PDF: here.
[Plot]: The main character is suicidally depressed (due to repeated family deaths) and, as a last resort, ingests San Pedro cactus.
[Abstract]: Respawn is an attempt to grammatically generalize the first-person perspective. Characterized by phenomenological narration designed to approximate certain aspects of subconscious mentation, it presents readers with a unique challenge.
Historically, the first-person perspective has been synonymous with “self-conscious narration”. Authors guarantee output-readability by equipping narrators with self-conscious monologues composed of sentential outputs known as well-formed formulas. Yet where subconscious grammatical operations are accessed and exercised without regard for readability, one may (1) decompose sentential outputs into generalized phonemes, morphemes, phonesthemes, lexemes, and phrasemes, and (2) recompose these units into proto-formed formulas. Rather than being gifted with a delicately curated sequence of well-formed formulas, readers are being tasked with dynamically coupling, re-coupling, re-re-coupling...to the subconscious traces of grammatical operations. Recognizing that literary expressions need not conform to the strict mandate of terminal well-formedness (readability) opens the door for proto-formed formulas to verbally approximate the subconscious aspects of behavioral, sensorial, memorial, attentional, intentional, ideational, and emotional qualia, along with their intricate interrelations.
The nonterminal phase of grammatical generation, corresponding to the property of nonterminal proto-formedness (perceivability), is broadly presumed to be introspectively inaccessible, uncontrollable, or unusable. Reinforced by the invention and popularization of computing devices whose functionality relies entirely on bitwise terminal symbols, terminal expressions, and terminal operations, this presumption has reached the status of common knowledge. In a literary context, it is taken for granted that nonterminal symbols, nonterminal expressions, and nonterminal operations are native to a reader’s cognitive apparatus and therefore unnecessary to include in the text. Indeed, the standard hierarchy of computing languages may be easily extended to include the stratified units of literary constructs. Where (1) the terminal symbols known as alphabetic symbols are the human-equivalent of the numeric symbols or base units manipulated in base-level hardware and machine code, it follows that (2) “words” and “phrases” may be analogized to the units of low-level assembly language instructions issued to a computer’s terminal machine code, (3) “sentences”, “paragraphs”, and “chapters” may be analogized to the units of high-level programming language instructions issued to a computer’s terminal display-extended assembly language, and (4) “settings”, “plots”, and “characters” belong to the limit-level programming metalanguage in terms of which human programmers generate, integrate, and calibrate their machine-independent abstractions. Note that this hierarchy is no more than a stratified system of terminal symbols, terminal expressions, and terminal operations.
Terminal well-formedness is a general property of words, phrases, clauses, and sentences which obey a dialect’s rules of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. For example, the word “kfj” is phonologically ill-formed in that it contains no vowels and produces a garbled sound without a discernible referent. Similarly, the word “ed-jump” is morphologically ill-formed in that it misplaces the past tense suffix “ed”, violating a basic inflectional rule. The dependent clause “plants the are” is syntactically ill-formed in that it invalidly inverts the noun and article. The following sentence is syntactically well-formed yet semantically ill-formed: “The plants are migrating.” The plethora of edge cases, being neither fully well-formed nor ill-formed, are termed proto-formed to the extent that they embody the property of nonterminal proto-formedness; that is, any word, phrase, clause, or sentence which may appear in the nonterminal phase of grammatical generation, but not necessarily in its terminal-sentential output. The previous examples may be converted into proto-formed variables and formulas as follows: “kfj” → “kfff” (signaling a scoff); “ed-jump” → “jump-ed-ed-ed” (emphasizing the elapse of the jump); “plants the are” and “the plants are migrating” → “plants proliferate through the actions of bees and other pollinating insects”. Proto-formedness permits the qualitative appropriation of nonterminal symbols, nonterminal expressions, and nonterminal operations – these being otherwise subconsciously processed and discarded in the course of generating a terminal expression – to proto-formed variables and formulas.
Restricting the first-person perspective to terminal well-formedness altogether suspends the attempt to controllably convey, through nonterminal proto-formedness, the subconscious aspects of the most ordinary, never mind anomalous, instances of behavioral, sensorial, memorial, attentional, intentional, ideational, and emotional experience. However, relaxing the first-person perspective to include proto-formed words and formulas, in addition to their terminal counterparts, causes considerable growing pains which are not to be misinterpreted as natural reactions to sloppiness or “word salad”. Generalizing “readability” to “perceivability” – “reading” being a highly specialized sub-operation of “perceiving” – cues certain morphological, grammatical, and typographical relaxations. This introduction to phenomenological narration in no way qualifies as a contribution to linguistics; it merely invokes established results and well-defined classifications to explain the role of proto-formed variables and formulas within a “generalized first-person perspective”.
