Social behavior is communication with others of our own
kind. We communicate, entertain, manipulate and threaten or deceive in
subtle ways. We help one another and we hinder one another.
We tend to think of emotions as purely subjective
reactions to events in our lives, but they are more complex than mere
reactions given our social need to communicate our emotional state to
others. Our emotions are displayed in our facial expressions and body
language as a form of nonverbal communication. They convey information
important to others. Others need to know what we are feeling to interact
with us. Before language enabled us to communicate in ways more
sophisticated than body language, our emotional behavior was the only way
a social group had of perceiving and reacting to the mental health and
psychological status of its members. We had to read our ‘alpha’ especially
well, and many of us still do pay more attention to the expression and
posture of a politician or pastor than doctrines or policies.
We learned as well to fake our emotional reactions for
the expressed purpose of deceiving others. Lies are disinformation, a
natural tactic of nature as in the false eyes of moth wings, or the
phosphorescent flash of a predator luring a firefly to its doom. But with
a mind as sophisticated as ours, irrelevant information can also be used
as 'ballast' to convey philosophies of belief and share our emotional
stance in that peculiar social institution known as fiction. Only the
vehicle of fiction is a lie. The message is a form of legitimate
communication.
Fiction is an author’s attempt to communicate to an
audience distilled truths he or she considers pertinent. No truth stands
naked and isolated from social and environmental context, but the context
in itself is irrelevant. It can be pretended and manipulated to highlight
the specific information the author is trying to convey. As an example,
truths about personal honor are more easily told in a war setting in which
both the best and the worse of human behavior is clearly evident. Which
war? Any war will do, up to and including a war or events that really
never happened.
We write fiction based upon what we consider to be
self-evident truth, but no matter how carefully we craft our truths, we
encounter challenges in getting our point across. We don't all wear the
same social and behavior 'clothing'. We assume a truth to be universal,
but truths cloaked in the words and expressions of one culture seldom
survive translation to another.
Our lives are linked by language, but no two people
speak the same language. We all have unique definitions of the words we
use, definitions made up of nonverbal feeling-tones acquired from personal
sensory experience. As extreme examples, a description of a dust storm in
the desert will not make clear sense to an Eskimo and a story of a
snow-storm in the Antarctic may be incomprehensible to an African Hutu. No
matter how carefully we define ourselves, what I say to you will never be
exactly what you understand me to have said.
No two people think exactly alike, or believe exactly
the same thing regardless of the lip service they may pay to the common
values society imposes upon us for the sake of unity in its politics or
religions. We need a heightened awareness of these factors to even hope to
communicate our message, and to understand what others may try to
communicate to us.
Commercial fiction displays the skills and depth of
understanding of the human condition an author must possess to achieve
this communication. We could all make use of a writer’s skills in our
attempts to understand 'human nature', which is our universal
'hard-wiring' aside from our personal idiosyncrasies and eccentricities. A
writer's greatest and most important skill is to be able to manage the
variety of belief-systems to be found in any audience and not to blindly
assume that his or her view of the world is exactly the way the world is,
the way it must be, and the only way it can be. An absolute requirement of
any writer hoping to communicate with others is the simple recognition
that we all interpret our worlds in slightly different ways. We are
leading different lives. We've had different experiences and we react
emotionally to them based upon the beliefs we've acquired about the world,
beliefs we often confuse for facts.
In order to indulge in these fictions, the audience
suspends judgment and replaces temporarily their own system of values with
that of the protagonist being portrayed, although most writers do take for
granted that we really are who we seem to be, and the world is really what
it seems to be.
If the truth be known, we are never entirely 'what we
seem to be' and neither is the world around us. We all fall prey to
illusions that blind us to broader views of our lives and hide from us a
broader repertoire of behavior. As long as we fall prey to these
illusions, or indulge in them, they constitute the boundaries to our
experience and the boundaries to our interaction with, and relationship
to, others. These boundaries are most often those imposed by our cultures
by chronic, subtle threats of harm.
One of these illusions involves the very nature of
fiction, that of constant immanent danger of one kind or another. Remember
that the human imagination seeks out hazards and dangers and finds means
of coping before they take form, before we have to deal with them one on
one. Remember that no hazard or danger can be disarmed entirely within the
imagination. We are meant to act on the information our imaginations
provide. Failure to do so only intensifies the perception of danger. Our
solutions become increasingly extreme and unrealistic when rerun
continuously within the imagination.
The human imagination feeds upon itself. As a
reflection of that unquenchable need to struggle with our phantoms and to
learn more about them, our appetite for fiction, too, is insatiable.
Let’s take a look at what drives our imagination.
Fiction is exciting and entertaining only because we can pretend it is
impersonal when the need arises. We can participate in a rape even when we
would never do so for real. We can vicariously take part in the
consequence of such an extreme of human behavior from the vantage point of
both predator and victim.
But, as we’ve touched upon already, at the heart of the
imagination, and at the core of fiction, lies fear, stark and naked. We
are looking for trouble, and we will not stop until we find it.
We need to take a closer look at fear, our greatest
nemesis and at the same time, our strangest and greatest ally in life.
