ATDTDA (5.1) - The Etienne-Louis Malus

[Dave Monroe]

--- David Casseres <david.casseres at gmail.com> wrote:

> So, Vormance = "forward divination."  Or varmints, I
> like that!

Well, I'm esp. interested in how that vor- (cf., say,
vortex) might connote both forwards and sideways ...

Morson, Gary Saul.  Narrative and Freedom:
   The Shadows of Time.  New Haven, CT.  Yale UP, 1994

In this important and controversial book, one of our
leading literary theorists presents a major
philosophical statement about the meaning of
literature and the shape of literary texts. Drawing on
works by the Russian writers Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and
Chekhov, by other writers as diverse as Sophocles,
Cervantes, and George Eliot, by thinkers as varied as
William James, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Stephen Jay Gould,
and from philosophy, the Bible, television, and much
more, Gary Saul Morson examines the relation of time
to narrative form and to an ethical dimension of the
literary experience.

Morson asserts that the way we think about the world
and narrate events is often in contradiction to the
truly eventful and open nature of daily life.
Literature, history, and the sciences frequently
present experience as if contingency, chance, and the
possibility of diverse futures were all illusory. As a
result, people draw conclusions or accept ideologies
without sufficiently examining their consequences or
alternatives. However, says Morson, there is another
way to read and construct texts. He explains that most
narratives are developed through foreshadowing and
"backshadowing" (foreshadowing ascribed after the
fact), which tend to reduce the multiplicity of
possibilities in each moment. But other literary works
try to convey temporal openness through a device he
calls "sideshadowing." Sideshadowing suggests that to
understand an event is to grasp what else might have
happened. Time is not a line but a shifting set of
fields of possibility. Morson argues that this view of
time and narrative encourages intellectual pluralism,
helps to liberate us from the false certainties of
dogmatism, creates a healthy skepticism of present
orthodoxies, and makes us aware that there are moral
choices available to us.

http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=0300068751

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

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0405&msg=90546

And here's why I miss Robt., e.g., ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0111&msg=62866

Not to mention Vince Maeder ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0111&msg=62973

... whom I think Tim and I still owe a dinner ...

> > vor = fowards (Ger.)
> >
> > ENTRY:  wer-
> > DEFINITION:     Conventional base of various
> > Indo-European roots; to turn, bend....
> >
> > http://www.bartleby.com/61/roots/IE571.html
> >
> > -mancy = divination, prophecy (Gr.)
> >
> > http://www.bartleby.com/61/26/M0072600.html
>
http://www.wordquests.info/cgi/ice2-for.cgi?file=/hsphere/local/home/scribejo/wordquests.info/htm/L-Gk-mancy-A.htm&HIGHLIGHT=mancy
> >
> >    "'It was some sort of prophesy, then?' asked
> > Dr. Vormance.
> >    "'Not quite as we're used to thinking of it,'
> > Throyle replied. "For us it's simple ability to
> > see into the future, based on our linear way of
> > regarding time, a simple straight line from the
> > past, through present, into the future. Christian
> > time, as you might say. But shamans see it
> > differently. Their notion of time is spread out
> > not in a single dimension but over many, which
> > all exist in a single, timeless instant.'"


 
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