In My Vicious Angel, wave-like musical time, with its rhythms, echoes and repetitions, is counterposed in both harmony and discord to linear narrative time, with its implied causality and its imperative need to subordinate the journey to the destination. In drawing on the tension between certain musical and narrative modes of address, the author has tried to foreground the volatility of time's relation to trauma and to memory. It is an anecdotal truism that in accidents, time slows down, emotion is suspended and sensory impressions acquire an extraordinary clarity and intensity. If traumatic incidents form a kind of rupture to the fabric of narrative time, how might this impact on the ongoing weaving of narrative? What kinds of rhythms, shock waves, stammerings result? Further, if the emotional charge of any event affects the subjective organisation of time, very quickly the tight weave of the linear narrative begins to resemble something more like beginners' macrame. If the writing has resonance, it does so because it finds a sympathetic emptiness, an echo chamber within the listener where the dialogue can move in counterpoint to lines of story already begun elsewhere which rub up against each other and whisper in the dark, travelling (like water, like memory) in waves. / Master of Arts (Hons)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/189428 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Evans, Christine, University of Western Sydney, School of Communication and Media |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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