timeline wackiness

[ritaxis]

So as I'm getting ready to go -- putting on real clothes, that sort of thing -- I had this sudden flash of insight: the current book works better if I thoroughly screw the chronology. It has to do with the ways the questions are asked and answered. And the kind of tension that's built: the second long chapter, the one where the man without a country marries the teenaged mother, is more final than the third long chapter, in which there's a big labor dispute and the possibility of violence. Since the very last vignette of the book is really quite violent, and the vignette between the two chapters is the one in which the man without a country's mother dies-- I think that it really makes much more dramatic sense to switch those two long chapters, which means that the chronology, which was formerly a little odd but basically quite orderly, has become completely tangled, like "Pulp Fiction." Which the kids were watching yesterday, and I didn't want to watch it again, but I did pass through the living room and appreciate the shape of the story, and I knew why it had that one scene at the end instead of in the middle. So maybe that's what made me change these things around. Understanding that the last bit of the story is the one that caps it, that makes the story be about what it's about.

Okay, so this is what ends up happening in my current version:

Readers 1(vignette 1): Chronological 8 (the burial of the man without a country)
Readers 2(vignette 2): Chronological 1 (the good bureaucrat's first memory of the rumors of peace: the man without a country's mother as a displaced child)
Readers 3(chapter 1): Chronological 5 (the good bureaucrat tries to repatriate the man without a country: the man without a country flees the gangsters)
Readers 4(vignette 3): Chronological 2 (the good bureaucrat meets the sisters of charity for the first time: the man without a country is born)
Readers 5 (chapter 2): Chornological 7 (the good bureaucrat and the man without a country take sides in a labor dispute -- the good bureaucrat splits with the other bureaucrats, the man without a country joins with the other repatriates: the teenaged mother sends her daughter and herself to school)
Readers 6 (vignette 4): Chronological 3(the good bureaucrat attends a peace demonstration: the man without a country's mother survives a massacre and dies of an epidemic)
Readers 7 (chapter 3): Chronological 6 (the good bureaucrat runs a camp: the man without a country takes responsibility for the teenaged mother)
Readers 8 (vignette 5): Chronological 4 (the good bureaucrat takes his first job as a bureaucrat in a refugee camp: the man without a country hides from other children: That Building is bombed: the mythology of the Flower Mother)

I hope it isn't more confusing than it ought to be.