non-linear narratives

[truepenny]

I am going to try very hard to ask this question in a way that will make sense. Bear with me.

I'm wondering what reasons there are for telling a story out of order. Let me be clear: I mean REASONS, not DEVICES. For example, you can have a narrative that starts at a wedding and is a series of flashbacks interspersed with the ceremony to show you how these two people ended up marrying each other (and trust me, if I were actually writing that story, their motivations would not be romantic). But that's not a reason to tell the story out of order; it's a device to structure that non-linear sequencing.

What I'm after is why. WHY does a story need, as some stories inarguably do, to be told in a nonlinear fashion? What are the thematic and structural underpinnings that will show the reader the choice is about something other than showing off?

Am I making any sense at all?

Comments

[magentamn.livejournal.com]

Off the top of my head, because sometimes it's more powerful if you start at the end, rather than the beginning - the movie "Sunset Boulevard" comes to mind. One of the 10 best movies of al time, IMHO (as well as the opinion of many film critics)

Sometimes you have to show two or more plots that merge into one - what it happening with A & B here, and C & D over there, and E & F in the next town. Usually, that ends up being somewhat non-linear.

A wonderfully non-linear book I would recommend is John Crowley "Little, Big". I can't imagine telling the story he tells in anything resembling a linear fashion. Some stories are linear - boy meet girl, boy loses girl, boy get girl. Some are not, or are too complex to be told a,b,c,d,e.

Is this at all helpful?

[kijjohnson.livejournal.com]

Two successful and necessary examples of nonlinear story telling spring to mind: the movie Memento and Michael Swanwick's short story "Foresight."

One reason you might run nonlinear storytelling (and one that was important to the book I just finished) is that you're actually telling two parallel stories, one in a properly sequential fashion, and the other told in an order where scenes from (for example) a person's life thematically resonate with the first story.

Mysteries, where events exposed to the reader as the detective uncovers them, which means the information may be out of time sequence.

[heresluck]

The reason that comes to mind for me is to emphasize a theme or emotion that differs significantly from that of the final chronological events. Best example I can think of is Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things: the narrative ends in the middle of the chronology, with a scene of tenderness and hope between two characters whom we know will suffer terribly later on. That knowledge of future suffering makes the scene incredibly poignant -- and the scene also redeems some of the later events, in a way.

It allows us to have it both ways: we get a happy ending, which allows for a certain visceral satisfaction, while knowing that that happiness is tenuous and fragile, and therefore not (as you were complaining about with Tad Williams and somebody else) unbelievable or unearned.

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

I'm really glad you brought this up, because I just finished reading The God of Small Things over the weekend, and I found myself not liking the non-chronological narrative in it. It felt like a device to me, and I couldn't see why the author felt it was necessary to tell the story in that way.

Now I understand why she did it. (: I'm still not sure I agree; that is, I still might have liked the story better had it been told in the usual chronological way. But I can now see reasons why the choice was made.

Thank you!

[heresluck]

I adore that book, and I'm sorry you didn't; but I'm glad to have helped the structure make sense, even if I can't make it satisfying. *g*

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

It just occurred to me that vids, while not narratives per se, are distinctly non-linear forms of STORYTELLING. You've got a thing you want to show the viewer, and you've got this sort of kaleidoscopic selection of clips: how do you decide how to put the kaleidoscope together to show the pattern you want?

That is perhaps an excessively tough question. I apologize. But if you have an answer (or anybody else has an answer), I'd be really interested to hear it.

[heresluck]

An excellent question. I will need to think about how to articulate my answer. I'll post a response in my own LJ, with an invitation to other vidders to think about it as well.

It may also be one that it helps to talk about in person, so you can stop me if I get all hand-wavey and unclear.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Do post it, because it sounds like it might be interesting for sisabet and your other vidding cohorts. And we can talk about it, too, if it seems like the thing to do.

[libskrat]

You might want to take a look at critical commentary on Howard Pinter's Betrayal. As best I recall, the reverse-order chronology foregrounds the "Gah, what an awful situation, how did these people *get* here?" question, refuses to allow the audience to get sentimental about the characters (rather Brechtian, actually), and lends *considerable* irony to the play's end, which is the chronological beginning.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

The examples that come to mind immediately are both movies. I attribute this to the fact that movies probably have simpler structures than most written fiction.

