“This radical dislocation between the world of romance and
the world of experience has been exploited in different ways. One way, the most
obvious, has been to suspend the laws of nature in order to give more power to
the laws of narrative, which are themselves projections of the human psyche in
the form of enacted wishes and fears…in the sublimative narratives of pure
romance they are merely more obvious than elsewhere because less disguised by
other interests and qualities.”
This is why literature is the true window to our souls,
reflecting our worldviews more than our world. People who wish to resist evil
but don’t have the power to do so will be attracted to stories about the
successful resistance, and the less power one has the more power one will dream
of having, hence why children are attracted to comic book and video game
heroes. Adults develop “other interests and qualities” so one’s taste in
literature can evolve, but the same basic desire for empowerment or
satisfaction never goes away completely.
Just yesterday I read an otherwise very good novel, “The Language of
Flowers” in which the heroine has remarkably forgiving friends, leaving me
wondering if that is what the author secretly wishes for.
“When romance returns deliberately to confront reality it
produces the various forms of didactic romance or fabulation that we usually
call allegory, satire, fable, parable, and so on…traditionally, it has been a
favorite vehicle for religious thinkers, precisely because religions have
insisted that there is more to the world than meets the eye, that the
common-sense view of reality – “Realism” is incomplete and therefore false.
Science, of course, has been telling us much the same thing for several hundred
years…thus it is not surprising that what we call ‘science’ fiction should
employ the same narrative vehicle as the religious fictions of our past.”
Science fiction latches onto many of the same questions as
religion, but no one novel that I am aware of tries to answer all of them. The existence of evil is the most common
question addressed, but free will v. fate, equality v inequality, our
relationship with nature, and our origins are all questions SF authors have
struggled with. Books like “Dune,” “Foundation,”
and “The Lord of the Rings” have directly shaped more minds than any book of
philosophy. Philosophers may have indirectly shaped more minds, because more
popular authors have read their books, but a literary game of connections gets
too complicated for me.
“And if a writer transports men to Mars merely to tell a
cowboy story, he produces not structural fabulation but star dreck – harmless,
perhaps, but an abuse of that economy of means that governs mature esthetic
satisfaction. Or if he allows such a variety of magical events that his
fictional world seems deficient in its own natural laws, his work will fail
structurally and cognitively, too, though it may retain some sublimative
force. But in the most admirable of
structural fabulations, a radical discontinuity between the fiction world and
our own provides both the means of narrative suspense and of speculation. In
the perfect structural fabulation, idea and story and so wedded as to afford us
simultaneously the greatest pleasures that fiction provides: sublimation and
cognition.”
Probably the reason I named “Dune,” “Foundation,” and “The
Lord of the Rings” is because they provide both sublimative and cognitive
satisfaction. Any of the books I enjoy rereading reach that beautiful level of
story and idea, from “Jane Eyre” to “The Gap Series.” Even the controversial “Atlas Shrugged”
reveals ideas through plot and description, even if it is weighed down by
excessive dialogue.
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