Sunday, June 14, 2009

From Michael Chabon's Maps & Legends



"I could adduce Kafka's formula: [A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul]" (2).

"...--we proceed, seeking out the blank pages in the map that our favorite writers, in their greatness and negligence, have left for us, hoping to pass on to our own readers--should we be lucky enough to find any--some of the pleasure that we ourselves have taken the stuff we love: to get in on the game. All novels are sequels; influence is bliss" (45).

"Children did not abandon comics; comics, in their drive to attain respect and artistic accomplishment, abandoned children" (79).

"It has often been observed that the writing of fiction is akin to the work of a stage magician, a feat of sustained deception in which by imagery and language the trickster leads the audience to believein the existence or possibility of a series of nonexistent or impossible things. In fiction and in stage magic, one result of this deception, if it works, is the experience of pleasure in the audience at the verisimilitude of the effect. In both cases the pleasure is possible--indeed, it depends entirely--on the audience's knowing perfectly well that it is being fooled, on its avid willingness to be fooled, to participate in creating the illusion of reality" (206).




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