Hi folks,

Today I’m flashing back to an old post I wrote, Letters on Literary Devices 6: Jumpy Writing, and providing an example of “literary fracking” for all of you who were confused by the term. I coined this term based off an actual term in literary criticism: “the fractured narrative.”

Basically, the fractured narrative is when a book travels from one perspective to another focusing on the same event. The perspectives can come from character who took part in the event or even characters who are commenting on the event days or months or years later.

In my novel Just After the Fall, I used this strategy throughout. The main event, the beginning of a religious cult, occurred in real time for the protagonist. Two separate commentaries are provided by a future historian and a future religious leader. There is also a separate narrative that occurs after the main event but during the life of the protagonist. This is important because it shows how the cult developed into a religion which inevitably benefitted its people through the creation of a shared, common culture. Despite the fact that  it was just made up.

The excerpt below shows the commentary by the future religious leader and the separate narrative that occurs after the main event (I couldn’t use the chapters that showed the main event because those chapters are too long for an excerpt). Notice the change in narrative tone. The second chapter, the chapter that shows the beginning of the religious cult, maintains a simple, matter-of-fact voice, absent of the thinly veiled sarcasm found in  the “Sermon”.

Hope you enjoy it! Literary Fracking, everyone!

from Just After the Fall

A Sermon on Suicides from the Year 2540: Part IV

…“Followers of Abraham,” the orator continued, his voice reaching the top of a crescendo. His hands were above his head. “On this day, as you depart, as you leave this holy service, look around yourselves. See that there are powers acting independent of you. See that none of these powers are greater than you. And know that you do not have control of those powers, nor do you need to have control of those powers, for you do control your individual self, for that, above all else, was the lesson Lawrence learned traversing the wilderness. For that was the lesson that brought our people out of the darkness of the mountains and into the white light of liberty. For myself and no-one else!”

“For myself and no-one else,” the flock repeated.

In his private chambers the orator de-robed. Underneath he wore black. Sitting across from him, on a thick mules-leather chair was another man in black.

“Well done,” said the man in black. “You are a tribute to our order.”

The orator nodded his head. He grinned. His teeth were perfect. His canines were sharp.

“Some of the boys at central ran numbers last week. Faith has increased almost six percent since you began here.”

The orator said nothing. He nodded his head.

The man in black reclined further into his chair. “We’ll see productivity numbers next week. The projection from central is showing a three percent increase.” He shifted his weight. “This looks good. You’re looking good. You’re making me look good.”

“Just wait till next week,” the orator replied. “I’m beginning my telling of the Abraham stories. Those, I do particularly well.” He chuckled. “I have a name for it. They’ll eat it up. I’m calling it, But the Angels Never Came.”

The man in black laughed. “They will,” he said. “I know they will. They’ll grow fat on your sermons, and we’ll grow fat on our bonus checks from central office.”

To the East of Eden: Part IV

The top of the mountain was white rock. There were no trees or vegetation. The old man, wearing the brown cloth unique to his tribe, walked across the space separating himself and Lawrence and embraced the younger man.

“It has been too long,” the old man said. There was no hair on his head, but his beard was still thick and long. The dark hairs of his youth had turned a healthy grey.

The old man turned towards Maria. He embraced her.

“How are the boys?” the old man asked.

Maria smiled. “It has been too long,” she answered. “George is a man now. He’s a leader in our tribe. There is talk of him running for the next election. We are proud. And Cain, he was such a smart boy. As a man he’s interested in farming. He has a lot of ideas. He’s been planting trees. He wants all the breadfruit, for all the people of Abraham, to come from the south. ‘Trade,’ he always says the word ‘trade.’ He thinks very big.”

The old man nodded his head.

“So,” Lawrence began. “How are your people Chet?”

“Well fed.” Chet answered. His hands were at his sides. He was old but his back was not curved. The muscles in his legs were thick. “And yours?”

“Well fed and growing. The lands to the south are filling up.”

Lawrence looked past Chet. Resting next to the old man’s bag was an automatic rifle.

“Come across any poachers?” Lawrence asked.

“No, I never do. They see my rifle and they stay away. Besides, I’m an old bag of bones. They go after young meat.”

