NARRATIVE STYLE & THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION
The following exchange started with a discussion of Ballard's 1966 essays Notes from Nowhere and Images of the Future, in in which he examined some of the concerns that lay behind his latest writings, which would eventually be included in The Atrocity Exhibition.
[RMcG: 31 December 2007]
JGB (from "Notes from Nowhere"): The analytic function of this new fiction should not be overlooked. Most fiction is synthetic in method -
So, there's a hint: the new stuff (AE) will be non-
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[MH: 31 December 2007]
JGB (from "Images of the Future"): One is dealing not with a formal sequence of events and relationships but with a series of shifting networks of possibilities that resemble the anticipated moves of a chess game. ... Above all, then, the future presents itself to us as a series of quantified images and relationships.
I've wondered in the past exactly what JGB means by "quantified". Maybe the chess game analogy suggests that he means something like "calculated" (in the non-
JGB (from "Images of the Future"): ... over the last decade or so it seems to me that more and more people have come to terms with the past, declaring a private moratorium on their own past failures and experiences, and are becoming more and more fascinated by a future that presents itself in terms of uncertainty, opportunity and the brilliant illumination of the chance encounter.
As we've mentioned before, the non-
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[RMcG: 31 December 2007]
MH wrote: I've wondered in the past exactly what JGB means by "quantified". Maybe the chess game analogy suggests that he means something like "calculated" (in the non-
I think you're right... or on the right track
"Quantified" is used three other times in this piece. In the first para:
JGB (from "Notes from Nowhere"): In "The Drowned World", "The Drought" and "The Crystal World" I tried to construct linear systems that made no use of the sequential elements of time -
Just prior to that he's defined SF as "a prospective form of fiction, concerned with the immediate present in terms of the future rather than the past", which is then compared to "social" fiction: "the principal narrative technique of retrospective fiction, the sequential and consequential narrative, based as it is on an already established set of events and relationships, is wholly unsuited to create the images of a future that has as yet made no concessions to us."
It appears JG is saying that he tried to make these non-
So quantified could mean "analyzed within an historical perspective" -
Para #11 is simply "Quantify" ... but it comes right after the famous #10:
JGB (from "Notes from Nowhere"): 10. Planes intersect: on one level, the world of public events ... On another level, the immediate personal environment ... On a third level, the inner world of the psyche. Where these planes intersect, images are born. With these co-
And in #13 the third use -
JGB (from "Notes from Nowhere"): 13. Dali: "After Freud's explorations within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which will have to be quantified and eroticised." Query: at what point does the plane of intersection of two cones become sexually more stimulating than Elizabeth Taylor's cleavage?
Dali's use of the word also implies analysis... or at least a new kind of consciousness... with an emphasis on measurement -
Hey, perhaps that's it... to quantify is to make something an objective reality by measurement & analysis, which is the step before it is eroticised -
Dali gives us one more clue... in his balanced statement he basically equates "explorations" with "quantified and eroticised" ... so there's an element of dealing with an unknown landscape here, as well...
As for the "handful of ontological 'myths'" he tried to create in the 3 novels? well, isn't that what he achieved in AE?
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[MH: 1 January 2008]
RMcG wrote: So quantified could mean "analyzed within an historical perspective" -
Mmm, not sure that's quite right.
I'm pondering that whole nexus of time, quantification, synthesis, etc that JGB throws into the Notes from Nowhere and Images of the Future essays.
