White Space

The concept of white space in fiction has my attention. It came up in class that white space – the use of a break between sections of short fiction – is a relatively new device, and it is accepted because of our familiarity with jump cuts in film. Simply stated, moving directly from one point in time or one point of view to another is understandable and palatable because we are used to it in other media.

This is not a new idea. A couple of weeks ago I surely could have told you that non-modern literature contains a lot of summary (from the Greek chorus to Victorian exposition) and that modern prose leaves more to interpretation. I had not thought of it in terms of film, though, and this reminded me of a conversation I had with my astrophysicist friend Dave many years ago, back when he was just an astrophysicist in training, and not the author of a greatly anticipated popular science tome (now available for pre-order!).

We were driving around one night, probably thirteen or fifteen years ago, talking about the ways in which movies, television, and written fiction influence perception. I do not remember who raised which points, but the idea was this. Fiction, whether in the form of television, movies, or prose, is uniquely ubiquitous in our culture and time. Fiction is also always written in hindsight. The whole point of fiction is to tell only the relevant parts of the story, which is something we can know only after the fact. The result of this is that we perceive our lives in a way that tries to attach often unnecessary drama to each and every event.

I would append that idea now to say that this kind of perception is the perception of an immature mind, and once we dig a little deeper into the mind -only to find it isn’t there- we stop attaching meaning to just about everything. Sometimes. If we’re lucky. What can I say, it’s been a very Eastern thought kind of decade and a half. We can add this to the list of things that were profound in the early nineties and have since lost a bit of their shine. Like political engagement. And Singles.