Reality Thought Out of the Box

Last week's session of our seminar began with a look in the life like happenings of the fictional short story Blue, Blue Pictures of You, by Hanif Kureishi, from his collection Love in a Blue Time. This story was discussed in one of the students' presentations I had to conduct. The rebellious,
irresponsible youth of England and issues of the middle aged share the topic focus of this collection. It is not surprising then to come across sex, drugs, music (rock 'n' roll) and the situations these create with an interesting touch of black humor. But more seriously, identity in postcolonial world and the struggles in small community of imigrants give the literary work an autobiographical feature, since Kureishi is the son of a Pakistani father and a British mother.

The plot is common place, but the characters and implications for the social stereotypes of London at the time give it an interesting twist, portraying reality in a very simple, yet appealing, way. A middle aged married (apparently not happily) photographer meets a drug dealer in his thirties who is dating a beautiful woman, around the same age. They ask the photographer to take some pictures of them naked, making love, fornicating... When it is done, the woman asks the artist to burn them. She wants him to be her guide in life for whatever is coming next. He needs the freshness of her naivety. An open ending makes us wonder whether they became lovers, or if maybe he just mentored her, or maybe even both of the above.

For last week's post we were to discuss Frederik Pohl's Science Fiction story Fermi and Frost, as well. It is a futuristic prophetic-like account of what could happen if, hypothetically, someone pressed the button for a nuclear bomb to go off. A reference to Fermi, an Italian scientist is given. His theory of the possible reasons other intelligent life forms from a distant planet might have not contacted us, assuming they could exist, include respect for our privacy, fear of our violence, or the fact that they themselves might have made the same mistakes humans did with the mishandling of technology and power, making them extinct as well. Reflection on the part of the reader is induced through the use of strategies such as self-reflexivity. The implications of these kind of texts include an unconventional presentation of narrative and a greater commitment on the part of the reader. In this case the author offers two ending possibilities that lead to the same course of events, although each with a different attitude towards them. It is up to the reader to take a stand and contribute to make either one of them happen in real life.

Finally, a song was to be selected, any song as long as it dealt with fantasy, magic and the like. Due to a silly grammar mistake on my part due mainly to distraction, a line in the aforementioned story, "we singed the carpet", was misinterpreted as sang the carpet (fortunatelly the misunderstanding was noticed before the presentation). This led to research on any song that had anything similar in the tittle or the lyrics, and that would belong to psychodelic rock, for this is what the characters in the story listened to. I came across Magic Carpet Ride (http://www.steppenwolf.com/lyr/magcca.html) recorded by Steppenwolf . The song is about a well around man who invites a girl to join him in an adventure of discovery, on a magic carpet. The magic carpet is an allusion to Persian carpets that were loaded with a hallucinogenic substance, and that made those "on it" trip away into fantastic adventures.

One of the verses of the song reads, "Fantasy will set you free", and in fact, all of these literary works we have discussed deal with created alternative realities. The use of Fantasy, Science Fiction, or Fiction for that matter, allows authors to devise creative ways to convey their self-reflexive messages. "Setting us free" from the stressful and sometimes cornering reality we are living in is contemporary authors' contribution to "thinking out of the box" for a better living.