When I first picked up the book Atomik Aztek by Sesshu Foster, I had no idea what I had gotten myself into. If Sesshu Foster has taught me one thing, it is that I am a spoiled reader. This seems like a weird conclusion to have come to, but it’s true. I have come to the realization that in my studies of literature thus far, I am familiar with the novel as being a western conception. Out of the many books and short stories that I have read, time, in most all of them, takes a linear form. This style of form and content has become the norm for me, and for this reason, the absence of a linear plot and time is confusing and to be honest, unsettling.
From the beginning of the novel, the epigraph actually, Foster offers his readers a warning of what is to come in his book. He warns readers that if they are attempting to find a plot in his novel, they should instead read Huck Finn. He prepares us for the non-traditional reading experience that is his book itself. He closes his epigraph with an excerpt from Charlotte Delbo’s piece Auschwitz and After, “Step out of history/ to enter life.” This is exactly what Foster is asking us to do, to abandoned all of our preconceived western conceptions and ideas of what the novel is and step into the abnormal, to chart the unfamiliar. This is no accident. The narrator states that the Aztex believe in circular concepts of time: Cyklikal konceptions of the universe where reality infinitely kurves back upon itself endlessly so all that has exited does exist and will always exist and so forth into infinity…(Don’t worry if you don’t get it the first time, it all repeats as you shall see. This happened to you already & it will happen to you again in the future.) (Foster 3) Foster demonstrates through his novel that the traditional conception of linear time is an inaccurate representation of reality. Linear time doesn’t imitate the world. It may imitate a western conception of time and reality, but certainly it doesn’t represent the global standard. Foster’s cyclical portray of time shatters the chronology and order that linear time is. And it is for this reason that I was uncomfortable throughout my reading of his text. But, the element of the novel that I was the most uneasy with became the force that drew me closer and closer into the text. Foster, through his shattering of traditional plot and linear time, pushes his readers out of their comfort zones. In doing this, he is able to broaden his readers literature view, providing them with a more accurate representation of reality though his writing. Foster, Sesshu. Atomik Aztex. City Lights Publishers , 2005.
1 Comment
Nina W
11/13/2017 01:50:18 pm
Thank you for this post! My initial reaction to Atomik Aztex was also that I did not like the book. I didn’t get it, I didn’t like it. I have relied heavily on our in-class discussions of the novel, and on thoughtful analyses from my fellow students, such as this blog post, to help me take a step back and examine my own approach to the novel as a reader. I can accept different understandings of time, such as the concept of reincarnation and parallel realities, but Foster aims, it would seem, to capture multiple moments in real-time on the written page. I appreciate that now, as I didn’t at first. I wonder if I would have accepted the novel more readily as a poem—I suppose I felt that novels have rules, whereas poetry is pretty much lawless. But that’s my western education background for you! To circle back to the class theme, I actually wrote a blog post on how my impression of the novel—in all it’s confounding disarray—was that it in itself is monstrous. Perhaps I perceived it as a threat to the rules I have been taught, a deformed literary monster rushing in to defile my sensible, linear reality! OK, maybe that’s a bit dramatic. Anyway, thanks again for this post and helping me to understand my initial aversion and to develop it into an appreciation.
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