Fiction

What is fiction? No, wait, what is reality?

Some models of existence suggest that there are a lot of universes in existence. Perhaps there are other universes with different physical laws and properties. Perhaps there are a number of universes parallel to our own which diverged from it at some point. Possibly even an essentially infinite number, composed of all possible paths that existence could have taken since its beginning, whenever the hell that was. This last possibility has always intrigued me, because I think it would have a very interesting consequence for a large portion of so-called fiction. If every possible history of this universe that could ever have unfolded has in fact unfolded in some parallel dimension, then I believe it follows that any piece of realistic fiction, by which I mean any story which has not happened in our universe but could have happened in a universe with the underlying properties of ours, is not actually fiction. It's just a story told from a different parallel universe.
Now, that example is a little too strong for the point I want to make, because it implies that any story you can possibly tell is the story of some parallel universe, as long as it meets some threshold for realism. These are some thoughts I'm having after reading a bit of online debate about what counts as "canon" for a sprawling work of fiction that comes in many different installments and media. A position advocated fairly strongly by many in that debate was that the creator of the fictional universe owns it, and has ultimate say about what happened in it. I think I disagree.

A little over a year ago, I read through the Twilight series. It was trendy, my sister was reading them, I figured, what the hell? Moreover, I didn't think the books sucked. I actually thought that books 1, 2, and 3 were pretty decent, or at least a pretty decent member of the trashy romance novel genre. Then came the fourth book. You could sort of feel the author's right-wing morality in the first three books, but it just wafted off the pages of book four. So much so that my sister and I both had the feeling of, that's not what happened! on reading it. Here's what I mean by that feeling, and why it entails my hesitance to grant the creator or author of a work of fiction plenary power over the storyline.

My copy of the Lord of the Rings has several little introductory bits by various people praising Tolkein and the work. One of these accolades says that, in its view, Middle Earth existed long before LotR was written, and Tolkein just saw it and conveyed its story to the rest of us. That's sort of my view of fiction. The author does not actually create the fictional universe; the author creates the story they tell us. They see this world in their imagination, and write down what they see. But they can get it wrong. Sometimes they may start seeing that world wrong, or interpreting what they see wrong, and what they write is no longer what actually happened in the imaginary world they originally envisioned. Now, I'm not exactly playing off of the "multiple worlds" idea here, because I'm including rather flagrantly fantastic universes that would be presumably impossible in a world of our physical constraints, and also because I want to reserve the right to say "that's not how it went down," not just "that's how it went down in one of the several infinities of universes that branched off from the beginning parts of this story." And of course I'm not actually claiming that the universe of the Lord of the Rings, or Twilight, or whatever, actually exist, in some physically and objectively meaningful sense. But I think they exist in some giant, nonexistent domain of the imagination, one that nonexists outside the imagination of any one person and into which everyone's imagination can tap. And in that nonexistent megaverse of things that have never happened and could never happened, things happened a certain way. The person who first sees one particular imaginary story and conveys it to the world successfully can subsequently start getting things wrong about it. There's no authoritative, independent, or objective way to judge this, of course, since this imagination world doesn't actually exist and every two people who see into it have exactly the same authority as one another. But I know a wrong telling of a tale when I see it.

As a side note, I think this relates to how I experience a story. I tend to get very attached to the characters, or at least the characters that I like, and so I often get a very intense feeling of nervousness watching a dramatic, suspenseful story arc near its close. I think that's partly because my conception of a "fictional character" is that it's a being that exists somewhere, really, except of course that it isn't real and it doesn't exist. But it still went down a certain way, and I care how it went down. Anyway, those are my deep philosophical thoughts about fiction, for what they're worth.

ALSO, I do understand that the word 'canon,' being originally derived from the idea of certain gospels being canonical and others being apocryphal and the difference being what the Roman Church said on the subject, is implicitly an authoritarian term. So I accept that Breaking Dawn is "canon," but it's canon within the story told by Stephenie Meyer, not necessarily an accurate representation of what went down in the imaginary universe she began describing in the first three books.