CHILDREN OF MEN AND RICHARD KEARNEY’S PERPETUATION OF NARRATIVE
- Mark Walter
Defining Narrative
The art of storytelling has been a developing philosophical endeavor since man has had the ability to communicate through language. Some would even argue that its origins are rooted in the programmatic arrangement of representational imagery that preceded descriptive language. Setting aside the notion of cave paintings as epic tales, the very first recorded myths from Western civilization were stories, hypotheses, fabricated to explain how the world was made and how people came to exist in it. They were devised as a means of explanation—an act which is intrinsically communal.[1] In his Poetics, Aristotle defines storytelling, or the developing of a plot, in terms of mimesis, the imitation of an action. Richard Kearney expounds in his work On Stories: “It was Aristotle who first developed this insight into a philosophical position when he argued, in his Poetics, that the art of storytelling—defined as the dramatic imitating and plotting of human action—is what gives us a shareable world.”[2]
An appropriate understanding of storytelling as shared human experience is a fundamental prerequisite for reading narrative film for its philosophical possibilities. Film is a project distinct from both the visual and literary arts, but with elements of each present, the viewership of film must be understood according to the vast history and developing tradition of all the communicative arts. This history of communication, in which cinema is a recent development, has evolved according to one central tenant that remains unchanged: storytelling is a human imperative. Kearney argues that postmodernism is not the end of the story. In fact, the possibilities for different modes of communication, including cinema, only serve to encourage the art of storytelling and affirm its continued impact within culture. Outlining his thesis for On Stories, Kearney states, “In our own postmodern era of fragmentation and fracture, I shall be arguing that narrative provides us with one of our most viable forms of identity—individual and communal.” [3] By exploring Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men as an important example of contemporary narrative success, the perpetuation of narrative will be argued as a necessity for human bios.
Aristotle: The Cathartic Function of Story
[Stories are] ways of expressing our yearning for the Great Escape from death. From the word go, stories were invented to fill the gaping hole within us, to assuage our fear and dread, to try to give answers to the great unanswerable questions of existence: Who are we? Where do we come from? Are we animal, human or divine? Strangers, gods or monsters? Are we born of one (mother-earth) or born of two (human parents)? Are we creatures of nature or culture?[4]
In Poetics, Aristotle addresses this same hypothesis about the function of art. He uses songwriting for musical dramas as an example to outline the possibilities for cathartic function of tragedy, epic, and comedy. He speaks of the artist as a sort of spokesman who is prone to demonstrating an excess of a particular emotion with which all people can identify according to varying degrees. The artist is able to employ his art as catharsis for himself and others.[5] So, in fictional endeavors such as fantasy or science-fiction, the exploration of life’s greatest questions can be defined in terms of the cathartic projection of alternate worlds. Tolkien defines fantasy as, “The making or glimpsing of Other-worlds.”[6] Whereas one of the ancient functions of mythos was to project an abstract world (i.e. heavenly realm preceding human existence) onto the physical one for the sake of explaining existence, the projection of an alternate physical world onto the one in which humanity already exists can be similarly cathartic. Kearny illustrates the human desire for imagining abstract worlds by describing the soothing function of a child’s bedtime story. He says, “Children crave for bedtime stories of fantastic creatures and conflicts—from Grimm’s fairytales to Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings—so that they may act out their inner confusions through the imaginary events and so, in the safety of their beds, prepare for sleep.”[7]
Cathartic World-Projection and Fictional Narrative