Are you familiar with Memento? The main character was knocked on the head by a burglar who also raped and murdered his wife. The result of the injury is anterograde amnesia (I think that's what it's called). That means that he can't store any short term memory in long term memory. Everything that he will ever remember stops at the point he was knocked unconscious. He has about a 15 minute attention span, so he can react in normal time to things going on for about a quarter of an hour. He uses Polaroid photos and notes and so on to keep track. He's determined to find and take revenge upon his wife's killer, despite this disability.

The movie opens with a hand holding a Polaroid picture which is being shaken back and forth to hurry the development of the image. As the picture is shaken, the image fades until it is blank. Beautiful opening. The rest of the movie is in reverse order, scene by scene, and that mimics the experience that the main character has of anterograde amnesia. The audience can't forget what's gone before, so if you tell the story in chronological order, the audience knows vastly more than the character, and it becomes harder and harder to relate to his motives. But being able to remember the future is poignant dramatic irony. I wonder how it was that the writer/director/whoever realized that telling the story backwards would mimic not being able to remember the past.

The other example is Pulp Fiction. I can't summarize it, so if you haven't seen it this may not make sense. The structure of Pulp Fiction is elegant; it even has a proscenium arch. I don't know much about formal structure, so it may have other classical elements. Here's the central question: What is Pulp Fiction actually about? There's all this stuff that's going on, chaotically, but what's the story? What's the theme? I finally realized that Pulp Fiction is about grace. (This fits in nicely with TNH's theory that the briefcase holds the Holy Grail.) Telling the story in chronological order would have placed far greater emphasis on Travolta's character, and minimized Bruce Willis and Samuel Jackson's characters. It would have thrown the story line out of whack, and it would not have ended with that one, final act of redemption and grace. Because it is told out of order, Travolta's death is in it's proper place, before the clear sign of Jackson's redemption. Willis' fall from grace, his kindness, and his redemption, are placed so that they can clearly foreshadow Jackson's. Finally, Pumpkin and Honey Bunny positioned within the story so that the audience can understand why they are granted mercy. Had it been in chronological order, they would have been a tiny filip, sufficiently unimportant that you'd have to ask yourself why Tarantino included it in the first place.

For everyone who is rolling on the floor laughing at my interpretation of the movie, I would like to point out that Bruce Willis' bike is named "Grace."

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Wow. A reading of Pulp Fiction that makes it make sense. Thank you!

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

I think one of the major reasons for doing it is to start the story at a point of drama or conflict, to draw the reader in; flashbacks or other out-of-time devices then serve to illuminate the motives etc. that led to the conflict, at a pace and schedule that helps keep the dramatic tension.

For example, in a novel I've been working on, a woman dies dramatically in the first chapter. The main character in the novel is given the dead woman's diary and is currently embroiled in the same nefarious schemes she was trapped in. I intersperse chapters of the story with extracts from her diary entries, which serves three purposes: plotwise, it identifies pitfalls and persons the main character needs to be aware of; characterwise, it lets the reader know that the dead woman is a person who had very good intentions and solid reasons for the decisions she made and the actions she took (all of which eventually led to her murder); and dramawise, it ratchets up the tension as the reader learns (with the main character) exactly what is going on and how much is at stake.

I may not be making any sense either. :)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Your novel sounds fascinating. V. v. clever use of the diary.

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

Because you may be telling a story and not a summary of some incident. We all live in a time-bound world, but we don't think that way. Linear is often just boring.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ooh, good point. And I like the way you phrased it.

[valancy.livejournal.com]

I'd say emotional timing is a major part of it. It's not as poignant knowing a man has gotten married even though he thought the woman he loved was dead last week if you knew that ages ago, but if you're finding it out mid ceremony, it hits you where you are: fresh emotions. Firefly's Out of Gas is a classic example: all the scenes are powerful, but your own growing understanding of the overall plan, the moments when you enough to let it click - that's what really makes it so powerful, sudden omniscence, (gah, spelling? I'm tired, I was brainy all day) and that's why I have an enormous amount of respect for editors.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And why I couldn't think of "Out of Gas" as a PERFECT example myself, I truly do not know. Because it is a brilliant, brilliant demonstration of how to tell a non-linear story.

Yeah, I like that icon, too. It's my obsessive-writing-freak mood warning. *g*

[valancy.livejournal.com]

Btw, love your new icon.

[yonmei.livejournal.com]

Wuthering Heights has a torturously non-linear narrative, but laid out so plainly that I know of no reader who is not able to work out exactly what's going on. (You can, from text alone, work out the dates of the birth, marriage, and death of nearly every major character in the novel.) I think Emily Bronte did it that way because she wanted to begin with an outsider's viewpoint on the situation - indeed, the two narrative characters are one wholly uninvolved and one who was a close witness but not truly part of the family. We begin with a mystery - the end of the story - and we end with an unravelling and conclusion.

Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany's circular novel, is clearer - Delany wrote it deliberately atemporal. The novel has neither beginning nor end, it's a story without time told in a city that has been taken out of time.

In This House of Brede, Rumer Godden, opens on the day the Abbess of a Benedictine monastery dies, a new postulant arrives, and an older postulant is up in the old bell tower looking at a glimpse of sea. The story is told in narrative progression from the days after the old Abbess dies, the appointment of a new Abbess, and so on: with flashbacks to the older postulant's arrival at the monastery, what led to it and what happened in her early days there. It works because you start out with questions and gradually they are answered, in an order that makes emotional, if not temporal sense.

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

One book that irritatingly doesn't work (at least for me) is Lisa Alther's Kinflicks in which the real-time narrative (grown-up woman comes home to attend very sick mother, from whom she is concealing the fact that she has left her husband) is intercut with scenes from her childhood/adolescence which is supposed to show how she ended up where she is. What it actually succeeds in doing is to make you not in the least interested in any of the past characters because you either (i) meet their incarnations in real-time before they've been fully developed in past time, so you know they're going to turn into boring slobs in whom the heroine has not only lost interest but never understood why she had any interest in the first place, or (ii) since they aren't either the husband she's left or the co-respondent, you know the relationship is going to turn out to be unsuccessful.

It is, I think, supposed to show her journey from then to now, and provide a sidelight on the sexual revolution during the sixties and seventies while doing so, while raising questions about the nature of the female condition, but the only question it raised in my mind was "Couldn't they have spotted that a mains-powered vibrator in a wooden shack with erratic wiring was a fire hazard?"

But I agree about Pulp Fiction being a classic example of non-linearity working to superb effect. Also, The Usual Suspects. As it is very much a filmic technique, I think to make it work in a literary context it may be necessary to view the narrative in filmic terms - shots, flashbacks - and consider how the change in timeline can be indicated (the convenient filmic device of a subtitle indicating "Paris,1940" over a shot of the Eiffel Tower not really being available to the writer.

an odd example

[redbird]

Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" is told in a nonlinear way, because a large part of what it's about is perceptions of time. It's also told in the second person singular, which is an even rarer choice (and, again, appropriate here).

Re: an odd example

[papersky.livejournal.com]

It's not, actually, second person singular, it's a rather unusual example of epistolary first.

It's addressed to "you" and talks about "you" being conceived and born and thirteen and so on, but it really is straight epistolary first person just like a letter written to a specific recipient.

Brilliant story. One of the few things I wish I'd written.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

My shorthand for this is "footfalls echo in the memory" which is from Four Quartets. You're perfectly coherent, I'm not sure I can be. I'll try.

I don't disagree with most of what everyone has said, especially that the real reason for doing it is the story requiring it -- Lydy's "Memento" example being a perfect one -- but often when it isn't a gimmick what I think it's connected with is resonance and recognition. You can get some of the effects of re-reading into a first reading.

It can let the reader know things without needing to tell them, and it can put them in the right place to hear things, and it can set up the emotional direction you want them to be coming from when they reach something.

It can give you irony and balance in a way that otherwise takes either a long time or referencing something outside the text (e.g. "Which one" in ACC, or the end of Jane Yolen's "Evian Steel") and it can help you position the reader in relation to the story, it can help you direct their sympathy as well as everything else.

It is, therefore, for me a mode thing. Were you there at WFC when Jane Lindskold and I were talking about this? i don't think you were, I think it was towards the end when I fell over in the lobby and you and Elise were loading things into the car. We were talking about retelling history in alternate worlds so the reader doesn't know the end, and she asked me in that case why I'd given the end on the first page in The King's Peace. And this is why: when you write a story, any story, the reader comes to the first word virgin, with no expectations. (At least, one would wish. They've seen cover and blurb and maybe reviews and friends comments and all that, but one can't control any of that so it's better not to think about it. And some people read the end first, but I'm not writing for them.) Then, from that first word, you're leading them down a word-river to the last word, a straight and direct channel drawing them forward one word at a time. By the time you get to the last word, they've been going down the groove with you for a long time and you pretty much know where they are. It's like a fast-flowing river at the bottom of a deep canyon. But at the first word, they're all spread out all over the page, because they bring themselves with them, and you need to narrow them down and channel them into the flow you want, from the first word where they don't know anything. And you have very little time really, even with a novel, and sometimes you want to position them very carefully and give them a little shake and make them do some of the work connecting things, and giving them some things that are not linear narrative, that sit differently than that in relation to each other, is a fast way of having them begin to recognise where they are and what direction they're going.

