Fiction, Reality, Error and Other

Just as a warning, in this entry I'll be discussing a funny experience I had while reading "A Scanner Darkly". I'll try to avoid spoiling the plot, though. But I can't necessarilly promise anything. Writing any kind of review is difficult because you have to capture the essence, but not the plot, of a story.

Towards the end of the book, one of the main characters mentions a guy called Tony Amsterdam, a friend of her's who saw God while on an LSD trip, and for months afterwards saw a beautiful doorway everywhere he went. But Tony never actually went through the door, he just admired it until it went away. After that he went slowly crazy because he would never see anything that beautiful again.

A few pages later, another main character meets Donald Abrahams, a major crime lord and businessman. The moment this guy was introduced, I got excited. I couldn't quite remember Tony Abraham's name and I thought they might be the same character. What a twist to find in the book: that an LSD burn-out case with a possible grudge against beauty and life had become a major figure in the sale of a drug called Death.

Of course, I quickly realised, the two characters where different people. But I decided to pretend that they were the same person and considered the symbolic significance of this plot twist some more.

Also, as I had been reading I had decided to read the book as though conspiracies and facts mentioned explicitly in the film but not in the book where real facts in the fictional world of the book.

This got me thinking. A Scanner Darkly is a fictional book. Therefore, nothing in it is literally true. However, it is true that in A Scanner Darkly Bob Arctor is a narcotics agent and it is false that Bob Arctor meets Tony Amsterdam. Can it however be true that in my reading of A Scanner Darkly, Tony Amsterdam is Donald Abrahams? Further, can my reading offer any insights into the text? How far can we take this? If I read the Lord of The Rings understanding that Tony Amsterdam is Gandalf, would my interpretation be right to some extent.

I have no answer, on the off-chance that someone reads this, I would very much like them to just ponder this for a few seconds.

But... if I were to answer, it would be that everyone reads every text differently. For instance, we all imagine character's differently. However, in discussions, we must go by what is commonly understood, this is usually what is written down and understood. This is an attempt to understand what the writer transmits. So we ask questions like, "What did Phillip K Dick want to say in A Scanner Darkly?"

Maybe, if we wanted to, instead we could try to interpret the material the reader receives, almost like dream analysis. So we could ask "Why did I misread the text in the way I did? I my subconscious trying to communicate anything through the connections it made while reading A Scanner Darkly?" Maybe we could go further, and cut up texts, connect characters from different stories, mess withdialogue, etc. After all, if fictional facts are only facts in the mind of the person imagining them then aren't we entitled to see our own meanings in them?

After all, anything we perceive only has the meaning for us that we see in it, so we can only ever see our own meaning in things.