, Paul 77, 79 Champaigne, Philippe de 82 Chatman, Seymour 103 n.5, 226 Chatterton, Thomas 92–3, 94, 99 Church, Frederic 54–8, 59 Cohn, Dorrit 104 n.12, 123, 131, 227 Currie, Gregory 111–15, 116 n.2, 193, 195, 196, 197, 206 n.1, 221 n.4, 222 n.12, 295 Davies, David 206 n.2 Davis, Don 48 Davis, Lydia 97, 102 Defoe, Daniel 94, 97, 98 Dickens, Charles 41, 45, 49, 59, 226 Diderot, Denis 10–12, 14, 230 Diogenes Laertius 9 Doležel, Lubomír 17, 195, 226, 227, 276–7, 278, 281 Doyle, Arthuc C. 226–7

Gendler, Tamar 99–100, 134 n.2, 142–5, 150 n.5 Gerrig, Richard 33, 34, 65 n.36, 87, 238, 241, 299 n.8 Glück, Louise 214–15 Goethe, Johann W. 92, 94 Gombrich, Ernst 15, 30, 34, 43, 44, 51, 54, 63 n.16, 71, 74, 77, 84 n.1, 190–2, 240 Green, Melanie 41, 62 n.2, 63 n.11, 65 n.36, 295 Guyer, Paul 5, 22 n.1 Hardy, Thomas 37, 225 Hegel, Georg W. F. 212, 221 n.3 Hemingway, Ernest 96–8 Hogan, Patrick C. 226 Home, Henry 12–15 Ingarden, Roman 42, 44, 109 Iser, Wolfgang 18, 42, 43, 46, 50 James, Henry 225 Joyce, James 97, 196 Kant, Immanuel 3, 6–7, 21, 167, 172, 180 n.6, 210, 211, 215, 216, 221, 221 n.6 Kierkegaard, SØren 94 Korthals Altes, Liesbeth 123, 127, 128 Kripke, Saul 196–8, 202 Kundera, Milan 230 Kuzmičová, Anežka 15–16, 65 n.34, 292–6

Ellis, Bret E. 128, 130–2 Euripides 80

Lagerlöf, Selma 290, 292, 294, 299 n.4 Leonardo da Vinci 191 Lessing, Gotthold E. 80, 212 Levi, Primo 178 Lewis, David 204, 227, 276

Flaubert, Gustave 193–6, 199, 200, 225 Fořt, Bohumil 191

MacNeice, Louis 216 Mäkelä, Maria 123, 126

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Manet, Édouard 77–9, 81 Margolin, Uri 122 Martínez-Bonati, Félix 227 Maupassant, Guy de 225 McDowell, John 204 Meegeren, Hans van 92–3 Mendelssohn, Moses 5–6 Mendilow, Adam A. 85 Merwin, William S. 215–16 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis 94 Moretti, Nanni 177 Murray, Les 123, 217 Panofsky, Erwin 72 Parrhasios 58, 191 Pavel, Thomas G. 16, 19, 226, 276–8 Pinker, Steven 100 Plinius 191 Pouivet, Roger 84 n.1 Pratt, Marie-Louise 227 Racine, Jean 80–1, 82 Radford, Colin 139–41, 143–5 Raphael 83 Rehault, Sébastien 84 Richardson, Samuel 94 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlommit 226 Robinson, Kim S. 55, 56 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 9–12, 14, 231 Ryan, Marie-Laure 6, 16–17, 30, 31, 39, 41, 63 n.17, 85, 88, 103 n.1, 125, 201–3, 206 n.4, 207 nn.5, 227–8, 253, 276, 277–8, 284 n.3

