The Line Formerly Known as Nonlinear

What constitutes nonlinear text? We build letters of lines. We arrange words in lines (mostly). Eyes flick across a page or (though irregularly) a screen in lines. Spoken words evanesce across a room into what we call past, and we model that idea time with a line. In a sense everyone reads in a line

In another sense no one does.

Once upon a time, language was always spoken, therefore always inescapably evanescent. All words went poof. But some trace of sound must to remain for us to compare the current word that completes a sentence with the recently deceased word that started the sentence. In some way we must retain words as simultaneous even to recognize that they're not, that they're temporally sequential.

I'd be thankful for someone who has the neurology or wishes to engage the phenomenology to describe this more rigorously, but meanwhile I'll keep to a simplish, metaphorical, probably coarse model: we keep running sequences of language back in some sort of loop or loop of loops -- or most likely, matching pairs or sets of loops of loops, like a little neurosymphony and lightshow.

Meanwhile we retain or posit some view of the absolute progression of time through all this, modelled as a line, perhaps of text.

So, we read a sentence: the eyes dart forward; the mind goes around and around and around and back and forth and across, comparing loops, tracing counterpoint and pattern. This same kind of activity happens in all forms of arts. Meter and line in poetry is obvious, as are the various rhythms of the musical (get this word) phrase and movement. Analogies exist in painting, dance, oratory, and even gourmet cooking. During this process, the mind must keep finding places where it can decide "Oh, we're done with this part; let me check back to the start and see how this fits together." That point is a sentence, a line, a beat, a musical phrase, the reference to thesis in the closing words of a paragraph or the end of an essay.

Of course, this is all described way too cleanly, but I simply don't know how the details pan out or how they will (let's trust to it) complicate or even contradict this account.

But line and sequence get used many ways in discussing text and narrative:

1. The reader's eyes generally read in a line as the mind loops, as discussed.
2. When events in a narrative are related as happening in the same order as that in which the narrator describes them, critics of printed literature often call that story linear, despite all the looping inter-referentiality of language and event.
3. When narrators do NOT relate events in the order in which they supposedly happen, print-critics may call the story nonlinear, a-linear, asequential, or even structureless, formless or timeless -- all kinds of literal absurdities. For example, Finnegans Wake, a story nominally circular, whose first sentence starts on the last page of the book, is generally read just as sequentially as any other, word after word. The book is rectangular, not circular or round, except in the sense that the reader is given to understand to that story doubles back on itself. Perhaps an e-version could be designed in which the reader starts on a different page each time -- not that FW needs complexities. But even in that event, chapters do clearly remain linear, just as the sentences are quite rigidly syntactic, progressing NVN through Joyce's extraordinary nest of allusions with fewer inversions than Paradise Lost.
4. A hypertext such as Afternoon also creates one of many possible linear reads at any given instantiation. That is, the readers process still remains equally linear. But the reader tends to understand that other possible combinations are equally legitimate.(Of course, that line the reader makes is apt to go over a single stretch of text more than once.)
5. A visual poem like Mallame's ."Roll of the Dice" is not unilinear. However, one reads it by forming little lines through it, looping and backtracking with the eyes in ways that must echo the loopings of the thoughts.

Now, the upshot of all this business of lines is that to have clarity, we would know where to let our minds loop back, and what information to bunch together.

Of course, this is what many artists wish to impede: they would not have us accept as gospel that single framing, single perspective, even for long enough to create and accept the frame. This can be fascinating. But its very indeterminacy gives us problems in identifying it firmly with any idea construct of our own, so that when the writing undercuts it, it may not undercut our own hallowed categorizations.

As an alternate type of indeterminacy, artists may allow audiences to complete a loop or a frame, only to contradict it immediately afterward. Almost any artwork constitutes an example of artistic surprise, which is what I'm referring to, but a particularly clear delineation of these two ideas may be had by comparing two narratives by Samuel Beckett, written several decades apart, How It Is and Ill Seen, Ill Said, In the earlier How It Is, readers must pick out their sentences from text punctuated only by wordspacings and linespacings that form something like paragraphs. Beckett apparently wrote the first drafts without these spacings. In Ill Seen, Ill Said, conversely, punctuation stops the reader continually, but the content of the punctuated phrases repeatedly demands to be read across the punctuation, so that the reader constantly must remake an impression of the text.

Item 6. Now, on an only somewhat more abstract level, the reader makes a story line by connecting or associating two events with a third conclusion -- as a necessary and inescapable conclusion. This is the act which potentially contradicts the reader's pre-existing categorizations, and which makes the story work. Of course, if this happens without any of the other lines, everything's fine. But there seems to be a tendency that premise(a) and premise (b) must be in order before readers arrive at conclusion.

Clearly, an ultimate conclusion's not always necessary or desirable. But some act of concluding becomes essential to reform previous conclusions.