JCB's Ruminations on the Craft of Fiction #65
August 19, 2021
I’ve been thinking about freedom of the will and fiction. Medieval philosophers had enormous concerns with human freedom as it intersects with an omniscient god’s capacity to know the future. Under such circumstances, they asked, can we be said to have freedom of the will if our decisions are knowable prior to our enacting them? Later philosophers replaced the omniscient god with a deterministic universe, and the question became whether human beings can have freedom of the will if every action has a deterministic cause. Philosophers are still arguing over these questions, but, irrespective of their posits, I find it useful to consider the problem of free will in the context of fiction.
Good fiction generally focuses on characters trying to pursue goals despite setbacks and obstacles. As we experience the story, we understand the characters as if they have freedom of the will. We talk about characters as if their futures are undetermined and unknowable--in effect, as if the rest of the book hasn’t already been written, and their ultimate fate is changeable. No matter how many times I read Hamlet, everyone always dies at the end, and it doesn’t matter how compelling all their agonizing is.
I think there are at least two things we might take from noticing this about fiction. First, maybe the problem of freedom of the will is epistemological, not ontological or metaphysical. Second, and more to the point of these ruminations on the craft of fiction, one of the key features of convincing fiction is the illusion of freedom of the will for the characters. If a reader detects auctorial interference or the possibility that a character’s fate does not depend on their own choices, the experience can be spoiled. Although there are ways to play with the idea of fate or determinism in fiction (some Greek tragedies come to mind), a reader should believe that the character has a hand in bringing about the end of their story. Our job as writers is to make this illusion compelling.