The Scrapbook
Disclaimer: To my eternal annoyance, I am not being paid to write fanfiction. If I were, I would quit my job, drop out of school, and spend the next twenty years breeding plotbunnies. Er, anyway. JKR owns the characters and the settings you recognize, and well as what's "really" going to happen. She's very kindly allowed loons like me to play with them, and We Praise Her For It. I seem to recall that the movie people have some sort of rights, too, so genuflections to them as well.
Chapter Description: A Forward, By the Author
A forward.
My grandmother has a collection of scrapbooks. There are two or three binders for each of her six children, plus some for herself and her husband. These scrapbooks are lined up along an old church pew in the attic bedroom my sister and I shared when we went to visit. There are pictures, and pamphlets from school, and letters, and crayon drawings. A thoughtful letter home from my father during his first year of college lies opposite a picture of him studying on the same bed I lay on to look at it. My great-grandfather's obituary is a few pages away from a first day of school picture of my father and his siblings.
I got to thinking about these scrapbooks one night---how we try to collect the memories that show how we got from here to there. There's no set thematic, no overarching mood; it's just a series of moments that we tried to capture, moments that helped us define who we are. I've slipped into the first person plural---my grandmother is not the only one who tries to collect her own history this way.
At the beginning of one of my classes this semester, we read Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, and a piece of this scrapbook puzzle fell into place. If style is to some extent imposed and artificial, then perhaps this ragtag collection of memories can employ it to tell each moment in its own way. I can tell I'm meandering off into the theoretical, so I'd better come back to my point before I confuse myself.
In the chapters that follow, I'm going to be experimenting with style a great deal. Each moment I describe will be true to itself, and will hint at thge greater story of which it is a part. If I were a Victorian novelist instead of a twenty-first century college student taking a postmodernism class, I would write you a frame story about how a Ministry of Magic employee in the late twenty-first century was looking through the archives and came across a set of scrapbooks from the estate of the late Mr and Mrs Snape. Except that a Victorian novelist would never have read Harry Potter. If it would make you happy to imagine such a frame story, please feel free.
Getting back to style, though, my way of telling this story does owe a lot to the Victorian novel---Bram Stoker's Dracula is an excellent example of using a collection of letters and journal entries to tell a story---but like any good writer of the postmodern, I'm not going to give it to you straight. I'm going to tell you this story out of order, I'm going to mix my persons and tenses, I'm going to give you screenplays, comics, letters, and epiphanies. Well, some may call it postmodern. I'm inclined to call it lazy.
In the continuing theme of postmodernism---or laziness, whichever you prefer---I will be updating as ideas come to me, not on any regular schedule. I suspect the frequency will wax and wane depending on how busy I am---ideas being more prevalent, of course, when I have two midterms, a paper, and a job interview in the next week. I will be tagging each scene with a date, to keep it from being too confusing where in the chronology I'm writing from.
That's all the advisory I think this thing needs. Welcome to the Scrapbook, and I do hope you enjoy yourselves.
Oh, and remember, nothing is more postmodern than that which is self-conciously postmodern!
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A brief disclaimer: Though I absolutely enjoy making fun of postmodernism, I should clarify that it's the popular use of 'postmodern' as a buzzword that I think is a bit stupid. Actual works of postmodernism--such as the Queneau I mentioned earlier--are wonderfully complex examinations of things we take for granted. I mean them no harm, and wholeheartedly admit that my work could never in a million years stand up to theirs. In much the same way I'm playing in JKR's backyard, I'm playing in the backyards of those people who made postmodernism cool.
If you're interested in postmodernism in general, here's the reading list for my class: Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange. Tom Stoppard, Rozencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions. Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber. Salamn Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh. Martin Amis, Time's Arrow. I don't have the bulkpack on me, but there's also some papers and short stories as well. And my personal favorite (though not required for the class), is Larry Wall's talk "Perl, the first postmodern computer language", which is available at: http:\\www.wall.org\~larry\pm.html (slashes are backwards to prevent ff.net losing the link)