Oneirophrenia
May 12th, 2005
I’m currently in the process of establishing Oneirophrenia.net, another “blog” powered by WordPress 1.5 that will basically host my freeform novel Oneirophrenia–a window into the mind of a pseudo-omniscient “narrator” who rattles about life in a constant dreamlike state. There’s really no other way I can describe it: there isn’t going to be any particular “plot,” at least not one that is particularly recognizable considering how often things shift and mutate at the drop of a fuckin’ dime, but everything will make a peculiar kind of sense–this ain’t Samuel Beckett we’re talking about here, though Beckett is an obvious influence, as are William S. Burroughs, Jorge Luis Borges, and various other “surrealist” or imagistic writers.
OK, I admit it, Oneirophrenia is mostly going to be an excuse for me to kick out the crazy-ass English-major word games. I’m a huge fan of creative stylistics, and I try to work with interesting styles of writing in everything I do…but, obviously, in a work like NONFICTION! or any other form of “popular” writing you can’t get away with a lot of wiggidy-wiggidy-whack word games and avant-garde stylistics for fear of swamping an otherwise engaging narrative beneath sheer orthographic craziness. When you’re writing from the point of view of a possibly-schizophrenic narrator, however, all bets are off and you can really let your hair down and just execute all manner of bizarre, innovative, or just plain entertaining linguistic acrobatics a la Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, but obviously not so dense and mutated and impossible-to-figure out that only the author himself could ever understand what’s going on. I want people to read this thing, and enjoy it. Enjoy something in which I can kick out the jams without having to worry about the confinement of conventional narrative, but at the same time not get so convoluted or esoteric that I render the “story” as such completely invisible.
So, there you have it. My aesthetic statement concerning Oneirophrenia. I’ll obviously let everyone know once it’s ready to kick off, so you can RSS it or bookmark it as it develops!
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