But one aspect still puzzles me ... and that's when he says "The analytic function of this new fiction should not be overlooked. Most fiction is synthetic in method -
Incidentally, here's a similar JGB quote I found on the web, from a 1969 interview in "Speculation":
JGB (from 1969 interview in "Speculation"): Freud pointed out that you have to distinguish between analytic activity, which by and large is what the sciences are, and synthetic activities which are what the arts are. The trouble with the Heinlein-
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[RMcG: 1 January 2008]
MH, quoting JGB: Freud pointed out that you have to distinguish between analytic activity, which by and large is what the sciences are, and synthetic activities which are what the arts are. The trouble with the Heinlein-
Synthesis is a function of the Ego in freud.... and the ego is battlefield of Id and Superego, the place of encounters and relationships with fellow humans, home of consciousness, sensory perception, memory, the awareness and expression of affect, thinking, control of motor behaviour, language, reality testing, integration & synthesis... it is the SYNTHESIZER of demands from the Id and Superego, and also the GUIDE for people interacting with the real world... this guiding freud called the EXECUTIVE function
So... is synthetic "immature" when it is "completely synthetic"? is it then simply an extension of childhood fantasies of power and aggression? isn't that the usual knock on SF? that's it's a type of escape literature?
In that case, the Analytic must be a function of the Superego, that place of parental influences, authoritarian commands and social conventions, time programmer and control tower for the implementation of the programme... Andrew Cutrofello also adds: the superego also is a reaction-
Anyway... I found this (and lots others... just google freud + "synthetic Activity"):
Stéphanie Z. Dudek and Florence Hoechstetter, abstract for "Libidinal Drive as Index of Creativity and Synthetic Ability in Artists": The goal of the present paper is to examine, within the context of psychoanalytic theory, the extent to which libidinal drive defines and enters into the artist's desire and ability to achieve synthesis, as reflected in imaginative responses to the Rorschach test. The basic Freudian postulate is that synthesis is the essential component in creative artistic activity, and that this ability depends on the ego's capacity to integrate libidinal and aggressive drive in the service of creative transformation. Integration can occur only if libidinal drives are readily available and preferably if they are present in excess of the aggressive (It is Eros that unites [Freud 1923, Silberman 1961]). There are many ways of obtaining an insight into the degree and quality of drive energy available to the functioning ego. Among these are dreams, free associations, phantasies, projective test responses, reflections, or ideation during the creative process.
Basically... what JG seems to be (perversely) saying is that we tend to get literary crap (retrospective narrative) when the ego completely synthesizes input from Id and Superego ... JG appears to want some kind of imbalance or non-
Does that make sense?
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[MH: 1 January 2008]
That's another helpful hint towards understanding Freud's comment (or supposed comment) about synthesis being a sign of immaturity. I've already found a few others, so I'll try and pull some sort of summary together tomorrow.
But it's still rather annoying not to have a direct source for what was evidently an important point for JGB.
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[RMcG: 1 January 2008]
I think we're off base here...
JG is saying Synthetic, not Synthesis... big difference!
To sum up, this whole thing started with JG's slamming of "retrospective narrative" in favour of "prospective fiction".... he's saying the past -
JG's error when he first tried to break away with his first 3 novels? "in spite of my efforts, the landscapes of these novels more and more began to quantify themselves"
How did these landscapes "quantify themselves"?
Elements of the story "became isolated, defining their own boundaries"... that sounds to me like he lost creative control over them... how? because he couldn't pry them out of the "sequential elements of time", meaning he couldn't get his mind out of the traditional narrative form
JG doesn't say what's "bad" about this directly, but he tells us the "good" by opposition: ...[in the 3 AE stories] "narrative technique seems to show a tremendous gain in the density of ideas and images".... implying a lack of same in "retrospective narrative"
He continues: "The linear elements have been eliminated, the reality of the narrative is relativistic. Therefore place on the events only the perspective of a given instant, a given set of images and relationships."
To overcome history is to destroy culture and accept the reality of death (so sez Norman O. Brown)
Apparently, surrealism will help, "turning its writers away fron so-
JG elaborates:
JGB from the 1966 book review "The Coming of the Unconscious": surrealism is in fact the first movement ... to place "the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible." This calculated submission of the impulses and fantasies of our inner lives to the rigours of time and space, to the formal inquisition of the sciences, psychoanalysis pre-
For "fusion" it's easy to substitute "synthesis"... for "the formal inquisition of the sciences", you can say "quantify"... for "its redemptive and therapeutic power" you can say "eroticize"
And again:
JGB from "The Coming of the Unconscious": This preoccupation with the analytic function of the sciences as a means of codifying and fractionating the inner experience of the senses is seen in the use surrealism made of discoveries in optics and photography -
I'd say retrospective fiction doesn't do any of that -
And, I suspect, neither does the work of heinlein or asimov -
Which leads me to think that JG means "imitative" and not "combined"
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[MH: 2 January 2008]
RMcG wrote: I think we're off base here ... JG is saying Synthetic, not Synthesis... big difference! <snip> The work of heinlein or asimov -
Mmm, I don't think I agree with this.
