The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction Page: 76
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nothing will ever occur in the future. But any real nature of past and future is beyond both
cognitive and narrative reach. As soon as a self focalizes the perceived phenomena of the outside
world into the worlds it builds in its experiential space, the data undergoes immediate and
unending revision.30 There are no real fabula for the narratives of consciousness to point to, for
selves create fabula simultaneously with their stories as they go about perceiving. As Bal points
out, there are inevitable disconnects in relations between story and fabula: "When a certain part
of the time covered by the fabula is given absolutely no attention at all, the amount of TF (time
of the fabula) is infinitely much larger than the TS (story-time). On the other hand, we can
distinguish the pause, when an element that takes no fabula-time (so an object, not a process) is
presented in detail."31 Bal's observations delineate the impossibility of "isochrony" between
stories and fabulas. The phenomenal world is its own fabula in that there is no overarching
narrative attempting to represent all of it. However, selves and stories, with their limited
perceptual capability, their constantly interrupting anachronies, and their focalizations cannot
possibly reconcile themselves with all of phenomenal space-time. Hence the necessity for causal
occultation; hence the need for sustaining a self model for those few aspects of phenomenal
space that interact with the self. Those aspects, in many ways, inform the anxieties and
dispositions that determine how the self will model its interaction with the outside world.
What selves are left with in this morass of created time, is an enduring present. Keen
points out that
The future, then, is present; it is not merely a point yet to be traversed. Even more
vividly, the present is not a specious point forever caught between a constantly receding
past and a constantly approaching future. Rather the present is a duration. Experience
endures, and its relation to both future and the past is one of appropriation. I appropriate
the future and the past, in anticipations and in memories, and through these
appropriations I weave together a now that has a complexity and density vastly unlike
that empty point on a Newtonian time line.3276
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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/m1/80/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .