I have been thinking about something for a couple of days. Just a little thing. I think I heard it in a podcast or on PBS, but Google can’t find it. Anyway, here it is:
“Fragments are the only way that life makes sense.”
Hmm. Restated, it says:
Life only makes sense in fragments.
Fragments make sense of life.
Life is made of fragments? … Life is fragmentary?
It’s true. We are the experiences we’ve had and the conditioning to which we’ve been subjected. And there’s nothing whole or continuous about that stuff.
Your mother at the sewing machine, working through the evening to get something ready for you.
A rainbow trout held to the light, returning light; fishing with your Dad.
Your little brother at Halloween, Casper the Friendly Ghost.
“And time is the matter before us, or memory and what it makes of a man and leaves of him as it gathers up the chips of wood and broken glass that time will always make of life.” [My novel in process.]
If memory and hence life is fragments, bit of broken things, then why do we write story the way we do? Why try to make life fit a continuum, and form narratives into long, smooth arcs of experience and time? Why pretend that all the pieces fit, and insist on proving to the reader that they do?
To be true to life, shouldn’t story be fragmentary too? Of course, good story is fragments. It’s just really hard to see one’s own work that way, or to believe it’s possible, when writing a first novel.
