Event overview
The Frequency of Magic
Abstract:
The Trinidadian novelist and philosopher Earl Lovelace has suggested that rules of linear or causal narratology are subverted in the Caribbean, and that, here ‘everything happens at once’. Earl says, ‘rhythm is a unit of meaning.’ For him, events do not wait, they happen, they overlap within the same spatiality. This is the central conceit of my novel The Frequency of Magic. In the novel, a writer is writing a novel - The Frequency of Magic - in which the characters have found a way to escape the confined continuum of the text. The reader observes the author’s creative process, his own interactions with his community, the lives of his characters, all of which becomes a work in which each of its 100 chapters is exactly 1000 words long, in which a weaving of plots occur simultaneously, where polyphonic narratives can be glimpsed behind those being told, shifting, from chapter to chapter, or from sentence to sentence. Here, each character is equally valid, each is heroic, each has a story to tell in a community of voicings.
This reading/discussion examines the theoretical background to the novel’s experiments, the rhythm of its prose and its stylistic and philosophical debt to jazz, calypso, oulipo and surrealism.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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15 Jan 2018 | 5:30pm - 7:00pm |
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