Of course, an intrinsic quality of story is that a fundamental distance separates the fantastical world portrayed and the reality in which the human teller and listener exist. It is a disembodied fabrication of plot and setting which is only partially physically-manifest by the language used to describe it and/or a dramatic representation of the action. In utopian and dystopian fiction, the projected world is absent from physical experience because it belongs to the future.[8] However, in storytelling, this lack of physical manifestation is what provides the reader or viewer with true understanding of the worlds and actions which are described. The receiver of the story listens in omniscient safety, removed from the dangers or ill effects of the imagined world. He vicariously experiences the actions of the characters, his fellow human beings, in his own imagination and thus is able to address his own questions of existence. Effective art is intrinsically and necessarily ambiguous for this very reason. The objective of a story or any other work of art is to construct the conditions, a set of experiences in context, which are necessary for the viewer or listener to have a particular experience (i.e. epiphany, catharsis) and not merely to receive an anecdote as interpreted by the artist. Art is, therefore, not an aesthetic description of a moral conclusion, but the structuring of a journey which will emanate the truth which the artist wishes to convey. Kearney addresses this as he expounds on a genealogy of storytelling:
From Aristotle to Auerbach, it has been recognised that this [synthesis of the empirical and abstract] involves far more than a mere mirroring of reality. When Aristotle defines mimesis in his Poetics as the ‘imitation of an action’, he means a creative redescription of the world such that hidden patterns and hitherto unexplored meanings can unfold. As such mimesis is essentially tied to mythos taken as the transformative plotting of scattered events into a new paradigm (what Paul Ricoeur calls the ‘synthesis of the heterogeneous’). It has little or nothing to do with the old naturalist conviction that art simply holds a mirror up to nature.[9]
Children of Men and World-Projection
P.D. James’s novel, Children of Men, and now Alfonso Cuarón’s film of the same title both assume the role of mimesis-mythos to offer a “newly imagined way of being in the world.” As Kearney puts it,
It is precisely by inviting us to see the world otherwise that we in turn experience catharsis: purgation of the emotions of pity and fear. For while narrative imagination enables us to empathize with those characters in the story who act and suffer, it also provides us with a certain aesthetic distance from which to view the events unfolding, thereby discerning ‘the hidden cause of things’. It is this curious conflation of empathy and detachment which produces in us—viewers of Greek tragedy or readers of contemporary fiction—the double vision necessary for a journey beyond the closed ego towards other possibilities of being.[10]
Children of Men’s anti-hero, as Slavoj Žižek chooses to call him, is Theo Faron.[11] In this futuristic Britain, the viewer is never completely sure why he has not chosen to commit suicide before his introduction at the beginning of the story. He is an alcoholic and smoker, which no one else really seems to fancy. Žižek’s term for Theo is an accurate description of his role within the narrative plot because of the nature of his involvement. Theo is not responsible for an initial morally noble response which involves him in the events of the rest of the film. In fact, as a bag is thrown over his head and he is shoved clumsily into a van, the viewer, who is as shocked as Theo is, realizes that Theo, the protagonist himself, has been forced into this story’s rising action against his will. This is Faron’s first step into any sort of plot conflict—one which he is pushed to take.
Because Cuarón depicts Theo as an anti-hero, and not a traditional tragic or epic hero, the conditions are ideal for Children of Men’s communication to be considered successful artwork. Žižek emphasizes the importance of the background as opposed to the protagonist or other main characters which function within the plot. Therefore, the infertility and social upheaval in Faron’s world is not a pretext for an ‘adventure’ or ‘cathartic journey’ that the classical hero would be expected to have. On the contrary, it is the fate of this individual anti-hero which serves as a prism through which the background is seen more sharply. Specifically, Žižek states that the oppressive social dimension of the story can only be experienced on a level that is beyond the superficiality of the cause-and-effect first impression if it remains in the background. He calls this Cuarón’s “true art”: that he is able to achieve the communication of catharsis in an oblique fashion—one that is necessarily subtle and essentially ambiguous.[12] In this way, Children of Men functions according to Aristotle’s initial thesis about cathartic communication. Kearney explains, “Aristotle confined this cathartic power to fictional and poetic narratives, maintaining that these alone revealed the ‘universal’ structures of existence—unlike historical accounts which dealt merely with ‘particular’ facts.”[13] Although Children of Men contains a historical element of narrative which is undeniably valuable and will be defended, the mere recounting of events is the superficial layer of context which Žižek asserts is not the focus of the film. These arts of fiction and poetry are ones that explain the abstract abstractly, and in doing so, communicate on a level which the spirit, and not only the mind, can comprehend.
