lunes, julio 24, 2006

Robert Silverberg

De postre, cuando termino de leer algún texto dramático, me empaco un cómic o un cuento ciencia ficción.

El postre más dulce hasta ahora es Sundance, un relato que Robert Silverberg escribió en 1969. Es una historia de adicción, de pérdida de identidad, de guerra unipersonal.

Unos años más tarde, Silverberg hizo un ensayo para explicar cómo había escrito Sundance, pero terminó hablando de la transacción artista/audiencia de una forma tan clara que pensé en reproducirla aquí:

These are some of the benefits the writer gets from the creative effort:

-Satisfaction of the shaping impulse, that seemingly universal human drive to reduce entropy, to bring order out of randomness, form out of chaos.
-Codification of the writer's own thinking in the congnitive sphere through the organization and development of the ideational substructure of the story -- a factor typical of sciencie fiction, in which conceptual rather than emotional material often lies at the story's heart.
-Emotional catharsis derived from transfer of some aspect of personal experience, perhaps painful, form recollection to artistic manifestation.
-Develpment of technical skills through exploration of form and possible extensions of the possibilites of form.

The reader, on the other hand, may obtain some or all of these benefits form a story:

-A moment of encapsulation in a "pocket universe" drawing him away from the problems of real-world existence: fiction as escape.
-Esthetic response to form and style: the pleasure of experiencig a well-made verbal object.
-Acquisition of vicarious experience: learning something from a story, perhaps of a technical nature (operations of the stock market, theories of linguistics, effects of psychedelic drugs, methods of sexual intercourse) or pehaps in some more general field of human relationships.
-Stimulation of thought: reflections evoked by the story, leading to conclusions not explicit in the text.