"Tramautized Time" and the Lyric Essay

We discussed this semester the three elements of narrative writing--time, space, and causality--and the lyric essay invites us to reconsider these things, especially the relationship between time and structure.  In his essay "traumatized time," David McGlynn writes that Tim O'Brien in The Things They Carried, seemed unable to write his war stories in a linear fashion because the memory of war doesn't work that way.  O'Brien notes that "in any war story, but especially a true one, it's difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.  What seems to happen becomes its own happening and has to be told that way."  McGlynn describes the structure of the novel (it is fiction but a very blurred combination of novel and memoir) is like the "shrapnel from a bomb, with fragments scattered across time and geography."

In conversation, we tell stories from beginning to end, chronologically, because that's how we sometimes remember them but also because that's a structure that allows the listener to follow what we're saying.  This is the default narrative structure.  In writing any essay, we sometimes play with this, beginning, say, in the middle, then flashing back to the beginning before we take up the present. The lyric essay invites us to "explode" the structure of narrative even more, and in doing so, it offers writers new ways to remember.  Today, you experimented with the segmented essay, and writing in fragments allows you to ignore linear narrative altogether.  The pieces can come from any part of your life, at any time, and can be ordered in any way that makes sense.  Time, which is usually a structural guide, may have very little to do with how we order the material.

Ignoring for the moment the implications this has for a reader of the work, for the writer this invitation to ignore the disciplining power of time on structure can be liberating.  It can present opportunities for connections between experiences you might never jam together, creating all sorts of unexpected meanings.  Is that what you found?