thread: 2012-12-04 : Positioning: Two Timelines in Text
On 2012-12-04, Tim Ralphs wrote:
I'm super happy with so much of this, and I wonder if I've worked out where I lose you. Let me re-state what I think you've been saying and then see if you agree:
1) At any point in our play, we have a whole host of gameplay options and moves. Some of these are available to us because of established details in the fiction. We can describe the fictional details that give rise to those gameplay options at that particular point of play as being the fictional position.
2) Assuming our game has some notion of a fictional present, some of those details are likely to be immediate fictional things. Some of those details may be from moments past, future, ambiguous. But whatever, in so far as we can put these fictional events in an order, we can consider there to be a fictional timeline.
Does that sound about right?
This makes llb go "I'm amused"
At the recapitulation of Humean empiricism going on here. Hume argued that continuity of consciousness is only an assumption -- under closer examination it dissolves into a series of arbitrary and unconnected moments. It turns out that this (stitching up of individual scenes into a hypothetical timeline) is exactly the process we apply to creating fictional consciousness.
This makes TR go "Hume is such a mystic!"
I've been thinking about him a lot lately, on unrelated grounds. Is there a good text of his that explores this idea?
