Hofstadter, Dennett - The Mind's I

Fiction 463modulations of feeling he knows and records, my Jamesian author.But does he control it all? Or does our author, through writing, learn about hischaracters and from them? Is he surprised by what he finds us doing and thinking? Whenwe feel we freely think or act on our own, is this merely a description he has written infor us, or does he find it to be true of us, his characters, and therefore write it? Does ourleeway and privacy reside in this, that there are some implications of his work that hehasn't yet worked out, some things he has not thought of which nevertheless are true inthe world he has created, so that there are actions and thoughts of ours that elude his ken?(Must we therefore speak in code?) Or is he only ignorant of what we would do or say insome other circumstances, so that our independence lies only in the subjunctive realm?Does this way madness lie? Or enlightenment?Our author, we know, is outside our realm, yet he may not be free of ourproblems. Does he wonder too whether he is a character in a work of fiction, whether hiswriting our universe is a play within a play? Does he have me write this work andespecially this very paragraph in order to express his own concerns?It would be nice for us if our author too is a fictional character and this fictionalworld he made describes (that being no coincidence) the actual world inhabited by hisauthor, the one who created him. We then would be fictional characters who,unbeknownst to our own author although not to his, correspond to real people. (Is thatwhy we are so true to life?)Must there be a top-floor somewhere, a world that itself is not created in someoneelse's fiction? Or can the hierarchy go on infinitely? Are circles excluded, even quitenarrow ones where a character of one world creates another fictional world wherein acharacter creates the first world? Might the circle get narrower, still?Various theories have described our world as less real than another, even as anillusion. The idea of our having this inferior ontological status takes some getting used to,however. It may help if we approach our situation as literary critics and ask the genre ofour universe, whether tragedy, farce, or theater-of-the-absurd? What is the plot line, andwhich act are we in?Still, our status may bring some compensations, as, for example, that we live oneven after we die, preserved permanently in the work of fiction. Or if not permanently, atleast for as long as our book lasts. May we hope to inhabit an enduring masterpiece ratherthan a quickly remaindered book?Moreover, though in some sense it might be false, in another