Untitled - witz cultural

225RECONFIGURINGNARRATIVEtext suggests that in the past authors have rejected linearity because it falsifiedtheir experience ofthings. Tennyson, for example, as we have already observed,created his poetry of fragments in an attempt to write with greater honestyand with greater truth about his own experience. Moreover, as several criticshave pointed out, novelists at least since Laurence Sterne have sought toescape the potential confinements and falsifications of linear narrative.One does not have to look back at the past for examples. In his review ofDiaionary of the l&tazars, awork by the Yugoslavian Milorad Pavic that RobertCoover describes as a hypertext novel, he asserts that "there is a tension innarrative, as in life, between the sensation of time as a linear experience, onething following sequentiality (causally or not) upon another, and time as apatterning ofinterrelated experiences reflected upon as though it had a geographyand could be mapped" ("He Thinks," 15). Nonlinear form, whetherpleasing to readers or even practically possible, derives from attempts to bemore truthful rather than from any amorality. Many contemporary works offiction explore this tension between linear and more spatial sensations oftime that Coover describes. Graham Swift's Woterland (7983), for instance,questions all narrative based on sequence, and in this it agrees with othernovels of its decade. Like Penelope Lively's Moon Tiger (1987), another novelin the form of the autobiography of a historian, Waterland relates the eventsof a single life to the major currents of contemporary history.Using much the same method for autobiography as for history Swift'sprotagonist would agree with Lively's Claudia Hampton, whose deep suspicionofchronology and sequence explicitly derive from her experience ofsimultaneity. Ricoeur suggests that "the major tendency of modern theory ofnarrative-in historiography and the philosophy of history as well as narratology-isto 'dechronologize narrative,"' and these two novelists exemplify asuccessful "struggle against the linear representation of time" (1: 30). Thinkingover the possibility of writing a history of the world, Lively's heroine rejectssequence and linear history as inauthentic and false to her experience:The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear historyl l've always thought a kaleidoscopicview might be an interesting heresy. Shake the tube and see what comes out.Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of amyriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The packofcards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everythinghappens at once. (2)Like Proust's Marcel, she finds that a simple sensation brings the past backflush upon the present, making a mockery of separation and sequence.