Fiction exists in two worlds

This is just a pondering if you will about what makes fiction great (IE transcending a singular person’s tastes and becoming an experience that can be shared by a multitude, an experience that can resonate far beyond the original author). Or at least a critical component. I wished to discuss the relation between the personal and impersonal.

It is one of our first revelations that this world we observe is seemingly divided into dualities. Light and Dark. Hot and Cold. “I” and “Not I”. Any story must neccesarily happen at the boundary of a duality. There is a division that exists in my faith between the human and the spiritual, the world we observe, and the hidden world of kami, a division I have tried to replicate in English with “personal” and “impersonal”. Perhaps this guides my thinking, but I would like to state my hypothesis:

The greatness of fiction requires an interplay between the personal and the impersonal.

I would hasten to not conceptualize this as a spectrum with personal at one end and impersonal at the other. That would suggest that to increase one would be to decrease the other, and that does not quite fit. Rather it could better be understood as two separate spectrums of personal-ness and impersonal-ness.

The Personal deals with persona, personalities, and most often with humans. The personal is the goals, motivations, actions, achievements, and failings of the human experience. The personal is the humanity of the piece.

The Impersonal by contrast deals with the abstractions that must be dealt with. In Shinto we would recognize these as the kami, the spirits. The impersonal is the guiding principles that determine the nature of things that the personal must cope with in some way.

It is perhaps obvious that these two must both be present to “some” degree. The personal without the impersonal becomes a canvas of shallowness, an emptiness and meaningless without any pursuit for the persona to act or react towards. It is a flatness without depth. The impersonal without the personal becomes a philosophical tract without emotion, an unchanging void out of space and time, a philosophical point perhaps infinitely deep, but without height or width (lacking any resemblance to reality).

Having an ill-developed one of either is better but still creates the conditions of bad fiction. The personal with an ill-developed impersonal, has barebones story, themes, and so forth and so becomes a mess of cliché. The impersonal with an ill-developed personal is filled with pretension as the characters act as mere stand-ins for the abstractions the author really means to speak off.

In short, ill-developed personal makes caricatures of the characters. Ill-developed impersonal makes caricatures of the plot.

The universe can be looked at as matter with energy defining the matter or matter defining the energy. The universe can be looked at as a set of nouns/things of which there is a different set each second accounting for actions/verbs. Or it can be looked at as a set of actions/verbs that create persistent patterns we call nouns/things. So too it seems is the nature of fiction. Fiction is an interplay between the impersonal and the personal, and any good fictional story theoretically could be looked at a set of personae and their struggles towards the impersonal, or a set of impersonal principles manifesting as a set of personae.

If you are a westerner, you may see this in the perspective of the philosophers Plato, with his pursuit of the realm of the perfect forms, and Aristotle, who looked to develop a science based on the empirical around him. In each duality, I can see a shadow of the divide between the personal and the impersonal.

There seems to be a most universal metric of quality of fiction, and upon observing much of what is considered the greatest, it appears to be the union of the realms of the personal and the impersonal. This seems to transcend genre, medium, and artistic milieu.