Lawrence nodded his head.

“It must be nice,” Chet continued, “traveling through the south, traveling without one of those.” He pointed back towards his rifle.

“We stayed as one people.”

“I still remember our splitting off. You were crazy, I thought, staying down there, near the patrols.”

“The first year was tense. But the drones got packed up and shipped off. Never saw one myself. Not after the split. The shared fear. In the beginning, that’s what kept us together.”

Chet nodded.

“How is Abraham?” Lawrence asked.

“Oh,” Chet replied, “last I heard, he’s doing fine. Always on the move. For so long he lived for the people of the Village. Since the split, he has lived only for himself. You see. I knew him. I knew him well. He was always under so much strain. I could never look at him in the eyes before. But now, he is at peace.”

Lawrence nodded. “He was right. He had the right idea all along. He had all the power, but he walked away.”

“It’s his example that they follow,” Chet said in agreement. “They can longer follow the words from his mouth. They follow his beliefs. They follow his morals.”

Time passed. Maria spoke more of her sons. Chet and Lawrence reminisced sitting with backs against the white rocks of the mountain. The sun went up. The sun went down. Maria started a fire and the three ate. It was not until after the meal that Lawrence brought up the matter of official duties. The men talked of trade, new developments in breadfruit farming, and efforts on both sides to maintain the religion of Abraham in their peoples, for the yearly gathering at Church Peak was only a month away.

Thanks for checking out this excerpt! If you still have questions about the fractured narrative or literary fracking, feel free to put those in the comment section below!

AND WRITERS: IF YOU HAVE AN EXAMPLE OF LITERARY FRACKING, SEND MY AN E-MAIL SO I CAN FEATURE YOU ON MY BLOG! EJAMESOLSON1@GMAIL.COM

Oh, and one other thing. All four novels in the series are still on sale. They are priced between 2.99 and 3.99.  Check out these links if you’re interested:

THANKS!!!!!!!!

Ladies and Gentleman,

Welcome back to Books for Men. As I mentioned in my post last week, I’ll be reviewing Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence .

For those of you who missed last week’s post, I’ll break down the most important parts for you: Books for Men focuses on fiction that emphasizes history, philosophy, politics,  religion, ideas, beliefs. The criticism centers on the author’s development of symbolism, allegory, and milieu, not the author’s development of character and plot. These conditions were decided based on well-documented trends in what men read, not on stereotypes regarding maleness, masculinity, what it means to be a “real man.” My goal has nothing to do with defining masculinity; it has everything to do with suggesting books that I think other men will like.

Without further adieu my review of Ape and Essence:

Ape and Essence starts out simply enough. Two men, both in the movie business, discuss an array of topics ranging from infidelity, to the assassination of Ghandi, to movie scripts that will never see the screen. The focus, however, appears to be the assassination of Ghandi. Through dialogue and inner narrative, Huxley juxtaposes two philosophical concepts: the plight of the marginalized individual vs. the machinery of civilized “Order”. Ghandi, of course, represents the individual serving his own cause,  who is killed because he “refused any longer to go on dreaming our dreams of a national Order,” concluding that “Order begets tyranny,” inevitably.

This representation of Ghandi, this dichotomy between the “individual” and “order” serves as a central theme throughout the rest of the book, an assertion that the plot will seek to make self-evident.

From here, our two men, Bob Briggs and the narrator are nearly ran over by a truck loaded down with movie scripts destined for the incinerator. The truck takes a sharp turn and several scripts fall out onto the pavement. Most of the scripts are trash, but one catches the eye of the narrator: “Ape and Essence.” It is this script, this piece of trash, this meaningless item written by an obscure author, that will serve as the majority of the novel.

Now, the men don’t just start reading. If they had just started reading the script, the significance of the script as an object in itself might have been lost. Instead, they try to track down the author. I won’t go into the details of their search. The search ends like this: he’s already dead. But the point is this: the story that he wrote, “Ape and Essence,” is not a story that other men want to hear. It’s a story that humanity turns its collective eyes from. It’s a story that owes its existence to the exigency of chance and luck. It goes against popular opinion. It isn’t comfortable. It isn’t easy to hear. But it does exist. It’s real.

