In so many ways writing is a way of slowing down time. A friend of mine told me about a book by Mark Mcgurl called Everything and Less. This is a translation from my friend, through me, and to you. But he said that novels are a way of manipulating time.
This has happened with several books, but I do find that narratives can do something to the rest of your life. When I read Anna Karenina I realized that my life was becoming influenced by the book, or maybe my life was influencing my experience of a book. Unlike film, when the narrative will always occur in the way the film plays, with only slight shifts in speed? This is how it feels to read the right book at the right time, some inexplicable shift occurs. I’ve heard that fiction can act as a veneer over reality. But I don’t think it’s right to maintain that kind of dichotomy between what is real and what is not, what is natural and fake. Aren’t we all living our unimaginable lives, constantly trying to make sense of them as we go? Can this vulnerability be weaponized? Of course.
The prime distinction between the land of faeries: or any magical land of archetype and magic no matter which culture from which it comes, is the way time functions within it. I don’t know why this never occurred to me before, but stories are a way of protracting time. Stories are those archetypal worlds. Not only does the written word provide a key to the imaginal realm, we can choose how we interact with them. We can choose how long we can read them for. The writer does not put us under a spell so much, we choose to be brought in, we choose to open the book. The author formulates their own timeline which we experience in collaboration with our own. So how do we teach this? How do we teach our students to understand the potentials for time in literature? In Mrs. Dalloway, the narrative is marked by the striking of the clock. Ask your student to imagine a time frame, mark it by specific markers of time. This can be over a long period of time, or a moment. Wake the story up, give it markers, and then put it to sleep. Truth is sometimes only a matter of time, and we all know time is relative.
I think back to Anna Karenina, how the train approaches. Maybe the train was always approaching. I have a vague memory of the book. It’s been twelve years since I read it. I misremember it from my own life at that time. But the memory, vague, heart wrenching, true, and wild; it lives in my peripheral vision like a cloud I can almost see, with people who won’t stop asking questions.
Bending Tree Education 