{"id":134907,"date":"2019-03-27T13:00:36","date_gmt":"2019-03-27T17:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=134907"},"modified":"2019-03-27T10:52:49","modified_gmt":"2019-03-27T14:52:49","slug":"beyond-the-narrative-arc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/27\/beyond-the-narrative-arc\/","title":{"rendered":"Beyond the Narrative Arc"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo: Just chaos (CC BY 2.0 (https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0))<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1926, an Irish designer named Eileen Gray built a shiplike villa on the south coast of France that drove the famed architect Le Corbusier wild. Corbu had declared that a house was \u201ca machine to live in,\u201d but Gray thought, No: a house is a person\u2019s shell, a skin, and should respond to how she lives. To start designing, she studied how she and her housekeeper moved through the day and made diagrams of their motions and those of the sun to reveal natural patterns\u2014loops in the kitchen, deep lines by the windows, meanders through the living room. The house she then built on rocks by the sea expressed this organic choreography. A mouthlike entry pulled you in; screens and mirrors unfolded from walls; windows and shutters opened in all directions for the right air, light, or view. On plans she drew lines showing how you could move, look, and live<\/em> in this house: natural pathways transformed to design.<\/p>\n

I love how Gray made this house, and really love how much it maddened bombastic Corbu. Gray\u2019s way of working from life to art could also describe writing: writers go about their observing, imagining lives, moving onward day by day but always alert to patterns\u2014ways in which experiences shape themselves, ways we can replicate these shapes with words. We then create passages for a reader to move through, seeing and sensing what we devise on the way. And when a reader\u2019s done\u2014levitation! She looks down and sees how she\u2019s traveled, the pattern of the whole.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m saying see<\/em> because we often think of narrative as a temporal art, experienced in time like music, but it\u2019s visual, too; a story\u2019s as much garden as song. Northrop Frye puts it this way: \u201cWe hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer\u2019s total pattern we \u2018see\u2019 what he means.\u201d John Berger atomizes further: \u201cSeeing comes before words.\u201d We first apprehend text as texture<\/em>\u2014blurry or dense, black on white\u2014and perceive each word as a picture (the part of our brain that recognizes words has a twin that recognizes faces). Then we pass through the words\u2019 looks and into their meanings, absorbing a stream of visual images conjured by the language. Next we might develop another layer of \u201cvision,\u201d sensing elements that give the story structure: a late scene mirrors an earlier one, or a subtle use of color tints the whole. And as we read, we travel not just through places portrayed in the story but through<\/em> the narrative itself. It might feel like gliding in a bayou, pacing a labyrinth, hopping from block to block: neuroscientists have recorded the inner sensations of reading as \u201ca felt motionless movement through space.\u201d Once you\u2019ve finished reading, that motionless movement leaves in your mind a numinous shape of the path you traveled. <\/p>\n

Goethe calls the path through a text a \u201cred thread.\u201d Henry James speaks of this numinous path or form as the \u201cfigure in the carpet.\u201d I like best how Ronald Sukenick puts it: \u201cForm is your footprints in the sand when you look back.\u201d<\/p>\n

Curiously, for centuries there\u2019s been a single path through fiction we\u2019re most likely to travel\u2014indeed, one that aspiring writers are told<\/em> to follow: the dramatic arc. A situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides. If you ask Google how to structure a story, your face will be hammered with pictures of arcs, triangles, pyramids. The arc is an elegant shape, especially when translated to its natural form, a wave. Its rise and fall traces a motion we sense in heartbeats, breaking surf, the sun, and there\u2019s real power in a wave\u2019s movement from beginning to midpoint to end. But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses: a little masculo-sexual, no? Why is this the form we should expect our stories to take?<\/p>\n

