Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9045748" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I have a great deal of respect for C.S. Lewis, but I must make some disagreement with his conclusions, here.That is, he has taken as an assumption that the only purpose of fiction is to find the familiar in the strange. And that is, quite often, what fiction is striving to do! But there is a mirror as well: finding the strange in the familiar. And you really do need to have some things that are out of the ordinary in order to do that. You can have un-ordinary protagonists in un-ordinary circumstances, if in the telling, you exploit the reader's ignorance of what is ordinary and what is not. I've used this device myself repeatedly, as did Isaac Asimov, one of the undisputed greats of science fiction. Susan Calvin is far from an ordinary human being, by her own admission, and yet she's central to the telling of most of his robot stories. Likewise, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle told stories with a decidedly un-ordinary protagonist, which could not meaningfully have been told about a perfectly ordinary person--and yet several of them are quite outside the ordinary as well, even if they are not supernatural proper (consider The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Silver Blaze, or The Dancing Men.)If the purpose of one's fiction is to make the audience feel what it is like to transition from ordinary to extraordinary and back, then of course one must start with something ordinary--perhaps painfully so, to make the transition to the extraordinary thrilling as well as narratively necessary. If the purpose of one's fiction is to draw the audience into discovering that what they thought would be strange is in fact not so very different, or that what they should find familiar is in fact alien when seen from another direction, then other avenues open. And there may be other purposes still.I am reminded of the way Syme describes having seen Sunday from the back, which made him seem monstrous, and then separately from the front, which made him seem like a doting father playing make-believe with his children. "We have seen the world only from the back," or something like that. Only a mooning poet like Syme could say such a thing--and only in such a cacophonoous adventure could it be said. A perfectly ordinary man would not have Syme's reaction; a perfectly ordinary situation could not have inspired Syme so, idiosyncratic though he may be.</blockquote>

Verification