Creating Aesthetic Distance
WRITING A BOOK THAT MAKES A DIFFERENCE
STORY PRESS 2000
by Phillip Gerard
Philip Gerard holds
an M.F.A. from the University of Arizona. A former
newspaperman and freelance journalist, he has published fiction
and nonfiction in numerous magazines, including New England Review/Bread
Loaf Quarterly, Creative
Nonfiction, and The World & I. He is the author or Hatteras
Light, a novel (Scribners 1986; 1997 Blair in paperback), Brilliant
Passage. . . a schooning memoir (Mystic 1989), two recent novels:
Cape Fear Rising (Blair 1994; also in paperback), and Desert
Kill (Morrow 1994), and Creative Nonfiction: Researching and
Crafting Stories of Real Life (Story Press 1996; in paperback
1998), which has been selected by Book of the Month Club and
Quality Paperback Book Club.
In 1895, the first public movie theatre opened in Paris and featured a film
by the Lumiere brothers, "The Arrival of a Train at the
Station"("L'arrive d'un train en gare"). As the
locomotive steamed head-on toward the camera, patrons ducked
and screamed in terror.
They were experiencing an absence of aesthetic distance.They
were so caught up in the movie– the onrushing train–
that they forgot they were watching a movie and not a real train.
The audience's inability to distinguish fantasy from reality
is understandable– they had no experience with the medium
of film, which is, after all, based on an optical illusion called
the persistence of vision. We think we are viewing continuous
action, but in fact we are seeing frames of projected images
in between frames of blackness. The brain can't register the
interruptions in the flickering images-- they happen too fast--
and it fools the eye into "seeing" the moving picture
as reality.
While watching a movie, more
than half the time we are watching utter darkness. Nothingness.
An absence of image and light.
As writers, we work in another
kind of illusion and we create another brand of persistence of
vision in the imagination: we create an interior "movie"
in the reader's head through words on the page. Even in a nonfiction
narrative, we create the fiction that we are delivering a character's
continuous, whole experience, when in fact we are pasting together
a collage of a very few selected scenes connected tenuously by
summary and transitional exposition– narrative sleight-of-hand–
and leaving out far more than we can ever include. Like all those
frames of darkness.
You'd think that this absolute
captivation would be desirable, but in fact it also works against
a story, even one told on film. The reason is that captivation
is an emotional response– basic, primitive, visceral, and
in part physiological-- our pulse races, our palms grow clammy,
we feel the rush of adrenaline from fear or excitement, our tear
ducts are stimulated. It creates the first necessary virtue of
a great story: persuasion ofcontinuity. We read on, breathless.
We try so hard to pull the reader
in, to connect him emotionally to our story, that we can easily
forget the need for the second virtue of a great story, aesthetic
distance. It's one of those contradictions that makes a story
work. And what goes for fiction goes equally for nonfiction crafted
with fictional technique. (More intellectualized essays implicitly
create distance.)
Aesthetic and intellectual appreciation–
the sense that we possess the story as our own somehow-- require
that we are captivated by a story knowing all that while that
it is exactly that— a story. A book, not a real experience.
A movie, not an actual onrushing train.