We inherited the arc from drama. Twenty-five hundred years ago, Aristotle dissected tragedies such as Sophocles\u2019s Oedipus the King<\/em> to find their common features, as he might dissect snakes to see if their spines were alike. He found that powerful dramas shared certain elements, including a particular path. Here\u2019s (some of) what he wrote in Poetics<\/em>: \u201cA tragedy is an imitation of an action that is complete in itself [with a] beginning, middle, and end \u2026 Every tragedy is in part Complication and in part D\u00e9nouement; the incidents before the opening scene, and often certain also of those within the play, forming the Complication; and the rest the Denouement. By Complication I mean all from the beginning of the story to the point just before the change in the hero\u2019s fortunes; by Denouement, all from the beginning of the change to the end.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beginning, middle, and end; complication, change, denouement. Two thousand years later, in The Technique of the Drama<\/em>, Gustav Freytag examined Greek and Shakespearean tragedies and drew a graphic like the pattern Aristotle described, showing the parts of drama: introduction, rise, climax, fall, and catastrophe\u2014Freytag\u2019s famous triangle or pyramid. John Gardner then helped make the link between tragedy and fiction, recommending to young writers the \u201cenergeic\u201d novel: \u201cBy his made-up word energeia<\/em> \u2026 Aristotle meant \u2018the actualization of the potential that exists in character and situation.\u2019 (The fact that Aristotle was talking about Greek tragedy need not delay us. If he\u2019d known about novels, he\u2019d have said much the same.) Logically, the energeic novel falls into three parts, Aristotle\u2019s \u2018beginning, middle, and end,\u2019 which \u2026 fall into the pattern exposition, development, and denouement \u2026\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n

But shouldn\u2019t the fact that Aristotle was talking about tragedy, not novels, delay us? Novels didn\u2019t exist for him, but if they did, he\u2019d have analyzed specimens to see their structures. The arc is<\/em> a perfect expression for the movement of tragedy and has created masses of elegant novels, too. But given that the kinds of stories in fiction aren\u2019t as tonally set as in ancient tragedy, why insist that a single shape form them?<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the arc\u2019s irksome sexual aspect. Here\u2019s critic Robert Scholes: \u201cThe archetype of all fiction is the sexual act \u2026 the fundamental orgastic rhythm of tumescence and detumescence, of tension and resolution, of intensification to the point of climax and consummation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Well. This is not how I<\/em> experience sex. Critic Susan Winnett says, \u201cMeanings generated through dynamic relations of beginnings, middles, and ends in traditional narrative and traditional narratology never seem to accrue directly to the account of the woman.\u201d And anyway, why should sex\u2014this kind of sex!\u2014be the archetype of fiction? Why should an art form as innovative as fiction have a single archetype at all?<\/p>\n

In twenty years of teaching I\u2019ve seen one smart, edgy young writer after another sleepwalk into the arc. They feel obliged to create \u201crising conflict\u201d and \u201cclimax\u201d and \u201cresolution,\u201d no matter how much they\u2019re faking it. And so many instructors, handbooks, and helpful sites\u2014our narrative-based culture at large\u2014insist: a story must have an \u201carc.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now that Gardner\u2019s got me imagining what Aristotle would say of fiction, though, I want to look at one of his core concepts about art forms altogether. I love that he likens specimens of literary art to living creatures, having organic unity\u2014indeed, having souls. \u201cThe first essential, the life and soul, so to speak, of Tragedy is the Plot.\u201d The term soul<\/em> here is part of his conceptual framework of \u201chylomorphism.\u201d Hylo<\/em> or hule<\/em> = matter, and morphe<\/em> = form; hylomorphism<\/em> refers to the compound of matter and form that exists in both artifacts and living beings. Matter <\/em>has potential <\/em>that is made actual <\/em>by form. <\/em>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<\/em>, of \u201cbird\u201d (and an artist to shape it). Once the clay has been modeled into a bird, it\u2019s a compound of matter and form: a piece of art. The form<\/em> that it could be has actualized the potential existing in that matter. In a living being, the corollary to matter is body<\/em>, and the corollary to form is soul<\/em>. Soul animates body to make a living being, just as form animates matter to make a piece of art. So when Aristotle says that \u201cplot\u201d is the \u201csoul\u201d of tragedy, he means that plot is the idea of a shape that will turn potential into an actualized whole.<\/p>\n

