Fantasy and reality, Iowa City Public Library, date unknown |
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Fantasy and reality, Iowa City Public Library, date unknown
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| Rating | |
| Title | Fantasy and reality, Iowa City Public Library, 2004 |
| Creator |
Shimada, Masahiko, 1961- Hvorecký, Michal Rivero, Giovanna, 1972- Stamatēs, Alexēs 'Āyidī, Aḥmad |
| Creator - Nationality |
Japanese Slovak Bolivian Greek Egyptian |
| Contributor | Merrill, Christopher |
| Date Original | 2004 |
| Description | "Shimada Masahiko traces all experiences back to the brain, including hysteria, neurosis, and relief that comes through receiving the word as medicine. Michal Hvorecký discusses the topic through two Czech writers, Dominik Tatarka and Egon Bondy, who he says give the world an imaginative new dimension, where borders between fantasy and reality blur convincingly. Giovanna Rivero believes that "fiction, fantasy and truth are a triangle, and fiction is the vehicle through which fantasy and truth blend, confuse and devour us." Alexis Stamatis states, "Real is that what can happen. Either in life, or in the mind." “to know that I am no-thing, that is reality. Ahmed Al-Aidy rephrases a quote by the Sufi master El-bistami and says, "To know that I am everything, that is fantasy. And between these two my pen moves.” |
| Venue | Iowa City Public Library |
| Topical Subject (LCTGM) |
Authors Writing |
| Geographic Subject | United States -- Iowa -- Iowa City |
| Chronological Subject | 2000-2010 |
| Transcription | About Dreams Which Confuse Fantasy and Reality Shimada Masahiko A brain is not its thought. When it claims that it is, it sounds like it is saying just that which it has contradicted. I'd like to ask the person who said that all behavior is a command of the brain: how do you then explain that action and speech are different? Do you say that it is because the left brain's thoughts and the right brain's thoughts are different from each other? A brain doesn't understand itself. Just as sometimes I don’t understand myself. Dreams are a good example. I break my neck on the nonsense of dreams every morning. However, even if I had a mysterious dream, it is forgotten beautifully after thirty minutes, and I return to the boring real world. A bad dream is sometimes the reflection of stress and frustration. Or, it suffers from self-contradiction, so that a brain may ask a dream for a solution. A dream is a physical phenomenon of the brain. Both emotion and pleasure are products of the brain, they can be reduced to their physical properties. We can also trace the origin of politics and culture and religion to the brain. Ancient politics depended on the dreams the shamans had, and their interpretation of those dreams. Neuroses and hysteria originated in the interpretation of dreams, too. If a vision of the future is seen in the dream, it is taken to be God's divine message. Religion begins from the dream which the founder of the religion dreamed. The border between dream and reality used to be not important. In the industrial civilization we need that border just as a convenience for living. No matter how many troubles a person has, he or she is saved by the dream which he dreams. Everybody holds troubles in their heart. Sometimes this is trauma, and then therapy is necessary: healing and psychoanalysis. If the trauma is left alone, it will cause hysteria and neurosis, and then become a deep wound on the wrist. The injured person must be able to interpret themselves so as to be analyzed by others. But the person who can give a clear definition to his worry needs neither psychoanalysis nor fortune-telling. Characters in recent mystery or romance or fantasy literature drag out each and every trauma, and from this they spin their story. A story becomes the start from which out the damaged self can recover. It seems that there are many injured people, who try to write a story for personal 1 healing. Because of this, it is said that the population that writes and that which reads are almost the same. In poetry, there are more writers than readers. Popular novel writers still obsess over character, hunting for alter-egos. Politics is also based on this method. The process that lifted Bush to the Presidency was something like that of a character hunting for an alter-ego, too. In his mid-30s, he was lost in the dark forest halfway through his life, like Dante. He suffered from alcoholism, and from business that didn't go well. He asked God for rescue, was born again, and now believes he became the President by God's revelation, is carrying out God's justice, and does so by striking evil. In this way, Bush is like the hero of a fantasy novel. The people who voted for him now must subscribe to this fantasy. More than fiction, good poetry is good medicine, which acts directly on the heart. The effect is even stronger if the poetry is accompanied by melody and pleasant rhythm. Since ancient times, an excellent poet was even considered to be a shaman, able to cure sickness. Pain cuts into the flesh more deeply than any medicine. In the same way, distress is deeper than any word, and it sticks in the heart. The medicine which is effective against the pain is hard to take, and the word which is effective in distress is difficult to understand. But it is necessary for the person with deep worries to listen. Therefore, the person who expects to be injured deeply in the future should get accustomed to the word as a powerful drug before he too becomes lost in a dark forest. 