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FURTHER EXAMINATION OF THE BONDIAN ÁPPROACH
we do and how we do it. Growing up into a society also means accepting at
least some of its narratives and defining yourself in relation to other stories.
They become defining elements of the individual’s thinking. The unawareness
of the culturally set narratives working in our thinking is of central concern
for Bond. He connects this with the gap between material reality and
the subjective image of reality in our minds and argues that “cultures record
‘social reality’ but mis-describe reality — not just human reality but reality
itself. This is counterproductive because we think that we are in reality,
not that reality is ‘in’ us”.?%6
Bond recognises that people need the fiction of ideology, he says that
“by mis-describing reality they enable societies to survive in it”. There is
a need for common values, for a shared understanding of how the world works,
for laws that create a framework for living together; these human creations
are justified by the stories of ideology. Bond claims that “fiction is our reality
because ultimately it determines our existence in society. The power of
ideology is that it uses the humanising force — our appetites, passions, needs —
that binds us to the reality of nature, to bind us to its psychotic fictions”.?°®
Bond summarises the relation of fiction and reality by comparing the use
of story by a child to the use of story by society.
To be human the pre-real child makes reality a story. Society adopts the story and
uses it to dehumanize the adult. Society does this — and is able to do it — because
the child learnt to anthropomorphize. The child anthropomorphized the world
to survive dangers, society anthropomorphizes the world to use the dangers as
threats: the child to be free, society to incarcerate. Society continues the story but
changes the meaning: it transcendentalizes it.?°
I will continue by examining if there are arguments that support Bond’s
theory of the relationship of reality and fiction from other fields of study.
The premise for any further thinking is the notion of the gap between material
and subjective reality.
It is interesting to look at this question from a physiological perspective.
The brain researcher Bruce Hood states that “we process the outside world
through our nervous system in order to create a model of reality in our
brains”.?”? He comes from a materialist stand and points out that there are
limits to what our nervous system can detect of reality, therefore much of
266 Bond: Creation of imagination, 1.
27 Edward Bond: Imagination — further notes, Unpublished notebook entry, Personal
communication, 4 December, 2012, 1.
268 Bond: The Third Crisis, xxxix.
269 Bond: Reason for Theatre, 123.
20 Bruce Hood: The self illusion, London, Constable, 2011, 2.
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