Rather than expect the \u201csoul\u201d or animating shape of fiction to be a plotted arc, why not imagine other shapes? The arc makes sense for tragedy, but fiction can be wildly other<\/em>. Especially now, when, to survive as a species, it had better exploit all it is that\u2019s not drama. Sukenick says, \u201cInstead of reproducing the form of previous fiction, the form of the novel should seek to approximate the shape of our experience\u201d; Aristotle saw art forms as organic beings. Wouldn\u2019t it make sense for the shape of our experience to be organic? And not necessarily orgasmic.<\/p>\n

The causal arc wasn\u2019t a given as Western fiction crawled to life, but gradually became a convention, with writers resisting it often. Other cultures evolved fiction differently from the start: as Ming Dong Gu explains, Chinese fiction grew with an emphasis on lyricism, relying on pattern, repetition, and rhythm, and \u201corganized on a structural principle different from the time-based, direction-oriented, and logically coherent principle of the Western narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Nigel Krauth puts it, \u201cIf 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.\u201d Think of the Modernists\u2019 shift from the \u201comniscient\u201d narrator toward narratorial consciousness that follows the tangles of human sensibility, or the many multistranded novels that arose early last century, the Oulipo with their fabulous strictures and the possibilities these strictures opened, the Nouveau-Romanist and their experiments with objectivism, and so on.<\/p>\n

Writers have proposed other shapes or patterns for narrative, too. Italo Calvino says that in Invisible Cities<\/em> he was thinking of a crystal\u2019s shape and \u201cbuilt 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.\u201d Gottfried Benn spoke of an orange-shaped narrative, in which segments radiate from or lean toward a central pith. Ross Chambers coined the (terrible) term loiterature<\/em>\u00a0for narratives that can be labyrinthine, digressing extravagantly. And Joseph Frank launched much of this discussion with \u201cThe Idea of Spatial Form,\u201d where he describes a kind of fiction in which juxtaposition or association replaces temporal order, sense not arising from linearity but from puzzle-like compositions or networks.<\/p>\n

I was looking for ways to create forward motion in narrative that didn\u2019t rely on the linear arc when I happened upon W.\u2009G. Sebald, twenty years ago. In The Emigrants<\/em>, he seemed to work with patterns that yielded connections and meaning, rather than anything linear. Since then, I\u2019ve sought powerful narratives with structures other than an arc, structures that create an inner sensation of traveling toward<\/em> something and leave a sense of shape behind\u2014not just slice-of-life. I dissected some of the most effective, unusual narratives to see what they had in common, and what I found: shapes recurring in these texts coincide with core patterns in nature.<\/p>\n

Matter fills space according to a host of natural laws that again and again yield the same patterns. This I learned only recently, when I read Peter Stevens\u2019s brilliant 1974 book Patterns in Nature<\/em> while riding Amtrak. I actually went through a cascade of epiphanies as I read, staring out the window at the world Stevens kept transforming. Philip Ball\u2019s newer book with the same name illustrates gorgeously how a cluster of patterns recurs at every scale in our world, atomic to galactic. The wave is one: it\u2019s everywhere. There\u2019s a reason we\u2019re drawn to it, whether watching a drama with swelling and collapsing tensions or gazing as surf breaks on shore: a wave is a clear instance of energy charging static matter until that energy is spent and equilibrium returns, elegant and satisfying. Arcs or waves can create powerful narratives, but it might be more freeing, as writers, if we think not of a story following an arc, but of the reading experience doing so. A tentative entry leads to ever greater involvement until the words stop, and the narrative settles into some kind of sense.<\/p>\n

Patterns other than the wave, though, are everywhere. Here are the ones Stevens calls \u201cnature\u2019s darlings.\u201d Spiral: think of a fiddlehead fern, whirlpool, hurricane, horns twisting from a ram\u2019s head, or a chambered nautilus. Meander: picture a river curving and kinking, a snake in motion, a snail\u2019s 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\u2019s heart, light radiating from the sun, the ring left around a tick bite. Branching and other fractal patterns: self-replication at different scale made by trees, coastlines, clouds. Cellular or network 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.<\/p>\n

