| Death and fiction... |
[Jul. 12th, 2007|02:54 am] |
So, I'm trying out themes, and there's one I keep tripping over --
In any narrative form, death (or oblivion in the case of narratives extending beyond "life") really only appears or becomes an absolute limit-case when the linearity of the narrative is preserved. In a non-linear narrative, then, death loses its position as a temporal end-point in the experience of either a subject or a character; birth and death are only minimally "bounds" at all, as neither is any longer capable of enforcing a split between what is internal to or external to a subject/character. (Birth and death are boundaries, then, which pass only within that of which they are taken to be boundaries; subjectivity is both finite and bounded, but the bounds no longer contain it.)
Does it work to carry the idea beyond this, though? Is it feasible to construct birth/death-as-limit-case as itself an artifact of linear narrative rather than expressed reality? I'm thinking a bit about Judith Butler's rejection of the requirement that a subject maintain a linear narrative construction of its own subjectivity to be considered "whole," but in the case of fiction I have the added advantage of working with an entity which is unproblematically a narrative construction and in which even the impression of time and linearity is unnecessary.
I'm not sure how I want to manage the idea. I am fairly sure now, though, that a character in Lionfish will die, but will appear later in script-time. Even though the script as a whole fits the constraints of "realism," a non-linear arrangement can play up some of the contradictions and unstated assumptions in that construction of the "real" itself. |
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