2. Magic Act

What attracts us to fictional narrative?  What makes us surrender whatever we would normally be thinking about or doing to the impulse to follow make-believe?  Because we want to get away?  You could escape yourself in lots of other ways that require, mentally speaking, much less work.  So, you say, I’m a reader, that’s recreation for me, that’s a way of using my brain which otherwise gets kind of dusty, becomes a lame place to be.

Fine, but why read fiction?  It may give you information about other places, other kinds of people, other ways of life, other eras, other worlds, but of what relevance is that?  How useful is it?  How necessary?  Not so much, if those are the only terms we can think of to justify the expenditure of time and effort, and maybe money.  There’s only one justification I can accept: because of how it makes me think.

But even that form of the statement dodges the key ingredient: imagination.  How it makes me think can be translated as imagining.  Making images in the mind.  I can daydream, I can dream for real, but I can’t at will summon up a lengthy, internally consistent fantasy peopled with figures I literally cannot invent myself.  I have to turn to fiction for that because it’s still the only form of writing that is primarily concerned with that magical property of make-believe, of imagine this.

Narrative that is not fictional also asks the mind to picture, to imagine, but it’s less challenging.  Why?  Because the very fact that this really happened, or this really exists or existed hampers the imagination.  We don’t have to invent so much along with the narrative.  We get to be more passive, like at a lecture or during someone’s story of their past.  Oh, really? we say, Let me make a note of that.  Notes don’t help very much with fiction because what you should really be paying attention to has very little to do with alleged facts.  Think of Peter Lorre as Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon.  Bogart, as Sam Spade, is flinging fictions at the cops to explain what has been going on, trying to be plausible but at the same time not telling what really happened: just putting in their minds something they could imagine as real.  One cop turns to Cairo and asks “what do you say to that?”  Cairo replies, musingly, “I don’t know what to say to that.”  Cop: “You could start with the facts.”  Cairo (I can’t describe the look on Lorre’s face, you have to see it): “Facts?”

Fiction, without imagination, just isn’t happening.  If you like watching movies or plays, this aspect of fiction might be the hardest thing to register.  Think of it this way: if you leave the theater to get a snack or something, the film or play continues without you.  Even if you pause your DVD and pick up right where you left off, it’s still not the same as reading.  The words are there, but they do not exist if not read.  Words in fiction are not meant to be looked at, simply.  Regarded.  Attended.  They have to be made internal, they have to be imagined, they have to inhabit a reader, or it’s just a lot of worthless paper (or screens, virtual pages).

This process of making fiction internal is the closest thing to magic that most of us will ever participate in, in part because it’s so easily available, thanks to the amazingly literate culture we pretty much take for granted.  How we use words—the fact that we can use them to refer to things that never were nor will ever be—is, along these lines of thought, definitive for what homo sapiens sapiens are.  If you wanted to list our many attributes, one of them would be: we can look at text and make it live in our minds.  We hear voices, we see things happening, we find that a situation we had no inkling of is now coming into being bit by bit in our minds.  But note: it’s not the text that’s magic, it’s the mind that receives it that makes that miracle happen.

You can train yourself to get better at that magic act.  And you may not need texts to do it.  You may have an imagination that leaves most texts in the dust.  So you may set yourself the task of trying to make your imaginary world exist in a text, for other people to inhabit and enliven.  It’s tricky, this address to other minds through words, but necessary too, if only to make the text truly magical.

So when you’re about to open a fiction and really get into it, you could even say open sesame, or abracadabra, or whatever talismanic word you’d like to intone, just so those people around you reading newspapers or magazines or tell-all memoirs or biographies or web blogs like this one or even a love letter will know that you’re performing a magic act.  –Donald Brown, 11/13/2010