one person from another, endlessly

I feel like so much of my brain lately has been focused on print as something obsolete, something that’s past its prime in a way, and I have to say it’s pretty damn depressing.

I know that perhaps this is not what Stephanie Strickland was going for in her essay, Dali Clocks: The Time Dimensions of Hypermedia, but her continuous emphasis on this concept of “now,” her cadence on this attempt to capture an immediate present or to define it in various ways through digital media, points back again and again to the obsolescence of writing linearly, to experiencing text as an easily definable series of moments on the page.

But then that same sort of thing has been attempted in textual works. What comes to mind is Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a rather strange work that tries to debunk the concept of linear fiction as much as it can while remaining readable, although its methods become a little comical. For instance, when characters are walking down a spiral staircase at one point, the text appears in a spiral on the page, thereby forcing the reader to either crane or rotate the book to take it all in. But more importantly, the whole thing is in two separate narratives, one the actual story (with its own footnotes, mind you, because it’s billed as a semi-academic analysis of a non-existent film) and the other the story of a guy named Johnny Truant entirely in his own set of footnotes. It degenerates eventually to the point that there are numerous lists of things going on next to the actual narratives and the page just becomes a clusterfuck of text that largely confuses and infuriates. Which makes me wonder: can these intentional mis-directions and visual trees (as with the Rosenberg piece Strickland cites in her essay, the text piling up as the reader scrolls his/her mouse over it) and games with the concept of linearity become so cumbersome that they destroy meaning? At what point does meaning break down entirely, or is it fluid, so that meaning can always be drawn from a piece no matter the breakdown of clarity in it? I don’t have an answer to that question, but my instinct is usually to err on the conservative side and assume that there is such a thing as betraying the reader by being too self-indulgent. A little bit old-fashioned of me, perhaps.

Another moment of synchronicity for me: I just did a presentation for Marcia Douglas’ International Fiction class about the concept of writing fiction with a purpose, specifically a socio-political one, which was intended to ask a few questions. Most relevantly, I wanted to know if Purpose, capital P on that one, muddles the work, if trying to Do Something with your work ruins its accessibility and alienates the reader before it can get its point across. In doing so, I was reading Milan Kundera’s The Curtain, a long essay about the craft of fiction, and he said a few things that seemed to directly pertain to Strickland’s piece, particularly about how ephemeral art is and the artist’s constant fight to create a “now” that can be preserved as an accurate mirror of society. For instance,

“What should the novelist do in the face of that destructive forgetting? Snap
his fingers at it and build his novel as an indestructible castle of the
unforgettable, even though he knows that his reader will only ramble through it
distractedly, rapidly, forgetfully, and never inhabit it.”

So that “now” can never be captured, and novelists may be even more ill-equipped to capture it in their work than the digital artists that Strickland speaks of, particularly those who in that “now”-capturing play with the very idea of “now,” so what you’re experiencing in any given moment can’t necessarily be reconciled to the moments before and after.
I wanted to close with this fantastic video from a group called Blu that is made by stop-action animation through erasable chalk. This felt like a great example of the concept of the ephemeral in art.