Here's where the phrase "synthetic" appears in "Notes from Nowhere" (1966): "The analytic function of this new fiction should not be overlooked. Most fiction is synthetic in method -
And here's where it appears in the interview in the fanzine "Speculation" (1969): "Freud pointed out that you have to distinguish between analytic activity, which by and large is what the sciences are, and synthetic activities which are what the arts are. The trouble with the Heinlein Asimov type of Science Fiction is that it’s completely synthetic. Freud also said that synthetic activities are a sign of immaturity, and I think that’s where classical Science Fiction falls down."
In both cases, "synthetic" method or activity is contrasted with that which is analytic. And in both case Freud is invoked as saying that synthetic activities are a sign of immaturity. Further, JGB says that the arts tend to be synthetic rather than analytic.
So I'd still view JGB's use of "synthetic" as meaning something along the lines of "assimilative" or "integrative" rather than "imitative".
RMcG wrote: For "fusion" it's easy to substitute "synthesis"... for "the formal inquisition of the sciences", you can say "quantify"... for "its redemptive and therapeutic power" you can say "eroticize"
Yes -
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[RMcG: 2 January 2008]
MH wrote: In both cases, "synthetic" method or activity is contrasted with that which is analytic. And in both case Freud is invoked as saying that synthetic activities are a sign of immaturity. Further, JGB says that the arts tend to be synthetic rather than analytic.
So I'd still view JGB's use of "synthetic" as meaning something along the lines of "assimilative" or "integrative" rather than "imitative".
Yeah... that sounds good... I found this definition of synthesis:
• the combination of ideas to form a theory or system (me: or work of art)
Contrasting with this for analysis:
• the process of separating something into its constituent elements.
However, note JG says synthetic "in method" -
Which I take to mean, esp with the reference to asimov and heinlein, "having or showing emotional or intellectual development appropriate to someone younger"
I'll be generous and say JG meant "showing" -
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[MH: 2 January 2008]
RMcG wrote: which I take to mean, esp with the reference to asimov and heinlein, "having or showing emotional or intellectual development appropriate to someone younger"
Well they may well have done! But then why bother invoking the authority of Freud? ;)
I think the best I can do with JGB's contention that Freud held synthesis to be immature is the following ...
Firstly, Austin Silber notes that in "Totem and Taboo", Freud "clearly introduces the concept of a synthetic function" of the ego. He then quotes Freud from T&T as follows:
Freud: There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one. Systems constructed in this way are known to us not only from dreams, but also from phobias, from obsessive thinking and from delusions.
Then I've got this quote from Hans Loewald:
Loewald: The original identity of ego and reality is connected, in experiential terms, with the original oneness of infant and mother. The view of reality as a hostile antagonist is connected with the emphasis on the hostile, castrating role of the father prevailing in psychoanalytic descriptions of the psychosexual development which culminates in the Oedipus situation. ... The synthetic-
So I'd suggest the following sort of picture of the analytic and synthetic functions of the psyche ... The ego develops from an initial situation where the unborn child is integral with the mother inside the womb -
But the world outside can be felt as emotionally threatening, and there is therefore a risk that the psyche will forego some of its objectification processes, and instead revert to a more narcissistic position whereby the synthetic functions are predominant and the world outside becomes understood in terms of the interior world. This is presumably why Freud said (or so JGB claims) that synthetic activity is a sign of immaturity. Of course, the synthetic functions are necessary for the normal development of the psyche, and for artistic creation, but the *over-
Which raises the issue of how all this relates to JGB's criticism of modernist literature and of the SF of Asimov and Heinlein, but this missive is long enough as it is ... so more on that later.