The Function of History in Narrative
“What both historical and fictional narratives have in common is a mimetic function.”[14] The synthesized journey is not merely a product of the artist’s conception, but is a more holistic manifestation of the stimuli presented, interpreted according to the receiver’s present personal and cosmic circumstances (location), and filtered through a frame of reference which has been shaped by the individual’s personal history. As Rabkin observes,
Like all fictions, utopian literature must deal with the values and experiences of its audience…. Morris, Huxley, Wells, Cabet, Butler, and Zamiatin, programmatically address society but dramatically address individual readers, playing on universal hopes and fears, complexes of emotion that arise not from the intellectual contemplation of group alternatives, but from the personal experiences of living. Each reader moved by utopian literature is responding intellectually to a vision of the future, but emotionally to a felt memory of his own past.[15]
So, even metaphorical similarities between events in a story and those in the reader’s own life contribute to his ability to relate to a particular character or action within the narrative. The author orchestrates these fictional events, though they may be very contextually specific, to be identifiable to a diverse audience for the purpose of catharsis. This is the art that has been practiced for centuries: structuring a plot around universal themes—hopes and fears, doubts and certainties, the struggle between good and evil.[16]
Whereas fictional narrative applied an ideal standard of beauty, goodness, or nobility, historical narrative in ancient Greece was a modification of traditional mythos which was characterized by an interest in being historically accurate for the sake of depicting ‘reality’. Herodotus and Thucydides “strove to describe natural rather than supernatural events, resisting the Homeric license to entertain monstrous and fantastic scenarios.” Their basic impulse was to tell a story as if it was happening. [17] Therefore, narrative descriptions of familiar historical people or events lend themselves to ‘convincing’ the listener that this sequence is to be experienced as reality, eliciting authentic emotional responses and genuine escape from the current world to the one being projected. This historical emphasis gave rise to the genre of biography at the level of the individual, and the writing of academic history at the level of collective humanity. Kearney describes narrative’s importance to humanity in terms of “becoming full agents of our history.”[18] He terms the process of haphazard happenings being transformed into story, and thus being made memorable as a part of an individual’s personal history, as “becoming historical.” This involves a creative transformation of culture—the development of a meaningful community of people who experience life’s events together. Kearney says, “Without this transition from nature to narrative, from time suffered to time enacted and enunciated, it is debatable whether a merely biological life (zoe) could ever be considered a truly human one (bios).”[19]
The Function of Historical Narrative in Children of Men
When someone asks you who you are, you tell your story… you give a sense of yourself as a narrative identity that perdures and coheres over a lifetime. This is what German philosopher Dilthey called the coming-together-of-a-life (Zusammenhang des Lebens), meaning the act of coordinating an existence which would otherwise be scattered over time. In this way, storytellinig may be said to humanize time by transforming it from an impersonal passing of fragmented moments into a pattern, a plot, a mythos.[20]
Kearney asserts that there is, indeed, significance in the historical or empirical aspect of narrative that is to be defended against Aristotle’s view that cathartic power exists only within fictional and poetic narratives. He argues, “I would wish to contest such a schismatic opposition and acknowledge some kind of interweaving between fiction and history.”[21] Specifically, the elements of attention to detail, the careful development of intricate characters, and the use of familiar and identifiable historical icons in fictional narratives like Children of Men are especially helpful in providing the viewer with a factor of personal identification with this alternate projected world. Details such as Theo’s London 2012 Olympics sweatshirt and subtle documentation of his and Julian’s past with the death of their son and breaking of their relationship lend themselves to a sense of reality. Cuarón effectively uses the setting of the film to intensify the theme of lack. Žižek points out that because the film is set in Britain, a land which relies on the substance of historical tradition instead of a constitution, the lack of meaningful historical experience is especially devastating. Referencing Children of Men as effective communication of “the ideological despair of late capitalism,” Žižek calls the true infertility of Theo’s world the obsession with the future and failure to acknowledge the past.[22]
On the level of personal history, Children of Men is able to evoke nostalgic emotions even though the world exists in the future. Cuarón adjusts P.D. James’s novel to account for the contemporary viewer’s frame of reference through which story’s elements are filtered. Žižek’s primary example of this function is Cuarón’s adjustment of Jasper’s character. Instead of James’s Jasper who is an old ex-official, Cuarón chooses a familiar old hippie to be Theo’s confidant. Žižek points out that this difference is a carefully chosen “stroke of genius” because the modern audience is readily able to identify this character as the sort of free-spirit that the generation over sixty has such fond memories of.[23] The change causes the viewer to consider Jasper’s experiences which are presumably similar to those of a hippie in the sixties. The disparity of his current society in light of his optimistic younger days intensifies the viewer’s compassion for Jasper and thus connects his death with that of a friend or acquaintance which existed in their own world.
