To me the act of reading is a dream that is already lucid. The reader’s state is hypnagogic, a threshold position to read the text and produce its commentaries. The body, the world, these are always present: the aches in the back, the heat of the sun, the position of the limbs, the time off work, the surveillabilities of the police state. The fictive dream is an image that has already been pierced by arrows, like a martyred saint: this is what we call allegory. The path of arrows is more parabolic than bullets. You cannot always pull on a string to trace their trajectory and figure out where they came from and where the sniper’s nest must have been. Allegory grows more powerful the hazier it is: you are not being handed a set of fixed, well-mapped correspondences, but being asked to engage in your own mappings, to consider the valences, to play and be played with. This is what I think is fun about fantastical literature and why it is a genre worth choosing to read and write in.
Posted 45 days ago.
