Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

by Jane Alison

I love how Eileen Gray designed, and really love how much it maddened the bombastic Corbu. I think that Gray’s way of working from life to art could describe writing, too. We writers go about our observing, imagining lives, moving onward day by day but always alert to patterns—ways in which experience shapes itself, ways we can replicate its shape with words. We create passages for a reader to move through, seeing and sensing what we devise on the way. And when the reader’s done—levitation! She looks down and sees how she’s traveled, sees the pattern of the whole.

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.

Given all of this, my writer self thinks two things: first, being aware of visual elements such as texture, color, or symmetry can open windows and let us design as much as write. 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 pu...

But fiction doesn’t “merely narrate”: this is one of its great potencies. In the centuries that Western fiction has taken to arise, it’s evolved to do many things, especially in the most cannibalistic form, the novel. Terry Eagleton sums it up: The point about the novel . . . is not just that it eludes definitions, but that it actively undermines them. It is less a genre than an anti-genre. It cannibalizes other literary modes and mixes the bits and pieces promiscuously together. You can find poetry and dramatic dialogue in the novel, along with epic, pastoral, satire, history, elegy, tragedy and any number of other literary modes. Virginia Woolf described it as “this most pliable of all forms.” The novel quotes, parodies and transforms other genres, converting its literary ancestors into mere components of itself in a kind of Oedipal vengeance on them.

But now that Gardner’s got me imagining what Aristotle would say of fiction, I want to look at one of the philosopher’s core concepts about art forms altogether. I love that he likens specimens of literary art to living creatures, having organic unity—indeed, having souls. “The first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot.” The term soul here is part of his conceptual framework of hylomorphism. Hylo or hule = matter, and morphe = form; hylomorphism refers to the compound of matter and form that exists in both artifacts and living beings. Matter has potential that is made actual by form. Imagine a lump of clay that someone wants to shape into a bird. That lump has the potential to look like a bird, but only if, along with clay, there exists the abstract idea, or form, of “bird” (and an artist to shape it). Once the clay has been modeled into a bird, it’s a compound of matter and form: a piece of art. The form that it could be has actualized the potential existing in that matter. In a living being, the corollary to matter is body, and the corollary to form is soul. Soul animates body to make a living being, just as form animates matter to make a piece of art. So when Aristotle says that “plot” is the “soul” of tragedy, he means that plot is the idea of a shape that will turn potential into an actualized whole.

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. In this sentence you have to wait until the end for the next action: the rest is a mental suspension, considering possibilities, not just watching what happens next.

Sebald’s Emigrants was the first book to show me a way beyond the causal arc to create powerful forward motion in narrative: motion less inside the story than inside your mind as you construct sense. This motion involved pattern, arising (I later learned) “from the spatial interweavings of images and phrases independent of any time-sequence of narrative action” (Joseph Frank, “The Idea of Spatial Form”). The Butterfly Man was that image.

Joseph Frank launched many of these conversations with his groundbreaking essay “The Idea of Spatial Form,” where he described a species of fiction in which juxtaposition or association replaces temporal order, each piece a part of a puzzle, or the whole forming a network of sense.

Recently I began dissecting some of these to see what they had in common. What I found: many structures that recur in these texts coincide with fundamental patterns in nature.

when I read Peter Stevens’s brilliant 1974 book Patterns in Nature while riding the Amtrak to New York. I actually went through a cascade of epiphanies as I read, turning again and again to stare out the window at the world Stevens had just transformed. Philip Ball’s recent book with the same name expands and illustrates gorgeously how a cluster of patterns recurs at every scale in our world, atomic to galactic. The wave is one.

Meander, spiral, radial, fractal, cell. Perhaps there are even correlations between kinds of stories and certain patterns, like tragedians following the arc. This way of seeing structure in narrative might seem reductive; that’s partly my point. And you might see slightly different patterns from those I see in the narratives examined in the coming pages. But what I hope is that thinking about patterns other than the arc will become natural, that evolving writers won’t feel oppressed by the arc, that they’ll imagine visual aspects of narrative as well as temporal, that they’ll discover ways to design, being conscious or playful with possibilities. How can you spread color across a story? Make texture with different kinds of words or sentences or zones of white space? Create repetitions or symmetries to strengthen (or trouble) a sense of movement? Even arcing fictions can be designed, with texture, color, symmetry, or repetitions graphable as wavelike stripes, these elements working beyond or with narrated incidents to create further motion and sense.

