Hoaxes
I have just woken up from a dream, and I wish I could give you a coherent picture of it.
It began with a scene from a later Harry Potter book, not one that exists in reality. Soon I realised that it didn't make much sense. But this was soon followed by the revelation that Harry Potter, as a whole, was a hoax. None of the story ever happened. Now, in the waking world, most people know that Harry Potter is fiction. But in the dream, people were shocked, and started making death threats against J.K.Rowling. It was only made clear in a conference held after the final book.
Soon afterwards it came out that another major multi-volume series was also a hoax, to similar results. (I forget which it was; in the dream it was another one about as famous that I'd read.) And then a third series, although that one was translated from Russian and I was only keeping up with it by reading the summaries online so that I could talk as if I'd read it.
You have to understand that these three successive revelations were bombshells not just to the literary world but to the world in general. They were front-page news for weeks.
And then, less than a week after these three stories had come out in quick succession, I found myself at a writers' conference where the three hoaxes were to be discussed. The eyes of the world were on this conference, and most news organisations had at least one representative there. What was to be done? What could be done?
brainwane stood up to give a speech on the matter, and it happened that I was the first to realise. There hadn't been three hoaxes. There had been one hoax. Rowling and the others were inventions or dupes of Sumana; she had arranged all three series, and all the films, and the faked deaths of many major players in the literary field and beyond, and several believable scenes in the lives of people involved, including my own, over many years, merely in order to tell a good story. Each discredited series was a necessary part in the metanarrative, and highlighted a different part of the human condition. And she was explaining where all the pointers to this had been buried since the beginning, and how we should all have known.
I should have been angry, but instead I was full of admiration.
Syndicated 2012-11-30 07:25:00 (Updated 2012-11-30 07:30:03) from Monument