Comeuppance by William Flesch poses a few radically simple questions: Why are we interested in the fate of people we know to be imaginary? What can our story, the Darwinian story, tell us about the stories we tell?
Flesch ably adjudicates among the fascinating claims of game theory and the evolution of cooperation to argue we do not care about fictional beings because we identify with them; rather our interest in fiction is a special case of that glue indispensable to our social world, our interest in seeing cheaters punished and self-sacrifice rewarded. He also argues that a literary criticism informed by the best thinking about human nature need not succumb to an impoverishing reductionism. This wonderful and surprising book, then, is sort of proof by demonstration. It is academic in the best sense: the product of a critical, synthesizing intelligence drawing on his vast and omnivorous reading. (Milton’s Satan and Austen’s Emma wait in the wings with hardboiled detectives and a Tarrantino heroine; the critical insights of Heinrich von Kleist and Gilles Deleuze share the stage with The Fan Fiction Glossary). Along this delightful intellectual promiscuity runs a strain of something simply unafraid of thinking critically about where our stories touch what it means to live and suffer: As in, “Altruists need not be innocent, but they are on the side of the innocent” and “We feel pity when someone feels pain or oppression or grief, only rarely when they feel pity, and perhaps never when they feel self-pity.”
