The Garden of Forking Paths

[version]

Some moves are obvious and some bewildering but then reveal or relate a retroactive ordering of the game and how it has been played.

You able to give an example?

 

[sus]

Narrative is something like song structure, the tempo and melodic development and chord progression. It's the logic of agentic action as it meets and models and ultimately masters or is melted by the unpredictability and complexity of the agents' environment. Their path through that environment's garden (more a wilderness, overgrown with half-trespassable thickets, despite the endless labors of gardeners to tame it) is a record of the decisions they make, and their perceptions of the roads available to them, and where those roads might lead. And those decisions are premised on fortune-telling—the models that men carry, of their moments.

 

[WashYourHands]

Far out

 

[sus]

You able to give an example?

Sure. I could mention all those Chris Nolan style mindfuck-genre thriller movies with twist endings that have you diving for a Reddit synopsis (where you relive the plot with a new lens of understanding). But less elaborately, it's that feeling where a line in the book just subtly stands out to you, snags your coat as you walk by, only half-noticed. And then a chapter later something happens that snaps you back to that moment—something was off here, something was wrong, and now I know why.

 

[version]

Sure. I could mention all those Chris Nolan style mindfuck-genre thriller movies with twist endings that have you diving for a Reddit synopsis (where you relive the plot with a new lens of understanding). But less elaborately, it's that feeling where a line in the book just subtly stands out to you, snags your coat as you walk by, only half-noticed. And then a chapter later something happens that snaps you back to that moment—something was off here, something was wrong, and now I know why.

Oh, you mean within a given work. I thought you meant within the broader scope of the form, like a book that seemingly comes out of nowhere and reactivates a bunch of forgotten books.

 

[sus]

Oh, you mean within a given work. I thought you meant within the broader scope of the form, like a book that seemingly comes out of nowhere and reactivates a bunch of forgotten books.

Oh yeah I think this (what you describe) happens more with art than literature.

Novels have stories within themselves that are so complex they provide an excess to chew on if you're so inclined. Contemporary and modern art can be very barren and unrewarding on its own, and therefore leans on narratives about the larger art game or artist biography or political moment to get its "charge" of meaning.

 

[sus]

Not that books don't try to do this too. Present a vision of literary history in which their work emerges as the pinnacle or culmination or mature vision. I think it's implicit in a lot of great works and in a lot of, say, experimental poetry. You also see how critics do this with the tiring (and premature, and simple-minded/reductive) metamodernism discourse. In art, critical concepts emerged that sharpened something undefined and preliminary into a narrative/progression-logic, e.g. Greenbergian ideas about painting and flatness, and that theory reflexively alters the work of artists today n tomorrow

My Maqamat project I've been working on forever does this at points quite explicitly — presents a specific vision of what the novel is and can and should be, and then tries to embody that spirit to the maximum degree. It's just, I think, a bit more on the fringes, and crops up mostly in avant or critical-/academic-adjacent literatures mainly?

 

[sus]

I may be wrong or off about some of this stuff this is just my impression/way of explaining or illustrating what I meant and what I see

 

[linebaugh]

Narrative I think "exists" insofar as it is a series of updating understandings/models. Things seem to follow next naturally. Others are jarring. Some turns are obvious i.e. foreseen and others are surprising i.e. unforeseen. Understanding of narrative fragment shapes understanding of macro structure shapes understanding of narrative fragment, ad nauseam.

I feel this as an Artist myself. If I can nail an initial detail of a drawing I know I will be able flesh it out into a full composition no matter how small or insignificant that intial detail will become. You just need to get that cycle to turn once and youre good

 

[version]

This sort of coincidence is not an illusion; it is a
warning, a signal. It bears witness to the fact that the
tissue of the universe is continuous, and that in the
vast labyrinth of the world there is no point where
apparently incompatible paths, from antipodes much
farther apart than those of geography, may not intersect
in some common stela, bearing the same symbols
and commemorating unfathomable yet complementary pieties.

 

[sus]

Eerie synchronicity with Crying of Lot 49 and my thought-train all day which was all about the nature of coincidence

 

[Clinamenic]

Eerie synchronicity with Crying of Lot 49 and my thought-train all day which was all about the nature of coincidence

Did you just read that? I remember you mentioned it at the Cale show.

 

[sus]

Yeah I re read it third time. Better than ever. Crack cocaine

 

[sus]

The layers of meaning he's able to pack into 150 pages are incredible. The sheer density of references and secret messages and thematic levels

 

[version]

My opinion seems to change each time I read it. The last time I felt it was too neat and that the sprawl of the bigger books was partly what made him great.

 

[sus]