Stories

Here is Coetzee:

One of the basic story-plots has the following shape. During his youth a man (it is usually a man) commits a shameful act, perhaps even a crime. He runs away, covers his tracks, takes a new name, makes a new life for himself in some faraway place. Years pass. He marries and has children; he becomes a pillar of the new community. He begins to allow himself to think his secret is safe, he has escaped his past. Then one day a stranger arrives in town and begins asking nosy questions. Implacably, step by step, the man’s secret is uncovered. He is shamed; he is ruined.

But what if that happens in an instant? What if this narrative is reversed so that the shameful act follows the man's integration into a new community. And what if the shameful act is in a way a fantasy, a construction that is intrinsic to the swirl experience.

Either way the story plot is quite probably paradigmatically modernist. What is indicative of that is the fractured movement from stability to instability or the other way round and all in a way that might be represented by ellipses.
This post could have been entitled parataxis. The point being that the move from outside of the swirl to inside seems to happen without any apparent cause so there is a gap. The gap, or ellipsis in a story might indicate just that this happened and then that happened without in any way suggesting that what happened last is a consequence of something prior. Another way of putting this is to introduce terms like trauma or shock into our thinking. The swirl is a dislocation, and as such difficult to make sense of both when caught up in it and after.
Important to consider the cognitive and affective dimension of the swirl.