These fundamental patterns inform our bodies, too. We have wiggling meanders in our hair, brains, and intestines; branching patterns in capillaries, neurons, and lungs; explosive patterns in areolae and irises; spirals in ears, fingertips, DNA, fists. Our brains want<\/em> patterns. We follow them instinctively: coiling a garden hose, stacking boxes, creating a wavering path when walking along the shore. And we even invoke these patterns to describe motions in our minds: someone spirals into despair or compartmentalizes emotions, thoughts meander, rage can be so great we feel we\u2019ll 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\u2019t they form our narratives, too?<\/p>\n

A meandering narrative might digress, sometimes flowing quickly and sometimes barely at all, often looping back on itself, yet ultimately moving onward: I think of Nicholson Baker\u2019s The<\/em> Mezzanine<\/em> or Marguerite Duras\u2019s The Lover<\/em>. A spiraling narrative might move around and around with regular, rhythmic repetitions, yet it advances steadily, deepening into the past, perhaps, or rising into the future. Essayists speak of spiraling form in reflective personal pieces; reflective, lyrical novels might be similar: think of Jamaica Kincaid\u2019s Mr. Potter<\/em>. A radial narrative could spring from a central hole\u2014an incident, absence, horror\u2014around which it keeps circling or from which it keeps veering, but it scarcely moves forward in time, like Gabriel Garc\u00eda M\u00e1rquez\u2019s Chronicle of a Death Foretold<\/em> or Joyce Carol Oates\u2019s Black Water<\/em>. A fractal narrative could branch from a core or seed, repeating at different scales the shape or dynamic of that core, possibly branching on indefinitely: I think of Caryl Phillips\u2019s Crossing the River<\/em>. And cellular narratives come in like parts, creating meaning through juxtaposition and links: Sebald\u2019s The Emigrants<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Meander, spiral, radial, fractal, cell. Maybe there are even correlations between kinds of stories and certain natural patterns, like tragedians following the arc. A feminist approach to writing? Or just more naturalistic? Or Aristotle\u2019s hylomorphism all over again: shape informing life.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jane Alison<\/a> is the author of a memoir, <\/em>The Sisters Antipodes, and four novels\u2014<\/em>The Love-Artist, <\/em>The Marriage of the Sea, <\/em>Natives and Exotics, and <\/em>Nine Island\u2014and is also the translator of Ovid\u2019s stories of sexual transformation, <\/em>Change Me. She is professor of creative writing at the University of Virginia and lives in Charlottesville.<\/em><\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2019 by Jane Alison, from <\/em>Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative<\/a>. Reprinted by permission of Catapult. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jane Alison imagines what fiction might look like if it took more inspiration from the shapes of the natural world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1724,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[5861,29813,8755,51595,573,14681,17811,51597,1022,51596,26138,722],"class_list":["post-134907","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-aristotle","tag-form","tag-italo-calvino","tag-jane-alison","tag-john-berger","tag-john-gardner","tag-le-corbusier","tag-meander","tag-nature","tag-spiral","tag-structure","tag-w-g-sebald"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nBeyond the Narrative Arc by Jane Alison<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Jane Alison imagines what fiction might look like if it took more inspiration from the shapes of the natural world.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/27\/beyond-the-narrative-arc\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Beyond the Narrative Arc by Jane Alison\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"March 27, 2019 \u2013 Jane Alison imagines what fiction might look like if it took more inspiration from the shapes of the natural world.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/27\/beyond-the-narrative-arc\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"The Paris Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/parisreview\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2019-03-27T17:00:36+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/aloe_polyphylla_spiral.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"800\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"631\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Jane Alison\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:creator\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:site\" content=\"@parisreview\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Jane Alison\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"14 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/27\/beyond-the-narrative-arc\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/27\/beyond-the-narrative-arc\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Jane Alison\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/e53fe5d30f51ccbb2c5fb5786bd733b5\"},\"headline\":\"Beyond the Narrative Arc\",\"datePublished\":\"2019-03-27T17:00:36+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/27\/beyond-the-narrative-arc\/\"},\"wordCount\":2733,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/03\/27\/beyond-the-narrative-arc\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/aloe_polyphylla_spiral.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Aristotle\",\"form\",\"Italo Calvino\",\"Jane Alison\",\"John Berger\",\"John Gardner\",\"Le Corbusier\",\"meander\",\"nature\",\"spiral\",\"structure\",\"W. 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