tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post4480583227874469656..comments2024-03-19T02:14:31.704-04:00Comments on <center>OnFiction</center>: Encountering MediationKeith Oatleyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-71213836581590868912010-04-28T04:52:58.029-04:002010-04-28T04:52:58.029-04:00Thank you, Valentine, for this. Yes, I agree: the ...Thank you, Valentine, for this. Yes, I agree: the process of mediation is very interesting. I think, perhaps, that reading, as compared to film, allows one to alternate immersion and awareness of mediation, or even when the writer isn't offering prompts to awareness of mediation, to alternate immersive feeling and the possibility of thinking at a bit more of a distance on what one is immersed in. In a film, one is paced by the film maker. In reading one goes at one's own pace and can move in and out of different modes. I think the amount of time and thought a novelist puts into a book then, enables structures to be included in the text that invite people to think and feel at several, and in the case of great writers, many levels. Perhaps one can only do this in alternation.Keith Oatleyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16419339550879570935noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5455277388900637928.post-56031830421320529782010-04-28T04:03:25.526-04:002010-04-28T04:03:25.526-04:00I guess that when Kundera tells his reader that a ...I guess that when Kundera tells his reader that a character was born of a gesture (as Agnes, I seem to recall was in "Immortality") or tells us he only began to see Tomas (of "the Unbearable LIghtness") clearly when he imagined him wavering about whether to invite Tereza to Prague, he violates some conventions of novel-writing. Thus you might say he makes us aware of ?what? a frame?--or would you say "mediation"?--Yet, Yet... for me it's just all about Agnes or Tomas or Tereza, people I care about. Oh yes, I know, they are merely fictional creations of the author. But, the author's role when highlighted is just another way to know about them.<br /><br />Or, maybe put differently: K. writes that the sense for beauty is sensitivity for chance and things that don't fit order, or the order we've imagined. (Now perhaps I begin to say more what I think than K.) And I like that idea: There's order and, then, there's what we imagine to be order. What's outside the order we imagine is real. And, sometimes, to notice it is to notice beauty. So, when K. comments on the character he's created in a way that highlights the fictional quality of it all... well, on the one hand, that's just another way of learning about those people, Tereza, Tomas, and Agnes--and, on the other, these forbidden perspectives are also beautiful. There is Agnes--- Born of a gesture, which might equally be the gesture of a young or old person because, at bottom, we live our lives outside of time....But when that gesture was made by an old<br />woman it stirred something incomprehensible in the author, an emotion maybe something like a kind of sadness or longing, and Agnes was born.<br /><br />(from Mark L.)formerly a wage slavehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16064562730082906589noreply@blogger.com