Virtual Selves Roaming Free

In some respects, a reader responds to a book with his own intellectual, emotional and ideological makeup; liking, disliking, enjoying, approving is a function of the person that reader is. But there is another side of the coin: the reader also abandons in part his "practical self" (as aesthetically-minded used to call it sixty years ago) and tries instead a virtual self which is in part proposed by the work, as part of the experience it provides, and is also in part an unpredictable mixture of this guided experience, of personal tendencies and sympathies, and of unconscious, repressed or unacknowledged drives usually kept under leash in more "practical" activities. The virtuality of fiction allows us to experience virtual selves which roam free (in a sense) not just over time and space, following the guidance of the plot, but also over a moral landscape of good and evil intermixed and problematized. This unruly virtual self is to a good extent under the vigilance of the critical, moral, official self of the reader during the reading process, and the latter takes over by and large at the end of the work, but the emotional and ethical gymnastics of virtual experience (I include here both fiction and narrative at large) have done their job, and some cathartic effects have taken place. Or maybe some seeds of evil have been sown, it's a risky carnivalesque space where reality and the moral order are problematized, and that's why professional moralists have often distrusted fiction or warned against it. The fictionist or narrator is an experimental moralist, and there's no telling what may result form such experiments in morals. Some shaking and discombobulation, one would not be surprised.

(A comment to a post by Norman Holland, "How Novels Make Me a Murderer")

Norman Holland niega en su respuesta que todo esto que digo tenga algún sentido psicológicamente o neurológicamente hablando—que no existe en psicología tal cosa como una proyección virtual del yo. E intento explicarme mejor:
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Any self is virtual to some extent - to the extent that is a socially distributed cognitive entity, an informational object so to speak. But a self which acts on the virtual environment of fiction (I think one can accept that fiction generates a virtual environment of space, time, action and character) acquires an additional virtual dimension - the reader of fiction is like an avatar in Second Life, to some extent. Neurology is not (yet) fine-grained enough to ascribe a neurological basis to this phenomenon, but this is a phenomenon as real as any other psychological phenomenon. Virtuality, that is, is a real psychological phenomenon.

La respuesta de Norman Holland...:

—I'm sorry to say that I simply disagree.

Dichtung und Wahrheit

 

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