A few literary Influences for Contemporary Creative Nonfictions:
1. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men for their extensive use of footnotes to both elaborate on and disrupt the traditional narrative flow.
2. Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, especially the story The Garden of Forking Paths, pp.119-128, as it is seen as a precursor to the idea of a hypertext novel, and even the structure of the World Wide Web itself. The story itself is about a puzzling narrative within another puzzling narrative–world within a world–in which all possibilities are explored.
“‘The Garden of Forking Paths is an incomplete, but not false, image of the universe as conceived by Ts’ui Pen. Unlike Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not believe in a uniform and absolute time; he believed in an infinite series of times, a growing, dizzying web of divergent, convergent and parallel times. That fabric of times that approach one another, fork, are snipped off, or are simply unknown for centuries, contains all possibilities. In most of those times, we do not exist; in some, you exist bu I do not; in others, I do and you do not; in others still, we both do. In this one, which the favoring hand of chance has dealt me, you have come to my home; in another, when you come through my garden you find me dead; in another, I say these same words, but I am an error, a ghost.’” from p. 127, Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges
I am also fond of The Circular Ruins, pp 96-100. The narrator of this story dreams an entire universe while resting for many days in an old temple which had been “profaned” by the “malerial jungle.”
3. from p. 3, David Quammen, Monster of God:
“Great and terrible flesh-eating beasts have always shared the landscape with humans. They were part of the ecological matrix within which Homo sapiens evolved. They were part of the psychological content in which our sense of identity as a species arose. They were part of the spiritual systems that we invented for coping. The teeth of big predators, their claws, their ferocity and their hunger, were grim realities that could be eluded but not forgotten. Every once in a while, a monsterous carnivore emerged like doom from a forest or a river to kill someone and feed on the body. It was a familiar sort of disaster–like auto fatalities today–that must have seemed freshly, shockingly gruesome each time, despite the familiarity. And it conveyed a certain message,. Among the earliest forms of human self-awareness was the awareness of being meat.”
Monster of God is interesting as a discussion of man’s relationship with the monsterous beasts with which we have shared this planet for the entire human history.
(to be Continued)
