Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

by Jane Alison

although we think of narrative as a temporal art, experienced in time like music, of course it’s interestingly visual, too; a story’s as much house or garden as song. Northrop Frye puts it this way: “We hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer’s total pattern we ‘see’ what he means.” John Berger atomizes further: “Seeing comes before words.” Glancing at a page, we first see text as texture: marks in a white field leave enough space to feel airy or form dense blocks, even weighted with a sludge of footnotes. Looking closely, we see each word as a picture: the part of our brain that recognizes words has a twin that recognizes faces, and if we never learned to read, both parts would focus on faces. As we pass through the words’ looks and into their meanings, our way of “seeing” shifts, now absorbing a stream of visual images conjured by the language.

Neuroscientists have recorded the inner sensations of reading as “a felt motionless movement through space.” Once you’ve finished reading, that motionless movement leaves in your mind a numinous shape of the path you traveled. A river, roller coaster, wave.

Text comes from texere, after all: to weave. Next, we can be conscious, deliberate, innovative, in the paths we carve through our words. Goethe calls the path through a text a “red thread” pulling you forward. Henry James speaks of the “figure in the carpet.” Ivo Vidan says that what stays in the mind is a “condensed Gestalt,” not the book. I like best how Ronald Sukenick puts it: “Form is your footprints in the sand when you look back.”

Beginning, middle, and end; complication, change, dénouement. Two thousand years later, in The Technique of the Drama, Gustav Freytag examined Greek and Shakespearean tragedies and drew a graphic like the pattern Aristotle described, a triangle showing the parts of drama: introduction, rise, climax, return or fall, and catastrophe. This is Freytag’s famous triangle or pyramid. John Gardner’s Art of Fiction helped make the link between tragedy and fiction:

Parataxis is linear and sequential: he got up and walked to the window and looked down and decided to go out, etc. Hypotaxis is more spatial, foregrounding some parts of the sentence and letting others recede, more interested in comparative relations among elements than in straight temporality: It was only after he’d woken up and lain in bed awhile, wondering whether he’d look out the window or instead ignore the world outside and step into the closet, that he finally decided to get up.

This is the first way we move through a story: one-way motion, word after word until the end. Narratologists call it movement on the discourse or textual level. (Discourse comes from discurro, to run back and forth: think of your eyes reading lines on this page.) Other movement takes place inside the content of the story: what happens, whether things happen chronologically or are tangled and must be unraveled, whether you move less through events than through ideas, and so on.

Ben Marcus calls the best stories “stun guns,” says they hold you “paralyzed on the outside but very nearly spasming within.”