JК
Danse Macabre :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 107 из 359They have never taken the trouble to strengthen the cage, and as a result, part of them has never accomplished the imaginative going-away that is so much a part of growing up, ofestablishing the tunnel vision so necessary for a successful career as an adult. One of the paradoxes of fantasy/horror is that the writer of this stuff is like the lazy pigs who built their houses of straw and sticks-but instead of learning their lesson and building sensible brick houses like their oh-so-adult elder brother (memorialized in his engineer's cap forever in my memory by the Disney cartoon), the writer of fantasy/ horror simply rebuilds with sticks and straw again. Because, in a crazy kind of way, he or she likes it when the wolf comes and blows it all down, just as he or she sorta likes it when the gorilla escapes from its cage.
Most people aren't fantasy writers, of course, but almost all of us recognize the need to feed the imagination some of the stuff from time to time. People seem to recognize that the imagination somehow needs a dose of it, like vitamins or iodized salt to avoid goiter. Fantasy is salt for the mind.
Earlier on I talked about the suspension of disbelief, Coleridge's classic definition of what the reader must provide when seeking a hot shot from a fantasy story, novel, or poem. Another way of putting this is that the reader must agree to let the gorilla out of its cage for a while, and when we see the zipper running up the monster's back, the gorilla goes promptly back into its cage. After all, by the time we get to be forty or so, it's been in there for a long time, and perhaps it's developed a bit of the old "institutional mentality." Sometimes it has to be prodded out with a stick. And sometimes it won't go at all.
Seen in these terms, the set of reality- becomes a very difficult thing to manipulate. Of course it leas been done in the movies; if it had not been, this book would be shorter by a third or more. But by detouring around the visual part of the set of reality, radio developed an awesome tool (perhaps even a dangerous one; the riot and national hysteria following The War of the Worlds broadcast suggests that it could have been so) * for picking the lock on the gorilla's cage. But in spite of all the nostalgia we might want to feel, it is impossible to go back and reexperience the creative essence of radio terror; that particular lock pick has been broken by the simple fact that, for better or worse, -,ve now demand believable visual input as part of the set of reality. Like it or lump it, we seem to be stuck with it.
Most people aren't fantasy writers, of course, but almost all of us recognize the need to feed the imagination some of the stuff from time to time. People seem to recognize that the imagination somehow needs a dose of it, like vitamins or iodized salt to avoid goiter. Fantasy is salt for the mind.
Earlier on I talked about the suspension of disbelief, Coleridge's classic definition of what the reader must provide when seeking a hot shot from a fantasy story, novel, or poem. Another way of putting this is that the reader must agree to let the gorilla out of its cage for a while, and when we see the zipper running up the monster's back, the gorilla goes promptly back into its cage. After all, by the time we get to be forty or so, it's been in there for a long time, and perhaps it's developed a bit of the old "institutional mentality." Sometimes it has to be prodded out with a stick. And sometimes it won't go at all.
Seen in these terms, the set of reality- becomes a very difficult thing to manipulate. Of course it leas been done in the movies; if it had not been, this book would be shorter by a third or more. But by detouring around the visual part of the set of reality, radio developed an awesome tool (perhaps even a dangerous one; the riot and national hysteria following The War of the Worlds broadcast suggests that it could have been so) * for picking the lock on the gorilla's cage. But in spite of all the nostalgia we might want to feel, it is impossible to go back and reexperience the creative essence of radio terror; that particular lock pick has been broken by the simple fact that, for better or worse, -,ve now demand believable visual input as part of the set of reality. Like it or lump it, we seem to be stuck with it.