2 Fantasy and Reality Michal Hvorecky As we all know, boundaries between fantasy and reality are blurred in some of the very first literary works, such as The Epic of Gilgamesh. Later Francois Rabelais, Jonathan Swift, Laurence Stern, Goethe and Voltaire further evolved this pattern, but not until the Realism Movement in the 19th century was there any need for categories such as “fantasy” and “reality.” This was because the literature’s original function was more mythic and religious, absorbing all parts of a society’s culture, not simply the artistic part, as we are used to nowadays. The crossing of the gap between fantasy and reality became part of the tradition of 20th century middle European authors of the former Habsburg Empire such as Robert Musil, Alfred Kubin, Sándor Márai and Franz Kafka. This crossing was also an important part of the modern Czechoslovakian literary tradition. The futuristic and catastrophic novels War With the Newts and The White Disease by novelist and philosopher Karel Èapek were partly inspired by the work of the mystic Joachim de Fiore. Fiore was also the subject of Èapek’s early work of non-fiction. Whereas the American science-fiction of the 30’s and 40’s tended towards the bug-eyed monster genre, Slavic literature of the same period embraced an ironic sense of humor, a love of the absurd, and an innovative style of writing. In 1948, the totalitarian regime and strong censorship began in Czechoslovakia. Even Isaac Asimov was forbidden, and Philip K. Dick´s Scanner Darkly was only published in Slovak by mistake as anti-drug literature. The regime lasted for four decades and brought with it the doctrine of socialist realism. Within this doctrine, culture was understood to be a mechanism of media propaganda. In the stated governed economy no real book market existed. The special tension between fantasy and reality in Czechoslovakian literature is particularly evident in the works of two authors: Egon Bondy (Czech), banned for 40 years, imprisoned many times Dominik Tatarka (Slovak), banned for 25 years, imprisoned at home Neither of these authors was born into socialism, but during their lifetimes, both were confronted with the reduced status of the freedom of the author. Reality represented a cultural challenge they needed to respond to. Censorship was a common thing for authors who refused to write under an ideological dictate. Writers such as Bondy and Tatarka were crossing the traditional borders of the genre in an attempt to express the modern totalitarian world in which they were living. Readers expected signs of this criticism in the writers’ works. The more courageous the writer, the greater the effect of his work on the public. Dominik Tatarka – The Demon of Agreement (a novelette, 1956) The controversial dystopia The Demon of Agreement delivers a horrible vision of a totalitarian society. It is both an engaging story and an allegory, fueled by intense disillusionment with Soviet Communism. The hero, Bartolomej, criticizes the work of the “central ideological organization,” the Czechoslovakian version of the Orwellian Big Brother. Both contemporary and futuristic, the novelette provoked fear because of how closely it fitted 3 the reality of 50´s Stalinism. The mix of characters, both fictional and real, dead and living, reflected the rise of a new paradigm, a symptom of coming postmodern times. Egon Bondy – Invalid Siblings (a novel, 1974) The novel Invalid Siblings, which takes place in the year 2600, exists on the borderline between utopia and dystopia. In this novel Egon Bondy coined the term “second culture” (Czechoslovakian underground subculture), an archipelago of intellectuals and artists who were relegated to the social margin and described by the rulers as “invalids.” The narrator, 20-year-old Vera, feels caught in joyless isolation. Her outside reality is a threat and the capitol city of Prague appears to be a “glass metropolis, devoid of people” submerged in a flood. The floating metropolis is one of the signs of the looming apocalypse. Bondy’s use of carnivalisation and dark humor are references to the invasion of “allied armies” in Czechoslovakia in 1968. A means to an end is the final realization of Huxley’s Brave New World – the annihilation of everyone. But even this becomes an object of Bondy’s incessant irony and derision. Invalid Siblings is fantastic writing in the sense that it exceeds the boundaries of pure realism (Bondy´s term: “total realism”). Bondy is a writer who employed the themes of science fiction to expose the foibles of contemporary society, to promulgate his pro-democratic, anti-totalitarian rhetoric, and to outline his relativist philosophy. Both Tatarka and Bondy give the world an imaginative new dimension, where borders between fantasy worlds and reality blur convincingly. Their literary careers radiate their extraordinary gift: accurate portrayal of the tragic dichotomy imposed upon them by the tension between the historical moment and their own imaginations. In totalitarian times, Tatarka and Bondy were able them to speak about their society much more openly and critically than the literary mainstream. Specifically, their use of the literary genres of utopia and dystopia provided an excellent medium for the political metaphor. Their similarities and differences help us to better understand the world to which we return after reading the last pages of their books. 