Compose a discursive response in which you extend the ideas in Text 1.
In your response, articulate your insights into how texts make meaning through the crafting of literary worlds.
Text 1
For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors – which is the logic of narratives in general – over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless. We spend our entire lives trying to tell stories about ourselves – they’re the essence of memory. It is how we make living in this unfeeling, accidental universe tolerable. That we call such a tendency “the narrative fallacy” doesn’t mean it doesn’t also touch upon some aspect of the truth. Some stories simply literalise their metaphors a bit more explicitly. I’m also a translator, and translation offers a natural metaphor for how I think about writing in general. Every act of communication is a miracle of translation. At this moment, in this place, the shifting action potentials in my neurons cascade into certain arrangements, patterns, thoughts; they flow down my spine, branch into my arms, my fingers, until muscles twitch and thought is translated into motion; mechanical levers are pressed; electrons are rearranged; marks are made on paper. At another time, in another place, light strikes the marks, reflects into a pair of high-precision optical instruments sculpted by nature after billions of years of random mutations; upside- down images are formed against two screens made up of millions of light-sensitive cells, which translate light into electrical pulses that go up the optic nerves, cross the chiasm[1], down the optic tracts, and into the visual cortex, where the pulses are reassembled into letters, punctuation marks, words, sentences . . . thoughts. The entire system seems fragile, preposterous, science fictional. Who can say if the thoughts you have in your mind as you read these words are the same thoughts I had in my mind as I typed them? We are different, you and I, and the qualia of our consciousnesses[2] are as divergent as two stars at the ends of the universe. And yet, whatever has been lost in translation in the long journey of my thoughts through the maze of civilisation to your mind, I think you do understand me, and you think you do understand me. Our minds managed to touch, if but briefly and imperfectly. Does the thought not make the universe seem just a bit kinder, a bit brighter, a bit warmer and more human? We live for such miracles.
KEN LIU Extract from The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
[1] chiasm intersection of pathways in the eye Reproduced by permission of Ken Liu, author And the author’s agents
[2] qualia of our subjectivity of our thoughts Scovil Galen Ghosh Literary Agency, Inc consciousnesses