Scalise Sugiyama, Michelle 100 Schier, Flint 71, 72, 77, 84 n.1 Sebald, Winfried G. 164–80 Seneca 80 Shakespeare, William 81, 92 Swift, Jonathan 94, 98 Szymborska, Wisława 218 Tintoretto 83 Titian 77, 78 Tyson, Lois 17 Veronese 82, 83 Vico, Giambattista 82 Vodička, Felix 233 Walton, Kendall 15, 32, 33, 35, 100, 129, 141, 207 n.6, 247, 253, 281, 285 n.5, 294, 296, 299 n.11 Weil, Simone 165, 166, 172 Wilson, Margaret 16 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 124, 219 Wolf, Werner 2, 90, 103 n.3, 104 n.6, 108, 122, 123, 125, 160 n.1, 209, 211, 213, 221 n.7, 225, 237, 238–40, 242–3, 245–56, 265, 273, 279, 280, 282, 288–91, 294, 296–8, 299 n.10 Wolff, Christian 3–4 Wollheim, Richard 108, 123–4 Wordsworth, William 220 Zeuxis 58, 191 Zunshine, Lisa 65 n.36, 122, 127, 128, 132

Index of Topics absorbed attention 290–1, 292, 294, 296–8, 299 n.6 absorption 63 n.12, 85, 88, 100, 125, 238, 253, 257, 258, 259, 289, 295 actual world 21, 76, 77, 83, 114, 185, 187, 189, 190, 192, 193, 196–206, 206 n.2, 207 n.5, 226, 274, 276–8, 281–2 aesthetic function 275, 280, 282–3, 284 aesthetic norm 192, 231, 232 aesthetic value 284 alief 100, 144–5 anachrony 111 analogy thesis 245 anti-illusiveness 14, 60, 192, 213, 226, 228, 232 appropriation 45, 74, 158, 160, 212, 239 as if 96, 157, 196–206, 209, 241, 248, 252 autobiography 95, 103, 231, 232, 296 beauty 5–7, 210, 278, 289, 298 n.3 belief 91, 93, 96, 99–100, 102, 113, 142, 144–5, 148, 150, 229, 289, 295 celare artem principle 40, 46, 51, 57, 104 character 2, 10–11, 34, 46, 49, 50, 52, 64 n.23, 80, 81, 86, 87, 91, 102, 110, 115, 121–34, 141, 150, 156–8, 160 n.9, 186, 187–8, 194, 199–200, 207 n.5, 209, 211, 228, 230, 238, 241, 245, 258–67, 276 character-centered illusion 121–34 classification of arts 7 cognitive impenetrability 139–51 cognitive realism 126 cognitive science 15 comedy 37, 40, 189, 251 comics 30 computer games 30, 66 n.38, 254 concretization 42, 44, 51 counter-world 277

deception 22, 113, 149, 150, 151 n.10, 243, 253 defamiliarization 279 delusion 32, 36, 90, 122, 125, 237, 243–5, 251, 254, 259, 264, 266, 289 description 13, 38, 41, 44, 56, 59, 60–1, 65, 95, 111, 189, 190, 194, 196, 199, 213, 215, 228, 248, 292 direct perception 159 directness 85, 87, 88–90, 101 distance 103 n.3, 108, 109, 110, 122, 150, 158, 228, 229, 231, 237, 240–1, 243, 245, 246, 250–4, 256, 259–61, 263, 267, 268, 273–4, 279, 289, 297 embodied cognition 15–16 emotion 2, 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 30, 32, 33, 37, 39, 40, 43, 51, 52, 57, 59, 64 n.6, 65 n.32, 87, 116, 122, 128, 130, 139, 140, 141–2, 145, 149, 150, 165, 212–13, 221, 229, 238, 241, 245–52, 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 273, 289 empathy 52, 85, 86–8, 128, 195, 222 n.12, 241, 287, 290 enactive cognition 129 enactment 65 n.34, 121, 292 ethics 127, 133, 163–4, 167, 168, 171, 173, 178, 180 n.5 expressive illusion 153, 154–5, 159 expressive resonance 157–60, 160 n.9 extension 16, 17, 277 extradiegetic narrative 225, 235 feeling 60, 65 n.34, 74, 80, 87, 89, 112, 140, 141, 143, 144, 159, 166, 169, 175, 217, 238, 241, 247, 250, 254, 259, 260, 261, 273, 274, 289, 292, 293 fiction 117 n.5, 128, 141, 174, 185–92, 193– 207, 260, 261, 267, 276–8 fictional world 276–8 film 52, 107–17, 243 focalization 39, 43, 213, 230

