The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction Page: 75
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the past or, similarly, readying a reader semantically so that he or she focalizes the remainder of
the unavoidably linear story appropriately.
Selves do the same thing in their processes of negotiation. Ernest Keen's observations in
"Being Conscious is Being-in-the-World" demonstrate that
A duration of present experience is a structured now, containing within its structure pasts
as remembered and futures as anticipated, and enacting through its structure those acts of
appropriation. Nothing could be more complex. Temporality, as it presents itself to us in
consciousness, when that consciousness is taken as a phenomenon, an appearance and a
presence rather than a function, freely violates the rules of Newtonian temporality. I
change the past in remembering it. Its role in my life, its causal efficacy, if you will, is
utterly unchangeable by my reinterpreting it-again, a backwards influence in which the
later present acts backward on an earlier past, changing the past's acting forward on the
later present and future. Consciousness times itself in its own way, a way unlike that
conceived in physics and extended to the analysis of functional relations between
organisms and their environment.27
Consciousness, of course, makes ready use of our pasts and futures in aligning its narrative with
its determining dispositions, anxieties, and concerns at any given time. Further, literature often
does the same itself: modernist writers like Woolf and Joyce working with stream-of-
consciousness demonstrated this keenly. Though they may be linear, narratives are not temporal,
for they are both created and received in the anti-Newtonian realms of experiential space. As
Bohm points out, "Protagoras said: 'Man is the measure of all things', thus emphasizing that
measure is not a reality external to man, existing independently of him."28 Bohm uses this idea in
support of his overarching thesis about the problems of fragmentation or categorization, but the
truism serves just as well in the study of narrative. Events must be timed so that they we might
properly focalize them as best suits narrative need, cognitive or textual. After all, as Baudrillard
says, "Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in
plain view."29
My point is not to argue that real-world events have not happened in the past, nor that75
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Bradley, Darin Colbert. The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction, dissertation, May 2007; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc3703/m1/79/?rotate=0: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .