Brain droppings

[felonius]

Been on a bit of a classic crime fiction fixation of late - here's one of the best short story openers of all time. It's from The Man Who Killed Dan Odams, by Dashiell Hammett:

When the light that came through the barred square foot of the cell's one high window had dwindled until he could no longer clearly make out the symbols and initials his predecessors had scratched and penciled on the opposite wall, the man who had killed Dan Odams got up from the cot and went to the steel-slatted door.

One sentence and you're there. It's the same way McCartney grabs you within four bars of one of his melodies...

[Kahrey]

Wow, thats a long sentence.

[spiphany]

from M. M. Bakhtin: "Epic and Novel"

In ancient literature it is memory, and not knowledge, that serves as the source and power for the creative impulse. That is how it was, it is impossible to change it: the tradition of the past is sacred. There is as yet no consciousness of the possible relativity of any past.
The novel, by contrast, is determined by experience, knowledge and practice (the future).

Prophecy is characteristic for the epic, prediction for the novel. Epic prophecy is realized wholly within the limits of the absolute past...it does not touch the reader and his real itme. The novel might wish to prophesize facts, to predict and influence the real future, the future of the author and his readers. But the novel has a new and quite specific problematicalness: characteristic for it is an eternal re-thinking and re-evaluating. That center of activity that ponders and justifies the past is transferred to the future.

The present, in its so-called "wholeness" (although it is, of course, never whole) is in essence and in principle inconclusive; by its very nature it demands continuation, it moves into the future, and the more actively and consciously it moves into the future the more tangible and indispensible its inconclusiveness becomes. Therefore, when the present becomes the center of human orientation in time and in the world, time and world lose their completedness as a whole as well as in each of their parts. The temporal model of the world changes radically: it becomes a world where there is not first word (no ideal word), and the final word has not yet been spoken.

The absence of internal conclusiveness and exhaustiveness creates a sharp increase in demands for an external and formal completedness and exhaustiveness, especially in regard to plot-line. The problems of a beginning, an end, and "fullness" of plot are posed anew. The epic is indifferent to formal beginnings and can remain imcomplete (that is, where it concludes is almost arbitrary). The absolute past is closed and completed in the whole as well as in any of its parts. It is, therefore, possible to take any part and offer it as a whole. One cannot embrace, in a single epic, the entire world of the absolute past...But this is no great loss, because the structure of the whole is repeated in each part, and each part is complete and circular like the whole.

In distanced images we have the whole event, and plot interest (that is, the condition of not knowing) is impossible. The novel, however, speculates in what is unknown.

[mccormack44]

Interesting! It has always bothered me that there is no time sense in the Greek myths; i.e., characters together on the voyage of the Argos live in different times and places in other stories.

These quotes explain that and clarify the issue for me. (The understanding doesn't make me LIKE it any better — I'm too much a modern reader; I want temporal consistency, EVEN in time travel stories!)

Sue