Awareness of Another World

“The word ‘artist’ is not applied to writers as readily as to musicians or sculptors or painters, because the medium in which they work – our language – is used by everyone without any particular thought or regard for economy or form. Language is the common drudge of every sort of experience and it does not enter the heads of most people to use it with any conscious skill or effectiveness.”

“But the serious writer is an artist and language is his medium, and the way he employs it is of the greatest interest. Graham Greene has said that ‘creative art seems to remain a function of the religious mind,’ and it is this quality of awareness of another world…”

– Robertson Davies, The Merry Heart, p. 115

“When Cervantes invited a new generation of readers to follow his knight into the Sierra Morena, they discovered through their tears of laughter that they had entered a new world. For the writers and readers to come, the pages of a book could never again stand like foreign objects of wonder, to be admired from a distance. From now on, opening a book would mean stepping into a space more like one’s own, a Sierra Morena next door instead of a mythical wood or mystic crag, and even those places of mystery or magic, from Never Never Land to Hogwarts, would always be places in which other versions of our own selves would go to for relief from the pressures, pain, or simply the boredom of our daily lives.”

– William Egginton, The Man Who Invented Fiction, p. 136

“In my life as a writer I often remind myself – comfort myself – with what William Faulkner said about The Sound and the Fury. The whole novel, he claimed, hung on one image, the glimpse of a little girl’s muddy underpants seen from the ground as she climbed a tree. How can an entire world spin off so small and incidental a hub? Can it be possible that Faulkner conceived his masterpiece from this thin, grubby moment?”

“I imagine most writers of novels begin with such a fragment, a shard of experience so compelling, so troubling and unavoidable – always there, on the periphery of consciousness – that around it he or she must construct an elaborate world. This world, this novel, is not merely a container or a means of filing the image away but an attempt to make it comprehensible, and to guard its power.”

– Kathryn Harrison, When Inspiration Stared Stoically from an Old Photograph

“Fiction is usually seen as escapist entertainment… But it’s hard to reconcile the escapist theory of fiction with the deep patterns we find in the art of storytelling… Our various fictional worlds are– on the whole– horrorscapes. Fiction may temporarily free us from our troubles, but it does so by ensnaring us in new sets of troubles– in imaginary worlds of struggle and stress and mortal woe.”

– Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human

“Go, then – there are other worlds than these.”

– Stephen King

If you want us to see a different world, it will be your choice of tools that defines you. Oscar Wilde was a playwright. He put his words, like a ventriloquist, into the mouths of actors on the stage. Ad writers, screenwriters and novelists differ only in their ventriloquist’s dummies, the masks they hide behind.

Some ventriloquist’s dummies are called “newscasters,” and they are no different than the actors in any other fiction. The question we must ask ourselves is, “Who is hiding behind that mask, and what imaginary world are they trying to sell us?”

Roy H. Williams

PS – At a 1962 dinner for 49 Nobel laureates, President John F. Kennedy quipped that the event was, “the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever gathered at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

Thomas Jefferson was a famous hater of newspapers, though I suspect he would have hated radio, television, and the internet even more. Writing to his friend John Norvell in 1807, Jefferson said, “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers. Advertisements contain the only truths to be relied on in a newspaper.”