Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative

by Jane Alison

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 puts it: “Form is your footprints in the sand when you look back.”

patterns other than the arc are everywhere. Here are the ones Stevens calls “nature’s darlings.” SPIRAL: think of a fiddlehead fern, whirlpool, hurricane, horns twisting from a ram’s head, or a chambered nautilus. MEANDER: picture a river curving and kinking, a snake in motion, a snail’s silver trail, or the path left by a goat grazing the tenderest greens. RADIAL or EXPLOSION: a splash of dripping water, petals growing from a daisy’s heart, light radiating from the sun, the ring left around a tick bite. BRANCHING and other FRACTAL patterns: self-replication at lesser scale, made by trees, coastlines, clouds. And CELLULAR patterns: repeating shapes you see in a honeycomb, foam of bubbles, cracked lakebed, or light rippling in a pool; these can look like cells or, inversely, like a net.

We have wiggling meanders in our hair, brains, and intestines; branching patterns in capillaries, neurons, and lungs; explosive patterns in areolas, irises, and sneezes; spirals in ears, fingertips, DNA, and fists. Our brains recognize and want patterns. We follow natural patterns without a thought: coiling a garden hose, stacking boxes, creating a wavering path when walking along the shore. We invoke these patterns to describe motions in our minds, too: someone spirals into despair or compartmentalizes emotions, thoughts meander, heartbreak can be so great we feel we’ll explode. There are, in other words, recurring ways that we order and make things. Those natural patterns have inspired visual artists and architects for centuries. Why wouldn’t they form our narratives, too?

Narratives that strike me as radial are those in which a powerful center holds the fictional world—characters’ obsessions, incidents in time—tightly in its gravitational force. That center could be a crime or trauma or something a figure wants to avoid but can’t help falling into: something devastatingly magnetic. Unlike in a spiral, the story itself—the incidents we see dramatized—barely moves forward in time. Instead, a reader might have a sense of being drawn again and again to a hot core—or, conversely, of trying to pull away from that core. You might already know the end at the start and get many fractured views of the same moment, or many fractured views of things avoiding that moment.

repeating shapes that fit together because there are only so many ways geometrically that matter can fill space. 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. Any literary narrative of depth asks your brain to pull threads across the whole, so, in a sense, all complex narratives are networks; your experience moving through them is never purely linear, but volumetric or spatial as your thoughts bounce across passages. In the texts I’ll look at now, though, your synaptic linkings alone give each narrative its greatest sense of forward motion. You’re thrown in to flail and find your way:

Fractals are everywhere. Look at a tree: from trunk to branch to branchlet to twig, you see about the same shape, same proportions. Consider a cloud or an island: impossible to say if you’re seeing something small or enormous, because the proportions of puff or curve stay the same. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot made up the word fractal in 1975 for irregular patterns like these all over nature, patterns that roughly replicate themselves at different scales and could go on forever. Geometry made no sense of these shapes, yet they seemed to follow a mathematical system that involved splitting and splitting again. Mandelbrot’s word comes from frangere: break in pieces, shatter. Lightning, coastlines, rivers splitting into ever smaller streams, cauliflower, capillaries, lungs. A core shape forms a blueprint for possibly endless growth. Spirals are actually fractal, too; they don’t branch, but do self-replicate at different scales, winding inward or outward.