The Fragmented Paradigm

About the Author

A dense cluster of matter explodes into an empty void, spreading itself outward, packing into solids, flowing into liquids, floating away as gases and igniting into plasmas. Further explosions follow, leaving in their wake the stars and the elements. The elements fuse together, creating comets and asteroids and planets, pushing the boundaries of that former void and filling the nothing with everything.

And on one tiny dot within that everything the molten rock cools and the boiling seas simmer. Deep within one of these oceans a small strand of amino acids bonds with another. Proteins connect with proteins and lipids join together and the first cell is born. And then it too connects with others and still others until a new creature emerges. And when the skies above fill with gases that swirl around, mix and remix to just the right proportion, that new creature takes its first tentative steps onto land and chokes down its first rasping breath of air.

Before long it finds others of its kind and they band together into groups. These groups become tribes, tribes become states, states become kingdoms, kingdoms become nations and nations spread around the globe, moving from darkness to enlightenment and then back again. Despots rise and fall, philosophers are hailed and then ultimately abandoned, wars are waged to see whose God is cooler. And then comes industry and medicine, democracy, television; and finally on September 12, 1985, Anders Fischer is born. And that’s when things really get kickin’.

“Who is this Anders Fischer?” you say. No one knows for sure. They say that he once walked the highwire from New York to Chicago to settle a bet with gravity, that he abated the murderous efforts of tigers by telling a story that lasted one thousand nights, that he traveled to the future and brokered an armistice with the invading Nevermen and that he solved the problem of global warming by walking right up to the sun and telling it to chill. He was once hit by a car and while his body lingered in limbo, his soul won back its life by beating Death at a game of Chinese Checkers. He swam with the kangaroos and boxed a dolphin. He climbed to the highest peak of Everest and dropped a penny over the side. He once ate a single chip and then turned away and said: “No more.”

But these are mere myths that grow with the telling (so start telling) and the truth is far more mundane, but it shall be presented here as though it were exciting.

His trials began early in life. Born with cerebral palsy, he was immediately written off by the Missouri public school system as being unable to learn to read, write or cut paper with scissors. Emboldened by these events that he was too young to understand or remember, he set out to prove them wrong and now he is a college graduate with a degree in English, a writer by trade and he can cut paper with scissors without anyone getting it started for him. But getting to this point was not easy, as the road held many obstacles. In particular was that most ghastly and demonic of social institutions, that place where civilization ceases to be and all of the human race is reduced to the malodorous, anti-intellectual crap-flingers we once were: high school. So traumatic was this time that he has relegated all memories of it to a sort of cognitive Gulag from which there is no escape. When looking back on his life, his memories shift abruptly from the last day of 8th grade to his graduation ceremony, where – to commemorate this grand turning point and the end of an era – he got a sunburn.

Appropriate in its own way.

From here, realizing that writing was his one true passion (next to Canadian candy bars), he made the perfectly logical decision to go to French Canada to study English (Well, actually, he made the decision to go to French Canada to study Biology, then switched to Philosophy and then to English). Upon first setting foot in Montreal, he immediately froze to death and then slid downhill until he shattered upon the door to a gigantic stripclub that was right across the street from a movie theatre showing Shrek 2. But he was quickly resurrected by the Angel of Literary Merit, who proclaimed he had a destiny yet to fulfill. And so, heartened and confused and not a little cold, he trudged back to McGill University to learn about stuff.

Among that stuff was how to dissect narrative structures and then reassemble them in a more pleasing form, as well as the knowledge that the hockey teams from Toronto dine on the souls of infants and, most importantly, that science is hard. Thus he shifted from his original plan and into cultural studies, which is basically the English major of other stuff. And thusly his new narrative dissection abilities were extended from literature and into movies, television, comics, theatre, videogames and really anything else with words in it. He was also so inundated with all thirty-two flavors of feminism that he became acutely aware that his own gender was pure evil and that all art created by any male was in fact done so to further the oppression of women. Shakespeare was a dick.

But eventually he was able to reconcile this perspective with the one or two other analytical viewpoints that were occasionally mentioned in passing over the four years of his education and all was well… until he one day found himself wandering aimlessly around the icy wastes of Montreal and then suddenly bonked on the head by an unfortunate bird that had frozen solid in mid-flight. This impact jostled the contents of his skull, throwing things all out of sequence and now he doesn’t know what’s going on anymore. Yet from this confusion arose conviction. The Angel of Literary Merit appeared to him as he lay on the sidewalk counting the little birds floating around his head – which then froze and fell onto him again – and set him to work on his holy mission to write stuff, promote said stuff and then maybe one day – when flying pigs filled up the sky and ski slopes opened in Hell – scrounge up some sort of living through doing this.

But as he watched the angel walk away into the sunset — which then froze, fell and shattered, plunging us all into eternal darkness — Anders Fischer came to realize that his ice-plunked brain could no longer properly perceive reality. And so he chose to dedicate himself to the furtherance and understanding of fiction, the only form of expression where acknowledgement of reality is considered to be a nuisance. But perhaps through fiction he would one day be able to restore sense and reason and rationality to his world… or at least expose its inexorable irrationality for everyone else to see.

The only problem was that he couldn’t decide on how to approach this attempt to understand the fictitious. He was so divided on this issue that his psyche split into three wholly distinct personalities: Anders, Charles (because that’s his middle name, you see) and Fischer. Anders believed that direct application was best, that his skewed perception of reality must be related through short stories that dragged all the little absurdities of the world into the open and then pointed at them and laughed. Charles disagreed, preferring a critical approach for assessing fiction and the society that penned it. Only through reviews of the artistic works of the day could one come to a solid understanding of the good, bad and meh of contemporary culture. Fischer was of yet another belief, that it was only through analytical essays, through that dissection of themes and structures, that one could come to understand the frameworks that held stories together and what a work meant to those who read it.

Ultimately, no victor emerged from this debate. After many a heated three-way battle royal of Rock, Paper, Scissors (that always ended in a draw because everybody picked something different) it was decided instead not to focus on one path toward truth, but rather to embrace this fragmented paradigm and follow all three methods of exploration in search of both a greater understanding of the inner workings of fiction writing and the answer to that most pressing of all teleological questions:

“Is everybody completely nuts, or is it just me?”