Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

by Jane Alison

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.”

Yay, Sukenick!

But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?

Terry Eagleton sums it up:

And he’s basically echoing Bakhtin

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”).

As Nigel Krauth puts it, “If one needs a short cut to understanding the nature of the Radical in [Western] literature, one might think first about concepts related to the singular, the linear, the beginning-middle-and-end structure, and think how a writer can replace them with multiplicity, collage or a rhizome of fragments.”

Italo Calvino says that in Invisible Cities, thinking of the shape of a crystal, he “built up a many-faceted structure in which each brief text is close to the others in a series that does not imply logical sequence or a hierarchy, but a network in which one can follow multiple routes and draw multiple, ramified conclusions.”

Gottfried Benn spoke of an orange-shaped narrative, in which all segments radiate from or lean toward a central pith. Ross Chambers coined the (terrible) term “loiterature” for narratives that digress extravagantly, that are often labyrinthine.

And 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.

Aeschylus gives us all of this in the Oresteia, where the dire system can end only when spirits of primal rage—the Furies—are denatured, turned into the Kindly Ones.

An example of normcoring

A meander begins at one point and moves toward a final one, but with digressive loops. Italo Calvino says that “digression is a strategy for putting off the ending, a multiplying of time within the work, a perpetual evasion or flight. Flight from what? From death of course.”

what Aristotle says metaphor should: create a stunning bridge between unlike items, making us see both anew.

Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg said that “quality of mind, not plot, is the soul of narrative.”

the Fates—Clotho, Atropos, and Lachesis (Nona, Decuma, and Morta for the Romans)—

This particular disorder both expresses and creates energy: I don’t read in order to sort out a storyline but instead to be stimulated drugwise, to find fresh pleasure or pain. Take this crot (please): “I just regret everything and using my turn signal is too much trouble. Fuck you. Why should you get to know where I’m going, I don’t.”

But without a plot, what exactly advances us? The questions a spatial narrative asks are not “what happens next?” but “why did this happen?” and, more complexly, “what grows in my mind as I read?”

But more germanely: “butterfly” in Greek is psyche, which also means “soul.”

This is actually probably false but a lovely story that won’t go away

If you grow up not with toys bought in the shop but things that are found around the farmyard, you do a sort of bricolage. . . . Bits of string and bits of wood. Making all sorts of things, like webs across the legs of a chair. And then you sit there, like the spider.

In a passage when characters have escaped the hellish metropole of corpocracy and roam the remnants of nature, “genomed moths spun around [their] heads, electronlike. Their wings’ logos had mutated over generations into a chance syllabary: a small victory of nature over corpocracy.” Wing patterns as chance syllabary: I love that. Entomology mates with etymology, Nabokov.

So often fictions that experiment formally do so at the expense of feeling. They toy on surfaces or are purely cerebral affairs, don’t explore human complexities. But the mostly unconventional narratives I’ve been discussing have dealt powerfully with core human matters.