This month we’re publishing Umberto Eco’s Confessions of a Young Novelist, a playful and brilliant collection of Eco’s thoughts on his intersecting careers as theorist and fiction writer. In the excerpt below, Eco reflects on the power of fictional characters to invade our emotional lives, setting the stage for an ensuing semiotic argument for the existence of fictional characters as concrete objects.
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Weeping for Anna Karenina
In 1860, on the verge of sailing through the Mediterranean to follow Garibaldi’s expedition to Sicily, Alexandre Dumas père stopped in Marseille and visited the Château d’If, where his hero, Edmond Dantès, before becoming the Count of Monte Cristo, was imprisoned for fourteen years and was tutored in his cell by a fellow inmate, the abbé Faria. While Dumas was there, he discovered that visitors were regularly shown what was called the “real” cell of Monte Cristo, and that the guides constantly spoke of Dantès, Faria, and the other characters of the novel as if they had really existed. In contrast, the same guides never mentioned that the Château d’If had held as prisoners some important historical figures, such as Honoré Mirabeau.
Thus, Dumas comments in his memoirs: “It is the privilege of novelists to create characters who kill those of the historians. The reason is that historians evoke mere ghosts, while novelists create flesh-and-blood people.”
Once a friend of mine urged me to organize a symposium on the following subject: If we know that Anna Karenina is a fictional character who does not exist in the real world, why do we weep over her plight, or at any rate why are we deeply moved by her misfortunes?
There are probably many highly educated readers who do not shed tears over the fate of Scarlett O’Hara but are nevertheless shocked by the fate of Anna Karenina. Moreover, I have seen sophisticated intellectuals openly weep at the end of Cyrano de Bergerac—a fact that should not astonish anybody, because when a dramatic strategy aims at inducing the audience to shed tears, it makes them weep regardless of their cultural level. This is not an aesthetic problem: great works of art may not evoke an emotional response, whereas many bad films and dime novels succeed in doing so. And let’s remember that Madame Bovary, a character for whom many readers have wept, used to cry over the love stories she was reading.
I told my friend firmly that this phenomenon had neither ontological nor logical relevance, and could be of interest only to psychologists. We can identify with fictional characters and with their deeds because, according to a narrative agreement, we start living in the possible world of their story as if it were our own real world. But this does not occur only when we read fiction.
Many of us have sometimes thought of the possible death of a loved one and have been deeply affected, if not moved to tears, even though we knew that the event was imagined and not real. Such phenomena of identification and projection are absolutely normal and (I repeat) are a matter for psychologists. If there are optical illusions, in which we see a given form as bigger than another even though we know they are exactly the same size, why shouldn’t there be emotional illusions as well?
I also tried to show my friend that the capacity of a fictional character to make people cry depends not only on his or her qualities but on the cultural habits of the readers—or on the relationship between their cultural expectations and the narrative strategy. In the mid-nineteenth century people cried, even sobbed, over the fate of Eugène Sue’s Fleur-de-Marie, while today the misfortunes of the poor girl leave us cynically unmoved. In contrast, decades ago a lot of people were moved by the fate of Jenny in Erich Segal’s Love Story, both the novel and the film.
Eventually, I came to realize that I could not so easily dismiss the whole question. I had to admit that there is a difference between weeping at the imagined death of a loved one and weeping over the death of Anna Karenina. It is true that in both cases we are taking for granted what happens in a possible world: the world of our imagination in the first case, and a world designed by Tolstoy in the second case. But if later we are asked if our loved one has really passed away, we can say with great relief that it is not true—the way we are relieved when we awake from a nightmare. Whereas if we are asked whether Anna Karenina has died, we must always answer yes, since the fact that Anna committed suicide is true in all possible worlds.
Moreover, when it comes to romantic love, we suffer when we imagine being abandoned by our beloved, and some people who have actually been abandoned are driven to suicide. But we do not suffer too much if our friends are abandoned by their beloved. We certainly sympathize with them, but I have never heard of anyone who committed suicide because one of his friends had been abandoned. It thus seems strange that, when Goethe published Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther), in which the hero, Werther, commits suicide because of his ill-fated love, many romantic young readers did the same. The phenomenon came to be known as the “Werther effect.” What does it mean when people are only slightly disturbed by the death from starvation of millions of real individuals—including many children—but they feel great personal anguish at the death of Anna Karenina? What does it mean when we deeply share the sorrow of a person who we know has never existed?
(Electronically reproduced from Confessions of a Young Novelist by Umberto Eco, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Copyright © 2011 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.)
