Dandelife: Rhizome, Anyone?

Wow. Everytime I get back here, something's new.

Marmelade's recent comment on Dandelife has me rethinking my ideas about coherence in text.

Did anyone else visit Dandelife and immediately feel confident that the metatext or megatext produced would be somehow coherent? I suspect that the insistence on dated entries somehow establishes this. For instance, Marmelade seems to have gone back and found things that happened on a birthday. My thought would have run something like "Gee, look at all these things that happened on that given day that seem totally unrelated." And the very difference, discreteness, of the events makes the metanarrative itself extremely coherent just because they are connected in our thought by their historical moments. And that connection is not at all arbitrary.

I suspect that this will hold even though surely some will fictionalize or outright lie in these accounts.

It reminds me of the work of Studs Terkel, who interviewed individuals involved in various historical processes -- the Great Depression, WWII, and so forth. He sought out people that held no public position, and the interviewers apparently knew little or nothing of each other, yet the mass of stories had meaning together that no single story had apart.

Of course, Terkel did deliberately find people who had experience of some single historical event or epoch. And I assume both the interviews and their collection into a single ms involved massive editing. This may turn out to be a major difference.

I like Terkel's books. I suspect they will become more significant as the points of view expressed recede into unimaginable past. If I had similar books for the 1800's and the American Revolution, I could throw away half the history books I'm going to have to read over the next year.

Accordingly, I suspect that in some sense at least some people do write such things for the betterment of knowledge, in a sense. But that knowledge may be personal, intimate, subjective. One of the feelings or ideas that got me writing manymany moons ago went something like "If they [whoever that is] could see it/feel it/know it like I do, they would not let it happen the way it has."

The coherence seems obvious. Am I overlooking something? Individual stories will cohere internally, at least insofar as individuals write coherently. The incoherencies, false coherencies, perspective-warps of the various author-narrators won't destroy the coherence of the metanarrative any more than our appreciation of The Sound and the Fury is crippled by the limitations of an individual narrator. Less, perhaps, because the world described is at least nominally our own. Dandelife is at least presented as nonfiction, so we don' t have to accept anyone's description of it. The game (gee, should I avoid that term? Oh well, onward) of reading does not here require any suspension of reality.