Clearly this is a GMTA sorta day, because I've been thinking about a meta concerning time travel/narrative/serial fiction in the wake of some of the IHNIIHBT comments, and then got quite excited by reading fmanalyst's post and the work she's planning, and now these wonderful comments here. So just a few thoughts.
I think that myth-forms, or archetypes, or simply certain sorts of storytelling, tend to hang around for reasons that don't always have much to do with their content (let alone some deep rootedness in human psychology, or whatevah). They persist in part because they do, in fact, offer an opening for re-telling, and making sense of something within the teller's or reader's own frame of reference. And at any given moment, such narratives have multiple possible re-tellings that can suspend disbelief or draw attention to their own artifice.
One such strategy is the Rashomon-like interpretation of a single text/event from several different viewpoints (a synchronic retelling, if you will); another is sequential or serial (diachronic). A lot of fictions, including fanfic, use both -- although seldom simultaneously, which to me is interesting to think about. I think that both approaches are equally capable of creating effective "windows." Whether the illusion sustains a reader's belief, I think, depends as much on frame of reference as the fictional framing. (Witness D. and the lawyer above.)
And now I've committed the Jamesian crime of using too many words without any of his elegance. Oh well.
I very much enjoyed, btw, getting the "Rashomon" version of the Cornell meetup. :D
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Date: 2009-02-13 10:19 pm (UTC)I think that myth-forms, or archetypes, or simply certain sorts of storytelling, tend to hang around for reasons that don't always have much to do with their content (let alone some deep rootedness in human psychology, or whatevah). They persist in part because they do, in fact, offer an opening for re-telling, and making sense of something within the teller's or reader's own frame of reference. And at any given moment, such narratives have multiple possible re-tellings that can suspend disbelief or draw attention to their own artifice.
One such strategy is the Rashomon-like interpretation of a single text/event from several different viewpoints (a synchronic retelling, if you will); another is sequential or serial (diachronic). A lot of fictions, including fanfic, use both -- although seldom simultaneously, which to me is interesting to think about. I think that both approaches are equally capable of creating effective "windows." Whether the illusion sustains a reader's belief, I think, depends as much on frame of reference as the fictional framing. (Witness D. and the lawyer above.)
And now I've committed the Jamesian crime of using too many words without any of his elegance. Oh well.
I very much enjoyed, btw, getting the "Rashomon" version of the Cornell meetup. :D