Another notable element of personal history is the effective character-development of Theo Faron. This development does not occur according to the traditional historical form of biography which is comprised of a summary of an individual’s accomplishments or ‘defining’ characteristics. Rather, the viewer knows Theo by non sequiturs, such as his smoking habit and several scenes in which he is seen soaking his feet. This information, though random, communicates who Theo Faron is in a way which transcends empirical data that Cuarón could have communicated instead. In his essay “The Biographical Illusion”, Pierre Bourdieu elaborates on this sort of superficial development that Žižek asserts is avoided altogether in Children of Men.[24] He quotes Alain Robbe-Grillet who states, “The advent of the modern novel is precisely tied to this discovery: reality is discontinuous, formed of elements juxtaposed without reason, each of these elements is unique, and all the more difficult to grasp because more continue to appear, unpredictable, untimely, and at random.”[25]
Narrative and the Novel
Kearney speaks about the novel as the apogee of post-Renaissance fictional romance. “What differentiates the novel from preceding kinds of romance is its extraordinary ‘synthetic’ power: it draws liberally from such diverse conventions as lyric (personal voice), drama (presentation of action), epic (depiction of heroes or anti-heroes) and chronicle (description of empirical detail).” Specifically in dystopian fictions like Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Huxley’s Brave New World, Orwell’s 1984, and James’s Children of Men, the audacity of the novel’s experimental capabilities is apparent. Drawing from all of these conventions, the novel even addresses the possibility of its own demise. [26]
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 concludes with a desperate description of a renegade community of former intellectuals who have committed their lives to the memorization and recitation of literature—texts that have been burned and only exist in their memories.[27] Kearney addresses accusations that the present age is similarly endangering the existence of the story. He speaks of the present age, the “cyber-world of the third millennium,” and “postmodern era of fragmentation and fracture,” as one in which it is increasingly important that the tradition of storytelling be perpetuated and adapt according to recent cultural developments which some critics fear is the end of narrative. “Their bottom line is that we are entering a civilisation of depthless simulation inimical to the art of storytelling.”[28] While Kearney disagrees that postmodernism is spelling the end of the story, what Wendell Berry calls “limitlessness” certainly characterizes the present age of technological advancement.[29] However, in the same way Fahrenheit 451 succeeds as a novel which forebodes the end of literature, Children of Men directly addresses the apocalyptic effects of this impending limitlessness while succeeding to perpetuate the narrative tradition which is threatened by it.
Children of Men: Cinematic vs. Literary Narrative and the Novel
Traditional dystopian and utopian fictions acknowledge a primal desire for the simplicity of an Eden-esque world. Rabkin observes, “The most common vision of a utopia, of course, is Eden itself. Often the utopian world is a pastoral one by virtue of the exclusion of technology, as we see in the Savage Reservation of Brave New World.”[30] There is a growing disparity in contemporary communication similar to the one Žižek describes as the true infertility in Children of Men. When Kearney speaks of “becoming full agents of our history,” he asserts that there is a need for the transition from meaningless sequences of life-happenings into a centralized, meaningful community—shared experience.[31] The disparity of modern society is that meaningful communities are becoming decentralized—they are instead becoming globalized. Thus, Wendell Berry’s assertion that limitlessness, or the boundless expansion of human communications and technologies, is the critical predecessor of dehumanization is to be carefully considered in a reading of the Children of Men film.[32] Although technological advancement is never called the demise of this futuristic society, there are many factors which indicate that the sinful desire to act as something beyond human is the culprit. Berry answers one of the great questions of existence—“Are we animal, human, or divine?”—with a resounding: human.
So, in order to further explain Children of Men both as a technologically advanced form of storytelling (film) in a postmodern culture and in terms of its message about limitless advancement for the culture, Berry’s claims about humanity’s violent boundlessness will be considered a helpful point of access for conversation. As Žižek expounds upon his own claim that the true infertility of Theo’s society is its lack of meaningful historical experience, he references the ancient artwork within Theo’s cousin’s mansion. Priceless artworks, including Michelangelo’s David, are stripped of their significance and primary function because they are secluded from viewers in the outside world. So, one of the results of a society that has been routed by the boundless pursuit of the future is that art has altogether lost its significance. Berry proposes a paradigm shift:
To deal with the problems, which after all are inescapable, of living with limited intelligence in a limited world, I suggest that we may have to remove some of the emphasis we have lately placed on science and technology and have a new look at the arts. For an art does not propose to enlarge itself by limitless extension but rather to enrich itself within the bounds that are accepted prior to the work.[33]
Redefining emphasis within this impersonal culture would, presumably, keep it from regressing into the artless, inhuman state which Children of Men depicts. Berry’s proposal can, then, be read as a support of Žižek’s claim about the true nature of the infertility problem in the film and also of Kearney’s assertion that the art of narrative is one that must be perpetuated. Though Berry may disagree with Kearney on the use of cinematic technology to do so, he would almost certainly agree that the art of storytelling is an essential human good.
