Reality Through Writing/ Reality Through Imaginary

I thought our guest speaker today did a great job pulling together the themes of “Memento” and our reading. I especially liked how he connected the idea of reality and where we think we got it to how the main character, Leonard, perceives his reality. I thought the guest speaker put a lot of emphasis on writing and the process of putting things down on paper and then trying to determine fact from fiction and having that become the reality. For example, we talked about how Leonard obtained meaning from the pictures he took by writing something about them below to the image. We linked his process of writing meaning down to our society’s process of writing meaning down. We have been writing things down for years. From laws to historical events to scientific data, we base our reality on these writings. I also found it interesting when we discussed Baudrillard’s theory on page 454 which talks about how we find our real through the imaginary. His whole construction of this idea is based on that binary we talked about and that is we have the real and we have the imaginary, without one or the other we have nothing to compare the other against.