So, types of letters, lengths of words, friction or fluidity among them, repetition, pauses or liltings within our inner ear signaled by commas or question marks: these are our elementary particles, the visual, auditory, and temporal units with which we first design.

Something fascinating about sentences is that when I’m in the thrall of one, I’m held in its temporal and spatial orbit; it begins and ends when it must, holding and directing me until ready to let me go. I move slowly through tricky syntax; luxurious language makes me linger; or I warily await a final word that will snap the whole into sense. For more on sound and syntax, see Ellen Bryant Voigt’s beautiful Art of Syntax.

Ben Marcus calls the best stories “stun guns,” says they hold you “paralyzed on the outside but very nearly spasming within.” Yes. Think of what we can do. Our hands (as I type I realize that once I’d have said hand, but now most writing takes two hands: curious) can hold a reader fixed, making her feel not her own time but the time we devise.

Since James, narratologists such as Gérard Genette and Seymour Chatman have studied the differences between story time (how long an event in the storyworld takes) and text time (how long the telling on the page takes) and have named speeds according to the ratio between the two. There have been more refinements since (see Brian Richardson’s Narrative Dynamics for many essays on this, or Anežka Kuzmičová). But here’s a basic menu drawn from Genette and Chatman: gap fastest no text/much story time summary fast little text/much story time scene “real time” text time = story time dilation slow much text/ little story time pause slowest much text/ no story time

The colors I hold in mind naturally appear in what I see when I write, so my private palette sifts onto the page. But I’d like to be more deliberate and start to design with colors. They can do more in narrative than just render a world plausibly: they can signal mood, change, or contrast; create an overall tone like a painting’s undercoat or wash; direct the eye.

I often dig to the roots of words, as though down there I’ll learn both origin and truth. Comfort seeps in when I find a word’s ancient seed, and then see how far it’s grown or scattered. Now, thinking of patterns, I open the Oxford English Dictionary, look up pattern, and am surprised to see that it was a doublet of patron and thus born of pater: father. It seems odd that pattern, with its whiff of wallpaper and McCall’s, is kin to patronize. But a word’s history and an OED entry can be long. And looking an inch below patron, I reach matrix, an archaic sense of pattern. From mater: mother. This note in the entry follows a cross, which is the grave marker of obsolete definitions, but I like knowing that pattern evolved through both female and male.

Once I translated the dramatic arc to a wave, I began to think that energy in narrative might also flow in smaller waves, wavelets. Dispersed patterning, a sense of ripple or oscillation, little ups and downs, might be more true to human experience than a single crashing wave: I’m more likely to feel some tension, a small discovery, a tiny change, a relapse. The same epiphanies every week . .

And so on, back and forth between wet and dry—but in a way that is just barely perceptible, something felt more in the mouth and throat than consciously registered in the mind: a form of embodied cognition. In this story’s subtle figurings, breath is akin to smoke, to wind, and the men themselves are tantamount to dry wells or ashen chimneys, through which air and smoke flow. And here is the problem: to be a dry well or a chimney—to be dry—feels dead. It feels ashen. Something cancerous about feeling your throat as a chimney, coal-dusted and wrong. But to survive N must go dry, the very thing that feels like dying. A terrible paradox. “Part of me wanted help,” he says. “But there was another part.”

Critics have read Hôtel Splendid as a deconstruction of French literature. Certainly almost everything about structures or edifices—the hotel and its figures, literally—has been dismantled by the final page, nothing left but the hotel’s sign hanging in the sky—and not even the full sign, only Splendid, an adjective with no noun to describe. Yet I think the novel is also a critique of the masculo-sexual arc: écriture feminine? I read Hôtel Splendid—with its three female characters “receiving” hordes of male guests, three female bodies as decomposing as the hotel they inhabit, and as swelling and subsiding as the swamp in which they sit; and with its abolition of a single wave in favor of a sea of many small ones—as a feminist critique altogether. The narrator exists, maintains, and renders in words a field of tensions that pulse around her, almost a sense of malign plotting outside her, as she tries to retain integrity—of place, body, self. If plot in Aristotelian terms springs from character, here we’ve gone awfully far from that: plot swarms around character. As our narrator says, “You would almost think it was deliberate.”

“Each and every object in the world has its own history . . . It can be triggered, Ellen was told, by a name.”

Ah, necessary slowness: this describes the special relation between needs of plot and delights of telling. Yes, yes: get to the end, but not yet. Why not wander a bit, look about, pause—plenty of time to carry on . . .