From here, it is important to consider that the narrative, Children of Men, exists both as a novel and a film. The viewer must be aware of his viewership, distinct from both the reading of literary narrative and the viewing of visual art. Film should be recognized as a hybrid at its base level: a narrative hybrid of history and fiction, and a communicative hybrid between the visual and audio-oral modes.[34] The importance of the visual image is film’s main point of divergence from, say, a play, whether it is a read literature or a viewed drama. There is also an important distinguishing factor between the types of image: that film is a disembodied representation which is projected within a frame. In The Art of Watching Films, Joseph Boggs states that because a play can function as both literature and action, a film—of which only about half is dialogue—is far more dependent upon the image itself. He argues,
Thus Artaud’s statement that “our theatre must speak a concrete physical language intended for the senses rather than the mind, independent of the dictatorship of speech” has a greater application to the film than it does to the average play. The “concrete physical language of the senses” in film is its flowing and sparkling stream of images, its compelling pace and natural rhythms, and its pictorial style, all of which are nonverbal means of communication. It follows naturally that the aesthetic quality and dramatic power of the image itself are extremely important to the overall quality of a film.[35]
Now there are two extremes, or abuses, of image in cinema. The first is what Žižek defines as the formally pornographic in Looking Awry. The pornographic, “showing all”, is self-defeating because it fails to achieve the pleasurable aspects of sex by showing the act objectively. The spectator looks on, wishing to view the ‘objects’ committing the sexual act, but is conversely objectified by the gaze of those in the film. The roles are reversed. The spectator misses the real experience of pleasurable sexual arousal precisely because the element of mystery is missing. “Contrary to the commonplace according to which, in pornography, the other (the person shown on the screen) is degraded to an object of our voyeuristic pleasure, we must stress that it is the spectator him—or herself who effectively occupies the position of the object.”[36] The second abuse of image, what Žižek identifies at the opposite end of narrative perversion, is nostalgia. Nostalgia is an equally superficial endeavor because the viewer’s relation to, for example, a film noir is “always split between fascination and ironic distance—ironic distance toward its diegetic reality, fascination with the gaze.” [37] Kearney cites this same irony, “a postmodern cult of parody and pastiche,” as the pessimist’s conclusion—the death of narrative.[38] Children of Men effectively avoids both perversions of image. Although its distinctive long cuts are characteristic of voyeuristic cinematography, the viewer is not objectified either by the violence nor Kee’s brief nakedness because Cuarón goes to such great lengths to make Theo’s perspective synonymous with the viewer’s. In fact, Kee’s nudity is so brief because Theo asks her not to reveal herself. The viewer simply sees what Theo sees. Also, Žižek points out the complete lack of sex in the film. Cuarón’s avoidance of sexual contact ensures that the ‘infertility’ is perceived as spiritual. Fertility is reinstalled, but not by depicted sex.[39] On the other hand, Cuarón avoids the use of montage of aesthetic, non sequitur events to achieve mystery or maintain some sort of transcendent ambiguity. Rather, his long, objective shots lend themselves to enabling the viewer to identify his own viewership. He is not dumbly watching Theo stumble behind the car which he is pushing to jump-start, but is participating in the reality of the situation—the manifest anxiety that results from Theo’s narrow, clumsy escape.
So, with an appropriate approach to the making and viewing of film as a successor of the novel, one can avoid the perversions which limitlessness, in its various forms, tempts the artists and audiences of the postmodern era. These perversions being the sacrifice of meaningful historical experience in favor of lusting after the future, the decentralization of meaningful communal interaction—submitting to the demise of art, and the abuse of the cinematic image which is the most important evolution in contemporary narrative.
Concluding Thoughts
Children of Men is a significant narrative because it functions successfully in contemporary film-philosophy in light of a rich and well-developed philosophical narrative tradition—literary and dramatic. It demonstrates Kearney’s thesis to be accurate, that postmodernism is not, in fact, the end of story, but a trove of possibilities for new insight into the way communities experience storytelling. It demonstrates that the development of film as a medium for storytelling can be significantly helpful for enriching the human experience, so long as it is approached in an appropriate manner. The hypothesis that narrative is essential for the fulfillment of human bios is one rooted in a history dating to the dawn of man. For the art of storytelling to thrive in the present culture—characterized by globalization and loss of identity, it must infiltrate and utilize even the technology which threatens its existence. This is why a philosophical reading of Children of Men is an edifying endeavor; the film perpetuates and secures a future for the most basic and implicit of the arts. By means of cathartic world-projection, its participation in the traditions and developing histories of fiction and historical narrative, and its bold divergence from the novel, the narrative constant, this film transcends the intentions of Alfonso Cuarón and even the developers of cinematic technologies. Žižek affirms, “Only films like this can guarantee that cinema as art will really survive.”[40]
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Allen, Richard. “Looking at Motion Pictures,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen, Murray Smith, 76-94. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Aristotle. Poetics, ed. Richard Janko. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987.
