This is now the third post I have started in the past week. I was trying to decide which of the other two should be this week’s newsletter when I came across this concept and it immediately overtook the others. I would like to thank American literary critic Gary Saul Morson for naming the term and Weird little brother Corban Skillånder for indirectly being the reason I came across it. Thanks guys!
“We possess no guarantee that each event in our lives will prove to be of significance or will fit a meaningful pattern. But successful narrative art, unlike life, does typically ensure such significance […]”
Gary Saul Morson
Exactly what I’ve been talking about lately, right? In literary and cinematic contexts, one expects foreshadowing. In ‘real life’ one (generally) does not. When you encounter a piece of narrative art you presume there to be a plot that has been intentionally laid out in a specific way - unlike the unstructured literal chaos of reality.
“In novels there is a point when all loose threads must be tied together. But real time is an ongoing process without anything resembling literary closure.”
Sideshadowing
So Morson proposes sideshadowing, a literary technique akin to foreshadowing.
To summarise his words: foreshadowing is like when you see the shadow of something before you reach that something. Even though an object is causing the shadow (not the other way around) you encounter the shadow first. It gives a hint to what is to come, a clue to the object you are approaching. Sideshadowing however, is how the present moment sits within the shadow of all the other potential presents that surround it. The implication is that if you acknowledge all the other potential realities, the given one loses its inevitability.
“The actual is therefore understood as just another possibility that somehow came to pass. It was perhaps not entirely accidental but it came without guarantees and it was preceded by no annunciation of its coming.”
So, sideshadowing is a method used to counter some of the typical literary techniques that differentiate a narrative work from real life - to make it feel less structured and reduce the sense of “fatalism, determinism, or otherwise closed time”.
This is of course the (almost?) opposite to my beloved apophenia - within which I’m particularly interested in the application of typical narrative structures to our supposedly unstructured reality.
If you’d like to learn more about Morson’s concept and have access to JSTOR or any of those other academic publication platforms the article is called Sideshadowing and Tempics. If you don’t have access or just hate reading academic texts (100% fair enough on both of those) then let me know if you’d like me to organise a live precis session on Twitch (is that too niche?)
On a lighter note
To save making this newsletter entirely impenetrable I thought I better stop with the intense academia and be more chill for this last bit. You’re welcome.
Firstly thanks to Martha of an artist's guide to computation for making me aware of this amazing example of the adventure game mindset:
Secondly here is a game I haven’t played yet but that I definitely think vibes nicely with the sideshadowing idea. The reviews amuse me - a mixture of people totally ‘getting’ it vs those who are mad they paid IRL money to pretend at cooking eggs and flicking light switches on and off for a bit.
The number of weird art games like this on my Steam wishlist is steadily growing. I’m thinking of devoting a weekly stream to checking some of them out. Lmk what you think of that idea.
Thanks everyone for reading. More pictures in the next one I promise (maybe).
Edie x
I like this, and Marson seems to sum things up nicely. I am currently listening to a series of lectures via Kanopy (free courtesy of my local library) on metaphysics and the nature of science. It deals with the way reality has been redefined through the centuries, through philosophy, mathematics and onwards. Not as highbrow as it sounds and I think you would like it.