Who likes to dream in the audience, and why
Yesterday, in ‘Dramtime,’ I wrote about ways to induce the dream or trance state in readers.
But why, you might wonder, would any talesman wish to do this?
The answer is that most fiction, and most movies, are enjoyed as dreams by their audiences.
To sum up, the ‘fictive dream’ that such audiences enjoy, involves identifying with the heroes in these tales. For the time they pass while reading, or hearing, or watching, these tales as they are told, the audience members get to live another life. As I defined it a while back, it is Adventure, or what once was called Romance:
The Other Self
with the Other Sex
living the Other Life
on the Other World.
What kinds of tales are those enjoyed as dreams?
Most genre fiction is for dreaming — this includes Romance and Adventure, which have spawned all the popular genres today. Fantasy, mystery, romance (small r here), science-fiction, westerns, historicals, pornography, war, confessional, horror, suspense.
Maybe the best way to look at the matter is to ask, What kinds of fiction are not read as dreams? I dare say almost all fiction reading is today done by those of us who wish to dream we are living another life as the Other. There remain some reading however that is more analytical.
Puzzle fiction is not for dreaming. There are some mysteries that are meant more as puzzles than tales. These are really riddles in the form of tales, and are meant to be solved more than experienced.
There is also a set of literary tales meant to be read as exercises in style, and psychological portraits of characters that are more akin to detailed news accounts of pathological murderers, where we are intensely interested in what could make a fellow man do such horrible acts, and yet we would never feel any urge to identify with him. There is always in these tales, both literary and psychological portraits, a great sense of distance between us and the characters and the events. One way to achieve and maintain such distance is through the constant presence of the Narrator, whose presence reminds us that it is but a tale.
Indeed, the Narrator disrupts the ease with which we fall into the fictive dream, and this is probably the reason why the Narrator has fallen so far out of fashion today.
(Composed on keyboard Wednesday, July 2, 2008)
1 comment:
I was struck by this phrase:
"There is also a set of literary tales meant to be read as exercises in style."
I have just become aware of Oulipo and their work over the years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo
I read Raymond Queneau a long time ago, but never realized there was a whole movement of people writing like this!
Anyway, I'm very happy that your general cosmological sense about writing and telling stories makes room for these variants. It's important to identify them, give them their due, and then remove them from the conversation. I sincerely doubt that the characters in any Oulipo work are meant to have the universal emotional qualities that characters in classical dramatic narrative require! The alternative (which I've seen too much of lately) is to dismiss the broader reaches of literature and experimentation as if they were lesser. Let's be clear! The "talesman's" art requires a much narrower skillset - but by narrower I mean honed and refined to perfection for a single task.
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