just another dead poet
Consider this a collection of scribblings cast from the margins of my mind.
Margaret Atwood asks good questions.
My girl Margaret Atwood’s at it again with her newest release “In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination” — allowing her inner geek to take up the pen to pontificate over everything from Batman to Victorian literature. My favourite passage so far is a rambling tangent of questions about my favourite meta-literary concept, storytelling:
“…do stories free the human imagination or tie it up in chains by prescribing ‘right behaviour,’ like so many Victorian Christian-pop novels about the virtues of virtuous women? Are narratives a means to enforce social control or a means of escape from it? Is the use of ‘story’ as a synonym for ‘lie’ justified, and if so, are some lies necessary? Are we the slaves of our own stories—our family narratives and dramas, for instance—which compel us to re-enact them? Do stories optimistically help us shape our lives for the better or pessimistically doom us to tragic failure? Do they embody ancient tropes and act out atavistic rituals? Are they essential to us—part of the matrix of our shared humanity? Do we tell them to show off our skills, to unsettle the complacent audience, to flatter rules, or, as Scherazade the Queen of Storytelling did, to save our own lives?” (41).