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[RMcG: 3 January 2008]
Freud, quoted by MH: There is an intellectual function in us which demands unity, connection and intelligibility from any material, whether of perception or thought, that comes within its grasp; and if, as a result of special circumstances, it is unable to establish a true connection, it does not hesitate to fabricate a false one. Systems constructed in this way are known to us not only from dreams, but also from phobias, from obsessive thinking and from delusions.
Beautiful.... "where planes intersect, images are born"
Hans Loewald, quoted by MH: The original identity of ego and reality is connected, in experiential terms, with the original oneness of infant and mother. ...
When I read this I immediately flashed to the scenes in Empire where young jamie misinterprets the meaning of the footprints in the powder on the floor of his mother's bedroom... culminating in the broken mirror image, and the synthesis of young jamie's oedipal desires...
MH wrote: But the world outside can be felt as emotionally threatening, and there is therefore a risk that the psyche will forego some of the objectification processes of the psyche ...
I think you should replace "psyche" with "ego" ...
MH wrote: ... and instead revert to a more narcissistic position whereby the synthetic functions are predominant and the world outside becomes understood in terms of the interior world.
Yeah... that seems like it -
MH wrote: Of course, the synthetic functions are necessary for the normal development of the psyche, and for artistic creation, but the *over-
Again, try ego for psyche... then you can see how the ego "escapes"... hence escapist stuff, which is immature (but not infantile)
MH wrote: Which raises the issue of how all this relates to JGB's criticism of modernist literature and of the SF of Asimov and Heinlein, but this missive is long enough as it is ... so more on that later.
This started because you were curious about JG how used the word "quantify" (believe it or not)
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[MH: 3 January 2008]
RMcG wrote : Beautiful. ... "where planes intersect, images are born"
Yes, but the production of a "valid reality" (as JGB puts it) in the intersection of different planes is a mix of both the analytic and synthetic functions, isn't it? You first need to discriminate and objectify the possibilities and the relationships between them (analytic), then start to integrate them into a "reality" (synthesis). Shades of Hegel/Marx here, I guess!
RMcG wrote: Again, try ego for psyche... then you can see how the ego "escapes"... hence escapist stuff, which is immature (but not infantile)
Well I actually started with "ego" but changed it to "psyche", which I felt was a more general, less technical, term! Was I wrong there?
RMcG wrote: This started because you were curious about JG how used the word "quantify" (believe it or not)
That's what the analytic function does, isn't it? Discriminates and objectifies objects, events, relationships ... or "quantify" as JGB puts it.
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[MH: 3 January 2008]
I'll try and answer the question I posed yesterday: if an over-
I think we need to start with JGB's views on the nature of the past and the future. The past is closed, a realm of definite occurrences that is described in terms of a linear narrative, i.e. a "sequential and consequential narrative, based ... on an already established set of events and relationships" (NFN, para 1). The future, on the other hand, is seen as being far more open, as full of possibility. It is a flux of events and relationships that has "as yet made no concessions to us" (NFN, para 1). It is perceived as a "free play and rapid association of ideas and images" (IOTF. 4th para).
So understanding the present through the past is to see the present in terms of some pre-
JGB's first approach to surmount this difficulty of the traditional narrative was to try and impose a *different* schema on the phenomena -
So an alternative is to look at the present in terms of the open and unstructured possibilities of the future, and this is productive because "the most significant relationships and experiences of our lives are intelligible only in non-
This requires us to imaginatively consider the various possibilities that are implicit in the world, trying to relate objects and events in various ways. There will be a multitude of such possibilities: "The linear elements [having] been eliminated, the reality of the narrative is relativistic. Therefore place on the events only the perspective of a given instant, a given set of images and relationships" (NFN, para 12). This activity requires analysis (i.e. the differentiation and objectification of *relationships* between phenomena) rather than synthesis (i.e. the assimilation of phenomena to our existing understanding): "Query: does the plane of intersection of the body of this woman in my room with the cleavage of Elizabeth Taylor generate a valid image of the glazed eyes of Chiang Kai Shek, an invasion plan of the offshore islands?" (NFN, para 15).
