In our stories, we usually have “the dramatic arc”, where “a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides.” Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative asks how far a certain fixation with that idea might be holding us back by proposing, in an accessible way, some other forms that our fiction might take. In this, she serves us all by reminding us that the novel takes its name from the same root as novelty, and that if novels ever seem tired and staid, there always remain ways of recovering that same sense of newness / excitement.
Alison begins by noting that when we talk about narrative, it’s typically in visual terms. Northrop Frye is quoted as saying that “we hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer’s total pattern we “see” what he means”. Narratives are generally experienced as images -or perhaps that’s how we explain them. Either way, Alison continues by suggesting that if readers experience narratives in this way, a writer could consciously choose to “design” a narrative with a particular shape in mind other than the typical arc. So far, so reasonable.
But why would the writer bother? Alison’s argument, built up through a liberal use of examples from longer and shorter fictions, is that we need different forms for different stories or ideas, or at least for different focuses. In a narrative about grief, must we always tell the story of overcoming, with its arching trajectory of shock and mourning to recovery? Or may we not, instead, focus on how grief works by showing how it ripples through the lives of those affected like a shockwave? In such a narrative there may be overcoming, but the focus is instead on variety and the writer as a kind of clinician, identifying human frailties and strengths.
From a basic toolkit of sentence and paragraph length and structure, the use of colour and any differences between story time and textual time, and other texturing such as repeated images, phrases, and scenes, Alison describes a wide variety of narrative patterns. There are “waves”, which are when the narrative is governed by the principle of symmetry, with scenes at the end mirroring those at the beginning. There are “wavelets”, which take this kind of mirroring and repeat it on a paragraph level. “Meanders” make use of digressions to force us to look around and refocus our attention on the scenery, while “spirals” advance chronologically while always looking back.
“Radials or explosions” are of the type I described above concerning grief – situations where everything looks into the centre, or where everything in the story is trying to pull away from some central point but cannot. With “Networks and Cells”, “Instead of following a line of story, your brain draws the lines, makes connections.” This is Sebald, where you do the work of identifying meaning. Finally, there are “fractals”, where the meaning is the narrator’s searching for meaning rather than the plot itself, and “tsunamis”, where Alison could only find one example, which in any case seems something of a hybrid approach.
The examples are all contemporary, with writers I knew – such as Sebald and Carver – joined by others I was less familiar with, such Lin Tao and Susan Minot. Arguably, many of the storytelling structures are older than this – we have been disobeying Aristotle pretty much since he first put stylus to wax (or whatever he used). But to criticise the book on this point is to miss the idea that these forms are practically essential for telling certain stories that are increasingly important to us modern readers. Sebald writes differently, sure, but we also needed the horrors of the 20th century to really get to a point where we needed Sebald and his style – and felt the need to write about memory at all as a kind of moral duty.
Then there is David Foster Wallace’s digressive style and his ambition in his unfinished The Pale King to write a novel about boredom and working in tax that somehow was uplifting rather than miserable. Within Meander, Spiral, Explode we also have Susan Minot’s Lust, which uses a fragmentary style and shifting narrative voice to draw readers into the breakdown of self as a young woman’s sexual encounters get the better of her. Yes, Schnitzler’s Fraulein Else has a similar plot, but Minot’s work has a different focus and a different form to make that focus possible.
As an argument about the importance of finding the right form, and as a guide to some of the forms available, Meander, Spiral, Explode is fun and helpful. It would be hard for a writer to read it and not feel at least a little inspiration on how to write next. But there is one point where the book is arguably a little weaker. (I will discount the cataloguing aspect – for example, why “tsunami” has only one example, why “waves” seem fairly unrecognisable to someone who has spent much time at the sea, and so on – all this is unimportant).
The main criticism is one we might detect ourselves from the examples used. With one or two exceptions, we are primarily looking at shorter fiction – short stories, novellas, and short novels. The problem with all the patterns Alison proposes is that they struggle with being sustained into a longer work. There is only so far that we can sit with Sebald before we get tired, given that his shorter fictions in Campo Santo are just as effective as those in The Rings of Saturn, with only a slight adjustment for the power that accumulation brings in the latter. We might circle around the killing at the centre of Marquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold for a hundred or so pages, but not for much longer without any forward movement. To look at other examples not given in the text, the guilt narratives of Grass’s Cat and Mouse and Bernhard’s The Loser are all short too, barely scraping two hundred pages in some editions.
It’s no surprise then, that the narratives that are longest in Meander, Spiral, Explode are also the ones where the arc is still central. We can talk about the mirroring of scenes at the beginning and end of Roth’s Goodbye Columbus, for example, but this is only a feature of a narrative that otherwise is a typical story of a relationship, from its beginning to its collapse. Cloud Atlas, the novel at the centre of the “tsunami” chapter, is huge – but it’s also six narratives in one.
This is not to suggest that patterns are bad, but rather that many struggle with an extension into longer works. We get bored, run out of energy, or even – most dangerously – have our moment of illumination too soon and put the book down, having understood what the author had in mind and lacking any comparably powerful plot to carry us on. Even if the pattern is delivering a moral message – and Alison is to be commended for showing through her examples that experimentation does not have to come at the expense of a sense of right and wrong – a pattern whose shape is determined too soon can lead to reader’s attention sagging. At least with a plot, the author is in charge, letting us know when we are in the beginning, middle, or end. If we want the whole thing, we have to follow them all the way.
I have been considering some of the problems in Meander, Spiral, Explode from a completely different angle this year, within the context of my re-reading of War and Peace. One of the great mysteries of that work is how it manages to keep the reader reading when it is so long. I am now reading, on and off, Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad, and will then read his Life and Fate, which together are probably at least as long as War and Peace and in the case of the latter, apparently nearly as good. With Stalingrad, however, I am struggling and was trying to understand why.
One reason is that Tolstoy does something that Grossman, at present, does not – he structures his book as a series of novellas with linked characters. We might describe one part of War and Peace as Natasha and Andrey’s romance, and another as Pierre’s experience of wartime Moscow. Other things happen in the parts, but each has a distinctive identity. Stalingrad is, after four hundred pages, just an accumulation – of people, primarily, and a little bit of plot. That makes it both harder to follow and less engaging. People might have a backstory, but they do not have much of a story in the present that drives the text forward. Instead, the only thing that does that is the historical context.
Because each section of Tolstoy’s epic is a kind of novella in itself, with an arc-like structure, the work remains engaging, providing a little bit of that same satisfaction that a shorter, complete novel would. We can say that War and Peace reaches the limit of the arc and has to adjust by breaking it into little arcs, just as some of the narratives in Meander, Spiral, Explode reach the length limit of their own patterns. The really interesting question for authors is how you can expand the patterns of Alison’s book to incorporate them into longer works, for I am sure that the selection here is only just the beginning of what kind of structures and forms we can write into our stories.
So, overall, I found Alison’s book an exciting and pleasant read, even with the length caveat. It certainly made me want to go away and think about my and others’ structuring decisions with a more architectural eye. And it also gave me a raft of new authors I might want to read. Really, in a book like this, that’s what success is all about.
