VLVL2 (15): This Alternate-Universe Idea

[Dave Monroe]

"'Sometimes,' she'd told Che, 'when I get very weird,
I go into this alternate-universe idea, and wonder if
there isn't a parallel world where she decided to have
the abortion, get rid of me, and what's really
happening is that I'm looking for her so I can haunt
her like a ghost.'" (VL, Ch. 15, p. 334)


"this alternate-universe idea"

http:///www.uchronia.com

Cf., e.g., ...

   "Next day, feeling mysteriously better, he was back
on the case [...], studying the road map like a racing
form till he'd handicapped the alternate routes and
imagined changes of plans associated with each ...."
(VL, Ch. 9, p. 161)

"Does Brittania, when she sleeps, dream?  Is America
her dream? [...] serving as a very Rubbish-Tip for
subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true."
(M&D, Ch. 34, p. 345)

"Could he have been the fork in the road America never
took, the singular point she jumped the wrong way
from?" (GR, Pt. III, p. 556)

"She had heard all about excluded middles; they were
bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it happened here,
with chances once so good for diversity?" (Lot 49, Ch.
3, p. 181)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0311&msg=87369&sort=date

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

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

"Sideshadowing ... names 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 projecting straight
lines from current trends or values." (p. 6)

"... it calls attention to the ways in which
narratives, which often turn earlier presents into
mere pasts, 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 that
has been lost.  It alters the way we think about
earlier events and the narrative models used to
describe them." (pp. 6-7)

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

"It is worth stressing how different this idea 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 the
multiplicity of the 'formations' themsleves.  in
reading these novels, we become trained not to search
for ever 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, the 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 counter-thoughts that
hover as its sideshdows, multiple alternatives
existing in a potential space and ready to be brough,
by th quickening of imagination or desire, out of the
shadows and into the light of formal expression." (pp.
6-7)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0111&msg=62858&sort=date


	
		
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs  
http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/careermakeover