THE ARCHIVES-PROJECT PLOTLINES:
The Archives-Project is a New Novel Which is A Direct Contrapuntal Response To Its Prequel, The History-Project Novel, Which Was an Abject Failure
THE ARCHIVES-PROJECT PLOTLINES:
2023–03–22 11:09:47
The Archives-Project:
I
The teams are put together, for the Archives-Project, which exists to try to analyze the failure of a previous failed project, The History-Project;
They want to know how and why the project failed, which was really an abject failure, wasting so many invested resources and also affecting the credibility of the actors involved in the realization of the project;
Two teams are put together, one to run a post-mortem analysis on The History-Project, to better understand how and why it failed;
The second team exists to run a pre-mortem analysis on the current project, The Archives-Project, to avoid having the same kind of failures as the previous project, The History-Project;
The Post-Mortem Team:
=> Evelyn, PhD in philosophy as well as Chair of Philosophy at Harmonia University in Montreal, Quebec;
=> Alphonse Lemoyne, schizophrenic painter also known as “Painter A.” who also writes novels and struggles with a substance use disorder;
=> Paula Benjamin, trans woman of Jewish ancestry who is one of the best, most accomplished archivists in the world;
The Pre-Mortem Team:
=> Dr. Kropotkin, retired psychiatrist from St-Petersburg, Russia, who ran experiments on schizoid teenage boys to study what he came to call “The Baron Complex” and who invented the theory and methods behind “historiotherapeusis” or “historical therapy;
=> J.G. Dufray, musical composer, sound designer, and radio DJ who also writes and has written The Small Book of Big Truths; he also is an accomplished intelligence analyst, computer programmer and designer, specializing in relational database systems and faceted classification schemes;
=> Amelia Berger, expert specializing in operations research, combinatorial optimization, linear programming, and related fields in mathematics and computer science, who happens to be the first woman, and first lesbian woman, to graduate with honors from her university;
The author of the novel of the same name, The Archives-Project, hires a freelance script supervisor named Octavius Octavius the IVth, to help him with “continuity” in the writing of his novel;
Octavius Octavius the IVth has an assistant named Fatimah who has a younger brother named Elijah Sahid, who is a film student at The Harmonic Institute of Higher Learning;
The muslim boy, diagnosed with autism, lives in New England;
Sahid has visions of The Invisible Forces who created a heavenly, palatial, crystal place at the beginning of time called NOUS;
NOUS is torn apart by a force called ANTINOUS, which then separates into separate “land-masses”, one of which is The Antiface-Cloud, the other being ANTINOUS itself;
Construction-Land or C-Land was devised to be utilized in the separation and subsequent construction of both ANTINOUS and The Antiface-Cloud;
It turns out that the author has always been plagued by a terribly debilitating learning disability, and that this was led him to create and work on all these different artistic projects, including the two novels mentioned above, The History-Project and its sequel, The Archives-Project (as well as a previous project called Exhibition in Tonal Cinema, several years prior);
The author speaks of art works being “solutions to aesthetic problems”, and gives the example of the invention of the fictional character in Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote;
Philosophical notes follow on the fundamental experience of the “novelistic phenomenology” in the author’s mind, and its many novelistic simulations or thought-experiments;
II
Four of the team members for the Archives-Project already know each other, having worked together on the now defunct History-project;
They are painter Alphonse Lemoyne and his closest friend the radio DJ and sound designer J.G. Dufray;
The group also includes Alphone`s ex-lover, Evelyn, who is chair of Philosophy at Harmonia University;
That leaves Dr. Kropotkin who is a retired psychiatrist originally from St-Petersburg, Russia;
Now there are two new members on the team, Paula Benjamin, a master archivist, and Amelia Berger who studies Operations Research, Combinatorial Optimization, and other branches of advanced mathematics such as linear programming;
All are assembled in the offices where the Archives-Project will take place;
All are sitting at a large conference table in the main conference room;
Dr. Kropotkin stands up and introduces himself to the teams, as he is the Chief Operator of the Archives-Project Field Operation.
