ABSTRACT
The commercial culture we absorb in such massive doses envelops us in make-believe and distracts us from the realities of current history that urgently demand our attention. This chapter seeks the origins of the confusion in the literary distinction between narrative and drama, and suggests that photography and its offspring, film and video, lend themselves to distortion and ambiguity because they appear so patently to extend the audience's own senses directly. Tenuous boundaries separate fact and fiction. Fantasy experience differs from that of real life, and dramatic audiovisual fiction differs from written narrative. Fiction's power derives from its capacity to convince its audience that it resembles reality. Reading requires more exercise of the imagination than audiovisual fiction, which occupies ever more time. News media propagate collective illusions, which differ from the fantasies in which individuals indulge. Fiction in dramatic form dominates commercial culture.