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folk psychology 125, 126, 128, 133 forgery 92–4 heterodiegetic narrative 225, 227, 230–2 homodiegetic narrative 43, 226–7, 231–2 ich-form 205 iconicity 53, 56, 59, 64 n.18, 71, 72, 75, 77, 84 n.1, 99 ideal 11–12, 71, 77, 82–4, 210 ideal presence 13–14, 15 identification 10, 12, 20, 34, 49, 64 n.23, 85–9, 102, 188, 241, 266, 287, 290, 297 i-experience 86–7, 89, 90, 100, 103 n.4 illusion passim imagination 16, 18, 20, 33, 42, 43, 53, 65 n.31, 88, 108, 115, 124, 129, 144, 153, 157, 172, 195, 197, 199, 201–3, 205, 206 nn.2, 4, 207 nn.5, 6, 210, 211, 213, 246, 255, 292, 299 n.10 imaginative resistance 129 imitation 3, 4, 8, 9, 38, 62, 192, 253, 265, 268, 280 immediacy 39, 85–104, 281 immersion 2–3, 7, 10, 12–18, 29, 30, 32–3, 36, 37, 38, 40, 49, 52, 53, 56, 58, 59, 62 nn.2, 6, 8, 9, 63 nn.10, 12, 64 nn. 21, 27, 65 nn.32, 34, 37, 66 nn.38, 39, 85, 86, 87, 88–9, 100, 103 n.1, 2, 6, 125, 209, 225, 228, 237, 238–44, 248, 250–9, 273, 277, 279, 283, 289, 291, 297 implied author 229 impossible worlds 192 intension 17 intentional object 107–8 intermediality 17, 58, 63, 64 interpretation 17, 39, 54, 89, 96, 100, 127–32, 134 nn.4, 6, 8, 229, 231, 242 intersubjectivity 52, 123, 125, 127–8, 133 involvement 37, 40, 248, 250, 251, 289 language 16, 47, 48, 51, 52, 85, 88, 101, 102, 157, 198, 204, 206, 213, 216–19, 230, 238, 243, 249, 251, 268, 269, 275 literary dummies 94–6, 98–9, 103 n.8 lyric persona 214–17, 222 n.10 lyric poetry 7, 209–22, 280–1, 283

make-believe 35, 95, 153, 197, 253, 287, 294–8 media blindness 29–31, 60 media relativism 30, 31, 63 n.17 medium 8, 9, 14, 17, 21, 29–66, 242 mental imagery 16, 44, 46, 238, 255, 292–4, 299 n.6 metacognition 121, 132, 255 metafiction 125, 226, 230, 232, 252 mimesis 3, 4, 6–9, 12, 14–17, 191, 279, 280 model reader 191 mood 2, 86, 132, 165, 212–13, 291 music 19, 48, 51, 64 n.26, 66 n.38, 80, 86, 88–90, 139, 144, 249 narrative 16, 32, 36, 37, 38, 44, 45, 46, 56, 59, 60, 65 nn.34, 36, 76, 80, 85, 87–91, 94, 96–103, 104 n.11, 124, 125, 127, 133, 193, 195, 197–8, 200–6, 206 n.2, 209–14, 216–17, 219, 225–33, 238, 251–2, 274, 276–9, 280, 283, 292–5 narrative mediation 274 narrative resolution 217 narrative unreliability 230 narratology 30, 31, 86, 122, 127, 228, 281 narrator 39, 43, 45, 46, 47, 52, 128, 130, 134 n.8, 157, 197, 198, 199–201, 203–6, 225, 226–32 natural sciences 1, 173 New Criticism 287 nouveau roman 38 novel 7, 37, 39, 52, 88, 94, 210, 213, 219, 225–33, 244, 279–82 painting 4, 30, 31, 39, 54–8, 59, 66 n.38, 71–84, 86, 92–4, 190–2, 219, 251 paradox of fiction 139–40, 150, 247 passion 8, 10, 80, 81, 172, 221 perception 13, 15, 29, 32, 33, 35, 39–41, 43–4, 46, 47, 50, 52, 53, 56, 57, 59, 65 n.32, 71, 72, 76, 77, 90, 93, 107–9, 110, 113, 114, 117, 126, 128, 133, 140, 156–7, 159, 190, 210, 241, 243, 246–7, 255, 265, 273–4, 278, 289, 299 n.10 perspective 31, 48, 49, 51, 57, 58, 64 n.23, 83, 98, 101, 104 n.10, 131, 191 photograph 33, 44, 74, 251, 266 pleasure 2, 3–8, 32, 53, 77, 88, 132, 152, 206 n.4, 253, 254, 275, 284, 288, 291, 298

