First published in Retort Magazine
Lucid Fiction: Beyond Anti-Stories
By Tantra Bensko
Though the experimental literary anti-stories push apart the structures of traditional plot arc, they may still be required to have conflict according to the current literary concessions. They disregard the idea of having to have only one character’s perspective. But Ethan Joella, in “In Breach of the Story: Braking the Shackles of Traditional Fiction,”
http://journals.hil.unb.ca/index.php/IFR/article/viewFile/704/1034 in International Fiction Review 33 page 38, 2006, describes how innovative the short story genre was earlier, but how conventional it has become. He does contend that in any case, even anti-stories rest on making an emotional impact.
My contention, though, as a human reaching for spiritual evolution, is: Are not emotions part of the ego’s need to maintain the sense of self focused on the lower levels of the auric field? What if we write from the perspective beyond the emotions?
I do love Joella’s article about experimental fiction, and he gives excellent examples of going beyond linear plot to fit the worldview such as Robbe Grillet’s sense of being a meaningless puzzle. He delves into fiction that goes beyond realism, and he sees the requirements of stories to be the emotional impact but also the universal theme and satisfying a contract between reader and writer. I don’t dispute him at all, and find his essay to be a wonderful comprehensive look at anti-stories.
I want to push the boundaries of experimental fiction by writing anti-stories that go even beyond what he is describing. I want to read more literature that pushes beyond the whole concensus version of reality itself, and I feel the age we are living in now is ripe for that. Meta-stories remain about writing, anti-stories remain about emotion about conflict. There are many stories in those sub-genres which do go outside those prescribed boundaries and are very innovative.
The style I am most interested in expanding is progressive spiritual experimental fiction, or Lucid Fiction, because it questions the very idea of what a person is. Do we have to focus on this particular incarnation? Can we see all our incarnations as pulsing out from a central core? Can we think of ourselves as being multi-dimensional, and describe our relationships with others as including the interactions on all the other frequencies at the same time? This is a quantum physics parallel universe at home to the Many World Theory. Time is scientifically suspected to travel both ways from the present. Lucid Fiction could present the movements and changes in the plot as being something that can be seen outside of one point in time. The actions could be looked at from a higher perspective as well, including perhaps the higher selves of the characters.
I see transformations, revelations, changes in perceptions, rearrangements of attitudes and organizations of life as a substitute for plot based on base action, straightforward events in chronological order. In Lucid Fiction, there could be a wider variety of progression within the stories, just not the typical conflict of someone doing someone wrong and someone feeling badly. A murder to be solved….While that may occur, the meat of the story may be in varying ways to look at that, all of which may be equally compelling. The narrator may move from one to the next and then set them all spinning and fly out through the center of them all, out of the idea of a story at all.
I call for Lucid Fiction to help us all move out of the glue of stories. I like to go into my core and pulse out from the point at which I am free from patterns and stories, linear moments continuing the problems from one minute to the next. I like to live in the miraculous realms in which spontaneous healings can occur, epiphanies can dissolve ignorance and let in enlightenment. And why not write about characters like that at times, where the plot can take the character upwards out of the traditional horizontal plot arc?
Though Joella can see anti-stories going beyond the traditional arc of plot, he still holds the perspective to the traditional idea of the persona most people inhabit, unaware of the rest of themselves they could inhabit if they broke the shell of the modern Western mundane version of the perspective on self. I personally like to write anti-stories that don’t cater to the traditional way that people look at themselves. I prefer to write at times from a more expanded perspective and encourage that perspective instead. It is a kind of Lucid Play between myself and readers, as we engage in an entertaining text together that allows us to hold on to a higher perspective.
I like to push beyond the need the usual persona has for egoistic drama. The individual life of a person is a pretense that I don’t want to be caught up in by living a fiction. I want the fiction of my life to become lucid. And I do experience this state almost all the time hovering on top of the other part of myself which lives inside the story to some extent, the plot of my life, the ups and down of desire and fulfillment. I do my best to keep a conduit between the higher perspective beyond the Maya, as the illusion of so called reality is labeled in Sanskrit, and the warm bodily self walking and sleeping upon the earth, smiling and enjoying the dream.
Can our fictions of this reality be acknowledged as dreams, both in life and in literature, and we become lucid within them, as the fictions themselves become lucid, more glowingly filled with the light of truth?
