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.”