From: Marc Aronson <75664.3110>
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1998 13:53:18 -0400

I've enjoyed Brenda's and Dick's comments, so I thought I might as well join in. There is a very interesting issue which these nonlinear books brings up: what is "realistic" in fiction. We know from Freud -- or Joyce if you prefer -- that our actual experience of life is nonlinear. And I'd argue that this is especially true for teenagers. So many narratives are competing for any teenager's attention: his or her parents' rules, school's policies, peers' attitudes, body's demands, even the strictures set by his or her beliefs and ideals. And the mass media, the world of MTV and popular music, is all about quick shifts of voice, volume, color, and tone. Given all this, a nonlinear narrative is probably more "realistic" than a linear one.
        And yet, we don't and often they don't see that. A book is
"realistic" if it is reassuringly told in a sequential form by a familiar narrator. If we are safely and securely taken from opening conflict to final resolution, it seems real and true.
        I think the books that are pushing at the linear form, either in their narrative structure or in their use of art and text, are trying to find a meeting place for these two kinds of realism. They want to be true to the disjunctive, fractured, non-continuous world of experience. Yet they want to find an inner narrative logic. Those that are able to do this are a true modern art -- an art of modern times. The discomfort we feel with them is our own anxiety about modernity, not their obscurity.

Marc Aronson
Received on Mon 05 Oct 1998 12:53:18 PM CDT