Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek said the following in respect of fiction (specifically, in the context of cinema): “I know it's a fake, but nonetheless I allow myself to be emotionally affected.” I’m not certain we have sufficient control over the emotional effects of fiction for the word ‘allow’ to be appropriate, but Žižek is certainly correct that knowing that something is ‘fake’ need not rob it of its impact.
Žižek is one of a small handful of philosophers in the contemporary continental tradition who seem close to where I am coming from with my own fictionalism, although his Lacan-inspired psychoanalysis is something I find a little tiresome. In The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, Žižek remarks that fictions “already structure our reality. If you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions which regulate it, you lose reality itself”. This is very nearly something I would write on the subject! He talks of the vacuousness of presenting a choice between illusion and reality, and instead asks for something that would enable the perception of “not the reality behind the illusion, but the reality in illusion itself.”
Precisely my claim in respect of fiction is that we need to appreciate the role fiction has in relating us to the world around us, and that indeed we cannot understand that world without fiction. The belief that we can is a leap of unfaith that will distort any notion of the real beyond all recognition.
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