It is often said that reality surpasses fiction. This phrase stems from the idea that fiction is something foreign to it. Of course, fiction is something unreal—that is its defining quality: it is a product of imagination, invented, even when based on real events. However, being unreal does not mean it does not contain truth. Fiction is capable of revealing to us, as Aristotle pointed out, a certain knowledge of the world through its representation. Art reveals the unspeakable through other languages, through symbols and the implicit. In both its creation and its enjoyment, there is something beyond aesthetic pleasure: the acquisition of knowledge. And although this applies to all the arts, it is more evident and less abstract in those that rely more heavily on narrative, such as literature or theater.
The art of conveying a message without explicitly stating it, and the ability to share an idea, an emotion, or a sensation without naming the thing itself, is one of the most difficult skills for a writer or playwright to develop. It is also, in many cases, what grants a work sufficient maturity to outlive and surpass its creator. There are countless examples. One of the most skilled writers in this regard in the history of world literature is Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), who was able to propose complex ideas without stating them outright—for example, through the contradictions in The Brothers Karamazov and the famous poem of the Grand Inquisitor. A reader is able to glimpse his philosophical proposals and discover new aspects of their own reality almost a century and a half later.
On the other hand, the phrase that reality surpasses fiction reveals a fundamental aspect of human nature: our unsurpassable inclination to interpret and to construct fictions around chaos and randomness. One of the most important plays written in Spanish (perhaps the most important) declares, among its many memorable lines: “for all of life is a dream, and dreams are but dreams.” It is the desperate declaration of Segismundo upon discovering (wrongly, as he believes) that his recent experiences as heir to the throne of Poland were “dreamed.” The play is Life Is a Dream, by Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681), and this idea echoes in many other works across genres around the world. William Shakespeare, perhaps the most famous playwright in history, also expressed it in Jacques’ monologue in the comedy As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”
There are more modern examples. “Life is a cabaret, my dear,” sings Sally Bowles, the protagonist of Cabaret, in response to her “paranoid” boyfriend worried about politics amid the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany. A clear message from playwright Joe Masteroff, who in turn based the work on the novel Goodbye to Berlin (1939) by Christopher Isherwood: the cabaret serves to forget the real world and mock it, but before it can truly separate itself, the real world catches up in the most brutal way possible. We are condemned to construct stories to understand the world, which perhaps does not need to be understood because it is merely an accident.
Carl Sagan also conveyed this idea, albeit without explicitly stating it, when he reflected on human existence based on the photograph of Earth taken by the Voyager probe in 1990. The image showed a distant, tiny blue dot where “everyone you love, know, have ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives (…). Earth is a tiny stage in a vast cosmic theater.” The fact that, in the enormous universe, planet Earth is little more than a blue speck does not, however, imply that our aspirations are insignificant. We are beings hungry for stories because the meaning of our own existence depends on them. And, curiously, what matters is not the story itself, but what it tells us about ourselves.
The American anthropologist Laura Bohannan, for example, documented in 1966 how, when Hamlet 's plot was recounted to the Tiv people of West Africa, they interpreted it from their own worldview, diverging from what anyone in England or the United States would have considered the correct, “universal” interpretation. They made important observations about kinship and considered the union of Gertrude and Claudius a valid and logical position; among other things, they refuted the existence of ghosts and explained Hamlet’s madness as witchcraft. A novel or play always has the potential to be interpreted differently from its author or a specific social group, because the context of the interpreter also matters.
Literature is the quintessential art form for transmitting knowledge; it is an essential document for understanding an era, a social context, a system of thought, and a set of ideas—or for revealing another through contrasting interpretations, as in the case of the Tiv. A good novel can depict, without explicitly stating it, a complex social dynamic. Goodbye to Berlinserves as an example, as Isherwood wrote it based on his experiences in the Weimar Republic.
Literature is also capable of producing a direct dialogue with the reader and letting them know that, as Segismundo well knew, “all life is a dream.” One of the resources for achieving this is metafiction, or self-aware narrative: those winks that characters give the reader to let them know they are fictional. This is a device that blurs the line between reality and fiction. There are several examples: Don Quixote in the second part when he discovers there is a first part that narrates his adventures; or Bastian, the protagonist of The Neverending Story (1979) by Michael Ende, in which he reads a book of the same title that tells his own story.
However, theater possesses a unique quality that transcends literature, and it lies in the fundamental aspect of a stage production: acting. The importance of this element is not merely the obvious—that without it there is no theater—but rather that it is an activity that involves a continuous exercise in understanding and reinterpreting what the playwright wrote. It goes a step further because it entails bringing a character to life through what Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938) called the creative process of experience and embodiment, which consists of a series of techniques and imaginative exercises focused not on pretending to do something, but on actually doing it. Acting consists of truly experiencing (in one's psychological state) what the character on the page experiences. This is why theater uniquely transcends the reality-fiction dichotomy, because it creates a liminal space (in which the actor is neither fully themselves nor fully the character) that, in this context, is called bifrontality.
And in theater, the notion of convention is also used, in which everyone (actors and spectators) implicitly agrees to understand something in a certain way. For example, that there is a fourth wall separating the stage from the audience, as if they didn't exist; or asides or soliloquies, in which a character says aloud what they are thinking without the other characters registering it, even though everyone hears them. It is worth noting that conventions are not only theatrical, as they are present in all areas of social life as rules, ranging from the most basic, like a certain way of greeting, to social roles. And they are, of course, invented, products of the imagination. Ortega y Gasset warned in Ideas and Beliefs (1940) that beliefs (things we take for granted and don't even know we don't question) are ideas that have become entrenched over a long time and have given structure to our reality, so that we are no longer aware that they too were invented, conceived.
But these are just examples of how, through their works, artists remind us (and themselves) time and again that we are beings in need of narratives and meanings, immersed in fantasy without knowing the difference between what we see and what is. This doesn't mean that nothing exists and that everything is relative, but it does show how incapable we are of completely shedding our own history when we analyze a social fact or any event. Thomas's principle sums it up very well: "If people define situations as real, they will be real in their consequences." It's worth keeping this in mind, as Calderón de la Barca expressed it through Segismundo: "Since life is so short, let us dream, soul, let us dream again; but it must be with attention and the understanding that we must awaken from this pleasure at the best time; for having this known, the disillusionment will be less; for it is to mock the deception by anticipating it." Reality doesn't surpass fiction because it is already fictional.
Photography by Fernanda Gutiérrez // Developed and scanned by Foto Hércules
Graduated in Politics and Public Administration from El Colegio de México, interested in the relationship between literature, culture and social life.