Imaginary Lands

[oursin]

Stimulated by this discussion with taelle to think about the question of imaginary lands which are not wholly imaginary, but are about inhabitants of one country's imaginings either about an idealised/other version of their own land (e.g. those idealised past periods so often invoked in support of various national agendas), or their suppositions about

Comments

[anghara]

I grew up on Kar May. As I progressed from childhood to (somewhat more educated) teen years and adulthood, I knew, intellectually, that he was talking balderdash - the noble savage, made even more noble in the end by "believing" the "true gospel" (and THAT message grated more and more as I frew older) but one thing he did leave with me. Winnetou was one of the upstanding heroes of my childhood, and to this day I admire the Apache nation because of him - them, and their fellow Indians, whose loss of their own culture and land I grew to understand deeply through this fictional account by a German writer who had never set foot in a pueblo.

[legionseagle]

Having suffered from a boyfriend who would keep trying to educate my literary taste by buying me RC Hutchinson novels, despite the fact that they made me profoundly and helplessly miserable I can only say that he is for my part a neglected novelist due for total annihilation from the memory of the world.

[oursin]

Hutchinson was definitely of the opinion that serious literature has to be massively depressing.

And by the way, happy birthday!

[green_knight]

The thing about Karl May is that even though he wrote without visiting, he managed to capture the landscapes he was describing to perfection - much better, in fact, than many of the writers who actually went places. The first time I stood on a patch of rolling prairie, or the day I saw the canyons of Utah - those were moments where my inner image, formed by years of reading Karl May during my formative years, and the reality in front of my eyes, merged in a single, satisfactory 'click.' And equally, his political analysis of the Middle East and all the tensions reigning it is eerily resonant with events of today.

I don't understand the lack of impulse to see for yourself, but writing about lands you have never visited, well, *that* I understand all too well.

[serrana]

As I know I've mentioned to you before, I'm *still convinced the UK is fictional -- despite having had lunch there. Of course, so is Berkeley, and I lived in and around there for over a decade. It's actually kind of handy -- when I got homesick in grad school, I could read Phillip K. Dick and David Lodge and Peter Beagle and Marion Zimmer Bradley novels and it was almost like being there.

Eugene is, fictively, terra incognita for me. I'm still not sure how I feel about that.

[taelle]

I think my imaginary England as I was growing up was more Agatha Christie and P.L. Travers than Dickens. I've even been to England, but it's still kind of imaginary. A bit.

I do not have imaginary Russia, though - Russians who have an imaginary Russia tended to be, in my experience, Not My Kind Of People (and imaginary USSR is probably worse). I wonder if it's true for other countries...

[oursin]

See my comments below on the people who would like to live in imaginary England - Not Quite Our Sort Dearie.