According to JGB, this approach should enable us to make more sense of our lives and of the world because we will be able to take account of those aspects that do not fit our existing schemas and explanations: "A huge portion of our lives is ignored, merely because it plays no direct part in conscious experience" (NFN, para 19). These aspects that conscious experience ignores occur in both our own psyches and the external world itself: "it seems to me that so much of what is going on, on both sides of the retina, makes nonsense unless viewed in these terms" (NFN, para 19). We see here a rationale for JGB's use of psychoanalytic concepts (manifest vs latent content, analytic vs synthetic activity, eroticisation) -
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[RMcG: 3 January 2008]
MH wrote: You first need to discriminate and objectify the possibilities and the relationships between them (analytic), then start to integrate them into a "reality" (synthesis). Shades of Hegel/Marx here, I guess!
Probably not so much Marx as Hegel, who knew more about history than Freud, but was unaware of the unconscious
Yes... it must be a mix... public/personal/imaginative = valid reality:
Norman O. Brown, from "Life Against Death": the notion of art as a mode of instinctual liberation suggests a further distinction between art on the one hand and dreams and neurosis on the other. Dreams and neurosis give expression to the repressed unconscious, but they do not liberate it.... perhaps we should say that neurosis and dreams are the determinate outcome of the unconscious, while art is its conscious articulation.
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[MH: 3 January 2008]
I'm still somewhat puzzled by JGB's sudden dropping of the At Ex narrative style after '69. I mean, he was really into it, wasn't he? ... writing some pretty impenetrable essays about what he was doing, mentioning it in interviews (and there's that one with George MacBeth which is reproduced in the Doubleday At Ex) ... and then he suddenly just drops it. Maybe as well as artistic concerns (doesn't work for different subject matter) there's more personal psychological stuff in play here, as you suggest, Rick -
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[RMcG: 4 January 2008]
Amazingly fascinating time... it's like he can't wait to discuss his ideas about the form & content SF should take -
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[MH: 5 January 2008]
RMcG wrote: ... in a few years all this excitement had passed, and he was back to writing in more traditional narrative forms.
By 1973, in that unpublished interview dug out of the Merril Centre, JGB was explaining it like this:
JGB, from unpublished 1973 interview: When I was writing about the Kennedys I was writing about the world of the 1960s, a world of multiplying confusions of every conceivable kind, and I liked to use a technique appropriate -
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[RMcG: 5 January 2008]
MH, quoting JGB: The ideas themselves, particularly in "Crash", are so unexpected -
Say, mike... might that mean that, in essence, the stories of AE are NOT "so unexpected -
I found it interesting that Talbot's quasar music machine on the roof may be a 3-
Then he backtracks:
JGB, from "Notes from Nowhere": For the moment it's difficult to tell where this thing will go. One problem that worries me is that a short story, or even, ultimately, a novel, may become nothing more than a three-
I take this to mean he's worried the form could become completely mathematical -
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[MH: 5 January 2008]
RMcG wrote: Say, mike... might that mean that, in essence, the stories of AE are NOT "so unexpected -
Not really! I think it's more a case of the form matching the subject matter in each case.
The narrative style of At Ex deals in fragmentation, complexity, and uncertainty, which seems well-
* Firstly it matches the increasingly complex and mediatised nature of the external environment. As JGB later put it: "[T-
* Secondly the style of At Ex fits a protagonist who is trying to make sense of his own fragmented life; T-
However, after the book's completion JGB found (perhaps to his own surprise) that the style didn't work so well for other topic areas. In the period 1968 to 1970 (from "University of Death" onwards), JGB became increasingly concerned with a much more specific topic -
Or ... maybe he just got bored with it?
