Topical Guide 204
Mark Dorset
Reality: Real and Fictional
From the ruins and the dissolution of real reality something very different will emerge, not a copy but an answer: fictional reality.
Mario Vargas Llosa, The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary
I know that the line between real reality and fictional reality is very thin in the passage that follows. It’s drawn very nearly from life.
Albertine and I were sitting in Dudley Beaker’s living room one evening. We had come for dinner, and we had been having a wonderful time. …
It was late now, and the four of us had moved from the dining room to the living room, where we sat sipping cognac, which I was trying very hard to learn how to sip, and talking, talking, talking. … Talk had turned to Burton Calder, whose new novel, Burning Wind, had everyone talking, including me. …
“You know,” I said, and I paused to gather all their attention, “that’s what I’d really like. I’d like a Burning Wind. I’d like to write a big, fat book.” …
Mr. Beaker … rose, stretched, yawned, looked down at me, and said, deliberately, “Ahhhh, but Peter Leroy will never do that.”
He gave me a twisted smile, drank the last of his cognac, and got our coats while my heart sank and snow fell on my future.Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
One evening, when Kraft was in his early twenties, he confessed to someone we’ll call “that cruel bastard” that he had in mind a big book that would—but here that cruel bastard interrupted him to say, “Ahhhh, but Eric Kraft will never do that.”
For a long time, while Kraft repeatedly tried and failed to make a start on the big book, he feared that the cruel bastard might be right, until a day came when he realized that the cruel bastard was right—Eric Kraft couldn’t write it and wouldn’t write it. Ahhhh, but he could imagine someone who could write it and would write it, and on that day he turned the writing over to Peter Leroy, his invention, his other.
Take that, you cruel bastard.
See also: The Babbington Review, Issue Number 8, “Making Your Other: An Exercise in Displacement”
Watching on the treadmill: Life in Manhattan, 1911 (promoted as “Surreal Old Timey Film of New York city in 1911”). Ignore the ridiculous title. “In 1911, Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern produced a nine-minute film showing everyday life in Manhattan. The remarkably clear footage, released by the Museum of Modern Art last year, includes recognizable modern-day landmarks like the Flatiron Building and the Statue of Liberty, as well as buildings that no longer exist, such as the New York Herald Building.”
[more to come on Monday, February 28, 2022]
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