I admit it: I’m the kind of fan Star Wars following alternative endings and conspiracy theories on the Internet. Why intrigued me so much? Why followers Game of Thrones are so angry at the idea that Jon Snow could be dead? Why fans speculated for years about the possible death of Harry Potter during the eight films that were filmed?
None of these people exist. Why, then, we engage in such an emotional way to their destinations? To help answer the question, professor at Stanford University and author of the monograph Why do we care about literary characters? Blakey Vermeule uses a combination of cognitive theory, history, social psychology and a hint of Darwinism. Vermeule suggests no fiction, we would have trouble making sense of the world. The narratives give you an order to what we see around us and they put the characters faces to what we learn.
Although stories Vermeule has in mind are especially classical literature, the author He approached the current fiction offering a really intriguing theory. “I think that this widespread fascination with fantasy shows that, in fact, live in a secular age. We live in a time of bright spells, heroes and villains, gods and monsters,” he said.
Vermeule realized, in other words, the deeper engagement of fans is with characters facing zombies and Sith of a distant galaxy. “That these worlds are fictitious and we know that they are going beyond the issue: it is very easy to fool the brain into thinking that things are real, visceral way, even when we know, in a rational sense, which are not “.
The teacher not only refers to the effects of fiction. “A friend told me that recently conducted a walk through a virtual reality lab at Stanford. The simulator made him think he was standing at a table over a ravine and nothing he could say to himself could convince him off the board, though he knew it was the carpet in a laboratory. “
Why does it matter what cognitive scientists make you clever to our minds? What happens is that those scientists are not the only ones able to. “The creators of fiction have gotten very good at defeating our rational correction.” According Vermeule, they can achieve this because in his creations “prevail some profound religious intuitions and give them a habitat in a world that has become increasingly skeptical, materialistic and cautious ideals”.
In his book , Vermeule argues that even the stories that we know are fictitious meet the need for a connecting narrative which is our own. We can better understand the world when we integrate their features in a story. However, that story must include certain personification. This was true with the old myths and what is now. Our identification with the characters can lead us to think that we are in the way of great truths.
In our meetings with the fiction we become seekers. Emotional energy spent on the characters as we pursue these deeper truths, even if they are outside of our reality. “Certainly we should delight in the power of fiction manufacturers (in any medium) have to transport us to other worlds and so immensely involved.”
The problem is that very often do not delight us. Instead, we get discouraged. Fans of Game of Thrones are upset at the thought that Jon Snow could be dead and desperate for signs to the contrary.
But the angry response to narrative paths that do not we like is not new. In the eighteenth century, says Vermeule, the novelist Samuel Richardson was inundated with protest letters that readers once they realized that he would allow his heroine Clarissa died. In more recent history, remember Vermeule, fans of The Sopranos have not forgiven the series creator, David Chase.
“Fiction does prevail our moral intuitions, our sense of good and evil, of right and wrong. When we suspect that justice is undermining, protest, and protest is profoundly moral. ” We are so caught up in the narrative that require correct results, as we do in life. We not only promotes affection for the characters, but because of our desperate need for justice somewhere. And, yes, we need to distinguish the difference between illusion and reality, and our emotional attachment adjust accordingly, but we can not.
Source: Stephen Carter / The Washington Post
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