I am trying to break down my novel.. Which I have a loose outline for.. Lots of half written sections and notes.. And am writing in a prose-poemy style with lots of digressions and musing.. Into smaller manageable sections. Needing to pick out the themes and ideas in each section.
The first opening five chapters or so is about cosmology… About how my main character as a young man feels himself adolescent in sexual and intellectual awakening.. A bit like a young warlord. His character will have an obsession with technology as it pertains to power and war in history. The countermelody to this is Copernicus destroying the idea of man at the center of the universe… By using science to reveal more of reality to mankind… Science as disabuse of comforting, even sacred illusions.
The book on a whole is divided into three sections in schema of where man loses stature in centrality… Based on a quote in Freud. From copernicus discovery taking man out of center of the universe. To darwin making us another animal among the rest. Finally to Freud making us not master of our own home by psychology making us question our will and reason.
I think the opening focus on Copernicus counter a young man who wants to be powerful and strong through war and potency while the ‘heavenly spheres’ collapse around him might be a good way to tell about what it is like to grow up… If I can make these conflicting narratives personal and relate to a young man’s individual story. As he navigates puberty.
Trying to hold on the things one wants to be so… With religious fervor… Like the church fighting the tide of the scientific revolution… Seems like an apt comparison to someone ‘growing up’ when facing harsh truths about the world.. Kind of devastating and also maybe giving character to reasons why someone would believe things AGAINST supposed ‘reason’… Because science and ‘fact’ does not always account for what feeling needs and ‘knows’
The Haunted Typewriter 