Thursday 8 March 2012

The Fictive Dream

The American author John Gardner used to talk about "the fictive dream", the idea that a novel or story lets the reader enter into almost a trance state while immersed in the story, all else forgotten. Gardner thought it was the novelist's job to not let anything jolt the reader out of this trance/dream state...
The idea of escape is very important too...it may be that the mind is really soaring, or escaping, during the period of reading a story...or sharing someone else's dream...released from the usual bounds and constrictions. 
(Maybe like when a Buddhist monk meditates and the mind soars free!)
It's almost like the mind speeds up too...zooming along to follow the story...(as long as we love the story!)
And along the way, while we're immersed in the dream, we will take in many little nuggets of gold from a good book...Roald Dahl was great for that, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory...there's a lot of "right and wrong" being taught to the reader, even while the dream is soaring along at top speed...
Or Aesop's Fables...the Tortoise and the Hare...you could tell a child all day about the facts and figures of going slow and steady vs a fast sprint burn-out that can't be sustained...but much more effective to invent some big, floppy-eared long-footed hare, flaunting and taunting some poor old tortoise with its powers of acceleration...and then see the tortoise somehow cross the finishing line first despite him seeming to have no chance!

So part of the skill of fiction would be to hide the scaffolding and architecture of the story, the nuts and bolts, from the reader, so that the reader is carried along effortlessly...

There may also be something of the premonition in a great story, the escape into the story may be more real than we at first think...each story may be a possible future coming to early life for a few hours...the author Colin Wilson talked about this in The Strength to Dream...he also talked about how we mostly live with a worm's eye view of the world, only seeing and feeling what is immediately around us...so we all seek to have periods of escape from this, freedom where we soar high and achieve a "bird's eye" view.

We are happier when we get this temporary bird's eye view...we feel free and perhaps for that short time before we fall back to earth again we are truly free...we've had a taste of it...a free state of mind...sometimes fiction can give this lift and freedom...sometimes the state of mind can come upon us all by itself...

A responder on a forum on the question of fiction vs non-fiction said something interesting to me once...he said he thought that there was a lack of compassion often, lying behind a distaste for all fiction (or for the fictive dream)...a lack of sympathy with the internal dream of the other person...he thought sometimes people had been brutalised and had that capacity to share and fall in love with another human being's dream broken for them...by first having their own inner right to dream stolen away from them harshly. 

So, by occasionally dreaming, or sharing each other's best dreams...we may be more human and humane when we fall back down into the day's "realities" again...



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1 comment:

  1. Deborah Logan, fan11 March 2012 at 08:38

    Well done, Mr. Logan, on launching your BlogSpot called The Solar Darkness with a post on The Fictive Dream.

    The juxtaposition of the blog title and The Fictive Dream post, go straight to the core of the seeming solar paradox.

    There are at least two possible interpretations for me:

    One of the notion of the dream being "eclipsed" for most of our waking lives by the cold and stark darkness of misunderstanding, ignorance, our pedestrian tendency to look down at our "feet of clay," and the inability for most of us to know how or when to look up, to find the "dream." The author makes the obscuration of the light pass quickly and opens the window to that sunlight (or shadow) of the fictive dream - allows us to discern the contrast between light and shadow.

    The second is the fact that deep within the core of the sun are unimaginably vast black clouds of molten gas and horrible tornadoes of hell which spin and twist unseen by most of us. But when they erupt into solar storms, they send out glorious rays and radiate into infinity. Again there is a vision of the fictive dream here - the turmoil and hell within us but more importantly within authors which occasionally come to the surface and provide light, heat and brief moments of insight and understanding for us readers.

    Your reference to John Gardner is well received. Gardner wrote:
    "This and nothing else is the desperately sought and tragically fragile writer’s process: in his imagination, he sees made-up people doing things—sees them clearly—and in the act of wondering what they will do next he sees what they will do next, and all this he writes down in the best, most accurate words he can find, understanding even as he writes that he may have to find better words later, and that a change in the words may mean a sharpening or deepening of the vision, the fictive dream or vision becoming more and more lucid, until reality, by comparison, seems cold, tedious, and dead.”
    – John Gardner, “The Art of Fiction”
    His novel Grendel is one I recently came to know and love. Grendel is truly a "fictive dream" who gives us considerable insight into our own humanity or lack of it.

    Gardner also wrote The Sunlight Dialogues in which he invokes the classical myths, the madness of magicians (or the magic of madness?) and the prosaic lot of the rest of us
    bound to law, order and rigid existence. So, he saw the inherent paradox which you have noticed, too.

    "Feet of clay" used in common parlance to mean a character defect, actually refers to a "fictive dream" of Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon detailed in the Biblical book of Daniel. He had a vision of terrible brightness and darkness in his dream. Thus, your noting that the fables of Aesop or stories not only allow us to soar near the sun, but also teach us lessons that most of us would not find independently - without our beloved authors - is apt.

    We are "happier when we get this temporary bird's eye view." We do indeed "feel free" before "we fall back to earth."

    And of course your fellow traveller, Carl Jung, would agree that the fictive dream serves as a spiritual guide for our waking hours and he talks about light and shadows as metaphors for our elemental selves.

    So my "take way" from your blog is that even after we have "fallen to earth" we know thereafter we can always pick up a book and fly again and again, with the stories of Icarus and Gardner and John Logan guiding our flights.

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