Those are all big questions. I think science fiction, fantasy, and imaginative/speculative fiction has explored and will continue to explore multiple realities or universes from different perspectives than what is considered “normal” waking reality or extreme realism in a three or four dimensional perspective. I don’t know for sure, but I think the old myths play an important role in bringing the audience out of “profane” experience of time into something bigger and more archetypal, greater dimensions beyond time and space as most people perceive life to be. Dreams are a great way to explore other realities. Being lucid certainly helps to remember and get more out of those experiences than just being asleep. Hopefully you have inspired me to write stories to test your theories. I mean, Shakespeare and Poe seem to be pretty multidimensional to me! And the idea of life being a dream is common in both of their work, as well as many other good writers. Maybe all the writers I like! Thank you for your thoughts and I will try to come up with some better ideas about them. The idea of multiples selves in parallel or alternate universes is very interesting to me. The concept of a soul seems to be a good word for the higher self or core of any particular persona or personality that probably exists outside of four dimensional time and space. I also think emotions are incredibly important in storytelling, and without them stories don’t mean much. I think that is why the soul is often considered to be in the heart, which is at the center of the body vertically in three dimensional space. Halfway between the emotions and creativity of Earth and Water at the root and sex chakras and the rationality and consciousness of the visionary and crown chakras. Or something like that. Please forgive the attempt to diagram such a complex concept as consciousness and emotions, but it helps me to visualize ideas and concepts to do so. Well, anyways, I will try and come up with a better answer, or just accept what you have written and try to make better stories because of it. Thank you for making me think, and realize I really don’t know anything for sure! But is sure fun to speculate. And and and. . . . I am tired and need to go to sleep, perchance to dream. . . . that I am a butterfly.
On second thought, I am not entirely sure about the details of my thoughts, especially my attributions of certain qualities with specific energy centers and consciousness in general. But then again, that is what makes living interesting, to learn more and constantly re-evaluate what we know, don’t you think? I am going to stick with my assertion that the heart is the center of the body, mind, and soul for now. It does seem like emotions are important in the heart, but I don’t know if that is where they come from. And I don’t know if thoughts and reason come from the crown chakra, but it does seem like a likely source. It also seems like the heart is a good place for me to focus on, with one eye to the top and one to the bottom, depending on how you want to look at the totality of auric existence that is the human being. The more I try and make sense of everything, the more I come to appreciate the complexity of the human condition and yet realize I simply cannot know for sure in a rigid and unchanging way. I always want to be changing, even and especially when I am standing still. I would definitely appreciate any insight you might have into any of the issues I mentioned.
Thank you, Joshua, for your wonderful comments. Yes, thank goodness speculative and fantasy literature is out there to explore multiple realities. I like the idea of exploring those within the realm of reality, not saying it’s fantasy, but that it actually could be telling a story just as realistically as a non-speculative type of writing. That, to me, makes more of a statement about the nature of our consciousness.
The idea of life being a dream, yes, an old one. Being dream-like enough to become lucid in it can lead to a type of metafiction, in which the fiction is our perspective on life itself.
And, whatever has taken us into the depths of believing in the dream, the trance, instead of being lucid, can be bypassed by lucidity exercises. Literature itself can be one of those exercises. But the powers that be that benefit from us being asleep may not like that.
That’s an interesting idea about the soul being in the heart. Shen. I think of the body as being inside the soul, like inside an aura, but even more, that the soul has no edges ultimately.
I think of the emotions as coming perhaps from many parts of the body, such as the traditional ideas of the organs in Chinese medicine, fear coming from the adrenals/kidney meridian, resentment from the liver, etc., though they can be seen as landing there more than originating from there.
The heart in some ways may go beyond the emotions, the soul go beyond emotions. Emotions can certainly flow to and from the heart and soul, and lead one into closer connection with them, if we follow them to their source. The emotions can also arise from not being connected to the soul or heart, can’t they? They can sometimes come from a lower level of the self. And feelings of the soul sometimes may be more agape, something more mystical, than emotions.
I also think of thoughts and reason coming from not as much the crown chakra, as maybe the third eye, even some other chakras as well, but the crown chakra as going beyond that, into the mysticism again, that goes beyond those rational, linear, segmented thoughts, but as something more flowing, from a larger perspective that sees the linear movement from above.
Love.
This was a very interesting read. I don’t have much to say except I wish more writers had such bold ambitions as yours. Thank you.
Jim