In this essay (and any follow-ups) I want to develop the line of thought in QUICK NUM NOTES.
As I said in NOTES, I'm not disavowing the assorted analyses I advanced with respect to looking at how fictional realities are governed by different combinations of (1) intelligibility and (2) casual coherence-- at least not in the way I disavowed Aristotle's criteria (as I understood them) regarding "impossibility" and "improbability"). HOWEVER, it has occurred to me that there could be a problem in talking only about the ways in which an author models the phenomenality of his fictional world after the way he perceives the real world to work. The author of fiction is not creating something that's ever totally faithful to the real world, even if the elements of artifice he may use are simply invisible structuring principles. Here's Herman Melville on the unrealistic "symmetry" of fiction as compared to really real reality:
The symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction cannot so readily be achieved in a narration essentially having less to do with fable than with fact. Truth uncompromisingly told will always have its ragged edges; hence the conclusion of such a narration is apt to be less finished than an architectural finial. --Herman Melville, BILLY BUDD.
In the same essay in which I quoted this Melville passage, I also compared Melville's "symmetry" to my concept of artifice. But one can see the function of symmetry/artifice as being just as present in naturalistic works as in the other two forms, the uncanny (where BILLY BUDD belongs) and the marvelous (where one might place Melville's MARDI, for what little that's worth). I'm not sure that any of Melville's works are purely naturalistic, but just to venture an example with another nautical theme, Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND has no metaphenomena at all, but it's certainly just as determined by artifice. What many critics have missed that this use of artifice is no less present in naturalistic works which seem to be based on "real" events. Flaubert's MADAME BOVARY may appear to the naive eye to be more "realistic" than TREASURE ISLAND, but Flaubert has to use the same range of tropes Stevenson did, in order to create the emotional effects he desired. Neither BOVARY nor ISLAND possesses the "ragged edges" of reality.
Yet Stevenson and Flaubert use artifice invisibly, somewhat like the "invisible style" attributed to the majority of movies in Classic American cinema. However, I posit that whenever an artist in any medium invokes metaphenomenal tropes to get his desired effects, I believe that he has to exert a new level of "authorial will" as I defined it way back in 2009. That's why I'm now seeking to look at the amount of work-- which I also called "crap"-- that an author has to put across to sell his metaphenomena:
But my current line of thought is more like, "how much crap did an author have to come up with to put across this involved a deception?" (like that of The Hound of the Baskervilles)... The opposition I'm currently playing with is that we're used to thinking of "marvelous things" are total inventions while "uncanny things" are supposed to be in line with the way the natural universe works. But the latter are arguably just as much inventions as the former. if you can't observe a real Pit and Pendulum in human history, or a real crime in which someone pretends to be a ghost to get rid of all the heirs to a fortune, then the phenomenon described is still a creation of the imagination-- just not one that requires as much imaginative effort as something overtly marvelous.
What further developments might be fostered from this line of thought, I cannot at this time predict.
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