4 Fantasy: the Fidelity of the Mirrors Giovanna Rivero No one knows who is behind the page, who is reading us, watching us, spying on us, believing with a certain morbid fascination, like an innocent voyeur, that the story made of letters is our life. This could be considered praise if we apply the following formula: if what you write is true, then what you write is good, and you are a true writer. However, the formula doesn’t always work. Sometimes it becomes a cage and we become prisoners of our fantasy. I want to share an anecdote from my history with you, perhaps because the moment to carry out my own catharsis has arrived. When I published my first novel, The Chameleons, I was “happily married,” as a fairy tale would put it. Nonetheless, the monstrous silence of dissatisfaction with married life was creeping inside me, taking up every space in my soul. Before The Chameleons, I had published three books of stories; but this new erotic novel was what would construct or destroy a public image for me. Later, it was difficult to recognize my own responses during interviews. A kind of alienation, a phantasm had occupied my place. Mr. Hyde had just murdered Dr. Jekyll. My ex-husband was also unable to discern the limit between fantasy and reality. The novel is written in first person; it’s the autobiography of a woman who becomes aware of her emotional experiences, of her sexuality, of her dissatisfactions and desires. My ex-husband believed incorrectly that she, the protagonist, was I. Obviously that was not the only point of conflict leading to our divorce, maybe it was only the tip of the iceberg. But, of course, that is not what’s important in this paper. I only want to point out that the power of the word, in my case, became flesh, and the price was very high. The novel became a prophecy of what was to come in my own life. Umberto Eco says that each sign, each metaphor, becomes an act to the extent that that fantasy, superimposed on reality, replaces it. Of course, I know that if I write a story about a murderer I have no reason to become a murderer. It is our fundamental dissatisfaction with immediate reality, with routine, and the things that are repeated mechanically, like a machine for living, that make us write and invent. For the time being, the only thing I know is that I have been given this life. At times it seems very long to me, it wearies me to live it, to overcome difficulties, to pay taxes, put on makeup; but at times I think that it is too short, that I’d like to experience every possibility, like an eternal hitchhike ride, never knowing where I’ll end up. It’s then that I create characters that don’t exist, in order to somehow ride this roller coaster of experiences. Is this perhaps an illusion? An epiphany? Some kind of schizophrenia? I don’t know. The world is wide and alien, and so I appropriate that distant world through fantasy, sometimes as though I were going to attend a costume party. I stand in front of the mirror, then, to see how well the words fit my mask, my feathers and sequins. The image that the mirror reflects back isn’t always the one I expect, and from that surprise arises the new and original metaphor to which Umberto Eco refers. 5 In Latin America, García Márquez and Alvaro Mutis, to cite a couple of famous names, have created non-existent cities, not as a game in the style of Italo Calvino, but as if that space and not others were the ones where people grow up, suffer, love, die and are revived. The generation of writers before mine has had to write under the shadow of those cities, of Macondos and Santa Marías, small, magic towns where anything can occur with complete naturalness, where dogs can howl in suffering for their loved ones, and people can bark from hunger. My generation has overcome the irresistible force of that style, perhaps because technology’s special effects make a tradition of magical worlds filled with women who wait like so many eternal Penelopes seem ridiculous. In our new rhetoric, images are fragmented into a hazardous and chaotic sequentiality that seduces us. This fantasy is like traveling in a bus, the window’s frame shows us images that last a second: a girl who’s too skinny, possibly anorexic, an old man who struggles against the wind to light his cigarette, a woman who discreetly adjusts her pantyhose. Maybe fantasy is an infinite comic strip into which we can insert a vignette blindly, in any part of the chapter. I think so. I also believe that fiction, fantasy and truth are a triangle, and fiction is the vehicle through which fantasy and truth blend, confuse and devour us. It’s not surprising that cinema has returned to the classic heroes. Spiderman has returned. Isaac Asimov offers us “I, Robot,” and animated actors attempt to replace Hollywood. Fantasy gestates reality in its womb. This, of course, is not apocalyptic news, it’s only a turn in a cycle. In a couple of decades we’ll again feel nostalgic for romantic comedies and linear stories that don’t obligate us to travel in the time machine until our nerves are on edge. Why do we write? Are we fakers? Maybe big liars or a gentle impostors? Again, I don’t have an answer. Anyway, since the dawn of time, the need to recreate reality reminds us that we need to challenge mortality in order to continue living with the only sure promise