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puzzles, narrative and time
In the comments area of Saturday's post, D. Bauler writes: "Can the Mayday Mystery be considered a narrative?"
The short answer is yes, but I'd qualify that in various ways, since the cryptic texts that constitute the corpus of the Mystery can categorically "fit" along a number of different axes.
First off, the Mystery texts may have a practical purpose: the webmaster of the Mystery site is attempting to interpret them as encoded "rules" to a "game," which would suggest that they're more comfortably classified under "instructions" or "puzzle," fields that aren't traditionally thought of as "aesthetic." (This may be a failing: elements of the aesthetic can be located in puzzles which are finely-crafted, as any fan of "enigmatologist" Will Shortz will readily attest to. And categorizing something as a "puzzle" doesn't
necessarily mean that it can't also be categorized as a narrative: certainly all mystery novels are "puzzle-narratives" of a sort, and other "book-puzzles" exist: as a child I logged a lot of hours looking at Christopher Manson's Maze, a "virtual space in the shape of a book.")
Mystery novels, of course, frame their puzzles with all the normal trappings of narrative, and even the nonlinear Maze has a setting, characters (it's told from the point of view of a guide) and dialogue. The Mayday Mystery corpus doesn't have any of these things: although it features various historical personages they don't "function" as characters, and at initial glance nothing resembling a plot or setting can be discerned. Its organizing strategy seems to be primarily collage / juxtaposition, producing something ideogrammatic rather than linear, which would seem to take it out of the realms of narrative or instruction and place it instead more into the realms of poetry (or magic).
Considered as a poem, the Mayday Mystery texts read as though they're using the strategy of recombining language from various disciplines into an ambiguous system of meaning. It can "function as" a poem with an exceedingly high order of experimentalism, far more experimental than the work of most experimental poets, but in terms of the current catalogue of poetic strategies it can be read in a way that "makes sense."
That said, there is something that distinguishes the Mayday Mystery corpus from a poem, and it is the same thing that I would say qualifies it as a narrative, namely, its temporal dimension. Time makes narrative: the fact that its inexplicability recurs in the world interests us, raises questions, unbalances us, and thus makes a plot. It is, to some degree, a contingent plot, that is to say, a plot that "happens" perhaps primarily in the mind of the reader rather than being dramaturgically represented in the corpus itself. Although this seems a little strange, it should be noted that we readily accept this idea in visual art, where, ever since Duchamp and ever-increasingly over the last four decades, the site where the "art" "happens" has been less located in qualities inherent in the object itself and more in the relationship (the dialectic?) between the artwork and the viewer's perceptions and context.
It's important for writers (and critics) to start thinking about narrative as a kind of four-dimensional construct, and to start producing writing that takes advantage of this, and this is at least one of the things that the author of the Mystery texts seems to be doing. Labels: writing |
Monday, September 20, 2004
10:24 AM
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