Creator-slash-Creativity
Imagine waking up every day in the same mundane, ordinary world. Your bedroom is exactly as you left it last night. Somewhere out there is breakfast and toothpaste and laundry and rush hour, all patiently waiting for you to resume the rhythm of your daily life. It sounds... familiar, doesn't it? It sounds an awful lot like actual life. A bit boring, a bit prosaic, a bit literal.
Where's the magic? The mystery? The enchantment?
If you step into your wardrobe and you'll find... clothes.
If you peer down the rabbit hole and you'll see, well... rabbits.
A tornado can strike and you'll absolutely still be in Kansas, Toto. (But now with millions of dollars of property damage!)
You can drive through the tollbooth and you won't be in the Kingdom of Wisdom, you'll be in New Jersey (I know... what dystopian horror is this?).
So what did you expect; some sort of picaresque fantasy? Sorry, but the Real World doesn't have magic portals to enchanted lands, it just has jobs and school and phone bills and deadlines. The more of life you see, the more you realise it isn't about escaping to Narnia so much as just measuring your life in coffee spoons. (The poets were right, it seems... but unfortunately it was the wrong poets.)
Portal Fantasy does exactly what it says on the tin: it imagines a self-contained fantastical world that is completely distinct from our own world, yet can be visited via some hidden mechanism. When Dorothy is swept off to Oz; when Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole; when Milo drives his toy car through the tollbooth, they are all passing through a portal that carries them out of their own realm and into a realm of fantasy; a realm with its own rules and parameters that are not necessarily related to anything we recognise.
But here's the thing. Couldn't you argue that all literature is Portal Fantasy?
Without wanting to sound overly portentous about it, isn't that exactly what happens when you read? You open the book and the words on the page transport you to Manderley or Hogwarts or Erewhon. Your journey is limited only by the imagination of the author, who can give you all manner of situations, characters and locations by merely assembling the letters of the alphabet.
When I said books transport you to another realm, I didn't mean that literally...
Philip K. Dick hinted at this when he was asked to define Science Fiction in 1981:
If it is good science fiction the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader, it so-to-speak unlocks the reader’s mind so that the mind, like the author’s, begins to create. This sf is creative and it inspires creativity [...] We who read sf (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read it because we love to experience this chain-reaction of ideas being set off in our minds by something we read, something with a new idea in it; hence the very best science fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create - and enjoy doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient in science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness.
Philip K. Dick may have been talking specifically about science fiction, but I would argue that all good writing is collaborative in exactly the way he is describing. An author creates Reality with language: using words to conjure something (or someone) into existence. The reader experiences that someone or something and thus gains something they did not previously possess.
The author J.R.R. Tolkien used the term sub-Creation to describe the Reality created within the narrative by the author. The reader is able to enter that sub-Creation, not through a wardrobe or a rabbit hole, but simply by reading the letters on the page.
Of course the sub-Creation contained within the narrative of a book is static once the book has been published. The reader may respond to the words, but the words do not respond to the reader. Philip K. Dick's "collaboration" is between reader and writer, while words are the medium, and the message (you should pardon the expression).
But what if the medium itself was one of the collaborators? What if the collaboration is not between "author and reader" but between author and medium?
What if we talk to the message, and the message answers back?
Paperhouse is an oddly unsettling film from 1988 about an eleven-year-old British girl who doodles a house in her notebook one afternoon.
Later, while in bed with glandular fever, she discovers she can visit that house.
As the film progresses, her "house" becomes a compelling metaphor for the creative act. It's creativity as Creation (in the "Genesis" sense of the term). She creates the house, and the house manifests. She creates a face at the window, and a little boy manifests. She neglects to give the boy a lower body, and the little boy can't walk. It's a perfect illustration of the fusion between Signifier and Signified; where her drawing is the Signifier, and the house itself (and everything else conjured to life by her drawing) is the Signified. Like portal fiction, Anna makes a journey from her own world into a (fantastical?) sub-Creation, but with the difference that she herself is creating that sub-Creation almost in real time, and her creation is collaborating with her (to use Philip K. Dick's term).
Paperhouse is (loosely) based on the novel Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr (also filmed for British television in 1972) but the 1988 film version dwells much more on the consequences of Creation.
When Anna steps inside the house that she had doodled on that lazy afternoon, she discovers that Reality is exactly as real as you choose to make it.
We will screen Paperhouse at 7.30pm on Thursday, the 6th of November at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.
Comments
Post a Comment