Time-hopping Prevents Arriving at an Ending

          Today, four former students, from different graduation years and different groups of friends, shared a news release on Facebook that announces the names of the two Illinois National Guard members who were killed in Afghanistan. When a newsworthy post does not have a news site supporting it, I become suspicious. I opened the link, read the article, knew that the local young man had died years ago, and found a date from February 2009. I immediately messaged the students asking them to remove the post or to make a note in the post that this was a remembrance of the deaths that took place seven years ago. I was at first concerned that another local young man or woman had died overseas, but then I was concerned that the mother of this young man (she is a teacher at our middle school) was being sent condolences on the loss from people who didn’t realize that the article was old. And if all four did realize that it was a memory, what were their purposes in sharing it? What ending did they envision?

            I had planned to write on this looping or hopping of time (in reference to the app TimeHop) after reading Susanna Schrobsdorff’s column “In our overdocumented lives, letting go has gotten a lot harder” in last week’s Time magazine (unfortunately, the article is currently blocked for general readers). Schrobsdorff notes that “the more we live in this parallel digital world, the blurrier the line gets between present and past. Because when nothing is lost, nothing is past. Even if you want it to be” (59), which reminded me of Frank Kermode’s “Fictions” lecture. Kermode stated “that in ‘making sense’ of the world we still feel a need, [. . .] to experience that concordance of beginning, middle, and end which is the essence of our explanatory fictions, and especially when they belong to cultural traditions which treat historical time as primarily rectilinear rather than cyclic” (35-36).

            This rectilinear structure may be disrupted by any of Gérard Genette’s “principal categories of order, duration, and frequency. Order describes the relation between the events of the story and the sequence in which they are related [. . .]; duration contrasts the time an event takes to occur in the story with the time it takes for it to be narrated; and frequency the number of times an event occurs in a story as opposed to the number of times it is recounted in the text” (Richardson, “Introductions: Narrative 11). If you replace story with Facebook feed, all three categories impact how events are read by others. I follow Humans of New York, which tends to share multipost stories, but many times I read post number two of four before post number one of four because number two has more likes and is at the top of my feed. So I read the middle of the person’s story before reading the beginning of his/her story. Duration impacts my Facebook feed because many people like to share short vague posts, so if I want to know more information about a past event I have to ask questions and wait for an answer if the person chooses to answer. Frequency is reflected by today’s example that I described in the opening. Not only did the article appear four times on my feed, but it repeated seven-year-old information that caused emotional responses. Schrobsdorff recounted a similar experience but with a more humorous outcome. Her daughter “fell in love with the band Queen,” but one morning her daughter “opened [the] bedroom door, distraught. ‘Mom, did you know that Freddie Mercury is . . . dead?’ [. . .] There was [her] 21^st century girl, mourning a 20^th century tragedy as if it had just happened” (59). Schrobsdorff points out, “Time is no longer a river; it’s a looping series of digital paths” (59). But as I’ve noted throughout the past couple weeks, one shape metaphor does not meet the various possibilities. Marianna Torgovnick “identifies and analyzes a number of prominent strategies of arriving at the ending in novels [. . .] and develops the categories of circularity, parallelism, incompletion, tangential, and linkage” (Richardson, “Introduction: Openings” 252). So no matter how much we want a rectilinear story, or history, or life a straight line will never describe our movement toward the end. Schrobsdorff explains that “[h]uman beings are built to bond and to resist separation, to grieve the end of things. It’s an ache that ebbs and flows, stirred up by reminders you can’t predict. But now the reminders are always on tap and dispensed regularly” (59).

            I’m not computer/technology savvy enough to create an analysis, but I think someone could create an interesting study of social media, Facebook feeds or Twitter, to examine how comments are circular, parallel, incomplete, tangential, or linked. And even those terms would be useful for someone considering a post—is it circular? If so, should I even bother posting it? Is it parallel? If so, am I providing enough detail for others to follow, or should I not post it? Is it incomplete? If I am not willing to provide more detail, then I shouldn’t post it. Is it tangential? If so, should I even bother posting it? Or, am I trying to start a new conversation thread? Does it link? If so, then I should definitely post it.

            How does all this apply to fiction? I think Torgovnick’s five categories are useful for analyzing multiple timelines and/or multiple points of view. I think a savvy reader would be less surprised by an ending if he/she were following the categories for arriving at an ending. Many readers are surprised by an ending because they view the ending as a final destination rather than a journey. And if an ending does blindside a reader, and a review of the text does not reveal a strategy for arriving at an ending, then the author should have rewritten the text; it’s no fun reading a mystery if the perpetrator is only introduced in the final chapter. As a teacher, I could incorporate these five strategies for arriving at an ending into my curriculum, especially to be used after the entire text has been read.

           

Kermode, Frank. The Sense of and Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. London: Oxford

            UP, 1967. Print.

Richardson, Brian. “Introduction: Narrative Temporality.” Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time,

            Plot, Closure, and Frames. Ed. Brian Richardson. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2002. Print.

            9-14.

Richardson, Brian. “Introduction: Openings and Closure.” Narrative Dynamics: Essays on Time,

            Plot, Closure, and Frames. Ed. Brian Richardson. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2002. Print.

            249-255.