Capturing the dream

You may not realize it from reading this blog, but I’ve been blocked for well over a month now. To psych myself up for what I hope will be a more productive writing weekend, I thought I’d post a few quotes on fiction-as-consensual-dream, an idea I first encountered in John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction (a book I dearly love and recommend to all writers).

I’ve quoted Gardner before, but it’s been well over a year, and some of you are relatively new to Balls and Walnuts. Here’s the money shot:

If we carefully inspect our experience as we read, we discover that the importance of physical detail is that it creates for us a kind of dream, a rich and vivid play in the mind. We read a few words at the beginning of the book or the particular story, and suddenly we find ourselves seeing not words on a page but a train moving through Russia, an old Italian crying, or a farmhouse battered by rain. We read on — dream on — not passively but actively, worrying about the choices the characters have to make, listening in panic for some sound behind the fictional door, exulting in characters’ successes, bemoaning their failures. In great fiction, the dream engages us heart and soul; we not only respond to imaginary things — sights, sounds, smells — as though they were real, we respond to fictional problems as though they were real: We sympathize, think, and judge. We act out, vicariously, the trials of the characters and learn from the failures and successes of particular modes of action, particular attitudes, opinions, assertions, and beliefs exactly as we learn from life. Thus the value of great fiction, we begin to suspect, is not just that it entertains us or distracts us from our troubles, not just that it broadens our knowledge of people and places, but also that it helps us to know what we believe, reinforces those qualities that are nobles in us, leads us to feel uneasy about our faults and limitations.

This is one of those paragraphs, like Nathanael West’s cannonball quote, which I revisit to fire myself up. If all else fails, I’ll write a bit of short fiction — that will often break a block. I’ve posted a new challenge over at Writer’s BBS, so perhaps I’ll participate in it. Something, anything to get unblocked.

I wish the muse would tell me what’s bugging her.

Back to fiction-as-consensual-dream. I’ve been rereading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (I read it for the jokes), and came across this today:

It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream — making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams . . .

And I wonder if he wasn’t thinking about writing — or perhaps editing — as he wrote these words:

No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work — no man does — but I like what is in the work — the chance to find yourself. Your own reality — for yourself — not for others — what no other man can ever know.

I would argue that Conrad’s Marlow is wrong on both counts. He does capture the dream-sensation; that’s the beauty of Heart of Darkness. And I also think he conveys to the reader his perception of reality.

That’s the goal, then; that’s the prize. When you can immerse your readers in the dream, even to the point of sharing those inexplicable dream sensations, you’ve succeeded in your task. Entertainment is important too, of course, but the two goals go hand in hand. I think the reading experience is so much more satisfying when the author falls away, is forgotten, disappears from view. We aren’t writers so much as we are conjurers. What better magic than when the magician himself vanishes?
D.