Huh?
What are the narrative characteristic of the story. What's peculiar about how it's content is developed?
posted from CPRR Discussion Group at 6:44 AM
Monday, June 05, 2006
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2 Comments:
As an asymmetric homologue to Philip Larkin's description of the formula of the classic novel: 'a beginning, a muddle and an end', the historical narrative, is in its essence predominantly a muddle, being unidirectional as constrained entropically by the arrow of time, while the images are symmetric static selections, dimensionless along the temporal axis. Hence the peculiarity that the flow of recorded historical development is incomplete because of its sampled nature, i.e., as the development of a finite incremental exposition (photographically) while an infinite succession of such images in Hilbert Space (coextensive both in time and place) would be required to completely define the higher order terms of a non band-limited abstract process. Moreover, even the non-orthogonal inner product of a pair of such historical sequences is sparse, imposing a fundamental limit on post-modern extrapolation.
[In case it isn't glaringly obvious, the preceding was intended to poke fun at the use of pretentious jargon that vastly overcomplicates and obfuscates simple ideas. (As Nobel laureate Richard Feynman's father taught him at an early age, just naming something doesn't tell you anything about it. ... or as the old joke goes "Doctor, doctor I have a nameless dread! ... Don't worry, we have names for everything.") Also, while we're always glad to help, we disapprove of attempts by students to have us answer homework questions assigned to them simply out of laziness.]
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