beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

Lodge, David The Art of Fiction
I've managed to read about half of this in one day, 120ish pages. compare to my three day 40 page nightmare in the very theoretical books. this one has a bunch of examples and topics and vocab. what it lacks is... I was going to say depth. I don't know, it's a bit like a tray of one bite sandwiches, you know? Every topic started as an article for a newspaper and it's just a little dab of topic and then there's another one. Would have been good if I'd read it at the start of the semester like the reading list suggested, I guess, but do tend to frustrate now. But whenever I feel like giving up and going to get the thinkier books it comes up with something nifty.

Section on Time-Shift

(quote)

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five (1969) is another striking example. The author tells us at the outset that the story of his hero, Billy Pilgrim, is a fiction based on his own real experience of being a prisoner of war in Dreseden when it was destroyed by Allied bombers in 1945, one of the most horrific air-raids of World War II. The story proper begins: "Listen. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time," and it shifts frequently and abruptly between various episodes in Billy's civilian life as an optometrist, husband and father in the American midwest, and episodes of his war-service culminating in the horror of Dresden. This is more than just the operation of memory. Billy is "time tripping". With other traumatized veterans he seeks to escape the intolerable facts of modern history by means of the science-fiction myth of effortless travel through time and intergalactic space (which is measured in time - "light years"). He claims to have been abducted for a period to the planet Tralfamadore, which is inhabited by little creatures who look like plumber's friends with an eye on top. These passages are both amusingly parodic of science fiction and philosophically serious. To the Tralfamadorians, all times are simultaneously present, and one can choose where to locate oneself. It is the inexorable, unidirectional movement of time that makes life tragic in our human perspective, unless one believes in an eternity in which time is redeemed, and its effects reversed.

(/quote)

There's a bit more, but that's the bit that made me think. The bold is mine (the italic is part of the original). Oddly enough it made me go WWII -time travel- tramatised veteran - Jack?

Thoughts remain fuzzy, but... what kind of guy would find WWII a good place to be?
Because he's got all of space and time to choose from, and he keeps going back there, not just physically but his style and his stories.

Could be he has intolerable facts in his personal history, and something about WWII makes them easier to live with? Like maybe the whole good guys vs bad guys bit?
I keep wondering what side he was on before he chose to be Jack, you know?

... this may seem a bit trivial lined up against, like, serious reality, but ... okay, it's like, Robin Hood the latest version is a haunted man come back from war in the east, and while I didn't much like the series I liked what they seemed to be trying to do, because hello to the relevant. So this stuff unfortunately *remains* relevant. Because the stories told about the past, the bits of it people are comfortable with, contextualise the present. War on terror? Axis of evil. So this shit resonates, and not always in ways that stand up to close scrutiny. So I'm trying to figure out the psyche of a fictional character, yeah, but only because on the bounce/reflection it's kind of relevant.

He's working in the Torchwood special ops paradigm, all that secrecy, all the lies, fighting against enemies that don't line up and wear uniforms. But he's dreaming on the war when it was all simple. Only he also knows too much history - he knows where the dead went after, he knows the people that went off to die, so it isn't a shiny hero story because there's too much lost. But at the same time the losses have to mean something so it becomes a hero story.

... bugger, I need to sleep and I'm not making sense.