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[RMcG: 5 January 2008]
JGB (from 1969 interview in "Speculation"): For the first time the outside world, so-
Therefore ... given that reality is now a fiction, it's not necessary for the writer to invent the fiction. The writer's relationship with reality is completely the other way around. It's the writer's job to find the reality, to invent the reality, not to invent the fiction. The fiction is already there.
There again I was starting to look at the characters, and the events of the story, in a very abstract, almost cubist way. I was isolating aspects of character, isolating aspects of the narrative, rather like a scientific investigator taking apart a strange machine to see how it works.
Nowadays, particularly in the social, psychological sciences, the raw material of science is a fiction invented by the scientists.
The world of these stories is the nearest I can reach to the matrix of my own consciousness and experience, an expression of the completely quantified and discontinuous flux of events taking place on both sides of my retina.
Applied to AE, could it be that Tman's "madness" is precipitated by the fact his life has become overrun and controlled by mediatised fictions, including the fictions of science, and his "quest" is to recover or find the reality of life (reality principle), which might be described as the reality of the psyche, which I would take as the healthy ego, able to synthesize those tensions between the demands of the inner & outer worlds?
If all is manifest, the trick is to discover the latent...
It's like JG has given us the story in jigsaw format, and we put the pieces together...
Does his machine do that?
Public fiction [put thru] personal analytic consciousness [put thru] the imagination (that which bubbles up from the unconscious) = images of a certain reality (the latent)
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[MH: 5 January 2008]
DP wrote (in a discussion about JGB's use of religious imagery): I don't doubt JGB dislikes all established churches, and regards himself as an atheist; but why does he keep coming back to those "spiritual" themes?
Here's another of JGB's disavowals of religious belief that I came across in a 1991 interview:
Science Fiction Eye, Winter 1991: Q: Do you consider yourself religious? I detect flavors of both Gnosticism and Zen in your work; the former in the belief that the world of the senses is merely a shadow of the hyperworld; the latter in a sense of mind as the ultimate reality.
JGB: No [I don't consider myself religious] but I accept that the world presented to our senses is very much an artificial construct, and that the imagination can break through the conventional picture our central nervous systems have created.
Note that the question was framed in a very wide sense -
And I find that a particularly significant comment. If, like JGB, you believe that the everyday world is a "construct" then what you may well be interested in is searching for some *other* view which is more interesting, inspiring, ecstatic, useful, or whatever -
But those commentators on JGB who are personally inclined towards the idea that there is some sort of "real world" or "real meaning" that lies behind the everyday world (and not just other ways of seeing or living) may misperceive JGB's search for other views as a search for a transcendent reality. That certainly seems to be the case with Gregory Stephenson in his book "Out of the Night and Into the Dream". But, on my reading of JGB, it just isn't so.
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[RMcG: 5 January 2008]
MH wrote: But those commentators on JGB who are personally inclined towards the idea that there is some sort of "real world" or "real meaning" that lies behind the everyday world (and not just other ways of seeing or living) may misperceive JGB's search for other views as a search for a transcendent reality.
And in a way it explains JG's insistence of including the objective "real world -
In a way, Tman in AE is trapped or liberated in a world where the only visual vocabulary available to him is either imposed by the external media, or exposed by his internal obsessions... his genius is in the way he creatively combines these concepts into a personalized quest to re-
By so doing, JG can escape the "immaturity" of the story written only for the "inner child", who, as a reader, demands the slavishly correct repetition of the same bedtime story...
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[RMcG: 8 January 2008]
I've re-
As for the narrative technique: one could also image it as a linguistic representation of tman's "time music" machine (sculpture) in the uni of death: "antennae of metal aerials holding glass faces to the sun, the slides of diseased spinal levels"
In many ways these stories are the same: each "slide" is a "chapter/paragraph" individually connected to the centre, and each slide can be read separately from each other, in any order, to achieve the same result: "time-
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[MH: 8 January 2008]
RMcG wrote, quoting JGB: "he realized the rectilinear forms of his conscious reality were warped elements from some placid and harmonious future"... is that death? I dunno...
The way I see it, the elements that T-
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