Oftentimes our lives do not unfold with respect to time so much as with respect to some mood or emotion. By “mood or emotion” I do not refer to the superficial connotations of these words that flood our airwaves, but rather something more serious and coherent, something along the lines of T.S. Elliot’s term “art-emotion”. Religious people might like to call it “holy spirit” or “atman” or something like that. The art-emotion may have been awakened through a traumatic experience, or a flash of illumination or bliss (which can be traumatic in its own way), that one had at a given point in time; but it is not itself an event. It is not of time. It is analogous to time in the way that it parameterizes our lives in terms of before and after, this and that, but it stands on an equal footing with time, as an alternative—and probably more compelling—parameterization. (The art-emotion is difficult to describe because language is generally time-bound. Successful attempts at evoking it generally take the form of great poetry.) Many find their lives unfolding more coherently and continuously with respect to the art-emotion than with respect to time. In lucid dreaming, eons can pass with respect to the mood or emotion, even though only a short interval of minutes or hours has passed with respect to time. Conversely, large tracts of time can pass by in which one feels no inner evolution, only physical aging. In screenplay parlance this monotonous succession of consecutive moments, completely immaterial to the soul of the plot, is called “coyote sequencing”. In comic book parlance there is a similar concept known as “action-to-action sequencing”.
Children are particularly alive to the profound, inner coherence of the alternative world within. “Education” that seeks to eradicate this world or to close the door on it—and to effectively feed the child’s flowering attention and energies to the world of time-parameterized forms—is evil. The sense of drudgery, of pointlessness, the coyote sequencing, if you will, of our adult lives—the sense that time passes for our bodies but not our souls—is a residual echo of this trauma. And yet we never completely lose touch with that inner world. We rake through the faetor of time-based formalisms with our bare fingers, in the dark, to find the door to the source of life that our educators bolted shut. To break the bolt and open that door again is the true business behind the satyr play of all our ostensible “adult” business.
In comic books, the name for alternative (usually mood-based) sequencing is “aspect-to-aspect”. In any craft, be it comic book writing, or novel writing, or painting, or life itself, the question you have to ask is, “what is the natural parameter with respect to which the content is evolving?” It usually isn’t time.
For a year or two, as an undergrad, I was intensely interested in the novel as a formalism, its nuts and bolts, its delivery mechanisms, why novels fail, and so forth. I read books like Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, Breton’s Manifestos of Surrealism, Blanchot’s The Space of Literature. In my novel reading, I had noticed that there are very few novels that do not fail. I had found many of these novels to be mostly ingenious, except for that awkward stretch at the end where the authors, suddenly and rudely awoken from a blissful stupor, begin groping around for a deus ex machina, or whatever will make their editors happy. More tragic still were the lesser known, fractionally ingenious works like How German Is It? or The Slynx, which start out with breathtaking promise, but quicly lose the thread and revert to a default, time-bound formalism that aborts the birth of genius that had unfolded with unconscious ease up until that point. I knew the feeling. Certain fragments of my own writing came out beautifully (my professors said so much) and with unconscious ease. But their beauty, combined with the diffidence of youth, afflicted me with a crippling self-consciousness. The dull, pretentious, belabored passages by which I strained to glue them together into a meaningful whole ultimately ruined my young attempt at a novel.
(Incidentally, Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Calvino’s Invisible Cities are examples of the rare novels that, in my opinion, do not fail—novels whose contents are perfectly unified with their forms, right up to the very last word. That last phrase of To the Lighthouse: “I have had my vision.”—Perfect!)
The novel has no a priori nuts and bolts, no archetypal, eternal architecture. Great novels are great for reasons unknown to their authors. Fiction fails for the same reason that life fails—because one loses one’s sense of the natural parameter with respect to which the soul of the plot is evolving. The key parameter is not time.
This is mostly just me wondering aloud why my own fiction emerges in such a non-linear, atemporal way. Ever since my painfully disappointing attempt at a novel, I have discarded the stream of oddly juxtaposed scenes as pretentious pseudo-avant garde crap. But it has persisted, and lately I have begun writing it down again. Here is an example of what I surmise to be my aspect-to-aspect fiction:
The four-treasury imperial expeditionary office was set up on the snowy loess plain of the Tungiyya Valley, not far from Fushun, Hetu Ala, and the imperial tombs at Yongling, facing south, marshaling lineages and resolving persons of blank status.
The imperial scholars were clarifying General Huwasan’s Manchuness when the dispatches arrived from the expeditionary historiographical sub-mission to the villages of Dong Ting prefecture. Thirty-two officials had been exposed as twice-serving Han and correctly divested of their powers, replaced by officials of authenticated Manchu descent. The Qianlong Emperor leaned forward on the sedan throne and dispatched a beile to the Jurchen tribes around Odori, saying:
“The Original Four Ancestors of Qing were Mongke Temur, Fuman, Giocangga, and Taksi, who came from Odori to the place we are now. But this is just a tale told by fathers to children at bedtime. We must follow the mighty river back up to its source. I remind you that failure to adhere to strict evidentiary methods carries a penalty of death.”
But the imperial scholars re-examining the ancestral record could turn up no mention of the story prior to the reign of the Shunzhi emperor. Indeed, they could find no mention of ‘Manchu’ or ‘Qing’ until the ninth year of the reign of the Purity Accomplished Emperor. And prior to that, the records were completely indecipherable, written as they were in an obscure Mongolian dialect no longer spoken anywhere in the world.
“Then there are no Jin among the Jurchen tribes from Heilongjiang to Jilin. Qing are originally Manchu, Manchu are originally Later Jin, Later Jin are originally Jurchen. Jurchen are originally Early Jin.”
These and other sayings extolled by aides with fine phrases and queued by scribes for codification, the Emperor then reclined and declaimed verse from his Ode to Mukden late into the night.
Diderot walked a long ways out beneath the eaves and collapsed to his knees in the snow, studying the soot-blackened tears that rolled across the back of his hands, late into the night.