Occupied Territories

“We read fiction,” writes James Wood, “with two eyes, as it were, one world-directed and one text-directed.” Which is to say, when we read about an imaginary world, we are able to simultaneously picture this world and analyze the tools that allow us to do so. Hence literary fiction creates a “doubleness,” as Wood calls it. Wood proposes what can seem like contortionist aesthetic arguments; for him, literary realism—the old-fashioned kind—provides the most sublime aesthetic pleasures not because it allows you to escape into a fictional universe but because, at its best, it does the most to italicize and enhance the doubleness inherent in reading fiction. That is, when you are most convinced of what you’re reading, you’re also most impressed by the devices—the similes, the exacting descriptive language—doing the convincing. Tradition realism done well, for Wood, offers the most exquisite formalist pleasures.

The writings of André Bazin regarding cinematic fictions make for an interesting point of comparison. Bazin snapped into focus something that had been present for, but not as forcefully articulated by, previous thinkers about cinema, which is that there is a tripleness to watching fiction film. We watch, as it were, with three eyes: 1) attuned to the proceedings as artifice, as projected light arranged in patterns that tell a story; 2) attuned to the proceedings of the story; and 3) attuned to the proceedings as their own reality, as documents of events that actually took place. When we watch the opening of The Searchers, we simultaneously see: A) a human cipher made of light approach a house made of the same; B) Ethan Edwards return from the Civil War; and C) John Wayne ride a horse up to a solid-seeming building.

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Tom McCormack, “The Two Horizons“ Moving Image Source (August 9, 2011)