So I was re-reading some
Subnormality and encountered the one about
Princess Washburn. That got me thinking. The debunkery on display here is nice, but what exactly is she debunking?
Well, she's trying to debunk the idea that "truth is stranger than fiction". That's an aphorism, and debunking one of those is a little like debunking poetry. And if you look at how she goes about it, you can tell how she thinks about the aphorism.
She's using a counterexample, which tells me she thinks of the aphorism as a statement of the type "P always has property Q," specifically, "Fiction is always less strange than truth." She then provides a counterexample consisting of a character who is more strange than truth. QED!
Still, I wonder...
First of all, how do you measure strangeness? If it has to do somehow with averages, then any discrete object you choose is likely to fall away from that average on some scale of measure. The "normal" is an
abstraction, even an illusion. Strangeness is more of an intuitive sense of difference from lived or imagined experience. A red, fire-breathing dragon seems less strange than a plaid, gravel-breathing one even though both are equally nonexistent. The red kind is just more common in the domain of fantasy.
Princess Washburn is certainly strange as far as fantasy people go, relative both to other fantasy and reality. But there are real people just as singular relative to other real people, as she is to fantasy people. She just gets to be extra weird by having properties no real person could have. There is a sense in which fiction has the luxury of being stranger because it need not exist. Truth is constrained by reality; fiction only by imagination. Fiction has another degree of weirdness freedom.
But that leads to another question. Is Princess Washburn really fictional? I don't mean, of course, that I think she might be real. I'm not talking about the axis of real vs. fictional. I'm talking about what it means to be fictional, given that one is known to be imaginary. Anything made up is imaginary, but what is fictional?
It seems reasonable to claim that the fictional is anything pertaining to fiction. And except for the fact that she is being discussed by fictional characters in a comic, Princess Washburn has only a tenuous connection to any narrative structure or fictional construct. The details that make her so weird are chosen randomly for the effect of strangeness. What connects coins, spiders, the Rolling Stones, and ultraviolet light, except for being related somehow to Princess Washburn?
Not a whole lot. Her personal details have the broad, scattered effect that the details of a real person do, the effect of springing from a deep, complex, and unstructured development process that is largely opaque to outside observers. Fictional characters, on the other hand, are generally expected to have fairly clear motivations within the confines of the narrative arc.
I think that may be where the aphorism comes from. Saying that truth is stranger than fiction is acknowledging
that fiction is a human artifact with fairly simple rules and an
expected structure. Fiction, as people say, has to make sense. True
stories also make sense, just in a different kind of context. All the
motivations are richer, and the character development is more organic,
because it is real. Princess Washburn is strange because everything that makes her who she is, is
hidden from us. Any real person would also seem strange if all you know about
them was a dozen or so random facts.
The personal details of fictional characters are meant to advance the story. But Princess Washburn is a character without a story, or at least not an accessible one. She is more like a real person, in a sense, than a fictional one, except for the part where she doesn't exist. She isn't fictional. She's imaginary.
