Writing the Past to Suit the Present

I was set about a quest after reading The Arc of the Covenant yesterday. Shelly does a wonderful analysis of the evolution of short stories using a brilliant example in "Bullet in the Brain" by Tobias Wolff. (Thanks to Lee for providing the link to story which eluded me on Ask.com yesterday.) In my failure to fulfil my quest for the Wolff story, I was taken down wonderful side alleys of the internet instead, which ironically seems to have brought me to another destination which is more resonant with other bloggers, and the upcoming Blogswarm. In addition a post Lee wrote today is falling into the mix of what's in my head. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

After little luck with searching out the Tobias Wolff story, I decided to check an old, but most beloved site that I Stumbled Upon a few years ago. The site is called Bookyards, and it's a wonderful place to find books that are no longer subject to copyright, i.e. some of the classics you may have missed in school. Unfortunately they only had one story by Tobias Wolff there, and where it was not the one I was in search of I downloaded it anyway for later perusal. Frustrated with my lack of success I decided to check the list of blogs participating in the Blogswarm. In the list this blog caught my eye. And then it further led me to this video:



***Note: The video is about an hour and a half long, but well worth the view. Click on the image to go to it.

The person that composed the video combines Orwell's "Animal Farm" and "1984", with commentary about Iraq and Katrina thrown into the mix. Since I have read neither "Animal Farm" nor "1984" but have been hearing much about them this last year, I downloaded them and made it through the first 5 chapters of "1984" in one sitting. (Apparently my school opted for "A Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley over Orwell's "1984" which I'm finding has a great many similar undertones.) The thing that struck me the most was the job of the main character, Winston. His job, for those that don't know, is to go back and correct past publications such as newspapers to agree with what has occurred from that point to the present.

So, this is a concept that I am chewing over already. Struck by Orwell's words about turning lies into truths, wiping out records of the past so that no one can contest the validity of the current "facts", and my experiences personally with just such concepts, and the echoes of it there are in other people I have spoken with.

Right on cue, Lee came through with a post about a literary hoax, and the concept of art standing for itself, and the realities that we impose on ourselves at times without help from mass indoctrination. And Smiler in her Thursday Thirteen lists the topic of propaganda as something she intends to address in the future. I look forward to seeing this post from her in particular, especially in light of current events.

So what destination have I arrived at, and what destination was I aiming for? The destination I was aiming for was a purely selfish motivation, I must admit. I was so enthralled with Shelly's description of Wolff's writing method, I was seeking to find if this arc Shelly described was at all similar to the tack I've been taking with my own short stories, that I have dubbed the "freeze frame" method. The freeze frame method, is not so much about laying out a plot with a protagonist and an antagonist. I do not present an introduction to a problem leading up to a climax and conclusion. Rather one character embodies the protagonist and is at the same time their own antagonist. The character is put under a microscope for one moment of thought or reflection, and a moment that normally lasts only seconds in our minds, as we ponder things over and draw our conclusions, is laid out in long descriptive paragraphs on paper, so that the reader has no choice but to pay attention to that brief moment in the character's life. It's very much like a photographer who shoots a close-up. They don't wish for you to be distracted by the surrounding landscape, but rather to take time to notice and appreciate the intricate details of the subject pictured. Wolff, takes my oh so basic concept and expands it with exponential skill. I humbly bow out in any comparison or contrast, as my skill pales into transparency next to his, but I digress.

The destination that I arrived at, is that there are much larger things that my mind contains, than whether or not a writing method I utilize is similar to that of an acclaimed author. Having experienced the indoctrination of falsified truths on a small scale, it is incredibly frightening to think of this happening to society on a large scale. And I, in many ways identify with Winston of "1984" in the feeling that there is something in this existence that I am being denied, something that I have an inherent right to as a human being... and further than that, it is something all of us are being deprived of in some way. In my own life I have also had to write the past to suit the present, not rectifying truths into lies as Winston is doomed to do in the book, but the other way around, turning the lies on their head and back into the truths they originally were. And then because it seems no one wants to hear the truth, and even I sometimes doubt the validity of those truths, I spin them back into fanciful fictions, releasing them in a less potent, and therefor harmless form. Hence the importance of utilizing the freeze frame method, as it allows me to focus on recycling one truth at a time, back into it's less threatening form.