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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