So, what’s in the script? Well, the second part of the novel titled “The Script,” claims to be a verbatim reading. And it does read a lot like a movie script and begins with a short vignette, an allegory portraying men with power, world leaders, perhaps,  as apes controlled by an inexplicable need to destroy each other. The vignette closes with two warring factions, both in possession of an “Einstein” who pushes a button destroying the entire planet. Literally, this short scene represents a futuristic WWIII. It also represents the control that political powers have over scientific discovery; the “Einstein’s” are literally kept on leashes, and the devastating potential that science can achieve. Think: Prometheus bringing fire to man, except no positives outcomes, only destruction. A more contemporary comparison would be Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. The message about the dangers of science is essentially the same.

From here, the script travels a hundred years or so into the future. With the exception of New Zealand, the entire world has been destroyed by nuclear blasts. The New Zealanders are scientists and in the midst of an exploration to California.

One of the scientists, Dr. Poole gets ambushed by the local Californian’s, a group of people who’s parents and grandparents somehow survived the initial nuclear blasts and weren’t killed by nuclear radiation.

From this point on, the suspense builds from a want to better understand these people. It becomes a milieu-based or world-building style narrative.

In the wake of nuclear catastrophe, Huxley creates a world where mankind has reverted to a state that is almost inhuman. He does this not by creating an absence of culture, but instead by describing a complete inversion of Western civilization. Instead of God, the people believe in Belial (the devil). Instead of Democracy, the people are ruled by despots (even though they call it a democracy, Animal Farm, anyone?). The women wear patches over their breasts that say “no”. They wear these patches over each of their orifices as well. The most grotesque manifestation of this new reality is in the mating ritual. Instead of marriages born out of love or arranged by parents or agreed upon by mutual recognition of common interests, the Belial worshippers engage in a yearly mating ritual in which any deformed children from the year before are slaughtered. Oh, I forgot to mention. The people are all deformed because of nuclear radiation. Any children who are “too” mutated are killed (This is Sparta!?!).

The slaughter is followed by an orgy. It isn’t a complete free for all. Much like deer during the rut, the men with the biggest horns get the women. The people in these scenes don’t seem like people at all. Reading these scenes was akin to watching the nature channel years ago, when all it ever showed was animals mating.

Much like in Brave New World, Huxley portrays women as a lower, unprivileged class whose main role in society is copulation. He goes further here, describing women as “vessel’s” for Belial. This brings about a strange irony: women are of a lower class because they carry “Belial” or evil with them; and yet, the people as a whole revel in, and celebrate Belial as their God. This also points out the inherent power that man, as an animal, has over women, as animals. Here, the men are shown as physically stronger, and the women are forced to “submit”. Although it isn’t clear, Huxley may have been commenting sarcastically about the inherent absurdity of gender inequality, showing that it’s a feature of our animal nature, not the part of our nature that makes us uniquely human.

After the ritual, our protagonist, Dr. Poole interviews the man who’s really in charge of this civilization, the head of The Church of Belial, the Arch-Vicor, and it’s from this Arch-Vicor the nature of this new world is fully explained, and for those who intend to read the book, I won’t spoil the reveal here, but I’ll give a hint: it has to do with the allegorical conversation from the beginning of the book regarding “Ghandi” and “Order”. He also reveals the reasons for the mating ritual and why the people are forbidden to have monogamous sexual relationships.

The novel concludes suspensefully. In spite of custom, Dr. Poole develops a romantic relationship with Loola, a native Californian who’s mutations are relatively unnoticeable: she has four nipples. Dr. Poole finds himself faced with a difficult choice: he can either join The Church of Belial and become a leader in the community (I forgot to mention that becoming a priest in this society requires surgery. Eunuchs), or he can leave with his new girlfriend in search of place that values individual freedom over collective order.

I won’t say how it ends. I hope you read it and please, feel free to comment below. There was so much more in this book then I had time to discuss and would love to hear your interpretations!

I’ll be posting my next Book for Men in two weeks. I’ll be reading and reviewing To Have and Have Not by Earnest Hemingway

Oh, and if you have any suggestions, know of any books that you think I should review, please let me know by posting them in the comments section below. I’d love to hear from you!