that we have: we are going to die. As writers, we leave behind a cast of characters who will outlive us. It is an act that says: “Hey, God, I want to be like you, I also want to create something that hasn’t been invented.” We want to find the word, the story, the plot inside ourselves that will have our mark. Only then can we write our own epitaph. Fantasy saves us from mediocrity. Reality, of course, is not always mediocre. How mediocre is a man who has decided to kill his wife’s lover? This happens everyday, we only have to open the police section of the newspapers. The reader believes in the “official words” covered by the verisimilitude of the journalism. If it’s believable, it’s true, at least as long as the fascination of a reader behind the page lasts. Permanence in the realm of the imaginary depends up how good of writers we become. On that personal path, we are irrevocably alone, barely accompanied by our phantasms, demons, by our invisible cities and friends. In some marvelous way, that converts us again into children, and naively protects us from everything else. 6 Writing is a mysterious act of faith, so blind, so committed, so peaceful and, at the same time so arrogant, like believing in God. 7 Fantasy and Reality Alexis Stamatis I quote from the «hyperdictionary», a useful tool you can find on the net. Fantasy: Imagination unrestricted by reality. Imagination: The formation of a mental image of something that is not perceived as real and is not present to the senses. Reality: All of our experiences that determine how things appear to us. So Fantasy is: The formation of a mental image of something that is not perceived as real, unrestricted by all our experiences that determine how this thing appears to us”. Confused? Yes that is what the real, rational world does to us, even through a hyper - invention such as the internet... Thank God things in the world of fiction are more free flowing... “All novels are really metaphors of reality,” John Fowles said. Writing fiction is not an escape from reality, it is a plunge into it. Even “magic realism,” a term coined by the Venezuelan writer Uslar Pietri, and excellently expressed in literature by such figures as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Juan Rulfo, is nothing more that heightened reality. Real is that what can happen. Either in life, or in the mind. A novel is, in a sense, a construction. And as such, it obeys certain laws. These laws are not of course those of everyday life - although they are not so distant from it. A character in a novel is believable – or should I say real - if he can act according to these laws. If he does this successfully, he acquires a unique property: he is able to literally do whatever his creator wishes… Let’s take as an example a famous short story by Kafka: The Metamorphosis. This is the first paragraph: One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. He laid on his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided up into rigid bow-like sections. From this height, the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes. From the first line we are already transferred into a world beyond the borders of reality, into the realm of fantasy, science fiction, the absurd, allegory - you name it. A man wakes up as a bug? This is not stuff someone can easily relate to. However, as we continue reading, we are able to follow this story with ease and enjoy it. That is because the author sets the laws from the beginning. Kafka starts by feeding the reader a specific, bizarre, concrete statement. Samsa wakes up transformed into a bug. This assertion seals the contract between writer and reader. We almost immediately identify with poor Gregor and read the rest of the story, thinking, fantasizing of him as a monstrous bug jailed in a room. Throughout the story Gregor obeys the laws the author has set out from the beginning. In order to write intriguing fantasy, Kafka has to be strictly attentive to every concrete detail, if he is to be believed. ALEXIS STAMATIS: FANTASY AND REALITY 1 8 All fiction is an illusion, but it has to be a believable one. If, in order to describe what you see, you are obliged to send your hero back in time, make him speak from the dead, or transform him into a bug that is okay, as long as you make it believable. Personally, as a writer, I am often concerned with the limits between fantasy and reality. Eighty percent of my novel Like a Thief in the Night takes place inside the protagonist’s head. She is an actress who undergoes a kaleidoscopic mind journey to fictitious places, a descent into a bizarre world that brings a number of buried secrets into light. Falling into a carefully--I hope--prepared narrative trap, the reader is led to believe that all these mysterious things actually happen to the protagonist in reality, only to be shocked at the last chapter, when it is revealed that the past 250 pages of the book were just a dream, a hallucination, a fantasy. I just said the reader is shocked. But is he really? Why? Because he suddenly realized that what he read wasn’t «real»? But, hang on a minute; at the time he was reading it, he believed it was actually happening. He remembers actions. And that is what matters. Reality is what is remembered. In life too, remembered things are not reproduced in the mind exactly as they have been experienced. The mind, memory, is not a digital camera, it is a chiaroscuro painting. We