And the digressions, footnotes? The antepenultimate footnote is actually about footnotes—and full of digressions even then—as if a coda to the whole. It’s long. Midway through he says this: [Boswell and Gibbon] loved footnotes. They knew that the outer surface of truth is not smooth, welling and gathering from paragraph to shapely paragraph, but is encrusted with a rough protective bark of citations, quotation marks, italics . . . that are the shield for the pure flow of argument as it lives for a moment in one mind. They knew the anticipatory pleasure of sensing with peripheral vision, as they turned the page, a gray silt of further example and qualification waiting in tiny type at the bottom. . . . They liked deciding as they read whether they would bother to consult a certain footnote or not . . . The muscles of the eye, they knew, want vertical itineraries . . . Digression—a movement away from the gradus, or upward escalation, of the argument—is sometimes the only way to be thorough . . .

You can call the pattern cellular if you focus on the shapes (bubbles, chips of bark); or you can focus on the lines defining those shapes and call the pattern nodular, a network. Either way, the look’s about the same: polygons in a plain. The pattern is a field, not a shape made by a single line, like a meander or spiral. The relevance for narrative? Some texts don’t give you a line to follow, however loopy or coiling. They don’t give you a hot core around which to circle, either. Instead, you gaze upon many segments, or a web. Instead of following a line of story, your brain draws the lines, makes connections.

“Superman and Me,” Alexie spoke about his sense of paragraphs, which I think we can liken to crots: I still remember the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph. I didn’t have the vocabulary to say “paragraph,” but I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence. This knowledge delighted me. I began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs. Our reservation was a small paragraph within the United States. My family’s house was a paragraph, distinct from the other paragraphs of the LeBrets to the north, the Fords to our south and the Tribal School to the west. Inside our house, each family member existed as a separate paragraph but still had genetics and common experiences to link us. Now, using this logic, I can see my changed family as an essay of seven paragraphs: mother, father, older brother, the deceased sister, my younger twin sisters and our adopted little brother.

Another new fractal discovery: many major writers—Woolf, Joyce, James, Bolaño—create fractals with their sentences. A word-count analysis of their texts shows self-replicating ratios between sentence lengths. The researcher Stanislaw Drozdz explains that fractals “point to the hierarchical organization of phenomena and structures found in nature. So we can expect natural language, which represents a major evolutionary leap of the natural world, to show such correlations as well. Their existence in literary works, however, had not yet been convincingly documented.” The most fractal works—meaning fractals of fractals—were stream-of-consciousness narratives, although it’s not clear whether that style reveals depths of consciousness or the writer’s imagination. But fractals forming the shape of a whole narrative are what interest me: texts that start with a “seed” or blueprint that spawns several more.

Is this book in our hands a prayer for gentler humanity, the book structured like two hands held out in supplication? Could the sixes that organize and run through this text be linked to Buddhism’s Six Realms of Existence or Six Perfections? Or, maybe an even farther-flung way of reading this: in a crucial early scene, Adam Ewing, being poisoned by a greedy doctor, protects and saves a Moriori named Autua who has stowed away in Adam’s cabin to escape the violence of his “master.” Five hundred pages later, when we return to poor Adam’s journal, we see that Autua has now saved him from poisoning. Human kindness repaid: awfully rare in the five hundred pages between. So with Autua’s return gift of kindness we have narrative balance and completion, and this act by Autua, who becomes a sort of angel or bowsprit steering the book, persuades Adam to devote his life to humanity. And here comes my most extravagant reading: look at the name “AUTUA.” Like the parts of the novel, the name’s letters form a palindrome or triangle (1 2 3 2 1). Midway, the sense of the name transforms, from “aut,” meaning self, to “tu,” meaning you. A shift from self-interest to empathy?

About Cloud Atlas

Next time you cross a bridge over a fast-flowing river, look down at the water as it streams past one of the bridge’s feet. You might see the current split into a liquid ravine, water streaming either side, sending out eddies one way and the other. There’s a name for this pattern: vortex street. Smoke does it, as do clouds, and if you’re canoeing and hold your paddle still in the river you’ll see water flow around it that way, too. In a vortex street you see linear flows, spirals, even foam: so many patterns, mesmerizing. These days I’m seeing this pattern in life. Moving forward in time as I naturally do even as my mind goes elsewhere, cycles of thought spin from me this way and that, the same cycles even if sometimes they spin one way, sometimes the other. I’m stopped almost short by small explosions of excitement or anger, then feel a change of mind, a change of mind again—around and around yet catching the stream and flowing quickly onward before another spin. As though worded thought, fantasy, memory, sensation all flow through and yet around some invisible but solid me.