Drifting: Time and Plot in a Global Pandemic

Abstract

At the height of quarantine, countless headlines assured us that everyone was thinking about time—how much of it we now had, and how strangely it was passing. We greeted each new month with dismay and genuine shock. How could it really, truly be December, when April was just yesterday? But the more I thought about quarantine time, the more I began to suspect that this wasn’t an issue of time at all, but rather of plot. What was missing from our quarantined existence was not the experience of time passing, but rather the absence of plot, of one event leading to another. Time moved forward, but didn’t yield the gifts or the consequences that we’ve grown accustomed to. This is the perfect time to be writing a plotless novel, because so many of us have recently been—or currently are—stuck in one. In this mid-pandemic thesis, I turn towards a plotless canon in order to inform and inspire my own novel manuscript.