MDDM Subjunctive Spaces

[Dave Monroe]

>From Gary Saul Morson, Narrative and Freedom: The
Shadows of Time (New Haven, CN: Yale UP, 1994),
"Introduction," pp. 1-14 ...

"Everything I do is planned." --Inspector Clouseau

"... we may also question whether it is not misleading
to assume a single temporality for all disciplines and
all aspects of experience." (p. 3)

"In our time, the greatest ritic concerned with
examining literary works in this way is, in my view,
Bakhtin." (p. 4)

"For Bakhtin, not just individual works but also whole
literary genres could profitably be viewed as 'forms
of tought.'  Specifically, he maintained taht each
narrative genre implicitly manifests a spcific model
of temporality....  Some rely on a sense of time as
open, otehrs as closed; in some, individual chracater
unfolds, in other it develops; aome allow for
contingency whereas others are fatalistic." (p. 5)

"Within the plurality of temporalities, I advocate a
particular conception of open time that i call
sideshadowing." (p. 5)

"Sideshadowing ... nams both an open sense of
temporality and a set of devices used to convey that
sense..... to offer an alternative to prevailing
deterministic and otherwise closed views of tims." (p.
6)

"... sideshadowing admits, in addition to actualities
and impssibilities, a middle realm of real
possibilities that could have happened even if they
did not.... encourages skepticism about our ability to
know the future and the wisdom of projectig straight
lines from current tends or values." (p. 6)

"... it calls attention to the ways in which
narratives, which oftne turn earlier presents into
mere pats, tend to create a single line of development
out of a multiplicity.  Alternatives once visible
disappear from view and an anachronistic sense of the
past surreptitiously infects our understanding....
sideshadowing restores some of the presentness thatb
has been lost.  It alters the way w think about
earlier events and the narrative models used to
describe them." (pp. 6-7)

"By contrast, various kinds of foreshadowing offer us
a world in which time is closed.... certain vnts take
place in a special way.  Instead of being caused by
prior events, they happen (or also happen) as a
consequence of events to come.  foreshadowing, ins
hort, involves backwards causation, which means that,
in one way or another, the future must already be
there, must already exist substantially enough to send
signs backwards." (p. 7)

"Even when foreshadowing is not explicitly used, it i
implicitly present by virtue of a narrative's reliance
on structure and closure.  In a well-constructed
story, everything points (or will turn out to point)
to the ending and to the pattern that will eventually
be revealed.... each detail can be explained not only
casually, by what happened before, but also
retrospectively in terms of the completed stucture. 
In rereading, we may take pleasure in contemplating
this double explanation of events." (p. 7)

"Writers who have wanted to represent time as open
have therefore sometimes struggled against the demand
for structure and closure.  And yet for very good
reasons, a work without these tin insurers of unity is
likely not to be effective at all.  It appears that
literary structure is not neutral with respect to
philosophies of time....  It i relatively easy to make
a narrative's temporality isomorphic with closed time
but ... lmost impossible to create isomorphism with
open time." (p. 8)

And from Michael Andre Bernstein, Foregone
Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: U
of California P, 1995), Ch. 1, "Against
Foreshadowing," pp. 1-8 ...

A: What is the great world-historical event of 1875?
B: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin turned five!

A characteristic Russian joke during the Brezhnev era

"In narrative terms, sideshadowing is best understood
in opposition to the familiar technique of
foreshadowing ..." (pp. 1-2)

"At its extreme, foreshadowing implies a closed
universe in which all choices have already been made,
in which human free will can exist only in the
paradoxical sense of choosing to acept or
willfully--and vainly--rebelling against the
inevitable." (p. 2)

"... there is a strong sense in which the very idea of
history as a linear unfolding from darkness toward
light, and from ignorance toward truth, is rooted in
neither Jewish nor Classical thinking but, as Jonathan
Boyarin has argued, entirely in 'the early church
fathers' idea of the progression from Judaism to
Christianity.'"

See here ...

Boyarin, Jonathan.  Storm from Paradise:
   The Politics of Jewish Memory.
   Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992.

Quoting p. xv.  But to continue from Bernstein ...

"Sideshadowing's attention to the unfulfilled or
unrealized possibilities of the apst is a way of
disrupting th affirmations of a triumphalist,
unidirectional viw of history in which whatever has
perished is condemned because it has been foun wanting
by some irresitibl historico-logical dynamic.  Against
foreshadowing, sideshadowing chmpions the
incommensurability of the concrete moment and refuses
the turanny of all synthetic master-schemes; it
rehects the conventionthat a particular code, law, or
pattern exists, waiting to be uncobered beneath the
heterogeneity of human existence.... sideshadowing
stresses the significnce of random, ahphazard, and
unassimilbale contingencies, and instead of the power
of a sysem to uncover an anfathomabl truth, it
expresses the evr-changing nature of that truth anmd
the absence of any predictive certaintites in human
affairs.  or in Robert Musil's more subtly ironic
formulation, we we need to recognize is the reality of
underdetermination, th fact that events do not occur
because of any logical or historical necessity.  As
Ulrich, Musil's mn Without Qualities, explains with
his 'Principle of the Insufficient Cause' ...' (pp.
3-4)

"It is worth stressing how different this ide is, in
spite of its apparent kinship, from Freud's concept of
'overdetermination.'...  For writers like Broch [The
Sleepwalkers], Musil [The Man without Qualities], or
Roth [The Counterlife], however, the multiplicity of
motivations of a dream, thought, or feeling is not the
primary issue; instead, the focus is on t multiplicity
of the 'formations' themsleves.  in reading these
novels, we become trained not to search fro evr more
deeply intertwined chains of signification
intersecting at the 'nodal point' of a single
expression, but to recognize that the whole
orchestration of complex sentiments and concepts might
be occuring, not, as it were, archaeologically beneath
the surface ones as their founation, , but instead,
topographically alongside of, and temporally concurrnt
with, teh one we notice and upon which our attention
and interpretive acumen are focused.  Novels like this
show us how each counterlife is composed of countless
counter-moments, and how each thought takes shape as
only one realization amid the countr-thoughts that
hover as its sideshdows, multiple alternatives
existing in a potential space and ready to be brough,
by th quickening of imagination or desirer, out of teh
shadows and into the light of formal expression." (pp.
6-7)

"To concentrate on the sideshadowed ideas and events,
on what did not happen, does not cast oubt on the
historicity of what occured but views it as one among
a range of possibilities, a number of which might,
with equal plausibilty, have taken place instead.  The
one that actually was realized, though, exists from
then on with all the weight afforded by the
singularity of what we might call event-ness.  Onlythe
brightness of an actual event can cast sufficient
shadow for sideshadowing to matter ...." (p. 7)

Morson and Bernstein's books, by the way, are
expressly presented as companion pices, an were
initially conceived as parts of one large work.  But
alternate history, the counterfactual, the
allohistorical, is a fascination of mine, e.g., ...

http:///www.uchronia.com

And I wonder to what extent Pynhon might have been
influnced in this regard by such works as, in
particular, at the more pointed end of yr alternate
historical novels, Philip K. Dick's The Man in the
High Castle and Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream (Ward
Moore's Bring the Jubilee?  And who wrote that Pavane?
 Have a tenuous connection here, afraid to go
searching) ...


__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! GeoCities - quick and easy web site hosting, just $8.95/month.
http://geocities.yahoo.com/ps/info1