As for not making the reader think it's a gimmick and you're showing off, well, like everything else, it can be done incredibly badly, you just have to do it from necessity and not to show off and then they'll recognise that and it'll be OK. Don't worry about it.

My examples of it being done superbly well would be Rumer Godden's China Court and Sumner Locke Elliott's The Man Who Got Away. tMWGA is backwards because the weight of the story, the weight of revelation, works backwards.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

This is very helpful. Thank you. Resonance is a good word.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

If I were going to attempt this, I would do it for purposes of revelation. If there was important backstory for a character, I could reveal that backstory at a place of my choosing, where it would make more sense than floating loosely at the story's beginning. I'd put that bit at a spot where it would explain something that had just happened, would give an "ah!" moment.

[loligo.livejournal.com]

One thing non-linear structures are good for is when you're telling the story of a life being lived, rather than the story of a problem being solved. I mean, certainly you *can* tell a life story in a completely linear fashion, and you can tell a problem-solving story in some tangled order, but that's not how we encounter them in daily conversation. Usually when we hear someone's life story, we already know what the person's current circumstances are, and what we're really learning through their conversation is how they got there.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

The first thing to come to my mind is Use of Weapons, which is written out of order the way it is because Ken MacLeod suggested that it might work better if the climax were at the end.

[kate_nepveu]

I couldn't believe I'd gotten all the way to the end before someone mentioned this!

Yes, _UoW_ is certainly the first thing that comes to my mind, becaise the punchline wouldn't be a punchline if it came in internal chronological order, and therefore wouldn't be interesting, just kind of sad and pathetic.

I think this is one of the same functions that non-linearity plays in _Memento_. Arguably _Memento_ is the better work, however, since non-linearity ties far more closely into the themes of the work than in _UoW_. I believe I've seen some people complain about _UoW_ in this regard, though I can't remember who.

Actually, I have a similar complaint about _The Usual Suspects_: I don't recall that there's any way to work out the punchline from the movie, so I felt as though the movie was pulling the rug out from under me just to be able to say, "Hah, hah, wasn't that clever?" Whereas there are clues in _UoW_ that the reader can see in retrospect, at the least. It's a respect for your audience thing.

I guess this boils down to, if you're using non-linearity for a punchline, make sure you have a really good reason for the punchline.

(Oh, and having now posted a handful of comments on your journal so you vaguely recognize my username, hopefully, I'm going to add you to my "friends" (read: watched) list, if you don't mind.)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

I don't mind at all.

I don't think I know about Use of Weapons at all. I'm assuming it's a book, but who's it by?

[kate_nepveu]

Oh, sorry--Iain M. Banks. I forget where you are, but it's out of print in the US at least. We have a loaner copy, if you like.

Things to know about it:

It's science fiction and part of the Culture universe, though I don't think you need to have read any others to understand it.

It's not a happy book.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

You don't need to have read other Culture books; it was the first one I read, and still my favorite. And one of the first things I thought of, at Truepenny's post, along with The God of Small Things, Venus Plus X, Little, Big and (a little later) Sarah Waters' Affinity.

I remembered an old conversation which might be relevant, here (http://groups.google.com/groups?q=micole+sudberg+god+of+small+things&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&selm=7c9scs%248u5%241%40news1.deshaw.com&rnum=1), coming at the same question (I think) from a different angle.

V. interesting question, and I need to let it steep a bit before I try to put an answer into words.

[kate_nepveu]

Anecdotal reports do seem to suggest that there's no such thing as a Culture book that you can't start with. And though I haven't an anecdote for it, I even suspect _Look to Windward_ would work fine as a starting point, as its links to _Consider Phlebas_ are not as strong as the titles suggest. Besides, _Look to Windward_ is brilliant.

I haven't read any of the books you reference except _Winter Rose_ (which I didn't like) and _Little, Big_ (which doesn't stay in my head), so I'm afraid I have nothing of substance to say regarding the main topic of this post.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I thought for a while that starting with Inversions would be a bad idea, but then I realized that there's enough detail to give away what's going on to a sufficiently canny SF reader, regardless of familiarity with the Culture.