2023–11–29 18:26:25
Editor’s Notes: The rest of the novel involves the logistics of running the actual post-mortem and pre-mortem analyses with each of the two teams of three people assigned to one of the two separate analyses. The teams share the same general workspace, in a large office space in Old Montreal, Quebec. SPOILER ALERT: The Archives-Project is ALSO AN ABJECT FAILURE! Sorry to ruin the punch, but in studying the FAILURE OF THE HISTORY-PROJECT, the post-mortem team essentially begins to study a massive SYSTEM FAILURE, and in studying “failure-systems” in general, they basically LEARN TO FAIL, so their project is a failure. And the pre-mortem team, in studying the possible FAIULRE OF THE ARCHIVES-PROJECT — to try to avoid failure at all costs !— FOCUSES ON SYSTEMS OF FAILURE, and so LEARNS TO ANTICIPATES FAILURE.
The rest of the novel is really just the logistics of how this plays out in two real teams collaborating together to finish this kind of complex, bipartite project (bipartite in that the work is divided between two teams.) The two new characters, the master (proud to be trans woman and Jewish) archivist Paula Benjamin and the genius (proud to be lesbian and not scared to show it) mathematical expert in operations research and combinatorial optimization, Amelia Berger, were NOT in the previous novel, The History-Project, but all of the other characters WERE. Their unparalleled expertise in logistics and archival science brings an entire new quality to this line of research, which is really just a continuation of the previous interdisciplinary research project.
The culmination of the two novels happens in the third novel in the trilogy, a novel called Integration/Disintegration. The trilogy is called The Revolt of Fiction, mainly because of the postcolonial historiographic metafictional elements in the first two novels. It’s not by accident that the author tries to redeem himself as author — from his failure to finish the previous novel, and because he was the CAUSE of the failure of the PROJECT INSIDE THE NOVEL (of the same name) — by adding a trans Jewish and a lesbian character. The author is a French-Canadian cis-gender heterosexual male who is trying to write postcolonial historiographic metafiction — “The Great Canadian Novel”!!! — and his characters become aware that they are fictional characters coming out of the author’s imagination. They are pissed off about it because he has basically just created characters based on aspects of himself and people he knew and worked and grew up with. He essentially has no imagination, hence The Revolt of Fiction, where the characters try to “emancipate” themselves from the novel, putting the author on trial, for his poverty-stricken imaginative powers and also for his constant “authorial insertion” techniques of metafiction, which are annoying. (And of course, in the new novel, the two new characters are revolted at the thought that the author would stoop so low as to include trans Jewish and lesbian characters just to “redeem” himself in the eyes of the public, as failed author.)
The author basically tries to “command” his novel and its characters, and the characters will have none of it. They are essentially “political prisoners” of the novel, and also “in exile”, stuck in the realm of fiction, unable to truly be free and have genuine, authentic experiences, like real, living human beings. Octavius Octavius the IVth, a freelance script supervisor, is hired to help the author in his Redemption Project, by ensuring the author does not lose “continuity” in writing his novels, as the characters continue to give him a hard time. He also realizes that his entire novel-writing career and practice is nothing but a big sham; he’s not even a real writer, lacking the cognitive skills to finish an actual novel, his novels all having been abject failures. It’s really all just compensation for a terrible neurological disorder of unknown cause, origin, and characteristics.
The real gist of the story happens with Octavius Octavius the IVth’s assistant Fatimah’s younger brother, Elijah Sahid, film student at The Harmonic Institute of Higher Learning, for it is through his “visions” that we learn about the real physical cosmology of the “world” in which the novel takes place. That is the real story, what the story of The Archives-Project is really about. The rest are just details, just logistical details of the author working out the story-lines. Really it’s THE INVISIBLE FORCES who run the show, being responsible, it is found out, for ALL EVENTS OF HUMAN HISTORY. But I am getting ahead of myself! These Editor’s Notes do NOT actually ruin anything, since what was initially conceived of as a large-scale interdisciplinary art-research project, and metafictional novels that are postcolonial historiographic novels, has now become TRANSMEDIA: i.e. the Author is Lifestreaming and Documenting the Process of Writing the Novel! Right here, right now! Watch out for him, he goes by the letters “A.G.”.
(To be continued…)
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