Bead on a String

[sartorias]

I've been hunkered down trying to finish this massive book, fighting heat (this room never cools down, ever) and dealing with family kafuffle, including five days there of having to walk four separate dogs. (Two dogs will kill each other on sight, one is so old and rickety he can't keep up, etc) so I'm reading here, trying to keep up with people's

Comments

[whswhs]

You know, I started to comment to you on the Nabokovian approach, and what I find unsatisfactory about it (or what I've read about it), but I found myself thrashing around in an unsatisfactory way. I don't think my thoughts on it are coherent, or are at the point where they fall into coherence when I try to express them. Maybe another time.

I can say that, with movies, I remember watching the first two Harry Potter films, and always being aware of myself looking at the screen, and saying things like "Oh, nice chocolate frog!"-but when I saw Prisoner of Azkaban I got involved with the characters and fell into the story. And I consider that a damning thing to say about the first two. I can step back and think about aspects of a movie analytically while I'm involved with the story, but if I spend the whole movie at that remove, I think the director has failed.

But anyway, I want to say that for me, there's a distinction between wish fulfillment and emotional engagement. If I read, say, Kipling's stories ("As Easy as A.B.C." or "The Miracle of Purun Bhagat" or "A Church There Was at Antioch") or many of Heinlein's juveniles (I'm thinking, for example, of Tunnel in the Sky or Citizen of the Galaxy) or The Lord of the Rings, there are passages that move my profoundly, but that aren't "wish fulfillment" in any way I can see. I think, for example, of the end of LotR, where Sam walks into Bag End and say, "Well, I'm home." And I think I read more for emotional engagement than for wish fulfillment. Too much or too obvious wish fulfillment can put me off.

You may be saying, or assuming, the same thing; but I'm not trying to argue against you if you're not. I'm just trying to make a distinction that, for me, is important.

[sartorias]

Yeah, we're probably more or less in agreement--wish fulfillment being the extreme opposite of the 'realism as nasty brutish and short' school of literature. All of it can be argued, but generalizing wildly.

[sartorias]

So for example, I feel the same about Sam and "I'm home" which has an emotional resonance that seems real. Whereas it would have been a wish fulfillment story if Sam had been made King of the Shire, or Frodo had had a magic wand waved over him by a grateful Galadriel and he smiled and got married and he was made king of the Shire. There's a degree of realism in LOTR in spite of the giant spiders and the orcs and magic and all the rest.

[whswhs]

I always like to quote Marianne Moore's line about "imaginary gardens with real toads in them."

[sartorias]

That's a good one!