A Book is a Dense Network of Roots Under a Bulb
So I'm reading this picture-book on Wittgenstein's philosophy, because I'm a millennial child who can only understand complex shit in tweet-sized snippets accompanied by big drawings, and I learned that this renowned (and eccentric) Viennese thinker conceived of philosophy as rhizomatic, or lateral and intertwined, rather than hierarchical (e.g., top-down).
Why do I really care about this? I've been thinking about how to make "new" kinds of books, also because I'm a millennial child, and it is this idea that has given me the most hope. For a while I grew disillusioned with the idea that I could tell an engaging non-linear story and be relevant, because I assumed my thought was just the product of my '90s-era cultural education, when broken narratives like Pulp Fiction and Memento and The Limey (to a lesser extent) were all the rage in cool artistic circles, and even broadly.
In a rhizome, which is basically like a bunch of bulby plants, every point of its roots can interconnect with any other point, which is very different from a traditional branching hierarchy. I really like the idea of viewing time this way, and so it is natural that I'd want to extend the metaphor to books, too (and life in general, but that's besides the point).
So what does a rhizomatic book look like? Is it a fragmented hodgepodge, a la modern and postmodern experiments like Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons or Bret Easton Ellis's The Rules of Attraction? I would say no, because these books focused on the fragments, not the connections. (Which doesn't mean they can't be good.)
Its goal would be to celebrate connections and meeting-points, which, incidentally, was one of the main goals of surrealism as practiced by Andre Breton and others.
I guess that means you could stick any two traditional parts of a novel (e.g., point of no return, moment of solace) together and have it both make sense and be emotionally (or spiritually) enriching! Connecting disparate pieces wouldn't be haphazard, meant to break things down to intelligibility. No, it would build stuff up.
I think you could make some pretty cool stories that way.
Where is this already being done? Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch? (In some way David Mitchell comes to mind, although not fully.) Let me know!
Why do I really care about this? I've been thinking about how to make "new" kinds of books, also because I'm a millennial child, and it is this idea that has given me the most hope. For a while I grew disillusioned with the idea that I could tell an engaging non-linear story and be relevant, because I assumed my thought was just the product of my '90s-era cultural education, when broken narratives like Pulp Fiction and Memento and The Limey (to a lesser extent) were all the rage in cool artistic circles, and even broadly.
In a rhizome, which is basically like a bunch of bulby plants, every point of its roots can interconnect with any other point, which is very different from a traditional branching hierarchy. I really like the idea of viewing time this way, and so it is natural that I'd want to extend the metaphor to books, too (and life in general, but that's besides the point).
So what does a rhizomatic book look like? Is it a fragmented hodgepodge, a la modern and postmodern experiments like Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons or Bret Easton Ellis's The Rules of Attraction? I would say no, because these books focused on the fragments, not the connections. (Which doesn't mean they can't be good.)
Its goal would be to celebrate connections and meeting-points, which, incidentally, was one of the main goals of surrealism as practiced by Andre Breton and others.
I guess that means you could stick any two traditional parts of a novel (e.g., point of no return, moment of solace) together and have it both make sense and be emotionally (or spiritually) enriching! Connecting disparate pieces wouldn't be haphazard, meant to break things down to intelligibility. No, it would build stuff up.
I think you could make some pretty cool stories that way.
Where is this already being done? Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch? (In some way David Mitchell comes to mind, although not fully.) Let me know!
No comments have been added yet.