Berry, Wendell. “Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits.” Harper’s Magazine, May 2008, 35-42.
Boggs, Joseph M. The Art of Watching Films. Menlo Park, CA: The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company, Inc., 1978.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Biographical Illusion,” in Working Papers and Proceedings of the Centre for Psychosocial Studies, ed. R.J. Parmentier, G. Urban, 297-303. 1983.
Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. London: Panther Books, 1976.
Chamberlain, Daniel Frank. Narrative Perspective in Fiction. Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1990.
Coste, Didier. Narrative as Communication. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.
Huxley, Alduous. Brave New World. Cutchogue, NY: Buccaneer Books, Inc., 1946.
Kearney, Richard. On Stories. Florence, KY: Routledge Publishers, 2001.
Matter, William. “On Brave New World,” in No Place Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, ed. Eric Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, Joseph Olander, 94-109. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.
Rabkin, Eric S. “Avatism and Utopia,” in No Place Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, ed. Eric Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, Joseph Olander, 1-10. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.
Robbe-Grillet, Alain. Le miroir qui revient. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984.
Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-Stories.” In Essays Presented to Charles Williams (June 1966).
Zipes, Jack. “Mass Degradation of Humanity and Massive Contradictions in Bradbury’s Vision of America in Fahrenheit 451,” in No Place Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, ed. Eric Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, Joseph Olander, 182-198. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.
Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2007. Žižek on Children of Men. On-line. Available from Internet, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbgrwNP_gYE, accessed 18 May 2009.
[1] Richard Kearney. On Stories. Florence, KY: Routledge, 2001, 3.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.,12.
[4] Ibid.,6-7.
[5] Aristotle. Poetics, ed. Richard Janko. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987, 59.
[6] J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,” Essays Presented to Charles Williams. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B Eerdmans. (June 1966): 65.
[7] Kearney, On Stories, 7.
[8] Eric S. Rabkin, “Avatism and Utopia,” in No Place Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, ed. Eric Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, Joseph Olander, 1-10. Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. 1
[9] Kearney, On Stories, 12.
[10] Ibid., 12-13.
[11] Slavoj Žižek. 2007. Žižek on Children of Men. On-line. Available from Internet, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbgrwNP_gYE, accessed 18 May 2009.
[12]Žižek, On Children of Men.
[13] Kearney, On Stories, 13.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Rabkin, “Avatism and Utopia,” 1.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Kearney, On Stories, 9.
[18] Ibid., 3.
[19] Ibid., 3.
[20] Ibid., 4.
[21] Ibid.,13.
[22]Žižek, On Children of Men.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Pierre Bourdieu, “The Biographical Illusion”, in Working Papers and Proceedings of the Centre for Psychosocial Studies, ed. R.J. Parmentier, G. Urban, 297-303. 1983, 298-299.
[25] Alain Robbe-Grillet, Le miroir qui revient, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984, 208.
[26] Kearney, On Stories, 10.
[27] Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (London: Panther Books, 1976).
[28] Kearney, On Stories, 4,10.
[29] Wendell Berry, “Faustian Economics: Hell Hath No Limits,” Harper’s Magazine, May 2008, 35.
[30] Rabkin, “Avatism and Utopia”, 3.
[31] Kearney, On Stories, 3.
[32] Berry, “Faustian Economics”.
[33] Berry, “Faustian Economics”, 41.
[34] Daniel Frank Chamberlain. Narrative Perspective in Fiction, Buffalo, NY: University of Toronto Press, 1990, 162.
[35] Joseph M. Boggs. The Art of Watching Films, Menlo Park, CA: The Benjamin/Cummings Publishing Company, Inc., 1978, 68-69.
[36] Slavoj Žižek. Looking Awry, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1992, 525-526.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Kearney, On Stories, 11.
[39]Žižek, On Children of Men.
[40]Žižek, On Children of Men.