Index of Topics portrait 72, 74, 76–7, 79, 95, 175 possible world 37, 190, 192, 194, 198, 201, 202, 207 nn.5, 7, 209–10, 212, 213, 221 n.5, 226, 227, 277–8, 280, 282 postmodernism 36, 62 n.7, 192, 226, 230, 232, 279 Prague School 232, 275–6, 281, 282–4 presence 3, 9, 13–15, 49, 65 nn.34, 36, 85, 87–99, 109–10, 115, 238, 292, 295 presentness 103, 109–12, 114–16 projection 34, 35, 45, 47, 49, 52, 54, 59, 163–80, 247, 255 proposition 101, 194, 196, 200–1, 204, 207 n.6, 212 reader 1, 2, 13, 14, 15, 17–18, 35, 36, 37, 38, 44–7, 52, 85–7, 91, 92, 94, 96–8, 101, 102–3, 122–33, 134 n.6, 158, 164, 168, 178, 179, 188, 191, 193, 196–205, 206 n.2, 207 n.5, 212, 225–32, 237, 239, 246, 253, 256, 257, 259, 261, 263, 274, 276–9, 281, 283, 287, 291–7, 299 n.5 reader response 17–18, 85, 287 realism 7, 37, 43, 46, 51, 55, 94, 124, 126, 189, 190, 191, 195, 206, 226, 227, 230, 231–3, 279–80, 283 re-centering 2, 18, 34, 43, 49, 58, 201, 202, 253, 274, 281, 283 reference 16, 17, 19, 50, 62 n.5, 63 n.17, 71, 72, 74–7, 82, 89, 94, 102, 103, 175, 179, 189, 194–9, 205, 230, 243, 255, 274, 275, 277, 279–84 relocation 17, 57, 59, 228 resemblance 4, 10, 12, 14, 74 romanticism 279 sculpture 62 n.3, 66 n.38, 71, 75, 80, 83 seeing-in 108 self-awareness 102, 103, 176, 259, 269 self-reference 275, 279, 283 self-reflection 37, 231, 232 sfumata 191 simulation 33, 52, 58, 60, 103 n.3, 287, 290, 294–8, 299 n.7

305

spectator 11, 17, 43, 49, 51, 52, 86, 87, 99, 108–17 speech 46, 58, 59, 154–5, 159–60, 204, 229, 231 story 16, 37, 43, 45, 51, 56, 87, 91, 111–13, 115, 117 n.4, 155, 193, 194, 200, 201, 211, 212, 216, 225–9, 231–2, 238, 249, 260, 292, 295 structuralism 1, 16, 190, 231, 275, 282, 283, 284, 284 n.1, 287 superworld 185–91 suspension of disbelief 33, 243, 253 taste 6–7, 210, 289, 298 n.3 television 107, 110, 112, 116 temporal order 111–14 theatre 8, 9–11, 66 n.38 thematic interest 156–8, 160 third person 39, 131, 180 n.9, 214, 225, 227 token 92–3 tragedy 80, 81 transcendental illusion 210 transmediality 29–32, 37, 40, 54, 58, 60–1, 63 nn.10, 13, 14, 17, 65 n.34, 242 transparency 14, 17, 37, 56, 131, 213, 260 transportation 2, 62 nn.2, 8, 85, 87–8, 238, 251, 252, 253, 257, 258–9, 266, 268, 287, 289, 290, 295, 299 n.8 trompe-l’œil 58, 62 n.6, 65 n.32, 108, 191 twofoldness 108, 123–6, 130, 133 type 71–7, 79–84, 93, 94 utterance 153–6, 159, 160 nn.3, 4, 194, 197–9, 201, 204–7 veracity 12–13, 15 verisimilitude 3–7, 10, 14, 15, 34–7, 98, 104 n.11, 116, 279 visual arts 19, 30, 54, 80–2, 191, 192, 248, 255 world-likeness 274, 280, 283 world-making 18, 38, 46, 50, 57

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