Time, forward: irreversible events, affect, and future narratives

Contemporary fiction and film are full of complex narrative forms. They attempt to make readers’ and viewers’ experience more perplexed, while also challenging and redefining the basic elements of narrative. The forking-path narrative also highlights the complexity of contemporary narrative forms: it presents a storyworld which encompasses multiple possible alternative worlds. Events within it can be either reversible or irreversible, and each time they remain unpredictable to the reader.

The author examines the irreversibility of events in forking-path narratives on the example of the Paul Auster’s novel 4321. While reversibility of events emphasizes that the fabula can be changed in each storyline and, as a result, it becomes multiversion, irreversibility of events instead has a different effect. Irreversible events operate in forking-path narratives on the principle of repetition: they invariably recur in each storyline, and this recurrence enhances (more frequently a tragic) experience. The recurrence of irreversible events also creates a specific rhythm within the narrative. Such rhythmic patterns emerge at the narrative level and have a major role in shaping the reader’s experience, requiring bodily response, i.e. potentially resulting in bodily feelings. It constructs a mimesis which can be understood as “carnal” (in terms of Vivian Sobchack), with less mediation between storyworld and reader reality. The experience generated by irreversible events conflicts with another, shaped by reversible events, and together they generate the effect of a chaotic temporal movement, typical for narratives that can be regarded as “unruly” and “extreme,” with a versatile (and simultaneous) impact on the reader.