Moby Dick Sub-Reality

Certainly we can agree on a few things. Fictional characters are real in the sense of being the subject matter of real books, the focus of real human conversations and literary analyses and flights of imagination.  But fictional characters aren’t real people. Fictional worlds too might be real, but they aren’t the real world. So where does that leave us?

In a recent post I acknowledged that I had written a particular fictional character in a very sketchy way, leaving the reader plenty of leeway to imagine what this character is “really” like. But creating characters wasn’t my main concern in writing the novel. Mostly I was trying to open up a window onto an alternate reality. The fictional characters serve as proxies, stand-ins for real people who might occupy this alternate reality. The characters also function as lures, attempting to draw readers into this alternate reality.

I could go into some detail describing the dimensions and contours of the reality I tried to open up in that book. The characters and events occupy pretty much the same time and space as the real material world we live in. What’s important in establishing the alterity of that particular fictional reality are the strands of meaning that link the characters together, that motivate their actions, nad that shape the imaginary trajectories they trace through the world.

There is no reason why real people, occupying the real world, couldn’t find their lives shaped by these same forces. They may in fact be so shaped, at least in part, without their consciously being aware of it. This possible overlap between fictional and ordinary realities isn’t true just of my book. Anyone could become entangled in obsessive vengeance, even if he’s not the captain  of a ship and the object of his passion isn’t a great white whale.

Still, you and I aren’t characters in Moby Dick — that fictional story does not include us as characters. Ahab isn’t real in our world, but by the same token we aren’t real in his. This isn’t to say that, as people, Ahab and you are of equal standing: you’re not. For one thing, Ahab is a lot more famous and influential in our world than you are; for another, Ahab has no material human existence in the real world and he never did.

There are strands of meaning and motivation that link fictional with nonfictional worlds. In understanding megalomania, Ahab presents an excellent case study. Of course we understand that he’s a fictional character. But Ahab is entwined in strands of meaning that affect us just as firmly as he is wrapped up in the harpooneer’s rope.

Sure, ultimately there is only one reality, even if it turns out that we occupy only one among countless universes in the multiverse. In our universe everything came out of the Big Bang, eventually including Herman Melville, his books, the characters who populate them, and the abstract themes that link them to us still. But isn’t it useful for certain purposes to partition the one reality into many?

The fictional reality created  inside Moby Dick involves certain characters doing various things in certain places that have a direct correspondence to the material world in which Melville lived. Real people alive at the time the book was written, as well as real places not directly mentioned in the book, as well as everyone who has ever read the book, do not exist inside that fictional reality. We live in a world that can be partitioned into a sub-reality consisting entirely of every novel ever written. Melville, though no longer alive in the real world, occupies a place in this sub-reality as an author. The original manuscript of Moby Dick may well be lost, but millions of physical copies of the book exist in various languages, as do online versions that can be downloaded onto computers. From the perspective of our sub-reality we can disregard all the physical and virtual copies, focusing on the single abstract object called “Moby Dick the novel.” Likewise we can disregard all the copies of Ahab residing in all the copies of the book, focusing on the single, abstract, never-alive but fictionally-real sea captain. And the theme of megalomania, though it’s never written in so many words in the book, emerges from the book as a theme that links Ahab to other fictional characters, to those of us who choose to occupy the sub-reality of all novels ever written.

In some other sub-reality, consisting of all printed documents, all those hard copies of Moby Dick do count as real. And in another sub-reality the megalomaniacal theme is real even to those who have never heard of Moby Dick.