Topical Guide 205
Mark Dorset
Fictional Reality: Writer and Reader as Collaborators in the Making Thereof
Those stories that had appeared over the years, those stories of which I had been so fond, in which I thought I had found so much more than met the eye, beneath the text of which I thought I had been able to read a richer text about the way Larry lived with his family and his friends, the way he understood things, the way he felt about things, had been built on a deception.
Only after a careful rereading and a good deal of thought did I understand that underpinning my reading of the Larry Peters adventures, the only foundation beneath them, was what I had wanted to be there, nothing but what I had donated to Larry from my past, from my imagination. To a great degree, the Larry Peters I knew, the Larry Peters I had once wanted to be, had always been my creation, was even, perhaps, me.Little Follies, “Call Me Larry”
The bridge of language, metaphor, anecdote, and imagination that I build each morning to cross the incongruities in my life seems very frail indeed.
John Cheever, journal entry quoted by Susan Cheever in Home Before Dark
I try to bring the essentials to a scene, so the reader, for example, can bring his own sexuality to that scene, which makes it sexier. Your sexuality is mine because it’s yours. All I have to do is give you the lead, you bring your own perception, and you are in it.
Toni Morrison, in Charles Ruas’s Conversations with American Writers
In short, our gentleman became so immersed in his reading that he spent whole nights from sundown to sunup and his days frowm dawn to dusk in poring over his books, until, finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind. He had filled his imagination with everything that he had read, with enchantments, knightly encounters, battles, challenges, wounds, with tales of love and its torments, and all sorts of impossible things, and as a result had come to believe that all these fictitious happenings were true; they were more real to him than anything else in the world.
Miguel de Cervantes, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha (translated by Samuel Putnam)
Like the box in Goethe’s tale, a book is not only a fragment of the world but itself a little world. The book is a miniaturization of the world which the reader inhabits. In Berlin Chronicle, [Walter] Benjamin evokes his childhood rapture: “You did not read books through; you dwelt, abided between their lines.” To reading, the delirium of the child, was eventually added writing, the obsession of the adult. The most praiseworthy way of acquiring books is by writing them . . . and the best way to understand them is to enter their space; one never really understands a book unless one copies it, as one never understands a landscape from a plane, but only by walking through it.
See also: Reality, Real and Fictional TG 27, TG 62, TG 64, TG 76, TG 78, TG 85
At cocktail time: Playing for Change, Song Around theWorld, “Gimme Shelter”
[more to come on Tuesday, March 1, 2022]
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