writers write about what we see, either with our eyes, or with our soul. The night I realized I wanted to become a writer, I was at a pub in London, sipping a beer and looking at the indifferent scene in front of me. This scene, this “plan” – as the French would put it - involved everyday sounds and images: trees, parked cars, people passing by, a dog, moist whispers from the leaves, a distant voice. Suddenly I understood that, within this trivial canvas, there was everything. I tested the image I was seeing against all values, all notions, all questions, and all ideas that sprang into my mind - however crazy, over the top or surrealistic they might have been. The “plan” contained all the answers. This accidental canvas reproduced the world, both in its reality and its fantasy. Later, as I started to work as a novelist, I understood that what the writer actually does is an editing job. The writer is a tutor, an editor of chaos. When I say chaos, I don’t mean disorder, but an uncharted space which contains emotions, loss, memory, conflict, reality and fantasy, a space which is a direct reflection of the universe. But the writer is at the same time a shepherd of clouds – clouds being the ideas, the feelings, the sentiments, the fluid of life. He guides the clouds in such a way that he permits them to be in a state of continuous free movement as well as one of constant alert. The writer is the spectator who follows their movement and chooses the one that interests him most. This movement becomes the writer’s world. In everyday life, we are at times drawn into situations where there are no clear borders between fantasy and reality. How then can we expect clear, definite boundaries in an art which only exists in mind and on paper? Fantasy and Reality are the two faces of Ianos, inseparable and knitted together as one. “Reality,” as Will Blythe said, “is largely created by the observer, which makes it an awful lot like - well – fiction.” Fantasy is actually a means of extending, bisecting, transforming, and editing this reality, in order to return to it. And fiction, literary creation, is this “Other way to see,” as Emily Dickinson brilliantly said, it is “another gaze” at the world, a gaze which interprets reality with fantasy and fantasy with reality, an imaginative construction with truth as its basic element. ALEXIS STAMATIS: FANTASY AND REALITY 2 9 Upheaval Ahmed Al-Aidy El-bistami, a sufi master, used to say, “to know that I am no-thing, that is wisdom. To know that I am everything, that is love. And between these two my life moves.” Think of everything and no-thing in a different way. Think of them as two sides of the same coin. So are Fantasy and Reality: two sides of the same coin. Do you know what the good thing about having a coin is? Flipping the coin. When you do that, listen to that metal vibration. Listen sincerely to the wings of this metal butterfly. When interviewed a young writer said, “my mission as a writer is to confuse the reader, to make him debate his beliefs.” That’s the core. Flipping our consciousness. Flipping the coin. You have two choices: flirt with the reality until it accepts you, or banish yourself to your daydreams. Of course the real world can carry all the good news to us: war, tornadoes, AIDS , nuclear weapons, cancer, and windows xp. But we have the freedom to be in two places at once. One foot in the real world and the other in a secret promised land. In the “Utopia” of the tired laborers, where there’s no black or white, but all the shades in between. Where your soul reshapes things. Where you’ll be able to kiss a wound and “look it’s gone.” Where you’ll be able to bribe the gatekeepers with little money. Any currency will be fine. Put your hand in your pocket and get the coin out then. Flip it in the air. When it touches the gatekeeper’s palm, he’ll turn into a butterfly. You’ll be able to plant your heart in the earth and throw your soul into the sky, to take strength from the earth, and courage from heaven. Heaven on one side, and the earth on the other. Flip the coin. Flip. Then wait for the upheaval. El-bistami says, ���to know that I am no-thing, that is wisdom. To know that I am everything, that is love. And between these two my life moves.” I say: “to know that I am no-thing, that is reality. To know that I am everything, that is fantasy. And between these two my pen moves.” 10 |
| Type (DCMIType) | Moving image |
| Type (AAT) |
Presentations (Communicative events) |
| Language | English |
| Digital Collection | Virtual Writing University Archive |
| Contributing Institution | Iowa City Public Library |
| Subcollection | International Writing Program Collection |
| Rights Management | Educational use only, no other rights given. U.S. and international copyright laws may protect this digital object. Commercial use or distribution of the object is not permitted without prior permission of the copyright holder. |
| Contact Information | Contact the VWU Webmaster: http://www.writinguniversity.org/index.php/main/info/25/ |
Description
| Title | Fantasy and reality, Iowa City Public Library, date unknown |
| Type (DCMIType) | Moving Image |
| Type (IMT) | mp4 |
| Duration | 01:28:52 |
| Digitization Specifications | Received as MPEG2 and converted to mp4 for streaming. |
| Date Digital | 2004 |
| File Name | iwp-icpl_fantasy.mp4 |
| Original File Name | iwp_fantasy.mpg |
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