One of the most abstract philosophical ideas address by Gould's Book of Fish is the possibility that time isn't linear. The notion that we hold of time as a linear motion, starting at one point and ending at another, is a human construct, and specifically a Western construct. Many Meso-American peoples believed that time was cyclical - something that the constant repetition in our lives, such as birthdays and Christmas occurring every year, or the seasons would support - as do many Eastern Asian cultures, some of which also believe that one can step outside the circle of time with the proper amount of effort (or lack of effort). We have spent an extensive amount of time in class discussing how this book refuses to fall into a linear fashion, be it through Thomas's comparisons to lost or our failed attempts to classify this book in parts or chapters. It's hard to break from the bias we've been imbued with by growing up in a Western culture, and in a heavily Western influenced world, but maybe it's time to look at time in a different manner.
On page 251, while Gould is describing Jorgenson's gripe with the world, he says "Books were solid, yet time was molten." In other words, the world didn't act like anything Jorgenson encountered in a book because time moves more like molten lava, in a seeping, spreading fashion, than in a line. Books have a start and a finish and always remain the same. Time, on other hand, says Gould, is not something that we can search out move along linearly. Rather, we live in it, our atmosphere, like water to a fish. Gould would say that, if you agree with him, this book is written chronologically (though not in chronological order). I'm curious what my peers feel about this - does time run in a straight line? Is it cyclical? Does it seep, like molten rock, or like water?
So, try not to judge too hard but I’m going to quote the eleventh doctor (who is an expert, after all) on his explanation of time.
ReplyDelete“People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect... but actually, from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it's more like a big ball of wibbly-wobbly... timey-wimey... stuff” (Dr. Who).
This story is retroactive (I assume, there isn’t a lot of this book you can be sure about). But when you think of memories, they rarely occur linearly, or with any respect for time. They happen as you think of them. It’s as those the past exists in a sphere of time, a swirling sphere of time, and Gould goes to remove a specific instance – that is, remember something – and gets caught up in the flow and is unable to get back to the present, where time is supposedly fixed. So the past is swimming in circles and the present is lurching forward and for us in this book they are all happening at the same time, and damn that shit is confusing.
In typical stories, there is a plot. We are introduced to characters. We are presented with a conflict. There is rising action as the conflict becomes more and more pronounced. Yay! There is a solution! Well, maybe in some of the more rebellious books, the solution is open-ended and left to the discretion of the reader, but there is still a solution somewhere.
But in Gould’s Book of Fish, it is more like there are many, many sporadic and brief stories that begin and end independent of whatever overall, autobiographical – for a lack of more eloquent terms – big story that is the basis for the novel. There is no solution, merely an outcome, and a negative outcome at that. The fact that these independent stories have little or no effect on any overall story is consistent with the theme of futility and fruitless labor.
Before I continue with that I’m going to interject myself and admit that I am having a difficult time seeing any evidence for hope in this book, which may be because I haven’t finished it yet, but still.
Gould seems never to quite gain anything, laboring extensively to merely get by and stay alive. All his art is traded for bar bills. He walks on the cockchafer for hours, for nothing. He builds according to the Commandant’s dreams, which are never realized. Even the tavern owned by Capois Death is named Labour in Vain, about which Gould says, “They would have laughed all the more over their pots of purlale if they had seen the future it truly signposted…”(77).
I tend to get carried away.