On the way to Nonlinearity in Literature: Time

Derived from Proustian structuralism, Gerard Genette's discourses on how nonlinearity appears in literature imply three keywords: time, order, and narration. He explains in Proust's model that events take place both in a particular order and a definable number of times; quite the reverse of the nonlinear approach that uses layered and dispersed timelines. In order to understand the deconstruction of the chronological order of events, one should first grasp the concept of time.

The chronology is based on time consisting of time past, time present, and time future.

''The future does not yet exist.

The past no longer exists, and the present takes no time at all. 

What then is time?''1


St.Augustine, Confession on Time



Exhibition, The way of Seeing,  John Berger, Arter, 2017


From Einstein's theory of relativity, which demonstrates that the perception of time depends on where one stands, to Aristotle's postulate, which relates movement and time to determine the before and after, studies show that time varies. On the other hand, Bergson suggests that measuring time is impossible. He concludes that ''one attempted to measure a moment, it would be gone: one measures an immobile, complete line, whereas time is mobile and incomplete.'' Therefore, he distinguishes the homogenous time that we perceive in our mind and its uses in positive sciences; durée, which we intuit time by our conciseness: time speeds up when we enjoy a moment, and slows down when we get bored. At the Time Regulation Institute, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar offers that one’s inner time would allow one to change without losing one's self in the process. He also draws on Bergson's duration in his poems.


I am

not within time,

nor entirely beyond;

but in the flux

of an all-embracing, complete, indivisible moment.2


In Calvino's Invisible Cities, we notice a continual blurring between the traditional distinctions of the past, present, and future overlaping each other. The deconstruction of narration here, both derived from time and order, leads this research now to focus on Genette's second keyword: order.


Word count: 324

Work cited:
1. https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~ijdavis/qic890/4.pdf
2. Translated by Ruth Christie https://cetinbayramoglupoetry.wordpress.com
http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys314/lectures/muon/muon.html
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jottturstuass.2.2.08?seq=1
https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/1175375
https://www.jstor.org/stable/44504640?seq=1
https://ekostories.com/2015/06/21/italo-calvino-invisible-cities/

Comments

  1. Elif AyiterNovember 22, 2020 at 4:21 PM

    I am not at all sure if this be relevant to you or not. I just remembered it and it might interest you since it is a way of combining visuality (space / architecture) with time and narrative. Heidi, the Norwegian storyteller that I was talking about and with whom I made several projects and wrote papers used this as part of her non-linear storytelling technique:
    https://tinyurl.com/y5m73r2m
    It is called the Theater of Memory and she said that it was way of combining space and narrative in a non linear way. She talked about it a bit in this paper that we co-authored quite a while ago:
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5pp1g1lgbBUSkw3TDE4RFphMFk/view
    There is a reference at the end of the article which also leads to other things about the memory theater:
    https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13528165.2012.696853
    This is on the Taylor and Francis portal but you should be able to get access to this through the university's information center. They changed everything there in the past few months and I am not at all familiar with how it works but it should be easy enough to find out.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Merve DenizNovember 25, 2020 at 10:39 PM

      Thank you, hocam! It reminded me of one of the memory technics ''mind palace/ method of loci'' that also appears in Sherlock Holmes books. I reckon it's very relevant to me as I should discover more about the technics that use in nonlinear storytelling.

      Delete

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